Monetary and military union are doomed
By Boris Johnson
PITY the poor Serb opposition parties: two men and a dog puffing gloomily in
darkened rooms and raving about democracy. Whenever they try to visualise
the world after Slobodan Milosevic, they grope for the same hackneyed
phrase.
"We must join Europe," they say. "We must take part in European
integration!" booms the Rasputin lookalike Vuk Draskovic; and I feel like
blurting, Vuk, my friend, what the Vuk are you talking about? Somehow,
amid the massacres, Belgrade's newspapers Blic and Politika have not
devoted much space to the fate of the euro or the excitement of the Cologne
EU summit. Otherwise these Serbs might see the irony.
What is this Europe whose 12 stars shine distantly in the eyes of the
bombed-out Yugoslavs? It is a Yugoslavia in the making, an attempt to turn
the whole continent into a string-and-bubblegum Balkan state, with political
institutions considerably less awe-inspiring than Tito, and roughly the same
democratic credentials.
I remember the shock of those benevolent EU Foreign Ministers, Jacques
Poos, Hans Vandenbroek and Gianni De Michelis, when we flew to Zagreb
on that bonkers mission from the Luxembourg summit in June 1991. "This is
the hour of Europe," said the great Poos, helmsman of Luxembourg's external
relations. He was going to explain to the Croats and the Slovenes that they
had it all wrong. The "in" thing was integration, he said, not splitting up. And I
remember the stunned embarrassment of the EU delegation on discovering
that, at the very moment when they were abolishing their currencies to create
the euro, the Croats and the Slovenes had just reinvented their own, called (I
think) the ban and the lipar.
How dreadful, we were supposed to think, that these Balkan types had
succumbed to a primitive instinct for national self-determination; but of course
they did. The deep truth of the Euro experiment is that nations always will.
Down, down, down goes the euro, which has now lost almost 10 per cent of
its original value against the dollar. The mere fact of its decay is perhaps
unimportant. Currencies bounce around. A low euro might even help the
stagnant continental economies to export. No, what matters are the reasons
for the euro's fall, and among them is that the markets do not believe in the
people running it.
Why should they have any confidence in Wim Duisenberg and his colleagues
in their Frankfurt eyrie? Who really believes that the European institutions will
prevail of the chicanery and incompetence of national governments? You will
perhaps remember the birth of the euro bank last year, when France
humiliated the Dutchman. Against all the statutes of independence, the French
bullied Wim into coming before heads of government and making a personal
pledge that he would quit early, in favour of a Frenchman - so making a
nonsense to a four-year term.
Immediately the markets sucked their teeth and demanded to know how such
wimpishness could serve as a guarantee of the euro's stability. Now they are
seeing their fears borne out. Scarcely bothering to explain or apologise, the
Italian government has decided to bust out of Maastricht's corsets by running
up an excessive budget deficit. If our leaders had any sense, they would be
concluding that there are limits to the ability of EU institutions to coerce and
control. Instead, they seem to be drawing the opposite conclusion: that we
need more federalism. Let's have a Euro-army, said the heads of state at the
Cologne summit: or rather, let's move that way by June next year.
You can see why they say it, in a way. Every since Jacques Poos coined his
inanity about the hour of Europe, the former Yugoslavia has been a graveyard
of EU pretensions. The Americans had to come along in 1995, at last, to
knock heads together at Dayton. As for this latest catastrophically
incompetent war, it has been America's show. When my tea-cup rattles in my
hotel because of the sonic boom 15,000 feet up, it is a dime to a dollar that it
was an American jet. America has provided 90 per cent of the munitions.
America got us into an unsupported air war, mainly because of the inept
ultimatum of Madelaine Albright.
It was American rules of targeting (their boys are told to hit anything that
could be a military target; our boys only hit things that are military targets) that
have helped blast so many civilians to pieces; but at least the bombing has
finally, in some sense, and then only after having triggered the worst pogroms
since the Second World War, worked.
The great thing about Nato is that there is a universally acknowledged chief,
who is called the Supreme Allied Commander in Europe, and he is always an
American. Nato has a natural hierarchy, in which deference is accorded to the
world's hyper-puissance, as the French put it, the country with the bucks and
the bombs. Who would be the central authority of this putative EU defence
force? It couldn't be the British because that would offend the French, and
vice versa. It couldn't be the Germans, because everyone would find that too
spooky. So they have apparently settled on Javier Solana, the
stubble-bearded former Spanish Foreign Minister who is to be the "supreme
head" of the new Common Foreign and Security Policy (CFSP).
Let us imagine that Europe had been running the Kosovo war on its own. Let
us imagine that EU taxpayers were ready to spend the $100 billion on
defence that would require. How would it work, when 67 per cent of the
British people are in favour of bombing and 99 per cent of Greeks are against
it? What would Señor Solana say, when most Spanish electors are against it?
What would the Supreme Head of the CFSP say if Britain and Argentina had
another spat over the Falklands?
The problem with these EU supremos, like Wim and Javier, is that they are
neither sufficiently potent to command respect nor sufficiently accountable to
earn people's trust. In an ideal world, one might imagine that people would
feel represented in Brussels by the Euro MPs, whose elections fall this week.
Look at them. They had one moment of glory, when, in spite of all that the
Labour MEPs did to prevent it, they "sacked" the Commission. And yet
Jacques Santer and his gang are still there, luxuriating in their petrol coupons
and their tax-free salaries. Where's the accountability in that?
To make the whole thing work, you would need to force nations together, e
pluribus unum, into a single polity; and you would need a single commanding
authority, in Belgium as there once was in Belgrade, a single figure whose
gold-braided image appeared on the wall in every fly-blown police station and
whose name and superscription appeared on the coinage. That, thank
heavens, will never happen, and if it did, as we have seen, it would eventually
blow apart.
Boris Johnson is assistant editor of The Daily Telegraph.
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