What next for Europe?
By John Simpson
BBC world affairs editor
news.bbc.co.uk
It was 30 years ago almost to the day. Britain was soon to vote in its referendum about membership of what was then the European Economic Community, and I was a BBC correspondent based in Brussels.
The United States of Europe is dead in the water
Across the table from me at an unfeasibly expensive restaurant ludicrously called Comme Chez Soi ("Just like being at home"), sat a visiting grandee from the British Foreign Office.
He was so superb, I was worried about my table manners.
"So if we vote yes," I asked him, "what sort of Europe will it turn out to be?"
He adjusted the position of his knife and fork, and outlined the future for me with a remarkable accuracy.
It was, he explained, a race.
The original six EEC members - France, Germany, Italy and the Benelux countries - would want to deepen the links between the member countries, to the point where they became a single super-state.
Super-state
The French, who would otherwise have disliked that as much as the British, agreed because they assumed they would control it.
Britain, by contrast, wanted to broaden the European Community and bring in more members.
The bigger the Community, the harder it would be to turn it into a super-state.
So the race was between the deepening process and the broadening process.
The Union can still run its own affairs perfectly well, even if it is a little cumbersome
"I think the broadeners will win," he concluded. "But only just."
Of course, as we sat there at Comme Chez Soi, not even the Foreign Office mandarin guessed that the broadening process would eventually include nations which then were buried deep behind the Iron Curtain.
But the British gladly welcomed every potential member.
In 1976, when Greece threw off the regime of the colonels, it immediately applied for European membership.
Most of the existing members were appalled: Greece had no land border with any other members, it had little experience of real democracy, it was poorer even than Ireland, and it trailed with it its age-long quarrel with Turkey.
But it was European and it was newly democratic, so it met the membership criteria.
And it had one quiet ally inside the Community: Britain.
The more difficult Greece was to assimilate, the slower the deepening process would be.
It wasn't a particularly noble approach, compared with the forgiveness and reconciliation which Frenchmen like Jean Monnet and Robert Schumann showed towards Germany at the end of the third catastrophic war between their countries in 70 years.
Broadening
The Franco-German alliance is one of the best and most miraculous things that have happened in modern times.
But Monnet wanted to go further and create a "United States of Europe", with a single government and a single parliament.
Sometimes it seemed a real possibility, but now that France has voted decisively against the notion, and the Netherlands seems certain to do the same, the United States of Europe is dead in the water.
The entire project, noble though it was, was much too "de haut en bas", as the French say - handed down to the hoi polloi by idealists who knew the direction Europe should take, and weren't prepared to take no for an answer.
The Prime Minister of Luxembourg, Jean-Claude Juncker, didn't quite say the other day that if the French voted against the EU constitution they would have to vote again until they got it right, but it sounded like it.
One reason why France voted "No" was a stubborn dislike of being ordered around by politicians and bureaucrats.
So my lunch companion 30 years ago was right: broadening has beaten deepening.
If the broadening had gone more slowly, then bringing in countries from Eastern Europe wouldn't have been such a shock.
Now, with 25 countries and 455 million people to govern, it simply isn't enough to spatchcock together a bunch of rules at short notice.
French voters don't want to be ordered around by politicians
If former French President Valery Giscard d'Estaing had been a little less grand, and a little more aware of the way ordinary people think, he might have made sure his team did a better job of it.
So where do we go from here?
Well, we still have a reasonably effective set of rules for dealing with 25 member-states.
It's called the Treaty of Nice, and it came into force in February 2003.
The Union can still run its own affairs perfectly well, even if it is a little cumbersome.
And what will happen by 2035?
Europe will include Turkey by then, and probably most of the other remaining countries bordering the Mediterranean as well.
Russia may even be a member.
The European Union, with a population of around 900 million, will be competing with the new economic powers, India and China, each with populations well over a billion, as well as a trading bloc in the Americas.
Unless, of course, some disaster happens; predicting the future is a mug's game, after all.
Yet partly because of the events of this week, I think we can be pretty certain of one thing: the grand idea of a United States of Europe, with a single government and a single capital city, is finished.
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