50 years of surrender to the EU

By CHRISTOPHER BOOKER

Last updated at 22:29 23 March 2007

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The signing of the Common Market treaty in 1957

Tonight the city of Berlin will be the scene for a very special party. A
giant all-night 'rave'.

Thousands of young Berliners will be able to dance at 35 nightclubs

across the German capital, to music played by 100 disc jockeys.

Special buses will be laid on to allow them to roam around the city
until dawn. And all those happy teenagers will be treated to free beer
and bratwurst.

The bad news is that the £1 million bill for all this fun and games is to
be picked up by you and me.

Because the purpose of this monster party, organised by German

government officials at the expense of EU taxpayers, will be to
celebrate the 50th anniversary of the day in 1957 when the politicians
of six European countries met in Rome to sign a treaty to set up what
was then called just the 'Common Market' - that now half-forgotten
entity which has grown over the decades into what we know today as
'the European Union'.

It is safe to predict, however, that, apart from those German

teenagers enjoying their 'rave', very few other folk across Europe this
weekend will be doing much by way of celebrating.

The one exception will be the scores of politicians and thousands of

officials who will also today be converging on Berlin, to pay tribute to
this historic moment in their own, rather different way.

What Tony Blair and his 'partners' will be honouring is the launch of
what we can now recognise to have been the most ambitious political
project the modern world has seen since Lenin set up the Soviet
Union in the Twenties.

The leaders of those six countries - Belgium, France, West Germany,

Italy, Luxembourg and the Netherlands - who met in Rome 50 years
ago were well aware that what they were setting in train was intended
eventually to grow into something very much more than a mere
'common market'.

Even then, as we see from the documents of that time, they dreamed
that it would be just the first step on the road to an eventual
'European government'.

But who, in those far-off days when Europe was divided between the
'free world' of the west, led by America, and the grim Soviet empire to
the east, could possibly have guessed at the progress their 'project'
was to make over the half-century which followed?

Gradually it has expanded from those original six members, taking

more and more countries under its sway (Britain joined in 1973) until
now they number 27, stretching all the way from Ireland to the
borders of Russia itself.

Only a handful of European countries have remained outside its

embrace, including Switzerland, Norway and Iceland - all of which, it
might be noted, are now richer per head of population than any
country in the EU.
During those decades the institutions which lie at the heart of the
'project' have steadily extended their powers, to such an extent that,
just as those who set them up dreamed might one day happen, they
are in effect a 'government for Europe' in all but name.

Today's European Union now has almost all the attributes of a fully-
fledged state - its own flag, anthem and passport, its own 'citizenship'
and currency, its own vast body of laws, governing almost every area
of life.

It is even on the way to establishing its own armed forces and police.

By any measure this is an astonishing achievement: one which would

have had its founding fathers rubbing their eyes in disbelief.

Nevertheless, there is no denying the fact that this weekend's

celebrations are distinctly muted - and for this there are three main
reasons.

One, as even the EU's leaders are themselves uncomfortably aware,

is that, for all its remarkable political progress since 1957, the way
their 'project' has worked out in practice offers few obvious grounds
for unqualified rejoicing.

For years now, most of the economies of the EU, burdened by an

ever greater weight of regulations from Brussels, have been
performing significantly worse than those of their main competitors
across the rest of the world, notably the U.S., China and India.

In many of the areas which are now subject to centralised EU control,

from fishing and agriculture to international trade, it is scarcely a well-
kept secret that the EU's record, characterised by massive
bureaucratic overregulation, has been dismal.

A second reason why so few 'Europeans' will this week be

celebrating this anniversary with any enthusiasm is that the system of
government it has led to seems so impersonal, so uninspiring and so
remote.
Although the peoples of Europe have become aware that this system
is having an ever-greater effect on their lives, most of them don't
really begin to understand how it works.

They have the sense that they are now ruled by a 'political class',
made up of bureaucrats and politicians who are no longer in any way
democratically accountable; a vast, shadowy apparatus of
government over which we no longer have any say.

The result is that, not just in Britain but all over the EU, people feel
alienated from those who rule over them, in a way which, in countries
which still like to think of themselves as democracies, is quite
unprecedented.

The third reason why the celebrations of this anniversary are so

downbeat is the mess they have got into over the 'Constitution'.

That holy text was intended to mark the EU's final emergence on the
world stage as a new state, taking its place alongside the U.S. as a
world 'superpower', uniting half a billion 'European citizens' in what
amounted to a giant new country.

But then, of course, came those historic votes by the people of

France and the Netherlands, chucking out the Constitution and
plunging the 'project' into a crisis like nothing it has known before.

The most obvious response of the EU's leaders has been to try to
carry on as if nothing had happened.

Again and again, since the French and Dutch voted 'no', they have
been smuggling in new laws or institutions which could only have
been legally authorised by the rejected Constitution - from the
European Defence Agency to the new Fundamental Rights Agency,
which is already being set up to enforce a whole tranche of human
rights.

Even now, they are trying to find ways of salvaging some of the
central features of the Constitution, such as giving the EU a
permanent president and its own foreign minister to act on behalf of
all the 27 countries - without having to go through all that tiresome
business of holding yet more referendums which they fear they might
lose.

But, despite all these efforts to cheat their way round the impasse
produced by those 'no' votes, the EU's leaders are well aware that, in
some respects, the onward march of their great 'project' has hit the
buffers, in a way it has never done before.

For decades they had been managing stealthily to take away the
powers of national governments, without ever asking the peoples of
Europe whether this was what they wanted - until finally, just when
the prize seemed within their grasp, the very people whose views
they had ignored hit back to say that they didn't want any more of it.

Today, even Brussels's own polls show that, for the first time in 50
years, the 'project' actually enjoys the support of less than half the
'citizens' of Europe.

Another poll, published this week by the Financial Times, shows that,
by a margin of nearly two to one, people in five of the EU's six largest
nations think that life has got worse since their country joined the club
(the only exception is Spain which, since it joined in 1986, has been
showered with nearly £100 billion from EU taxpayers).

And in no country, it appears, is the EU more unpopular than Britain,

where the same FT poll found that nearly twice as many people
would now like to see us leave the EU as want us to stay in.

Yet therein lies the rub. For the fact is that, if there is one thing on
which all Britain's major political parties are more firmly agreed than
any other, it is that they have not the slightest intention of pulling us
out.

However unpopular the EU may have become, not just in Britain but
all across Europe, we are stuck with this weird political construct,
which now rules over our lives to a far greater extent than most
people are aware of.

One of the subtlest strategies employed by the EU, as it has

gradually taken over more and more power from national
governments, has been the way it has left each country's national
institutions in place.

Monarchies and presidencies, national parliaments, civil services and

legal systems have all been left standing, looking outwardly as if not
very much has changed.

Yet over the decades they have all been gradually hollowed out from
within.

Today, over vast areas of each country's national life, the power to
decide policies and make laws no longer lies in national capitals. It
has been transferred to our new 'supranational' centre of government
in Brussels.

And the clever thing is how successfully most of this has been kept
out of sight.

How many people are aware, for instance, that it is now Brussels, not
London or any other national government, which makes our laws on
how we dispose of our rubbish, on food safety, on how many hours
we can work, on how company accounts have to be drawn up?

How many people know that it is Brussels which dictates which seed
varieties we are allowed to plant in our gardens; which prescribes,
down to the minutest detail, how we can make buses and cars; which
lays down the height of our office chairs, the design of our fire exit
notices, the exact permissible measurements of destination displays
in our trains?

It is thanks to our joining that mere 'Common Market' 30 years ago

that we have seen the near-destruction of our fishing industry, once
the largest in Europe; that many of our farmers, until 1973 the most
successful in Europe, today wonder how much longer they can
survive.

It is thanks to the EU that millions of businesses are now stifled by an

unending avalanche of costly red tape; while even the City of London
now fears that a flood of new directives from Brussels could before
long cost it its place as the leading financial centre in the world.
Step by step we have seen our politicians handing over to this weird
new system of government control over almost every aspect of our
national life, from the power to decide who can come to live and work
in Britain to the way our judges now have to interpret the law in our
courts.

What in fact we have witnessed over the past 50 years, has been in
effect an immense, slow-motion coup d'etat.

Our power to govern ourselves has been stealthily handed over to an

entirely new kind of 'supranational' government, over which we no
longer have any meaningful democratic say.

Therein lies the real triumph of that breathtakingly ambitious 'project'

which was set in train by the Treaty of Rome 50 years ago this
weekend.

Although half a century later it no longer enjoys the support of even

half the 490 million people who must now live under it, it seems there
is now nothing we can do to change it.

That is why tonight we are all having to pay for those Berlin teenagers
to enjoy their 'rave' - to promote the sad pretence that anyone other
than the politicians and officials can find anything in this dismal
anniversary to celebrate.

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