About the European Union

I have been working for the European institutions for over twenty-five years. Last year, rather quaintly, I was even given my European public service medal for it, a surprisingly heavy gong which looks like gold-foil wrapped chocolate and is routinely given to staff after twenty years’ loyal service.

It’s good to work, albeit in a humble and minor capacity, for European integration, a cause in which I believe. This over-riding purpose gives a dimension to what I’m paid to do that helps offset some of the more humdrum aspects of routine.

When people, especially my compatriots, complain about “Europe” they all too often fail to see the bigger picture, which put most simply is that the European Union has given this previously war-torn continent over half a century of peace and prosperity.
This is something easily taken for granted, but which in fact has to be worked at laboriously. The minutiae of European integration are mind-numbing and the whole thing moves forward at the speed of a glacier, so that when you’re on it, not much may appear to be happening. This is fine as it must not be forgotten that the enterprise is consensual and involves gradually changing mentalities from the narrowly national to the broadly European in outlook, all of which takes time. Thanks to European policies and legislation I have nonetheless seen major changes in my everyday life during the last decades.

I have not lived in my country of origin, England, for as long as I’ve been working here and have, therefore, gone totally native. I make no apologies for regarding myself as a European who was brought up in England, rather than as an Englishman.
For all its insularity England and later Britain has always been an important part of European history and culture, interacting in events and movements on the continent. Brits, although they ape the Americans and think they speak the same language, actually have more in common with their European neighbours on the mainland in terms of their cultural heritage, outlook on life and expectations of the state.
It’s funny but so often I have to be on the defensive explaining the benefits of the EU to some people in Britain, things which seem obvious to those of us here on the continent. Partly that”s because of consistent disinformation on the part of the British media. Partly it’s also because successive United Kingdom governments have chosen, for example, not to participate in the single currency (euro) and border-free area (Schengen) thereby depriving those who live there of the ease with which the rest of us move about Europe and make cross-border purchases.

You may think that last bit sounded reductively economic. In fact the economic is where you start and the founding fathers of Europe knew what they were doing in starting with the Coal and Steel Community and then moving on to the Economic Community in the 1950’s. It’s above all by doing business with each other that peoples first come into contact with each other on a mutually beneficial basis which requires peace and trust. Subsequently they become so dependent on each other for their livelihoods that the very idea of going to war with each other becomes absurd.
I believe that the Roman Empire and related spread of the Latin vernacular was a long-term success not because its military might forced the peoples in its provinces to espouse its ways but because they saw it as a way to improve their lives and get on in the world. “What have the Romans done for us ?” goes the sketch in Monty Python’s “Life of Brian”, “All right, apart from the roads, the schools, the sewers..” and so on. That scene can be seen parodied on YouTube as “What has the European Union done for us”, in an attempt to persuade the knee-jerk anti-Europeans that benefits are real and that most people, politicians and countries are in the EU because they want to be.

So what are the benefits of the European Union ?

The Economic Community, as it grew out of the Customs Union, used to be known as the Common Market, and the Single Market remains at the heart of the project. If you look at what is on the shelves of your local supermarket compared to what there was a few decades ago, you must acknowledge that it has delivered greater consumer choice.
By availing itself of the economies of scale of a very large market, Europe has produced world beating champions of industry. In the process some names have come and gone, but the overall result has been greater wealth creation.
A later major adjunct to the single market has been the single currency. You can read my positive views on the Euro in “About the Euro” (May 2010).

For the single market to work, a vast rule-book has had to be created to ensure common standards for safety, labelling and compatibility (etc) of products to make them acceptable across borders. This is one area where the EU gave itself a bad name in the 1980’s by trying to standardize too many things, since then the approach is rather to ensure that a few essential requirements are met. The Commission has for example abolished many of the rules on fruit and vegetable standards: yes, bent cucumbers are again ok.
The Commission is, on the other hand, pushing mobile phone manufacturers to develop a single charger good for all models, which would be welcome. By the way, on the subject of telephony, the Commission, in its capacity as competition watchdog on the single market, has successfully forced operators to reduce roaming charges as they did not reflect the real cost of international calls.
The single market has also been used as a pretext for imposing such things as minimum environmental standards and working conditions throughout the EU to avoid companies getting an unfair advantage by locating to where local rules are lax and cheaper to respect. Generally this had led to a levelling upwards which has worked in favour of citizens rather than business.

Another area where the EU has moved on is the Common Agricultural Policy. It was originally conceived in the 1950’s with the purpose of feeding countries whose agriculture had been seriously damaged in the war. It was so successful that by the 1970’s farming was over-producing mountains and lakes of subsidized food we could not consume ourselves and which were then often dumped on the world market to the detriment of dveloping countries’ agriculture.
The CAP has since then been undergoing constant reform eliminating its worst excesses and wastefulness, along the way reducing its share in EU spending from two thirds to one third. I admit that is still pretty big and the managing of it accounts for a lot of the meetings I work in. However, I have to say in its defence that all developed countries bolster their agriculture for two sound reasons: firstly, it would be foolish to abandon your own capacity to feed yourself even if you can buy food cheaper elsewhere, because the world is an uncertain place and nothing is more essential to a society than food; secondly, it would be foolish to abandon economic activity and land management in the vast rural areas of our countries.

These days, the EU spends about another third of its budget on various forms of regional and “cohesion” policy in a redistributive act that seeks to improve prosperity in its less-favoured areas, often through infrastructure projects (most obviously roads) but also by investing in human capital. Ireland has been a success story in this respect, moving from being one of the poorest members (per capita) when it joined to being one of the richest today.
More generally the EU invests in research and development to improve the lot of all its members.

The four initial economic freedoms of movement enshrined in the Treaty of Rome include not just those of goods, services and capital but also that of people. Doubtless originally conceived as free movement of labour, it has over time developed into a right for EU citizens to reside in any EU country they choose as long as they are not a financial burden on the host state. With that comes the practical ease of moving around a border-free area in the Schengen passport union and even the concept of EU citizenship, including the right to vote and stand in municipal and European elections in the country of residence.
The Erasmus programme for EU student exchanges is a practical example of promoting a sense of European citizenship, creating a new generation at ease with the idea of horizons broader than the merely national.
Generally, I would like to think that any European Union sponsored event which brings together people of different nationalities but similar background helps foster a feeling of shared European identity much more than any piece of legislation could.

As job-seeking people move more freely across borders so too does the criminal element and the EU has been at pains to enhance coordination in the vast area of justice and home affairs to keep up with that, which I’m afraid will also mean making sure that the speeding fines you pick up in other EU countries follow you back home.

On the world stage, the EU enables a lot of individually not so important countries to act together internationally and to be seen collectively to be a big player. As an individual it’s when you travel to another continent (Asia, Africa) that you start to realize that Europe isn’t just a figment of some political theorist’s imagination and that we do have a shared European identity. So maybe it should not come as a surprise to us, who are so often obsessed by our differences and immersed in internecine squabbles, that we are actually pereceived by the rest of the world as a monolithic bloc.
This is partciulalry true in the area of trade where it is always the EU and not the individual member states that engage in negotiations in WTO and elsewhere. Europe as a zone of limited natural resources but of great inventive and manufacturing capacity has for centuries gained from trade. The EU has always been a strong advocate of free trade and notwithstanding certain restrictions we do practise the lowest rates of customs duties in the world and have the biggest export and import volumes. According to economic theory, which is most often borne out in practice, free trade allows countries to make the most of the comparative advantage they enjoy in certain areas thereby enabling them to earn more. Trade not aid is the true motor of develoment.
Having said that the EU also supplements its members’ official direct aid, making us collectively the world’s biggest donor.

In terms of a Common Foreign Policy, the EU is still fumbling, notwithstanding the Lisbon Treaty’s attempts to raise its profile. Its members’ interests simply don’t always coincide and fudge is often what comes out as a common position. There are those who argue that you can’t have a common foreign policy without a common defence. I don’t hold with that myself. It’s part of our European identity that we are more interested in the carrot than the stick, conciliation rather than confrontation. At least on the continent, the challenge internally has been to supplant war with peacuful co-existence and that is externally the not so clear-cut message we seek to project to others.
Even so, we cut a more convincing figure as a union than as individual members.

These are just some of the benefits that come from EU membership. The nature of EU integration is that it is a work in progress: “the process of creating an ever closer union among the peoples of Europe” (to quote the first article in the Treaty).
Its benefits are much greater than can be construed in terms of whether a member state is in financial terms a net contributor or beneficiary, of what after all remains only a very small part of its GDP. Germany, for example, may be the biggest net contributor, but German industry benefits immeasurably from the single market.

However, as I hope you will have been convinced by my brief enumeration, the EU is far more than an economic union: it is a political project that seeks to promote and protect the peace and prosperity of the peoples of Europe.