• Choose a category
• All
• Classic-Fiction

By Root 2746 0

barking in the course of the negotiation of the Single European Act of 1985–6.1 had not wanted any reference to EMU in at all. The Germans failed to support me and so the reference to EMU was inserted. But I had Article 20 of the Single European Act give my interpretation of what EMU meant; its title read: ‘Co-operation in Economic and Monetary Policy (Economic and Monetary Union)’. This enabled me to claim at subsequent forums that EMU now meant economic and monetary co-operation, not moving towards a single currency. There was a studied ambiguity about all this. Councils at Hanover in June 1988 and then at Madrid in 1989 referred back to the Single European Act’s ‘objective of progressive realization of economic and monetary union’. I was more or less happy with this, because it meant no more than co-operation. The rest of the European heads of government were equally happy, because they interpreted it as progress towards a European Central Bank and a single currency. But at some point, of course, these two interpretations would clash. And when they did I was bound to be fighting on ground not of my choosing.

For the fact was that the more I saw of how the Community operated the less I was attracted by any further steps on the road towards monetary integration. We advanced our proposals for a ‘hard ecu’. We issued Treasury bills denominated in ecu terms. And (though this was done because it was in our own interests, not in order to please our European partners) we had swept away exchange controls before anyone else. All this was very communautaire in its way, as I never ceased to point out when criticized for resisting entry into the ERM. But my own preference was always for open markets, floating exchange rates and strong political and economic transatlantic links. In arguing for that alternative approach I was bound to be handicapped by the formal commitment to European ‘economic and monetary union’ — or indeed that of ‘ever closer union’ contained in the preamble to the original Treaty of Rome. These phrases predetermined many decisions which we thought we had reserved for future consideration. This gave a psychological advantage to my opponents, who never let an opportunity go by of making use of it.

THE BRUGES SPEECH

Not the least of those opponents was Jacques Delors. By the summer of 1988 he had altogether slipped his leash as a fonctionnaire and become a fully fledged political spokesman for federalism. The blurring of the roles of civil servants and elected representatives was more in the continental tradition than in ours. It proceeded from the widespread distrust which their voters had for politicians in countries like France and Italy. That same distrust also fuelled the federalist express. If you have no real confidence in the political system or political leaders of your own country you are bound to be more tolerant of foreigners of manifest intelligence, ability and integrity like M. Delors telling you how to run your affairs. Or to put it more bluntly, if I were an Italian I might prefer rule from Brussels too. But the mood in Britain was different. I sensed it. More than that, I shared it and I decided that the time had come to strike out against what I saw as the erosion of democracy by centralization and bureaucracy, and to set out an alternative view of Europe’s future.

It was high time. It was clear that the momentum towards full blooded EMU, which I always recognized must mean political union too, was building. In July M. Delors told the European Parliament that ‘we are not going to manage to take all the decisions needed between now and 1995 unless we see the beginnings of European government in one form or another,’ and predicted that within ten years the Community would be the source of ‘80 per cent of our economic legislation and perhaps even our fiscal and social legislation as well’. In September he addressed the TUC in Bournemouth calling for measures to be taken on collective bargaining at the European level.

But there were also more subtle, less easily detectable, but perhaps even more