John McDonnell
BUSINESS POST 16.03.07 RT HON JOHN REDWOOD MP
It is fifty years since the European Economic Community was first set up. In the immediate aftermath of World War II Europe was poor, badly damaged, with many itinerants of the roads trying to get back to their old homes after years of bombing, brutality and mass migration in the face of hostile armies. By 1957 a great deal had been achieved, thanks to Marshall aid from the USA, the help of the victorious powers and their armies, and the hard work of many British, Germans, French and Italians who set about rebuilding their battered countries.
The decision to set up the EEC was born of a long tradition in continental Europe that wanted to create a united Europe. Charlemagne, Napoleon, Hitler had all tried by conquest and with varying degrees of barbarism. Now some politicians thought it might be possible to do it by diplomacy and persuasion, selling it around the idea that it would promote peace.
In practise the peace in Europe from 1945 to 1990 was kept by the presence of US and other NATO forces on German soil, keeping at bay any possible threat from the Soviet bloc which also occupied a portion of the former German Reich. There was never any likelihood that a democratic and disarmed Germany would want to go to war with France, and no likelihood that democratic France would seek to claim German territory by force of arms that they had not claimed in 1945 when Germany was partitioned.
Instead of concentrating on unifying or destroying continental armies which provide the sinews of war, the founding fathers concentrated on economic amalgamation, seeking to combine the industries which made the supplies of war through the steel and coal plans and then the common market. The original six members in 1957, Italy, France, Germany, Holland, Belgium and Luxembourg, have expanded in the five decades since to encompass 27 countries covering most of Europe.
It has not brought a proper peace to Europe, because the EU countries did want to intervene militarily in the Balkans when civil wars broke out.In the 1990s Europe was at war again in the east. The EU now seeks a military capability of its own, and wants through its High Representative on Foreign Affairs to have a foreign policy for the Union as a whole.
Some say the common market has brought great prosperity, and has shown how collaborative endeavour enriches us all. The EU has been fortunate to live through the second half of the twentieth century for its first fifty years, for those years have been good years for the world economy as a whole. The fact that the USA started richer and has ended richer, and has in the last decade been growing much more quickly than the Euroland countries should make people pause to ask what is the EU doing wrong economically? We should also be worried that Switzerland and Norway are two of the richest countries in Europe, achieved by standing outside the Union.
The EU today looks old and tired. It is based on too much government from the centre, too many regulations, and too much political interference in daily and commercial lives. If member states want to capture some of the magic of the American economic dream, or some of the dynamism of the fast growing Asian economies, we need in the next fifty years to dismantle many of the expensive and interfering institutions that form the Union, cut out much of the economic and social regulation, and set the people free. Then we might get unemployment down and average incomes up, as they have in the rich west outside the EU.
