LIKE A NORWEGIAN WOULD:

October 27, 2005

What we can learn from Norwegians (Daniel Hannan, 27/10/2005, Daily Telegraph)

Today, Norway’s king will take his leave of Britain’s queen. Both are monarchs, but only one is sovereign. The word “sovereignty” is often used nowadays as a loose synonym for power, but it has an exact meaning. In Norway, the 1814 constitution vests supreme authority in the Crown. In Britain, the 1972 European Communities Act shares sovereignty with the EU, which now accounts – depending on how you measure it – for between 50 and 80 per cent of our laws.

Sovereignty evidently suits the Norwegians. They are the richest people in Europe, with a GDP per head of £31,200, as against an EU average of £12,600. According to the UN, which measures infant mortality, literacy rates and so on, they are the healthiest and happiest people in the world.

We are forever being told that Britain is too small to survive on its own: a post-imperial state, a speck of land on Europe’s fringe, blah blah. This is bilge, of course: we are the world’s fourth largest economy and fourth military power. But it is instructive to consider the situation of a country that really is small, and really is on Europe’s fringe.

There are four-and-a-half million Norwegians, clinging to an icy strip of tundra on the uttermost edge of the continent. Yet, on every measure, they are outperforming their continental neighbours. At a time when France and Germany are struggling to comply with the Stability Pact, Norway is running an annual surplus of seven per cent. Its unemployment is less than half the EU’s. Its real interest rates are comfortably below those in the euro-zone. Its inflation is low, its trade booming, its stock exchange soaring.

A people two generations away from subsistence farming have become Europe’s new elite. Like blue-eyed sheiks, they buy vast houses in Chelsea which lie empty between their occasional visits to London (Norwegians, in the main, being tremendous Anglophiles).

How have they done it? Much of the answer has to do with the deal they struck with Brussels. Norway is a member, not of the EU, but of its penumbra, the European Free Trade Association (Efta). It participates fully in the so-called Four Freedoms of the European single market-free movement, that is, of goods, services, people and capital. But it is outside the Common Agricultural Policy; it controls its own territorial resources, including energy and fisheries; it decides its own human rights questions; it determines who may settle on its territory; it can negotiate free trade accords with third countries, and it makes only a token contribution to the EU budget.

Trade everything freely but your own sovereignty.

MORE:
In Norway, EU pros and cons (the cons still win) (Ivar Ekman, 10/27/05, International Herald Tribune)

Jens Stoltenberg, the recently installed leftist prime minister of Norway, believes that his country should join the European Union. So do some of his rivals on the right. Even the often euroskeptical populists today say they are neutral.

So why is this increasingly wealthy North European nation remaining outside the fold at a time of broadening European integration? [...]

At present, 54 percent of Norwegians oppose membership, according to a poll published Monday in the newspaper Aftenposten. Their opinion, analysts say, is intimately linked to the broad feeling here that oil-rich, high-growth Norway does not need an economically stumbling European club.

Projections show gross domestic product in Norway growing almost 4 percent this year, up slightly from 3.5 percent in 2004, compared with about 1 percent in the euro zone in both years.

Even the European Commission’s ambassador to Norway, Gerhard Sabathil, admitted last year that such figures posed a problem. “There are no economic arguments for Norway to join the EU,” Sabathil said in an interview with Aftenposten.

“But,” he added – and this is where those working for Norwegian membership get most of their ammunition – “there are arguments for Norway to become a member in order to have its voice heard on a European level.”

Today, Norway is part of the European Economic Area, a solution that gives the country and its companies access to the EU’s internal market. For most Norwegian businesses – the fishing industry is a clear and vocal exception – this arrangement is a necessity, with close to 80 percent of Norwegian exports going to the EU.

The flip side is that Norwegians have to abide by almost every piece of internal-market legislation while having no vote on these laws. In Norway, this has become known as the “fax democracy,” since Brussels simply faxes new directives for the Norwegians to follow.

“Because we’re not part of the decision-making process, we can’t take care of Norway’s interests in a good way,” said Svein Roald Hansen, chairman of the European Movement in Norway, the main organization working for Norwegian membership. “We’re left to lobbying other countries to make our views have influence.”

But the lack-of-influence argument has not been enough to inspire a wider Norwegian debate on Europe. Instead, most politicians avoid the EU question.

Norway’s voters have twice rejected EU membership in referendums – in 1972 and in 1994 – and most pro-European politicians fear that a third loss would kill the matter for the foreseeable future. “It would probably be received as if we had closed the door emphatically,” Stoltenberg said.

Comments Off | EUROPEAN UNION | Permalink
Posted by orrinj

NOW HE TELLS THEM?:

October 21, 2005

Schroder warns against too much EU interference (Honor Mahony, 10/21/05, EUOBSERVER)

Outgoing German chancellor Gerhard Schroder has taken a parting shot at the EU warning that it should not interfere too much in member states’ business.

Writing in the weekly newspaper, Die Zeit, the chancellor said that citizens were annoyed that the EU was not effective where they wanted it to be, such as in foreign policy, and overbearing in some areas where it was not wanted.

Mr Schroder accused the European Commission and the bloc’s highest court of contributing to the “creeping impression” that they are “using common market principles to justify European regulations for which there is no need”.

“Nothing infuriates citizens more than the suspicion of a creeping loss of sovereignty,” he wrote.

He also warned that the over extension of EU powers put the member states’ “intact statehood” into question.

So what’s wrong with the EU is the idea of union.

Comments Off | EUROPEAN UNION | Permalink
Posted by orrinj

CZECH, PLEASE:

October 21, 2005

EU criticism has become fashionable, Czech leader says (Lisbeth Kirk, 10/21/05, EUOBSERVER)

The 64-year old [Czech conservative president, Vaclav Klaus, ] has had a busy schedule combining over the last few days with a speech at the Global Forum conference in Gothenburg, followed later by reception with the Swedish Royals before he headed to London to congratulate former British prime minister Margaret Thatcher on her 80th birthday.

Lady Thatcher and Vaclav Klaus are politically very close allies. He, more than anyone else in continental Europe, has been keeping alight her conservative ideals of freedom, liberalism, democracy and euroscepticism.

Five months have passed since one of their mutual bugbear, the EU integration ship ran aground following the rejection of constitution by French and Dutch voters.

Since then the EU has deemed itself to be having a ‘period of reflection’ which Mr Klaus believes is not enough.

“The pause for reflection is a pause for inertia. We should do something”, he demands adding “Time will not wait and the opportunity we have now will not repeat itself any time soon”.

“The EU needs a change. To be satisfied with recognition of the status quo and with an eventual slowing down in further unification, is not sufficient”, he says.

The Czech politician calls for a revision of the whole EU project even if it goes against some powerful vested interests.

Arguing that “the State of Europe” should be forgotten he says that a “higher European-wide democracy is an illusion”.

Mr Klaus also rejects the notion of variable geometry – the idea that different countries can integrate at different speeds and to a different extent.

“We should try to create something like an Organization of European States (OES), whose members will be individual European states rather than the citizens of these states directly, as suggested by the European constitution”, Mr Klaus suggests.

He argues that such a construction would be different to the Council of Europe – the group of states keeping an eye on democracy in Europe.

“[This] is a different institution, created to help fighting non-democracy”, says Mr Klaus.

“We should not Europeanise issues but fight for the preservation of basic civil, political and economic liberties …. The alternative is a non-state, post-democracy and administered society.”

The young Czech Republic has already produced more great leaders just named Vaclav than the French Republic has produced even mediocre leaders ever.

Comments Off | EUROPEAN UNION | Permalink
Posted by orrinj

NOW BURY IT:

September 22, 2005

EU admits constitution is on ice (BBC, 9/22/05)

European Commission President Jose Manuel Barroso has acknowledged that the EU will not have a constitution for “at least two or three years”.

He said that the text was unlikely to be ratified in the near future, after French and Dutch voters rejected it.

However, Mr Barroso said this should not mean paralysis in Europe.

He said it was important to convince citizens of the relevance of the EU by creating jobs, improving security and protecting the environment.

So just scale it back to a trade federation with joint security services.

Comments Off | EUROPEAN UNION, TRANSNATIONALISM | Permalink
Posted by orrinj

YES, TO TRADE–NO, TO UNION:

August 28, 2005

The EU can work for Britain – if we quit (Daniel Hannan, 28/08/2005)

The idea that the EU might abandon its founding ideology in order to humour Britain is one of our more enduring self-deceits. It lay behind Harold Macmillan’s original application in 1961, which was launched on the basis that “the effects of any eventual loss of sovereignty would be mitigated if resistance to Federalism on the part of some of the governments continues, which our membership might be expected to encourage”.

Even in Macmillan’s day, this was wishful thinking – although, with the EU not yet five years old, it was perhaps excusable. It is less excusable today, when we have half a century of evidence to the effect that the Treaty of Rome means what it says about “ever-closer union”. Yet still we delude ourselves, imagining that the other members are on the verge of coming round to our point of view. [...]

My sense is that most British people want to retain our trade links with the EU, and to accompany them with close inter-governmental co-operation, but not with political assimilation. Is it feasible to have our cake and eat it? Absolutely.

Consider, as an example, the members of the European Free Trade Area (Efta): Norway, Switzerland, Iceland and Lichtenstein. Each of these countries has struck its own particular deal with Brussels, but the main elements are the same. They participate fully in the four freedoms of the single market – free movement of goods, services, people and capital. But they are outside the Common Agricultural and Fisheries Policies, they control their own borders and human rights questions, they are free to negotiate trade accords with non-EU countries and they pay only a token sum to the EU budget.

Unsurprisingly, they are much richer than the EU members. According to the OECD, per capita GDP in the four Efta countries is double that in the EU. Euro-apologists are, naturally, quick with their explanations. “You can’t compare us to Iceland,” they say, “Iceland has fish.” So, of course would Britain, but for the ecological calamity of the CFP. “We’re nothing like Norway,” they go on, “Norway has oil.” Indeed; and Britain is the only net exporter of oil in the EU. Then my particular favourite: “But Switzerland has all those banks.” Yes. And London is the world’s premier financial centre – although it is, admittedly, being slowly asphyxiated by EU financial regulation.

I am not arguing that Britain should precisely replicate the terms struck by these Efta nations. On the contrary, we could do far better. We are a larger country for one thing, and, unlike the Efta states, we run a massive trade deficit with the EU. Indeed, the easiest way to answer Tony Blair’s claim about the millions of jobs that depend on the EU is to point to the astonishing fact that the Efta nations export more per head to the EU from outside than does Britain from the inside. Efta stands as a living, thriving refutation of the assertion that we must choose between assimilation and isolation.

No man may be, but some nations actually are islands.

Comments Off | EUROPEAN UNION, TRANSNATIONALISM | Permalink
Posted by orrinj

MARK MY FOOTSTEPS, MY GOOD PAGES (via Tom Corcoran):

March 21, 2005

Europe’s Problem–and Ours: Will the EU choose collectivism over individualism? Will we? (PETE DU PONT, 3/21/05, Opinion Journal)

Vaclav Klaus, president of the Czech Republic, was recently in Washington to meet with President Bush and release his new book, “On the Road to Democracy.” When the Berlin Wall fell in 1989 and the Velvet Revolution came to Czechoslovakia, Mr. Klaus became finance minister in the new democracy. He became prime minister in 1992, and later president. His market principles replaced communism with freedom and choice; he liberated prices and foreign trade, deregulated markets and privatized state ownership of assets. Communism was dismantled and prosperity came to his country.

But now President Klaus sees an unsettling new challenge: the zeal of Old Europe–France, Germany, Brussels–to impose collective choices on New Europe–Poland, Denmark, the Czech Republic, Ireland. “Ten years ago,” Mr. Klaus writes, “the dominant slogan was: ‘deregulate, liberalize, privatize.’ Now the slogan is different; ‘regulate . . . get rid of your sovereignty and put it in the hands of international institutions and organizations.’ “

“The current European unification process is not predominantly about opening up,” he continues, “It is about introducing massive regulation and protection, about imposing uniform rules, laws, and policies.” It is about a “rush into the European Union which is currently the most visible and the most powerful embodiment of ambition to create something else–supposedly better–than a free society.”

As Vaclav Havel symbolizes the defeat of communism, so too might Vaclav Klaus one day symbolize the defeat of transnationalism, a far more important fight since it affects us directly and has a domestic appeal the other isms never did.

Comments Off | EUROPEAN UNION | Permalink
Posted by orrinj

NO MAN IS WISE AT ALL TIMES:

November 24, 2002

A philosopher king’s farewell in Prague (MARTIN WALKER, 11/21/02, UPI)

Havel became the moral leader of the struggle against Soviet oppression long before he became, in what he called “one of those playful tricks history plays on us humans,” the leader of his country. And almost immediately, he saw it wrenched apart, as the Slovak half of the country decided to go its own independent way, and Havel’s humanist convictions and his devotion to human rights and freedom of choice ensured the breakup was so civilized that it became known as the Velvet Divorce.

Havel remains president until early next year. But after 13 years in office, the man who led the Velvet Revolution that broke Czechoslovakia free from Soviet rule, and who brought his country into the NATO alliance and now into the European Union, is finally stepping down after one of the most extraordinary careers in modern politics.

I’m a huge fan of Vaclav Havel, but the following speech seem fundamentally wrong, SPEECH: “The Transformation of NATO” (Václav Havel, 11/20/02, NATO):

NATO represents a unique combination of two parts of the world–North America and Europe–closely related to each other and yet fairly distant in many ways, both geographically and mentally. Numerous circumstances indicate that the present era–when so much is changing, so much is being born and so much is subjected to examination–is becoming, among other things, a time of serious testing of the relationship between America and Europe, and that the fate of NATO in the future depends, to a substantial extent, on how those concerned will stand this test.

My personal opinion is that although the two components of our alliance may, in the future, divide various tasks between them in a greater measure than they have until now, they will always need each other. Actually, they may need each other even more in the future than they do now and it would, therefore, be an historical mistake of immense consequences, possibly close to a disaster, if they were to begin to move away from one another at the political level in any major way.

What needs to be done in this situation?

I believe that the first requisite, above all else, is a quest for better knowledge of each other, better mutual understanding and a greater capacity for empathy with one another’s positions and one another’s dilemmas.

Europe should perhaps remind itself, more than it has before, that the two greatest wars in the world’s history to date grew on its soil from conflicts between European countries; and, that on both occasions it was the United States–which had no part in the outbreak of those conflicts–that eventually made the decisive contribution to the victory of the forces of freedom and justice. And more than that: Who knows whether Western Europe would have been able to hold its ground during the Cold War and withstand the Stalinist, or the Soviet or the Communist, expansion if it had not been backed by the immense potential of strength brought in by the United States, among other things within NATO? And it was, again, the United States that acted as a driving force in the solution–though apparently belated and imperfect–of certain European conflicts that emerged after the collapse of the Iron Curtain. Would Europe have been able to resolve them on its own? I am not certain. Looking back at all we have been through during the twentieth century, and witnessing all that is happening today–with the United States being inevitably involved in some way or to some extent–Europeans should be more conscious of the roots and the type of the American responsibility and, if necessary, show a certain amount of understanding for the occasional insensitivity, clumsiness or self-importance that may come with this responsibility. I would even go so far as to profess my feeling that every European who blames the United States for the manner of subjugation of the world’s economy by its global corporations should realize that it was Europe that gave birth to the entire culture of profit and economic expansion and laid this culture in America’s cradle. It is not very wise to blame our own mirror. Actually, is this not an inadmissible ethnic interpretation of the problem? It is no accident that the large corporations are called “supranational”!

On the other hand, America should realize not only the fact that it owes a substantial part of its greatness and strength to the European roots of its civilization. First and foremost, it should be aware that it might still need Europe very badly indeed. It is not so difficult to imagine that other powers, equally advanced as today’s USA, might emerge on various continents of our planet ten or twenty years from now and that a close cultural, political and security link with half a billion Europeans might prove to be very useful for the United States, even if merely for the purpose of maintaining balance. Perhaps all those complicated debates with that fussing gaggle that Europe may occasionally resemble in the eyes of the Americans have meaning after all and are worth pursuing again and again. Where but on European soil, for that matter, can America find a spiritually closer ally or partner in the future?

There’s entirely too much here of that European taste for blood and soil. The West is really much more of an idea than a place or a people and that’s why it’s reached its pinnacle in America. Though we’re many different peoples and we’ve few ties to any specific bit of land, we believe the ideas ferociously. If Europe, as appears increasingly likely, stops believing in things like freedom, democracy, and the like, then no shared history or racial characteristics will suffice to hold the alliance together. And if places like Turkey, Iran, Israel, India, Taiwan, Chile, etc., embrace our ideals, no differences in race, religion, or tradition will be able to keep us apart. That even a Vaclav Havel doesn’t yet get that is more than a little scary.

Comments Off | EUROPEAN UNION, VACLAV HAVEL | Permalink
Posted by orrinj

DADDY, WHAT WAS EUROPE? :

April 15, 2002

Does Democracy Need Voters? : The question Europe still needs to answer (Jonathan Rauch, March 2002, Atlantic Monthly)

Let’s face it, voters are a nuisance. They have an inconvenient habit of refusing to follow where social reformers want to lead. And so reformers are always on the prowl for ways to bypass electorates. One such effort is the increasingly audacious campaign by American lawyers and activists to circumvent legislatures with lawsuits. Another is the attempt to set up a number of supranational agencies, including an International Criminal Court, whose functionaries would not be accountable to voters anywhere. A third, and at least until lately the most ambitious of all such projects, is the European Union.

The EU is a consortium of European governments (fifteen at the moment) that for most of its forty-plus years has drifted steadily away from the moorings of good governance. A good government should be delimited in its powers, but the EU’s guiding premise has been “ever closer union,” leading to a permanent constitutional revolution that has inexorably gathered power toward the center. A good government should be comprehensible in its structure and open in its workings, but the EU’s processes are bafflingly arcane, and many of its key deliberations are conducted behind closed doors. A good government should, above all, be accountable to voters in regular elections, but the EU has only one elected branch, which is by far its weakest: the parliament. [...]

Europe’s unprecedented and, it must be said, surprisingly successful effort to create a Europe-wide democracy without a Europe-wide electorate has finally hit a wall. The EU plans to admit twelve new members in the next few years. Getting the existing members to agree on anything is hard enough; twelve new ones may cause total paralysis. Prompted by this realization, an especially prominent critic has recently pointed out many of the shortcomings delineated above, charging that the EU’s citizens “feel that deals are all too often cut out of their sight,” that they believe “the Union is behaving too bureaucratically,” and that the EU “needs to become more democratic, more transparent and more efficient.” This critic is none other than the EU itself, which made these points in a formal declaration in December and announced plans for a convention, starting this month and continuing into next year, to draft a constitution for Europe.

Americans may yawn. During a war on terrorism, who can be bothered with “qualified majority voting,” “subsidiarity,” “variable geometry,” and the other tongue-twisting and brain-addling elements of the EU apparatus? Besides, no one would be surprised if a grandiose EU parley disintegrates into diplomatic pablum.

But the new convention looks to be different. Its mandate is sweeping, putting on the table everything from the Union’s basic division of powers with its member states to the direct election of an EU President. It will consult a wide range of real people–national parliamentarians, academics, members of private groups, business leaders–in addition to the usual coteries of EU ministers and bureaucrats. Above all, it is impelled by Europeans’ realization that today’s blob needs shape and limits if it is to grow without collapsing.

The EU can take on a host of new members, or it can become more democratic and open, or it can become more streamlined and efficient; to do all three at once, however, seems impossible. The EU’s constitutional convention, in short, faces a hopeless task–just as our own constitutional convention did in 1787. I wouldn’t bet that the talks will produce a turning point in Western history. But I wouldn’t write off the possibility either.

Unlike Mr. Rauch, we’ve written the possibility off. The sclerotic and authoritarian bureaucracy of the EU is merely the last nail in Europe’s coffin. Its more serious problems include : the passing of religious belief and the according death of morality; social welfare states that mitigate against productivity and creativity; declining birthrates; and dependence on immigrant labor. Overcoming this series of problems would require a conservative counterrevolution on a scale that we’ve probably never seen in human history. It would require dismantling the entire network of government benefits and required corporate benefits to which Europe’s citizens feel themselves entitled, making them dependent once again on themselves, their families, their neighbors, and their churches, for their social services. I suppose you can’t rule out the possibility, but it seems awfully far-fetched.

Europe fell prey to the precise danger–which America has, thus far, better avoided–that was enunciated by many of the great conservative critics of democracy; its citizens, born with the inclination and suddenly finding themselves with the power, have voted themselves an ever greater share of other people’s wealth while requiring ever less labor and social responsibility of themselves. In order to believe that Europe can reverse its century long decline, it is necessary to believe that it can overcome the natural acquisitiveness and selfishness of its citizens. This seems dubious enough even before you add in the disturbing decline of religion throughout Europe–a decline so complete that the Archbishop of Canterbury has referred to Britain as a post-Christian nation. In the absence of Judeo-Christian beliefs, from whence will come the morality and the ideology of freedom coupled with personal responsibility that would have to underpin such a counterrevolution? Certainly not from a gang of German and French bureaucrats.

Comments Off | EUROPEAN UNION, JONATHAN RAUCH | Permalink
Posted by orrinj

Next Entries »
Follow

Get every new post delivered to your Inbox.