Non and Nee: two views

The peasant's revolt

Simon Jenkins went to Holland to see the death throes of old Europe and found himself witnessing a rebellion that is both thrilling and laced with menace

Sunday Times 5 June 2005

In Brussels the “mannequin pis” winked. In Holland the boy took his finger from the dyke. In Paris Marianne bared not her breast but her buttock. The cock crowed, the lion roared, the bear growled. Bliss it was last week to be alive and in Amsterdam, the city which since the 17th century has embodied civic autonomy and global commerce. It has just perpetrated a revolution and can hardly believe it.
Two hundred kilometres to the south in Brussels, the humiliated courtiers of the European Union sat gloomy in their gilded salons, wondering how to hold off the upstart mob. Jean-Claude Juncker of Luxembourg, presiding over the EU’s Council of Ministers, tearfully suggested that Europe’s voters be asked to vote again “until they get it right”. Lord Kerr, Britain’s envoy at this court, described the referendums as a “macabre ritual”. Jose Manuel Barroso, commission president, warned of a “risk of contagion” spreading across Europe. Only in Brussels is the word democracy synonymous with disease.
On the radio I listened to Peter Mandelson, Neil Kinnock, Chris Patten and Jack Straw splutter that a period of “sober reflection” was in order, as if a brief visit to the confessional would purge Holy Mother Church of the sin of pride: surely this Martin Luther moment must pass. But by the weekend, anti-constitution sentiment was wildfire. Those silent referendums, the opinion polls, were taking up the cry from Warsaw to Lisbon. Even pro-European Luxembourg doubled its “no” vote in a month. It is hard to overstate the trauma of this past week.
What does it mean? In France the vote was being interpreted in as many ways as there are French philosophers. The best answer was the simplest, that of a veteran of the Foreign Legion, a farmer in the Lot, on whose views on Europe I can always rely to produce unprintable expletives. He loathes Paris, Brussels and Muslim immigrants in that order. He is the personification of “non”. But France’s defection has always been on the cards.
I remember a French embassy official during Britain’s last referendum on the EU in 1975 (when only the Shetlands voted no). He warned me that “France will be European as long as Europe is French”. When that ceased to apply, “France will dispense with Europe. It will destroy it”. Last week he was proved right. France embodies the nation as saboteur.
The Netherlands result seemed to require a different reading. At an informal seminar in a Concertgebouw cafe on Thursday, I heard a group of Dutch writers gasp at what their countrymen had done. A loyal European state that once viewed the EU as a bulwark of prosperity and security in a hostile world had voted a massive “nee”.
This outcome once seemed inconceivable. Every political party, every newspaper, every trade union, the entire Dutch establishment, had campaigned for yes. Over Amsterdam’s central square, the Dam, towers a royal palace filled with the emblems of world trade. Yet Holland had gone for what was in truth a chauvinist rebellion. Nor were there any fancy excuses. The pundits agreed that the people were voting not just against an unpopular prime minister but against the euro, immigration, the loss of the Dutch veto and Europe in general. This was new.
The Dutch government had tried to scare them into a yes. It used television footage of Auschwitz and Srebrenica to imply that a no vote meant war. It said that electricity would fail and lights would go out. The economics minister, Laurens-Jan Brinkhorst, took leave of his democratic senses and declared the referendum stupid because the Dutch people “are being allowed to vote on an issue they know nothing about”. The prime minister, Jan Peter Balkenende, pleaded with the electorate not to “humiliate me when I go to Brussels”, an invitation no red-blooded democrat could refuse.
Three years ago the Dutch gave their leaders a warning by flirting with the gay anti-establishment politician Pim Fortuyn, since dead. Now they let rip. As the columnist Leon de Winter remarked: “The Dutch people looked at what was on offer and immediately smelt a rat.” The referendum was “Pim Fortuyn part two”.
Though the French and Dutch votes have been given wildly differing analyses they have much in common. Both display the new politics of Europe. This no longer trusts those in power to protect the public’s demand for commercial, social and ethnic sovereignty. It is the politics of protectionism in every sense of the word. The Dutch may be less chauvinist than the French, and less committed to a “social” Europe, but they too see the EU as no longer a defence but a threat.
British Eurosceptics may welcome the no vote for their own reasons, but they should not be fooled. With the kitchen of global competition hotting up, the no vote is mostly a vote to leave it for the comfort of protectionism.
The Dutch may profess themselves liberal in outlook, but each day the motorways from the north bring swarms of economic migrants from Poland and beyond, ready to work for low wages. Ninety per cent of the rented housing in Amsterdam is now subject to some form of covert anti-immigrant control. Predictions suggest that Amsterdam and Rotterdam will have majority immigrant populations by 2010. The government is already expelling “illegals” by the thousand.
Tell the Dutch that their social policy within a decade may depend on the votes of 70m Turkish Muslims and they will blow a raspberry. Even Maastricht, the city that “beats at the heart of Europe”, voted no last week. An informal poll of 24,000 Dutch high school pupils registered 70% in the no camp.
Returning to London I heard a Eurocrat and a Finnish MEP claiming on the radio that, despite all this, ratification should proceed anyway, a view shared by many stunned European leaders. They might have been on the moon. The argument was that a majority of EU governments were for the constitution and a minority should not be allowed to“get in their way”. No American senator would dare speak that way of states’ rights, even within the US. The conversation showed the mindset of thousands whose careers must now depend on the Brussels gravy train moving forwards.
Europe is not a majoritarian state but a treaty-based collection of free countries. As the phone lines burned this weekend and France and Germany rushed into a defensive clinch, the terms of European statecraft were being rewritten. In Madrid and Rome, in Athens and Prague, in Dublin and London, elites stared at the ruin of half a century of shared assumption, that Europe would progress to the Treaty of Rome’s “ever closer union”. The phrase had guided their careers. It had sent their children to Fontainebleau and Harvard, to apprenticeship at the World Bank and sinecures in a Brussels “cabinet”. Ever closer union had distanced them from their home countries and, fatally, from their electorates. I shall not forget the expostulation of that master Eurocrat, Pascal Lamy, in Brussels 15 years ago, “But Mr Jenkins, you cannot take national governments seriously. They are the past!” Thus might a pampered prelate dismiss Luther’s Reformation as a minor burp.
The referendum is the answer to Lamy. It is democracy’s nuclear weapon, used only where conventional politics are thought to yield insufficient legitimacy. That is why governments turn to referendums only when they think they can control their raw explosive power. The French and Dutch votes show what happens when that calculation goes wrong. They are to the EU what Hiroshima and Nagasaki were to wartime Japan.
The countries of Europe must now seek a new political narrative and a new and limited destination. As the Dutch foreign minister admitted last week, the EU was always a journey rather than a goal. Europe set off after the second world war like Ulysses on an odyssey. It diverted itself to Brussels and found a city full of horrors, Cyclops, the Sirens and Scylla and Charybdis all in one. It plotted schemes and interventions more potent than the dreams of empires past. It measured swimming pools, counted chemicals and fixed the length of ladders. It taxed its subjects to distraction. Ulysses may have gone along with this, but his crew have mutinied.
The new narrative must run with, not against, the grain of Europe’s national groups. It must lie in the cantons of Switzerland, the mairies of France, the “free communes” of Sweden, the Rathausen of Bavaria and the parish halls of England. There must be a new treaty to guide European trade, but it must respect subsidiarity, not just the lip service paid in the doomed constitution. It must grow from the bottom up and cannot be fashioned in a French chateau amid claret and caviar.
The wisest comment on last week’s events came from the Swiss finance minister, Hans-Rudolf Merz: “European integration that goes beyond economy and security always stumbles at borders.” Europe has borders for good reasons. They are written in blood and cannot be discarded to suit the convenience of a codfish lobbyist or a cosmetics directive.
One destination is obviously the “variable geometry” presumably plotted this weekend by the Germans and French in Berlin. It has already entered the post-referendum lexicon with its two speeds, twin-tracks, concentric rings, core-and-periphery and an end to one-size-fits-all. The message is slowly striking home, that a wider union cannot mean a deeper one. Brussels was an empire too big. Enlargement was an empire too far. As both Napoleon and Hitler discovered, when European imperialists march to the east they eventually lose in the west. The elastic is overstretched.
It is now inconceivable that the French will ever tolerate 70m Turks as common citizens of Europe. It is inconceivable that the British will tolerate France’s rampant protectionism. It is inconceivable that anyone will tolerate Britain’s budget rebate. New and variable relationships must be forged.
The old stereotypes are defunct, of Germany and France in the “fast lane” with smaller states cringing under Germany’s skirts and Britain as the ever sceptical laggard. When I asked my Dutch friends if they feared a new Franco-German “core” they laughed. France and Germany are now the problem, not the solution. The euro is a brake not an accelerator. The Czechs, Poles, Scandinavians are in the fast lane. As for Turkey, Angela Merkel, the possible next German chancellor, is already talking the realpolitik of “privileged partnership”.
A bold futurologist might even take his cue from Donald Rumsfeld. He might see in “old and new Europe” the next continental dynamic. This sees another iron curtain rising across Europe. To its west are the old socialised economies of the original Common Market, stuck inside protectionist walls and crippled by emigration, low birthrates and welfare burdens. These economies will be trapped by voters of the fearful right and the fearful left. Their borders will close and their politics become ever more introverted.
To their east will be the “new tigers” of the former Soviet bloc, untrammelled by social models, with open labour markets, natural resources and easy access to the Middle East and Asia. It was the Czech Republic that on Thursday heralded the French vote as “a victory for freedom”. The Poles could well vote against the constitution in September. Nor is that all. Since most eastern states will remain oligarchic in character, they will be less inhibited by electoral resistance to economic reform. They may be nasty but they could be rich.
Last week’s referendums offer one final message that might avert such a nightmare prospect. It was not only a European constitution that hit the buffers. It was also the constitutions of France and the Netherlands. The no votes were a withdrawal of trust equally from the denizens of Brussels and of Paris and the Hague.
The present leaders of France, Germany, Italy and Holland are more discredited than any of their predecessors. In France the division of power between President Chirac and his cabinet is near chaotic. In Holland the “rolling” Christian Democrat coalition under Jan Peter Balkenende is the most unpopular in modern Dutch history. Yet proportional representation gives it indefinite life. PR constitutions have blighted democratic participation in Scandinavia and Italy. Everywhere constitutions are in crisis — even to some in Britain.
Many European states struggled to amend their constitutions in the 1980s and 1990s. Denmark, France, Italy, Spain and Sweden all radically decentralised their governments. Some did so to stem the tide of separatism, notably in Spain and Italy. All were responding to a widespread sentiment that modern government had become too distant, that real political power should pass back to local communities and provinces.
When France passed the decentralist “loi Deferre” in 1982, departmental prefets in line of descent from Napoleon reportedly broke down and wept. Germany has had a decentralised constitution ever since the war, when the allies imposed Länder devolution to impede a revival of the Führerprinzip. This devolution was so effective as now to stymie economic reform, the allies’ poison pill within the German post-war miracle.
Until now these decentralist measures have been popular. French politics, so moribund nationally, remains vital locally. Vital too are such renascent cities as Milan, Toulouse, Barcelona and Munich, revived by a civic autonomy unthinkable in Britain. An ironic result has been that constitutionally reformed nations have been more tolerant of power passing to Brussels than has unreformed Britain.

If a Swede or a Sicilian can run his own school, his healthcare and his community planning, he is less inclined to worry when his national parliament loses out to Brussels. In return Brussels has assiduously courted localism. Go to the Scottish Highlands and ask who pays for its excellent roads.
Yet the referendums suggest that even this “Euro-regionalism” is not enough to placate the people of Europe for their loss of local power. The flight into the politics of identity is now a panic rush. It leaves not just Brussels but national capitals vulnerable to the new politics.
Last week the Dutch voted to stay Dutch, not just in social laws but in the ethnic composition of their country. The French feel the same, as do the Ukrainians and other east Europeans as they emerge from the yoke of Russian homogeneity.
I found in Holland and France an openness in opposition to non-European immigrants that in Britain would be thought racist. The Dutch “no” campaigner and MP, Geert Wilders, makes the British National party seem like reticent liberals. If the sentiments are not racist they are ethnically exclusive.
The new politics is reflected throughout Europe. It is seen in the demands of Basques, Catalans and Galicians to self-government within a Spain that is nowadays more a loose confederation than a nation. Public schools in Barcelona teach in Catalan, not Spanish. Special constitutional status in Italy is awarded to the Sicilians and Val d’Aostans and in France to the Bretons and Corsicans. Germany may struggle to re-establish Berlin as a strong centre, but it must do so against the mighty länder. Even in super-centralist Britain, nobody would seriously propose reversing Scots or Welsh devolution. The Welsh television channel may be the most expensive in the world, but nobody would dare close it down. Across Europe this “enclave democracy” is gradually superseding the federal nations fashioned in the 19th and 20th centuries. Politicians such as Le Pen, Wilders and Austria’s Jörg Haider are not passing phenomena. They have emerged as a result of lax constitutions which assumed that popular apathy meant popular consent.
The most alarming response to this comes from an improbable quarter. In 1998 the Norwegian parliament, the Storting, decided to celebrate the millennium in an appropriately solemn fashion. It commissioned five wise persons to investigate Norway’s democracy and chart its course over the next century. The curt answer was that “the democratic infrastructure is in collapse”.
Democracy might prove to have been a passing blip on the radar screen of history. Proportional representation and “rolling coalitions” were breeding public cynicism that elections never changed governments. Local democracy, once strong in Scandinavia, was waning. People were becoming comfortable and apathetic, roused to anger only “just-in-time”, on specific issues such as the location of a road or the closure of a hospital.
Unless the Norwegian constitution was reformed, said the study, Norway would become a form of oligarchy. A stage army of self-selected party politicians in Oslo would share power with an elite of unelected technocrats, lawyers, bankers and journalists. They would adjust policy by regular focus groups and opinion polls. The urban poor would be a helot class, too small to matter politically. The only threat to this oligarchy would come from outbursts of protest, controlled by ever tighter security.
What is plausible in this prediction is that it echoes trends discernable across most of Europe. Deprived of power over their local communities, people cede control over their lives to national and international elites. They no longer participate in conventional politics and “care” only when the rhythm of their lives is upset by some extraneous phenomenon. When they are upset, the explosion is the more seismic, as when they are visited by a new European currency or the arrival of a wave of immigrants. Such politics is reactive, introspective and chauvinist. It is the true meaning of “no”.
If history offers any lesson from the past week it is that Europe courts disaster if it allows the politics of union to override the politics of division. Regions, enclaves, provinces and statelets are part of the European kaleidoscope. The peoples of eastern Europe, notably in what were Czechoslovakia and Yugoslavia, have just risked their wealth and even their lives to recover their historical identities. They want self-government to mean just that, as do the enclaves of the west. Only if they are convinced such so-called subsidiarity is genuine will the myriad peoples that make up Europe consent to the national or supranational disciplines needed to keep Europe competitive.
This past week has seen democracy explode its most dangerous weapon, a referendum. The release of energy was awesome. Power asked a question of freedom and was given a punch in the face. Such moments are rare and they are beautiful. They are also menacing and full of meaning.

What is to be done?

Blairism is the answer to Europe's ills - but we need someone else to deliver it

Timothy Garton Ash

Guardian June 2, 2005

Last week I wrote, in this column, a passionate appeal to the French to vote yes. This British appeal appeared on the front page of Le Monde the day before the referendum. Perhaps it contributed to the scale of the no vote.

[Appeal column http://www.guardian.co.uk/Columnists/Column/0,5673,1492249,00.html]

For many French people, if the British think something is a good idea, that's another reason to be suspicious of it. In this referendum campaign, one of the main French objections to the European Union as represented by the constitutional treaty was that it was too "British": that is, too much enlarged to include new countries, too Anglophone, and too enamoured of liberal, free-market economics. In one poll of French no voters, 40% said they had rejected the treaty because it was "too liberal".

Yet will the French no - especially as it has been followed by a Dutch one - result in precisely the outcome they hoped to prevent? A French commentator, Alain Duhamel, observes sadly that the French vote on Sunday could mark the birth of "l'Europe anglaise". (Or rather écossaise, in the case of Gordon Brown; but the French, like most continental Europeans, still elide the British with the English.) France, according to Duhamel, has abdicated its position of leadership in Europe. The Franco-German axis is no longer the motor of the union - to recall the dominant mixed metaphor of the last 40 years. Chirac is enfeebled and Schröder on the skids. Who's left? Blair and a British Europe.
I note with alarm that this analysis is shared by some in London, not a million miles from Downing Street. Visions are invoked of Blair and Britain riding to the rescue of the European project, during our presidency of the union in the second half of this year, with a galvanising insistence that what Europe needs now, more than ever, is British-style economic and social reform. Only thus can we face up to the dragons of globalisation. The hour of London has come. Cry God for England, Tony and St George!
This analysis is both completely right and absolutely wrong. It's completely right to say that more reform is the only way the more developed countries in Europe will prevent jobs continuing to leach away, both to central and east European countries with cheap skilled labour and, on a larger scale, to Asia. With all its faults, Blairism - more accurately, Blair-Brown-ism - is the closest any European country has come to combining American-style enterprise with European-style solidarity. That's one big reason New Labour just won a historic third term. It is this relative success which - before the Iraq war - made many on the continental centre-left and centre-right aficionados of what the Italians called Blairismo .
At the same time, the analysis is absolutely wrong. For the surest way to ensure that Europe does not adopt this necessary programme is for the British prime minister to advocate it, in missionary mode, at this particular juncture. The French, and now also the Dutch, have just delivered a resounding no, both to the treaty and to what they see as a British Europe. The perfect moment, then, for a British prime minister to say: "So, mes amis, you have spoken, and I conclude that what you really need is a British Europe!"
Moreover, while British government sources - and especially the foreign secretary, Jack Straw - are letting it be privately understood that we almost certainly won't have a British referendum, the government of every other referendum country is saying that they are going ahead. That has, so far, also been the clear position of the Luxembourg presidency, which chairs this month's summit of EU leaders, and of the European commission.
There are formal, political and democratic arguments for this otherwise slightly surreal commitment to go on riding a dead horse. The formal one is that the treaty provides for everyone to go ahead and ratify. If 20 out of the 25 member states have done so, but up to five have not, it then goes back to EU leaders next autumn, and the European council must decide how to proceed. The political one is that we don't want a Europe where all countries are equal but some are more equal than others. If Denmark says no, that's a problem for Denmark, but if France says no, that's a problem for Europe. Small countries must have their say as well. The democratic argument is that these ratification debates have finally got the peoples of Europe to re-engage with the European project. This was, of course, one original purpose of the whole constitutional process. In this sense, its failure is testament to its success. No one can say the French did not have a serious popular debate about Europe.
At some point it will be clear to all that the horse of the constitutional treaty is really dead. However, reaching that point may take all of the British presidency, if not beyond. Whatever the political pressures on him, Blair would be ill-advised to be the first to say he definitely won't have a referendum, thus furnishing a convenient scapegoat for Jacques Chirac and others. There are enough difficult arguments to be had as it is, where Britain and France will find themselves on different sides: about the EU budget and the British rebate, the working-time directive, the services directive. It would be folly to add to these a grand confrontation between British and French models of socio-economic reform. Chirac's disastrous new choice of prime minister, the Napoleonic poet manqué Dominique de Villepin, would like nothing better than to fight another battle of Austerlitz - even if it ended in another Waterloo.
No, the wise course for the British presidency is to behave in quite un-Blair-like fashion, in order to achieve the final, strategic triumph of Blairism. No missionary preaching. No headline-grabbing prime-ministerial initiatives. Instead: quiet, patient behind-the-scenes diplomacy and European-style consensus-building. The British presidency should aspire not to be the relaunch of the European project but to prepare the ground for that relaunch. Given time, the ratification process will play itself out, and the allies for substantive Blairism will grow. In the German elections this autumn, the Christian Democrats' Angela Merkel is likely to win. If de Villepin fails, Chirac may finally be compelled to call on his arch-rival Nicolas Sarkozy. Sarkozy gave a fascinating response to the referendum result in which, while speaking the language of social Europe, he effectively called for radical reform. "We must," he said, "give to our social model the reality which it has lost."
Substantive Blairism, which is what Europe needs in its socio-economic model, only has a chance of being accepted if Blair's Britain is not seen to be its main missionary. As it was only the anti-communist Richard Nixon who could afford to open relations with communist China, and the rightwing nationalist Margaret Thatcher who could give away Rhodesia, so it's only Sarkozy and Merkel who can sell Blairism to the European mainstream. Blair's objective should be that, under next year's Austrian presidency, the EU comes up with proposals which bear a strong resemblance, in substance though not in rhetoric, to his own. Then he should graciously welcome this magnificent new Franco-German initiative.