Labour victory would keep door open to vision for EU

ACCORDING to John Major, the Labour Party is unpatriotic because it is not prepared to see Britain isolated in Europe. Developing a distinction made by his Foreign Secretary, Malcolm Rifkind, Mr Major argues that isolation may be preferable to an involvement in the EU that sacrifices interests to protect influence.

Tony Blair has said repeatedly that Britain must not be isolated in Europe, so it is not difficult to understand why Mr Major should make this an issue. But the logic of his position is worth exploring in the light of the strategic choices facing the British electorate over European policy in this campaign.

The European issue has not as yet come fully into the foreground, although it continues to take up a remarkable amount of comment and analysis in the serious media. This is because it is assumed - correctly - that the outcome, based on the positions of both main parties, and the choices facing whatever government is elected, will determine Britain's position in Europe for decades to come.

It is equally clear that the future shape of European integration itself will be significantly determined by the result.

An enlarged European Union in which Britain consistently exercised an isolationist option would bear a much greater Franco-German stamp than one in which Britain seeks to exert a leadership role. Historically, the Benelux states strongly favoured British entry precisely to rebalance France and Germany.

Their readiness now to go along with a new flexibility formula proposed from Bonn and Paris to bypass a reluctant Britain is an indication of how disenchanted the Benelux states have become with London.

Although there is comparatively little difference in the formal positions of the Conservative and Labour parties on many of the main European issues, they do differ on their orientations towards integration and the desirability of Britain playing a leadership role in Europe. This applies as much to the likely new crop of Labour and Conservative MPs as to the attitudes of the party leaderships, which the latest row over whether Tory candidates will endorse the wait and see line on EMU perfectly illustrates.

AS the political writer David Marquand has put it, the logic of each party's position is driving British voters "towards a kind of Rubicon", as between differing models of British society and Britain's international positioning.

He characterises them as the Tory authoritarian individualist vision of a European Hong Kong, "an offshore island, profiting from free trade with the mainland, but refusing to pay her share of the social and political costs that the mainland's free-trade project has entailed".

This compares to an alternative vision of Britain "as a full partner in a Christian-cum-social-democratic Europe, protofederal, even if not formally federalist in structure embodying a distinct, European model of politics, economics and society".

As he puts it, Labour has not fully opted for the second vision because it is torn between its politics and its economics, its communitarian values and its me-tooism on Thatcherite individualism. Mr Marquand argues that whereas a Conservative victory would foreclose the second option, a Labour one would keep it open.

A great deal would also depend on whether Labour was ready to pursue its constitutional changes in line with its European ones, introducing change in absolute parliamentary sovereignty by devolution, electoral reform in a drive towards a political realignment that could introduce more consensual and coalitionary politics in Britain.

BOTH parties have adopted a wait-and-see policy on economic and monetary union, which would probably delay British entry until the year 2903.

Both are sceptical about whether the single currency project will work and uncertain about whether it would be in Britain's interests to join. Britain, as EU president, will preside over the crucial decision-making on who is in and who out in the first half of next year. The logic of these alternative roads in Europe will therefore unfold very rapidly, irrespective of the eventual timetable that might lead Britain towards the heart of the EU, much less to a leadership role within it.

The EU flexibility debate, insofar as it is intended to bypass a slow or reluctant Britain, contains within it the emergence of a new power bloc within an enlarged EU, based on a Franco-German model of integration.

Both parties are alarmed by this and have warned against its consequences for marginalising Britain. But if they stick to a wait-and-see policy on EMU, the core part of the project, it is difficult to see how this can be avoided.

There has been very little effort under Mr Major to play to British strengths in other spheres, such as rapid enlargement or the development of a more coherent and effective common foreign and security policy.

This would require a greater willingness to support qualified majority voting at the Inter-Governmental Conference. Whoever becomes prime minister will be attending the special EU summit in Maastricht on May 23rd, called yesterday to familiarise the other 14 leaders with him.

It is difficult to see how Britain's interests in the EU could best be protected by a loss of influence, much less by a policy of isolation.

As Timothy Garton Ash has put it: "Britain might actually find itself doing worse in a Europe in which Germany and France started behaving like Britain than in a Europe in which Britain and France have to be a little more like Germany."