ACCORDING to John Major and Malcolm Rifkind, British voters face a stark choice between preservation of the nation-state and absorption in a federal European superstate when they vote next Thursday.
Devolution within Britain and a fuller engagement with European integration, as advocated by the Labour Party, would break up the United Kingdom, they say. Sovereignty is therefore threatened in both directions.
It is a compelling case, which may yet pay electoral dividends by putting Labour on the defensive and exposing that party's own confused policy on both issues. But is it an accurate characterisation of how the European Union actually works and how it is likely to evolve?
This is an important question, which should not be obscured by the flood of campaign rhetoric. Because of Ireland's exposure to the terms of the British debate on the EU, it is worth exploring in the light of our differing and converging European interests.
Stark election choices are often based on false dichotomies. The central issue is whether we are indeed witnessing the demise of the nation-state and its supercession by a federal superstate, dominated, we are usually reminded, by Germany. The question is posed in zero-sum fashion, so that those who support more integration are necessarily committed to regard national governments as part of the problem and not the solution, while those who wish to defend the nation-state are obliged to resist supranationality in the name of continuing inter-govermentalism.
But there is a compelling case that both political practice for most of the EU member-states and recent theorising by academic and policy specialists have moved beyond the stark polarities posed in the British debate. This suggests that they are much more a matter of political choice in Britain than in Europe as a whole.
A comprehensive study of Ireland's position, interests and priorities in an enlarged and more closely integrated European Union from the National Economic and Social Council (NESC), published this month*, puts the nature of the emerging political and decision-making system under scrutiny before going on to answer a series of questions about eastern enlargement, policies for growth, employment and competitiveness, European social policy, economic and monetary union and public finance and cohesion.
It concludes as follows: "Continuation of European integration - along the lines of the Single Act, the Maastricht Treaty and the current Treaty revision - will not replace national government or policy with large federal structures, policies and administrative programmes. It will increasingly embed the national within the European, and the European within the national, and create European-level interaction not only between governments, but also between enterprises, trade unions, interest associations and social movements."
Debating Europa's future as a choice between inter-governmentalism and federalism is therefore misconceived. As is argued in another recent study by myself and other Irish authors**, the EU is original and exemplary in going beyond classical federal and inter-governmental forms of regional co-operation. Nation states and national identities have to be accommodated, not replaced or superceded in its structures.
It follows that the EU is neither a super-nation nor a super-state and cannot be properly understood if seen only in the perspective of classical European state and nation-building. It is explicitly predicated on a rejection of imperial or dynastic paths to European unity and the imperial state-led nationalisms that lad to two world wars this century. In this sense, a superstate model, based on domination by one or several large European states and on neo-imperial power projection, would be a betrayal, not an affirmation, of the original design.
Much argument is possible concerning the extent to which national sovereignty has been or ought to be eroded by international economic and political movements. But it is batter conducted on a realistic basis that takes proper account both of the survival of the nation state and its increasing operation within a wider European network of complex, multi-layered systems of government.
Policy in more and more spheres is not usually thought up nationally and then brought to Brussels but rather arises from a continuous interaction between them. The art of successful politics in this system has to do with adaptability, problem-solving, communications skills. The NESC study notes that Ireland has proved adept at understanding and using this emerging Euro policy. It concludes that our interests would not be best served, as we converge rapidly towards average European income levels, by reverting to a looser or a la carte form of integration, as is advocated by and entailed in the British Conservatives' European policies.
It warns, however, that the institutional issues at the centre of the current treaty revision negotiations, including the powers and balance of the Community institutions and the balance between large and small states, are important from Ireland's point of view. "While Ireland may no longer be a `poor' state, it remains a small state. As a small state within the EU, Ireland retains an interest in an integration process which is shaped by the EU institutions, governed by law and accompanied by common policies. The alternative is international economic integration in which competitive market forces are qualified only by the power of large states and large corporations.
From Britain's point of view there is a great deal of ground to be made up by whatever government is formed after the election. Much goodwill has bean lost through the last few years of Euro-scepticism, non-co-operation over the BSE crisis and even by the raucously nationalistic tone of this election campaign. If it is a Labour government, Mr Blair will find much readiness to make up the ground. Ha will have an opportunity to do so at summits in Maastricht and Amsterdam and than next year in the British EU presidency.
