After the umpteen crisis summits that have dominated Brussels-night life, last week’s meeting of EU leaders was one of the dullest in recent memory. With the clock well past 3am, bleary-eyed leaders stumbled along to brief the no-less bleary-eyed Brussels press corps that, after ten hours of painstaking negotiating, a couple of words in the summit conclusions had been changed.
Three months after agreeing to create a single supervisor for the eurozone by the end of 2012, EU leaders confirmed that they had actually meant it and that the legal framework would be in place by the end of 2012.
But while leaders lined up to put their own national spin on the banking union agreement, David Cameron’s Friday morning press briefing was significant, not just because of what he said, but also the way he said it. In the course of a 20 minute briefing Cameron referred to “a new settlement” for both the eurozone and Britain about five times. Every time he spoke of the necessity of a banking union and deeper integration for the eurozone in the next breath he added that Britain would not be involved in any of it.
As a statement of fact, it is hard to disagree with him. Deeper integration of the eurozone will change Britain’s relationship with the EU. Whether it is bank supervision by the ECB, a specific budget for the eurozone or a single Treasury for the single currency, all have as profound implications for the 10 countries outside the eurozone as for the eurozone-17. All, particularly Denmark and Sweden, the two other countries where euro-membership is squarely off the political agenda, will have big decisions to make, but a multi-speed Europe will surely become even clearer than it already is.
The first question is whether Cameron genuinely wants Britain to have second division membership and, if so, whether other countries will let him. Although Michael Gove and Iain Duncan-Smith lead the ‘get-outer’ faction in his cabinet, it seems clear that Cameron does not want Britain to leave the EU. In fact, he was at pains to repeat his commitment to Britain’s EU membership, particularly to the single market, and to the country’s ‘euro-realism’ on foreign policy.
The Cameron-doctrine on Europe seems to boil down to the following: pro-single market and in favour of ad hoc co-operation on foreign policy and blanket opposition to everything else – from the euro and JHA policy to social policy. However, while there is plenty to criticise from a left or liberal perspective, it is an ideologically coherent and thoroughly Tory approach.
At the same time, however, his government continues to add fuel to the perception that Cameron’s EU policy is one of outright hostility. Indeed, after a week in which his government decided to opt out of over 130 legal acts on justice and home affairs policy and senior ministers mooted the possibility of a referendum on the EU within a year of the next election expected in 2015, the remark by Finland’s Europe minister, Alex Stubb, that Britain was waving “bye, bye to Europe” is understandable. One of the Tories’ main weaknesses on Europe is their lack of any significant allies and it is hard to see how Cameron can secure the opt-outs his party craves if he constantly provokes hostility from other European governments
That is why Cameron should tread carefully at November’s specially convened EU budget summit. Angela Merkel has already thrown down the gauntlet, threatening to call off the summit – a veto to pre-empt a veto – if Cameron and William Hague continue to demand big reductions in EU spending. The entire EU budget only represents 1 per cent of GDP and the funds being argued about between countries are pretty small – around 0.1 per cent of GDP. But if it is already hard to see other countries agreeing to more British opt-outs, holding the rest of Europe to ransom over a tiny proportion of the EU budget would be completely counterproductive.
The other question is whether his party is prepared to listen. One of the mistakes Cameron made early on was to think that he could buy off his eurosceptics. Despite pulling his MEP delegation out of the centre-right European People’s Party group and putting a “referendum lock” into UK law, many Tory activists are still convinced that their leader is a kool-aid slurping federalist and will accept nothing short of as many ‘in/out’ referendums as it takes to get the right result.
However, it is not as if either Labour or the Liberal Democrats have a coherent Europe policy around which to take advantage of Cameron’s contortions. Since being ousted from power in 2010, Labour has taken a conscious decision not to be a hostage to fortune by laying down detailed policy platforms and Europe is no exception. Senior figures in the party are even considering whether to steal a march on the Tories by promising a referendum on Britain’s EU membership in their next manifesto, a high risk strategy for no obvious political gain considering that the party won’t convince anyone if it tries to ‘out-sceptic’ the Conservatives.
As for the Lib Dems, the only way that their pro-EU stance will be a vote-winner is if they use it in 2014 to despatch Nick Clegg to Brussels as Britain’s next Commissioner, conveniently a year before facing the wrath of the electorate the following year.
Europe has been one of the most destructive forces in the Conservative party for over twenty years. After wrangling over the ERM and attitudes to European integration contributed to Thatcher’s downfall, John Major’s government was wrecked by civil war over the Maastricht Treaty and, since then, the Tories have repeatedly failed to articulate a policy position capable of getting grass-roots support and being put into practice. But now eurozone integration seems set to formally create a club within a club. Cameron acknowledges this and is inching towards a sceptical but engaged role in Europe. The question is whether other European leaders, and his party activists, are ready to listen.
Ben Fox is chairman of GMB Brussels and political adviser to the Socialist vice-president of economic and monetary affairs.
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