The long referendum campaign over whether to leave the European Union is getting underway in Britain, and the pro-Brussels side has recruited its first high-profile supporter: Barack Obama. At the recent G7 summit in Bavaria, to the delight of the Euro-elites, the president declared: “We are very much looking forward to the United Kingdom staying a part of the European Union because we think its influence is positive not just for Europe but also for the world.”
Positive, eh? We’re talking about the same EU here, right? The one that funnels cash to Hamas? That has declared its willingness to sell weapons to Beijing? That refuses to deal with the opposition in Cuba? That keeps dragging its feet on sanctions against Vladimir Putin? That EU?
To be fair, the president was simply repeating the Europhile line that the State Department has been pushing since the 1950s. Back then, the issue was framed in Cold War terms. European integration was seen as a way to bolster NATO, and the CIA funded several of the politicians who supported it. In particular, it spent a lot of money on building up the Christian Democratic parties of Western Europe, seeing them as a way to lure working-class voters away from communism.
The Christian Democrats were anti-Marxist, all right; but they were not in any sense free-marketeers or conservatives. They tended to lean Right on social questions, such as abortion and homosexuality, but Left on most other things, being big supporters of state intervention in the economy, powerful trade unions and so on. They extolled a United States of Europe as the best hope for a “middle way” between the dictatorship of Soviet communism and the barbarity of unchecked American capitalism.
When the Soviet military threat receded after 1990, the EU elites felt free to express their anti-Americanism more openly. European integration was now explicitly defended as a way to challenge what the French call American “hyper-power.” Jacques Chirac, for example, insisted on building up an EU satellite system to challenge the “technological imperialism” of America’s GPS. From Israel to Iraq, the EU began to define its foreign policy interests in opposition to those of the United States.
Under the circumstances, you might have expected American enthusiasm for the European project to wane, but that’s rarely how foreign policy works. Strategic assumptions remain in place long after their rationale has become redundant. The desirability of European integration is part of the mental architecture of the State Department. It is the default assumption, too, of most Democrats and McCain-type Republicans. None of these grandees ever seems to ask from first principles why it is in the interest of the U.S. to support a process which makes Europe more regulated, less competitive and less democratic.
Barack Obama is an outlier, though, even among Democrats. This is the man who, in effect, launched his presidential campaign in Berlin, and who used his first international summit to praise European supra-nationalism. Could it be that the president sees the EU as a role model? Might he be attracted precisely by the centralization, the rejection of national sovereignty, the welfare profligacy, the pacifism, the obsession with renewable energy, the state-run healthcare? The fellow would hardly be human if he didn’t enjoy the media adulation he gets when he crosses the Atlantic. Perhaps he might be forgiven for wishing that Americans were a bit more like Europeans.
But here’s the thing. Britons don’t want to be more like Europeans. When we joined in the 1970s, we were signing up for a common market, not for a superstate. In fact, we never even properly got the market. Instead of mutual product recognition, the EU is based on corporatism and micro-regulation. In consequence, the EU’s share of world GDP is collapsing. In 1980, there were nine EU member states, and among them they accounted for 30 percent of the world economy. Today there are 28 members, but they make up only 17 per cent of the world economy.
Most British Euroskeptics want to slough off this declining customs union and reintegrate into world markets. In particular, we want closer ties with the countries to which we are linked by language and law, including the U.S.(whose share of world GDP, by the way, has held pretty steady).
So, let’s ask the question. Which of the 28 EU states has been America’s most reliable ally over the past century? Who has been prepared to deploy significant forces alongside yours, from the Korean War to the Afghan campaign? Who, even now, is joining Washington in pushing for a tougher line in Ukraine, while other EU states agonize about lifting even the trivial sanctions to which they have so far agreed?
Perhaps the answer to that question explains, deep down, why President Obama wants to submerge Britain into a European federation. The Anglosphere alliance represents all the things he dislikes, above all the “arrogance” which he spent his first term apologizing for. Me? I’d hate to see a world without it.
Dan Hannan is a British Conservative MEP.
