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Enlargement has benefited not only those countries that have joined in recent years but also, in many cases, existing members. Although immigration into the UK appears to be uncontrolled, there is no doubt that the 0.5 to 1 million people who have come in since 2004 have stimulated the economy. The Government, we are reminded, forecast 26,000 over that period. However, with so much to agree with, I think that the Dutch would be disappointed to read that their GDP is only just greater than that of Malta, and it would have been informative to have included an analysis of population trends. The old EU has a rapidly ageing and declining population, as we all know, thus placing a huge burden on the working population. The new members tend to have younger and growing populations, particularly Turkey—although it is not a member—which will be absolutely essential if the EU is to grow and expand. I am sure that without the influx of foreign workers the UK inflation rate would have been immeasurably higher.
I was encouraged to read that new members have a preference for a Europe of nations, because they fear that in a federal Europe their voices would be lost. However, I was discouraged to read that there was no evidence that enlargement had led to gridlock in EU institutions. That might have forced a reform of them, which most agree is desirable.
The conflict between the deepeners and the wideners, as they are termed, reflects a disenchantment with the EU as it now is. To have the EU as a large and growing single market is surely better than having continued political integration. Let us hope that the desire to sort out the constitutional question is not speeded up at the impending June meetings, and is not shuffled through as minor changes not requiring a referendum in the desire to agree to further countries eligible for enlargement.
I was delighted to read that the committee recommends that the constitutional treaty described
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In June, Europe’s leaders meet to try to revive the European constitution. Their desire to do so is contrary to the desires of many of their electorates and, what is more, electors want a direct say in any decisions that are taken. Some 75 per cent of them in a recent poll said that they wanted a referendum. As I have said, our Prime Minister said that the earlier constitution was a tidying-up exercise. In the same breath, he said that he recommended it as a success and a major step forward in creating the kind of Europe that the British people want. It is strange that he did not have the courage to put it to the referendum that he had promised us. Now we are told that we should have a mini-constitution and that without it the EU would stop functioning. However, as the committee so ably points out, the EU has not ground to a halt since the no votes in 2005. Indeed, nearly 5,000 directives and/or regulations have been produced in the past two years.
Our leaders are now trying to bring in a mini-constitution by the back door, without referendums—a single legal entity with a single foreign policy and full authority over home affairs. The word “constitution” is of course not being used, and the suggestion is that the contents of the Charter of Fundamental Rights should be cross-referenced to give it the same legal value. If only some effort were made to roll back the EU’s powers from the largely unaccountable Brussels bureaucracy, to repatriate employment and fishing and reform the common agricultural policy or even sign off the accounts, the electorate might be more interested.
In this age of globalisation, the EU needs to look outward, not inward, and adapt to the challenges of a fast-changing world, to recognise that restrictions and regulation will not meet the opportunities awaiting China, India and the developing world with a population of nearly 4 billion compared to the EU’s 460 million. In the absence of this, a core Europe with the UK excluded or variable geometry, as it is called, may be the way forward. But the EU must go on taking new members for the many reasons so eloquently set out in the report. The more members there are, the more diverse will views become and, one hopes, in the absence of reform of Brussels from within, the larger EU will become ungovernable and will be forced to perform the rationalisation that most agree is now urgent. So my objective is the same as that of the noble Lord, Lord Stoddart, but I believe that it will be achieved by enlargement, creating so many problems that the EU as we know it today will cease to exist.
7.25 pm
Lord Judd: My Lords, I join those who have thanked the noble Lord, Lord Grenfell, and all the members of the committee for this helpful and
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At the outset of my remarks I endorse what my noble friend Lord Dubs and others have underlined. I welcome the honesty of the committee in recognising that an obstacle to enlargement is the existing state of public opinion. I also welcome the candour of the committee in bringing home that one reason for this is the inadequacy of political leadership in explaining exactly what the community has achieved, what it means for the people of its members, what its potential is and in taking a positive approach to building it for the future, instead of that leadership wanting to come home from every meeting claiming how it has fought for our exclusive interests more successfully than anybody else.
The community is not, was never conceived as being and must not be allowed to become just an administrative top-down arrangement. The quality of its democracy is crucial to its success. Perhaps it is worth pondering what we mean when we say that democracy is crucial to its success. The words flow easily, but what do they really mean?
First, democracy matters in terms of the values and culture of the society of which it is the political system, but it matters equally because it is a sound step towards stability by ensuring the accountability of government. Therefore, when we talk about the importance of the quality of democracy in the European Union, that is not just a light refrain; it is absolutely fundamental to its effectiveness and sustainability.
We all know—and the committee has certainly recognised it—that for most people in this country Brussels appears to be a remote, authoritarian body. We also know that if Brussels seems to be remote, the Parliament—whether it is in Brussels or under this absurd arrangement in Strasbourg, commuting backwards and forwards at God knows what expense to the taxpayer—is even more remote. The challenge is to bring democracy nearer to people. Here I want to take issue with Polly Toynbee. I do not often do that, but I read a recent article by her, and although I normally regard her as almost infallible as a political pundit I found myself very much in disagreement. She suggested that the recent elections in our country demonstrated not that people wanted localism, but that the voting system was unsound and what people wanted was proportional representation. I must not allow myself to be drawn into a long analysis. That is an unfortunate contrast; I think that they want both. I am certain that people want to feel that they have more influence and that decisions are made in a context which they can feel part of and understand.
Let me go further. In recent years I have become convinced that identity matters desperately to stability in national and world affairs. People need a meaningful sense of identity. In its absence there is a danger of alienation. Therefore, I, for one, am a positive enthusiast for what the Government have done in terms of devolution. They have acted ahead
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Of course, identity and devolution are not enough in themselves. The other reality that we are faced with is the world’s total interdependence, not least in the age of terrorism. We have a world in which international co-operation must be seen as not just a nice option but absolutely essential to the management of human affairs. Therefore, the challenge to political leadership is, having established a sense of identity, to lead people to support the international institutions and the co-operation which are essential if any of us are to have a future.
In the sense of what I have argued, enlargement is to be welcomed. If I am committed to enlargement, there must be no question but that undertakings which have been given must be honoured. The instability and dangers that could be provoked by rejecting people who have set out upon a particular course in good faith, and by taking the ground from under the imaginative leaders who are trying to work for what we all want, is incalculable.
I do not find myself in agreement with some of those who have spoken on Turkey. My thesis is that we, and certainly our children and grandchildren, need inclusive and not exclusive political institutions—institutions which face diversity and turn it into a rich and positive dimension of society, as distinct from something to be feared and rejected. Therefore, an increasingly democratic Turkey—of course there is a way to go yet—with an Islamic culture is going to be a positive asset for the Community as a whole, not least for the stability of our multicultural society in the United Kingdom. The Turkish army has given grounds for concern. Surely our message to the army should be, “Please understand: it is because your country is an increasingly democratic country in which the army must be servants of the political order, and because it has a strong Islamic tradition—which we value—that we want you within the Community”. If the army does not recognise that then it had better be told in no uncertain language that the road that it is taking is the one thing that could wreck the progress of Turkey towards membership.
My noble friend Lord Clinton-Davis spoke movingly about the values of the Community. It is good to hear that from someone who has been a Commissioner. There is one dimension to enlargement which we all have to take seriously; that there could be a tendency for the values to become aspirational rather than substantial. That is a possibility that we must not discount. For a number of years I have been on the delegation of the Council of Europe. I have no doubt that it has changed. Its culture now is more aspirational and rhetorical, rather than substantial in its commitment to the values about which we are speaking.
While I am making this observation and talking about the experience of the Council of Europe in this context, I will make another observation. There is a
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The logic of how I see it all is that we should be more relaxed about the principle of a confederal rather than federal European Community, as we used to call it, because I want it to be strong and effective—a European Union of co-operating states with which ordinary people can feel a greater identity. Back in the 1970s when I was the Minister of State in the Foreign Office responsible for Europe I sometimes felt, with some sadness, that the European Parliament had gone down the wrong road—that it was a mistake to have a directly elected institution. It would have been better to have an indirectly elected Parliament. The responsibility is not soundly based. That might have been a better arrangement, but so be it. Whatever the intention was, it is perceived—if it is not all fear and reality—that we have parliamentarians who are not engaged with the daily reality of substantial politics in their societies. Parliamentarians in the individual member countries can make a lot of fuss, get a high profile and news coverage by being hostile to Europe and its institutions.
I will finish by saying, with conviction, that I am certain that the way history will judge us all in this period of the 21st century is by how we build the European institutions—the way that the European Union adds to the quality of accountable government and democracy as I described it earlier, and to the effective contribution that Europeans are making to the stability of the wider world—and on recognising that the problems of our children and grandchildren, whether the environment, security or economic affairs, cannot be solved in a European context alone. They can only be solved in a global context. The test of the institutions, therefore, will be how they play in to the global institutions which have become so vital.
7.40 pm
Lord Wallace of Saltaire: My Lords, I wondered for a moment whether the noble Lord, Lord Judd, was going to take us on to the implications for British politics of the recent local elections. I am tempted to follow him for half a minute. For me, the most glorious point in those elections was watching the newly elected Member of the Scottish Parliament, the noble Lord, Lord Foulkes, saying, in an irritated fashion to a “Newsnight” presenter, “But you have to understand: we have a four-party system”. I am glad that he now understands that, and I look forward to his altered behaviour the next time that he visits us in this Parliament.
This was an extremely valuable report. It showed us a number of important issues, which I hope the committee will continue to study. Enlargement, it
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The issue of what the borders of Europe are has been with us since 1989. I then had the mildly painful experience of getting the LSE maps unit to draw some maps on European fault lines for a Chatham House paper and giving a presentation at Harvard. An elderly professor called Samuel Huntington got rather excited at one of those maps and reproduced it to demonstrate that Croatia is European but that Bosnia is on the other side in the clash of civilisations. That is one of the reasons why I very much hesitate to go along with the noble Lord, Lord Borrie, in suggesting that after Croatia we have a pause. That is the Catholic western Europe that some right-wing Americans and some in the Vatican wish us to hold to and which many of the rest of us wish to move away from as far and fast as we can.
I am not at all sure that Cyprus is really in Europe, as one defines Europe. I am not entirely sure, if you want to be deeply geographical, that Iceland—or at least the western half of Iceland—is in Europe; it is certainly the other side of the Atlantic divide. We need to be very careful when playing around with these geographical ideas.
We have had awkward states in the European Union for a long time. Many of us remember how difficult Greece was in its first 10 years of membership—it looked after its own national interests and did not think that it had anything to give in return. Sadly, Cyprus has now clearly taken on that role. That is part of the reason why we have to take much greater care in assessing the criteria for future accession. The report clearly says that the most recent enlargement has been an enormous success. The transformation of central and eastern Europe since 1990 has been astonishing. The support for economic transformation and the conditionality imposed on political and administrative reform has worked remarkably well.
However, I think that we all accept that the transformation of Romania and Bulgaria still has some distance to go and that allowing those two countries to join the European Union, though necessary in order to maintain the pace of reform, strengthens the argument for much stronger mechanisms for scrutinising the implementation of EU legislation and the quality of courts and public administration post-joining in all member states. After all, this is not just a question of Romania and Bulgaria; the water standards in Brussels are in many ways lower than those in Warsaw because of the difficulty of the Flemish and French-speaking communities in sorting out problems of sanitation. The noble Lord, Lord Triesman, looks surprised; I thought that that was a well known fact. Agricultural funds in southern Italy have not always been distributed entirely without corruption; nor, indeed, have structural funds in Spain or fisheries policy in
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We need stronger scrutiny. The European Parliament is beginning to address that; it could have a very useful role in that regard. We must also recognise that this involves not just the resistance among our publics to further enlargement but the resistance of many of our publics to eastern enlargement. That was a factor in the French and Dutch referendums—people felt that they had not been consulted about Poland, Hungary and the Czech Republic coming in and that that threatened their jobs and social welfare and would bring higher taxes. That was certainly part of the negative response to the constitutional treaty. There was a clear failure of political leadership and communication by all member Governments, including our own. But that is, of course, part of the greater failure of our Government to make any greater effort to carry their own public to understand the advantages of European integration. Further enlargement has some distance to run. The question is: how much further should it go?
On the western Balkans, I argue, as do all of us on these Benches, that we have obligations that we must fulfil. I say in passing that my noble friend Lord Ashdown very much wanted to have been here tonight but, unfortunately, is attending a ceremony to unveil his own portrait in the National Liberal Club. I say to the noble Lord, Lord Stoddart, that we on these Benches used, jokingly, to refer to my noble friend as the viceroy when he was in charge of Bosnia; it was, after all, a protectorate—and, so far, it has been a relatively successful protectorate. Does one prefer to allow parts of south-eastern Europe to deteriorate into disorder or do we recognise that it is in our shared interest to help to reconstruct conflict-ridden societies and rebuild broken states and weak economies? That would allow us to stop transnational crime, drug smuggling and people smuggling—those are all things that south-eastern Europe and the western Balkans were exporting to the rest of Europe—and, over the long haul, bring those weak and small states into full membership of the European Union.
We do not need to have deliberate pause after Croatia. There will be a natural pause, because the process will be long and hard—more like 10 years than five. However, the cost of leaving those countries out might well be too high, even though the process of bringing them up to the standards required for membership will be long and painful.
We have all agreed that Turkey is a much more difficult issue. It is a far larger and much more diverse country. I remember at a conference in Istanbul two years ago that a professor from Ankara University said to us that we had to understand that there were four different societies in Turkey: there were half a million Turks who were fully part of the sophisticated cosmopolitan global society; there were 5 million Turks who were urbanised and educated, and would
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Turkey is a very diverse society, which is developing very rapidly and which now has the least corrupt Government since the Second World War; the current Government have many very attractive features. I agree entirely with the noble Lord, Lord Judd, about the development of an Islamic democracy. I find deeply unattractive the army and those representatives of the deep state, who are nationalist, authoritarian and brutal in their attitude towards minorities and the Kurds in particular.
I wish that Her Majesty’s Government had thought through more fully the implications of offering unconditional membership to Turkey at an earlier stage. As with so many other issues, this was an area in which Her Majesty’s Government took our policy from the Americans, who wanted us to offer membership to Turkey without thinking through its implications for the European Union. We must maintain negotiations with the Turkish Government in good faith, because the reform process is well under way, which means that we have to bring increasing pressure on the Government of Cyprus to fulfil their obligations as a member of the European Union on opening their ports to trade with Northern Cyprus. However, it is quite possible that the long-term process of negotiations with Turkey will not end in full membership.
The question of the states beyond is more difficult. It is partly an issue of integration capacity and is certainly a question of relations with Russia. I very much hope that the committee will return to the issue of neighbourhood policy, into which it rightly states the European Union has not yet put much effort, nor has the committee defined what it wants neighbourhood policy to achieve. The report did not say, although I wish that it had, that the European Union needs a much more active approach towards the “frozen conflicts” in Moldova, Georgia and elsewhere, of which the noble Lord, Lord Dubs, spoke. We need a much better accompaniment to enlargement to provide the sort of partnerships that the countries around the EU, if they ever approach membership, will need to offer—and that will require 15 or 20 years or more.
What about the institutional implications? Again, I welcome the report’s argument that we need some further institutional reform—not as an end in itself, but as a means of ensuring that a widening European Union retains the capability to take and implement decisions that represent the common interests of its members. The report makes the case, therefore, for an amending treaty and for some further extension to qualified majority voting. I note that; I trust that, when we in this House come in a few months to debate the proposals for an amending treaty, other Members of this House will take it fully on board.
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