Daily TelegraphAT moments
of danger, one of the things a pilot of a modern warplane can
do is to emit chaff - clouds of tiny strips of tinfoil, which
hang in the air, confusing enemy radar. Last week the Prime Minister
and the Foreign Secretary started emitting large quantities of
Euro-chaff: Mr Blair delivered a speech about moving forwards
in Europe, and Mr Straw simultaneously published a newspaper article
about the need to "pool our sovereignty" there.
The Euro-chaff which was used to bulk out
both of these texts serves the same purpose as the military variety:
diversion and conceptual confusion. But close inspection reveals
that it is made of a different material; instead of strips of
tinfoil, Mr Blair and Mr Straw appear to be using shreds of old
Michael Heseltine speeches, or even whole yellowing pages from
his The Challenge of Europe: Can Britain Win? (London, 1989).
There is something peculiarly depressing about a Government so
obsessed with newness having recourse to the cliches and outmoded
arguments of more than a decade ago.
The central argument is a claim about the
nature of sovereignty. The Prime Minister offers a definition
of it: the power to maximise our national strength and capacity.
The Foreign Secretary insists that sovereignty is just a relative
concept, and suggests that if we gain more influence on the outside
world, our sovereignty is thereby increased. The way a country
gains more influence is by pooling sovereignty with other countries:
therefore, the United Kingdom will somehow become more sovereign
if it shares its sovereignty with the rest of Europe.
We are back to the old confusions of Heseltine,
Howe and Heath, circa 1990. The key confusion, once again, is
between power and authority. Power is indeed a relative thing,
which can grow or diminish in relation to external factors, but
sovereignty is a matter of authority - the final legal and political
authority to make decisions. While some states are more powerful
than others, every sovereign state in the world is equally sovereign:
in the same way, a rich person may have more financial power than
his poorer neighbour, but each has the same final authority to
decide how to spend his own money.
The Heseltinian Fallacy - or the Blairite
Fallacy, as it has become - goes as follows: if the poorer person
pooled his bank account with a group of his neighbours, think
how much more financial power and sovereignty he would have! The
fallacious element, of course, is the use of the word "he"
in the last part of that sentence. The whole group would have
more power, but that individual would have only one vote among
many. (Under majority voting in the EU, the United Kingdom has
roughly 11 per cent of the votes.) Each time the vote went against
him, he would find not that he had gained financial power, but
that he had lost financial sovereignty - his final decision-making
authority - altogether.
Does such final authority really matter?
In innumerable different ways, this country has already delegated
the exercise of its authority to European bodies (delegated, but
not irrevocably ceded). But we have retained the use of our own
decision-making authority in several areas which matter vitally,
such as defence, control of our borders, and most aspects of taxation.
These are all areas in which the onwards and upwards rhetoric
of the EU is demanding that our sovereignty be pooled.
Curiously, no one has done more in recent
months to demonstrate the importance of keeping our final decision-making
authority than Mr Blair. The support he has offered President
Bush since September 11 goes far beyond that of any other EU member;
in some European countries (Greece being only the most extreme
example) the popular stance towards America has been not shoulder-to-shoulder
but thumb-to-nose. If British sovereignty, including the final
decision-making authority over British diplomacy and the deployment
of British military force, had been properly pooled with Europe,
Mr Blair's flight-bookers would have been strangely underemployed
during the last 10 weeks.
Why, then, does Mr Blair choose just this
moment to call for "sharing more sovereignty" in Europe?
As with the warplane's chaff emissions, the prime purpose is deflection
and diversion. For his British audience, claims about sharing
sovereignty can deflect attention away from the economic argument
about the euro - which, now that Germany is going into recession
and several European economies are about to breach their own convergence
criteria, is looking increasingly shaky.
More importantly, such speeches are intended
to deflect criticism aimed at Mr Blair by Europe itself, which
bitterly resents his starring solo performance on the world stage.
One might almost admire the brazen Machiavellianism of the man,
emitting phrases about pooling sovereignty to cope with the fact
that his actions have clearly demonstrated the benefits of not
pooling it.
Yet a ghastly suspicion remains. Those old
Heseltine speeches are not only being used for chaff; up there
in the pilot's cockpit, they are being used for navigation too.
