2015
EUROPE 2020
In the year Britain leaves the European Union, Covid-19 shuts previously open borders, and billions of euros are needed to shore up already struggling economies, is it possible to foresee the future for this continent in the 21st Century?
And what happened to the dream of Turkey joining the EU, narrowly avoided - by a whisker - after the whole Brexit thing, the failed coup in Ankara, and the financial crisis of 2008-10?
Turkey not only imprisons journalists and all other dissenting voices, not only disputes election results that go against the ruling party, but also violates Greek air space on a daily basis, and has done so blatantly for years. It threatens to send thousands of refugees across the border into a Europe already turning extremist in some parts due to the whole immigration business. It disputes the territorial integrity of Greece and sends invading expeditions to Libya and to Syria while still occupying Northern Cyprus and prospecting its natural resources while the Turkish currency and economy are in free-fall. There is a pattern of very violent aggression here towards all and sundry, including its own people, which only a blind eye refuses to see. Imagine such a Turkey inside the EU as some would have it, including some former British Prime Ministers.
This is a classic example of the difference between reality and the dreams of those who think they can impose their own naive vision upon hard facts and change the state of affairs by manipulating language. It reminds me of clever lawyers, including judges, who use their skills in court to, yes, I will say it, knowingly pervert the course of justice. And they succeed in perverting justice, but not in changing the actual facts of the case in the past, present or future. I see them as no different to criminals who do affect people's lives profoundly, by stealing, killing, raping or harming in other ways, but cannot possibly change the fact that there is something called truth and therefore reality, a reality which can come back to bite.
So no Turkey in the EU as yet, but what now? Are we going to see the end of Schengen and a return to hard borders in the EU? I have just avoided saying 'borders in Europe'; it is important to remember that Europe is not a synonym for the European Union (EU). Europe is so much more. And the EU could learn a number of lessons from the wider Europe, positive and negative.
Europe is Switzerland, a very rich country with its own healthy currency and a peaceful history the world envies.
Europe is the Western part of Russia, armed to the teeth but one of the poorest countries in the world, after a century of militarism and socialism.
Already in the EU is Greece, the cradle of democracy, a country that gave mankind the values, over and above the democratic vote, which enable every individual human being to flourish and to fulfil its potential, if only such values were upheld by the state. But Greece a) had to fight off invader after invader to preserve its values, and b) invented a whole raft of other concepts and ideas to create an ideal climate for the lives of its citizens, starting with freedom of thought, as opposed to blind religious belief, to accompany democratic practice, without which democracy cannot function.
So Europe is all that and more.
On the other hand, Europe is not the free movement of people, an insane concept which robs the poorest countries of their own doctors and nurses by enticing them to richer countries, with the obvious consequence that those poorer populations now want to uproot and move to where their doctors have gone. The EU went all wrong when it forgot what it was all about in the first place, a group of very different populations with different patterns of behaviour setting up an area of free trade and the free movement of capital, goods and services.
Europe is not a house whose front door never closes, and everyone and anyone from around the world can come in and use your fridge and your toilet and your bedrooms at will, and then bring their relations over also.
To Great Britain it makes little difference now, but for the EU itself the question is profound, even existential. When billions of refugees from around the world knock on the door on a daily basis and actually break the door down and succeed in entering anyway, the logic is clear that continents will empty of their excess populations and export their poverty to richer countries making them poor as well. Not only would that impoverish the EU, already struggling and overcrowded, but it damages also the prospects of those poorer parts of the world where migrants come from, when those countries lose the young, able part of their population, very much needed at home, who would do better to stay, with financial aid from the West, and solve their local problems.
Others are not as benign. When islamists succeed in destroying their own native lands, there will be nothing left for them to do except try to destroy the more stable parts of the world they go to afterwards. For them, there is no such thing as the peaceful resolution of differences, they only know force and violence as a way of life. Our ideas and fundamental beliefs shape our entire lives, individually or collectively, for better or for worse. If their beliefs and ideologies destroyed their own counties, those beliefs will not change when they move to Germany, France or Italy.
The West has been created by the ideals of freedom, the rule of law, and other civilised values inherited from ancient Greece. And just like Persia repeatedly tried to invade and destroy Greece at the time, the barbarians of the present are already trying to invade and destroy the better way of life of the West.
One has to think deeper, wider, and far further into the future than the apparent immediate. Turkey may have the second biggest army in NATO and this may seem crucial and strategic in any stand-off with a nuclear Russia, Iran or China and their likes, but not if this blinkers the deeper, wider and future implications. Turkey is flirting with Russia anyway, even buying its military hardware, defying NATO, so its importance to NATO and the dreams some have to see Turkey in the EU are the kind of thinking we talked about at the start of this editorial - using words to misrepresent the real world and to pervert the course of justice.
Turkey would suffer - is already suffering - from distancing itself from the West and its values. Turkey knows that, and it is time to call its bluff, even perhaps expelling it from NATO, the aim being to prevent war with its closest NATO ally, Greece, a peaceable, long-suffering member of the EU. We cannot have another Pakistan in the heart of Europe, Pakistan being another Moslem Asian country sucking billions in aid from the West while harbouring its most ardent enemies. Both Turkey and Pakistan are home to wonderful peoples who still struggle to find a political system that fits in with their cultures and religious beliefs, very different from those of ancient Greece or the West, and therefore suffer from constant coups and other forms of violence. All the more reason such cultures do not fit into Europe and the Greek ideals it espouses. Even if Turkey and Pakistan had truly free AND FAIR elections, which is questionable, this alone does not make them democratic in the way the West is, with all the cultural and civil institutions that make the free world what it is. For a start, historically and culturally, both Turkey and Pakistan have seen violence as the first resort to solving problems, which is the very opposite of civilisation. In Turkey, courts have been known to show sympathy to husbands who kill their wives for disobeying them. Any legislative changes demanded by the EU before joining would be cosmetic, they would not change the cultural fabric of 82 million people now free to move into Europe and live among Europeans on an equal basis.
So the two issues are interlinked. Both immigration and military aggression are issues of borders. The Middle East as a region has bred and exported enough violence, this must not be allowed to spread to the Balkans, or further up into the continent. A complacent attitude to either would be disastrous. Europe cannot just sit back and hope that everything will be all right, as Obama did while Syrians were being gassed, flooding Europe with refugees. Avoiding war and the influx of immigrants both require a robust attitude which has to start from the firm, informed political will of governments advised by the will of their long-suffering peoples.
Germany, the biggest European economy, has built industrial success with the aid of immigrants, including many from Turkey, outside the EU, and all credit to Germany for that. But Germany must not forget its own recent past, and the fact that indigenous Germans will only embrace as much as it helps their own economy, and no more. As in every European country, from Greece to Great Britain and from Poland and Hungary to France, extremist parties emerge when the voice of the people is overridden by the kind of language we talked about, putting clever words above reality.
One next thinks of Japan, also an Asian non-Christian country, like Turkey, which, despite defeat in war, like Germany, became successful because it has maintained its traditions of respect, honour, duty, bravery and detailed methodical perfectionism while also aligning itself with the West and its ancient Greek ideals of freedom, democracy and respect for the individual citizen, values imposed upon it by force by the West after World War II. And while on the subject, Japan controls immigration and restricts foreigners more than any other free democratic country, because it knows that its modern values and ancient traditions would be diluted by an influx of foreigners, and Japan would be poorer for it, even if it gained a little financially in the short term. Let me repeat yet again, clever words by politicians cannot change reality, e.g. when they say that our lives have been enhanced by creating so called multicultural societies, if that is at the expense of an ancient native way of life, in any country.
Is there a lesson in this for Europe? Perhaps:
1. The path to prosperity does not lie in a constant stream of imported cheap labour and all the problems it brings with it. This only improves the appearance of budgets and balance sheets in the short term, without looking at the real lives of real people long term, or even now.
2. An ageing population should not be seen as big a problem as overpopulation. If seven or eight billion humans are not enough, despite having destroyed the planet already, the solution is not to produce more of the same. Thinking long term, ageing populations will die soon, aided by covid-like viruses which love crowded places, leaving the youngest behind. Such deaths are tragic but there is nothing new about them. Planet earth can only support so many hungry mouths and will always remind us of the fact. Increasing the birth rate or allowing mass migrations is like lifting the lid nature is trying to put on a plague of all-devouring humans who, naturally, want the best for themselves.
3. If you do not fight invaders as the Greeks fought the Persians at Marathon, Salamis and Thermopylae, you are destroying the civilised world for thousands of years to come - which cannot be undone with a few political speeches later.
4. Barbarians have no scruples any more than the common criminals mentioned at the top of this article, and you cannot trust them to play by the higher values you show towards them. You have to confront them just like those brave Greeks did, against vastly superior odds, if necessary.
5. Appeasement led to the Second World War and ended up destroying much of Europe, rather than saving it from conflict.
We must always think long term, something few can do, which is why we call them visionaries.
And once you see reality as it is, not as you would like it to be, you
have got to take the corresponding action.
EUROPE 2014
It was fascinating to watch, day by day, the relative strength of the Euro against both the British pound and the US dollar throughout the many crisis in southern European countries and Ireland. Why? What would it take for investors to be scared off? Did they stick by the Euro because they believed no country could possibly exit, or because they believed Greece would exit leaving a much stronger bloc?
The story of the Euro from 2010 to date is the perfect illustration of how difficult it is to predict the future of such vast projects, let alone make the right decisions for such projects. And the larger the project, the more the imponderables and the greater the unpredictability.
If this is true, it does not bode well for an ever-larger European Union, let alone an ever-closer union.
Expansion of the EU puts the whole project at risk. Beyond a certain point, it would make the EU meaningless as an organisation. If everyone is a member, there is no longer a club; there will need to be clubs within the EU to accommodate different interests, as there is one already, it is called the Euro.
Perhaps the clue lies in the name. When it was called The Common Market, everyone knew what it was - a small number of countries geographically close together who exercised free trade between them. No derivative of the word Europe was in the name, and rightly so. Even now, Europe is so much larger and so much more than the European Union. Some European countries have less in common with each other than with far flung corners of the world. Britain has so much more in common with Australia, for example, than with Lithuania, not to mention future candidates like Turkey. What difference does geography make and why is trade with Turkey preferable to trade with Australia, Canada, the US, or even with India or Argentina?
It is politicians who create such monsters, not the free peoples of their countries. When people voted No in referendums, politicians simply disregarded the verdict and repeated the exercise. Political leaders act under pressure from different vested interests, their often misguided beliefs, or even ephemeral considerations. As they all told British Prime Minister John Major during negotiations at Maastricht, "Come on, it is late, we want to go home." And as John Major said in Parliament on his return, "Game set and match to Britain." On such trivial considerations they embark on projects which risk the fortunes of half a billion people long into the future.
PROS AND CONS
Membership of any club has advantages and disadvantages and those change at different points in time. Britain is relieved not to have joined the Euro, while Greeks probably wish they had waited. At some point in the future both positions may be reversed. Things looked different a few years ago, and will look different again in the future. Countries make choices on what seems right at the time - at least what seems right to some. France, Germany, Belgium and the Netherlands are so closely linked geographically, a single currency made sense. You could stand on their borders watching traffic as commuters simply drove through, perhaps to work in one country, then come back to their home country in the same evening. You could even watch the sparrows hop between one country and another with a quick flutter of the wing. It would have been ridiculous, for the humans at least, to have to change currency every time they crossed a border. Under such conditions, the Euro made perfect sense. Any disadvantages, and there were many, were outweighed by the advantages.
The British do not have that experience and are not in the same situation. They too would have gained from membership of the Euro, but the losses outweighed the gains. The loss of government freedom to determine economic policy, for example, would have been more costly than any gains.
The same applies when new countries join the European Union itself. With each new country joining, there are advantages and disadvantages for all concerned. This must mean some conflict of interest between countries. Up to a point, such conflicts can be resolved with compromise in exchange for some gain. Beyond that point, the conflicts will remain unresolved and tensions will be created. And the greater the club, the greater the probability of such conflicts.
We are not predicting the end of the EU any time soon. What we are saying
here is that, long term, things cannot continue as they are now for any
country in the European Union, old or new.
DISCLAIMER
The content on these pages does not constitute professional advice, as
it does not take account of individual circumstances.