CHRIS PATTEN

I came across a speech given by Chris Patten in 2004 when he was EU Commissioner for External Relations  (HERE). He uses a brief conversation he had with a stewardess on a flight from Tokyo who asked him, "Do you think that Britain will ever actually join Europe?" I'm not clear if this was deliberately ironic or an accident but it was a jolly good question and he does his best to answer it.

"Why is the European question so difficult for us? What is the problem? We grumble about loss of sovereignty while our Westminster Parliament is gutted by the executive, and our unwritten constitution is regularly re-written on the back of an envelope".

He first begins by identifying Britain's post war search for identity as the Empire slipped away and how we stood at the intersection between three overlapping rings America, the Commonwealth and Europe and he notes:

"Perhaps it took Suez as well as the remarkable speed at which the German economy overtook our own to convince us that the Fellowship of the three Rings was not going to provide us with an adequate infrastructure for our diplomacy, our economic prosperity and our security. So Mr Macmillan applied for membership of the Common Market and when his suit was rejected by General de Gaulle in 1963 wrote in his diary, "All our policies at home and abroad are in ruins. We have lost everything, except our courage and determination."

"A second strand in our relationship with Europe has been the sense that we are fundamentally different from them different and superior. Margaret Thatcher conceded in her famous Bruges speech in 1988 that links with Europe had been "the dominant factor in our history", but she and many others still looked back to borrow a phrase from John Major "to a golden age that never was". Golden and gloriously insular, "this blessed plot" had a longer and deeper tradition of liberty, parliamentary democracy and law than our European neighbours". 

This is what we now think of as British exceptionalism. The increasingly strained belief that although superior we are somehow being cheated out of what is rightfully ours by a bunch of too-clever-by-half foreigners, particularly German foreigners. We watch as living standards rise in continental Europe and cannot come to terms with the idea they might actually be better that we are.

"Worries about sovereignty are the cause of a third set of concerns. Now sovereignty is a notoriously slippery concept. It is not a finite, political commodity here one moment, gone the next. But that is how it is invariably discussed bearing one simple political meaning, our ability to manage our own affairs largely on our own. I inserted the word "largely", assuming generously that not even the most extreme sovereigntist believes that we can run Britain entirely on our own, "master of our fate, captain of our soul."

"And here lies what I believe to be one of the most interesting problems today in political science. The nation state remains everywhere the unit most able to attract and reflect the loyalties of individual citizens. Yet citizens in many countries recognise that their interests cannot be protected or advanced by their national governments on their own. Crime, disease, terrorism, drugs, trade, the environment all demand co-operation between national governments." 

I think because we have had a long tradition of deciding things for ourselves as head of an empire stretching around the world, the concept of sharing decision making was always a grudging one.

"Fourth, The European Union also suffers from being thought to be the political product of an elite, something foisted on the hewers of wood and the drawers of water. This is not a uniquely British feeling. Fifty years ago Raymond Aron wrote, "The European idea is empty…. It was created by intellectuals, and that fact accounts for its genuine appeal to the mind and its feeble appeal to the heart." The strongest appeal to the heart has probably stemmed from the historic act of reconciliation between France and Germany which was the Union's real genesis."

"The most successful institutional changes in Europe have come at the service of policies. We wished, for example, to make the single market work more effectively so we introduced greater majority voting to manage it. We wanted to introduce a single currency, hence the Maastricht treaty. We wanted to develop a more coherent approach to external relations so we changed the treaties and appointed a High Representative for Foreign and Security Policy. Where the institutional debate seems divorced from practical ends it is always more likely to run into difficulties. The work of the Inter-Governmental Conference, following the Convention, needs to be seen clearly to be focussed on the practical issue of making a Union of 25 or more work effectively."

And his description of Britain's reaction to the very first tentative plans for cooperation in Europe after the war could still apply today. Attitudes have changed barely at all. Listen to the this about the Schuman plan [Schuman was the French Foreign Minister] for the Coal and Steel Community:

"A fifth characteristic of our own European affair is our consistent belief that whatever the others are up to is probably bad and will certainly not work. This attitude existed from the very beginning. The Foreign Office's reaction to the Schuman plan which, in 1950, laid the first building block for the new Europe, was to denounce France for behaving extremely badly by springing the proposal on the world without consultation. Britain refused on principle to join in any talks on a plan for pooling the coal and steel industries of France and Germany and placing decision-making in the hands of a supranational body. In Clement Attlee's words this would be "utterly undemocratic and responsible to nobody". The story continued from Messina to Rome, and on to today and the launch of the single currency."

"The construction of the European Union has not been smooth, nor easy nor a matter of triumph piled on triumph. But what has been put together represents an astonishing indeed unique sharing of sovereignty involving today almost every nation state in Europe as present Members, Members-in-waiting, or aspirant Members. What is surprising is not that we lurch from drama to drama, but that we move forward so fast and, for most of the time, so effectively. When eventually we in Britain join the euro-zone, as most of our public seem to think inevitable, we will doubtless bemoan the fact once again that we have not been around for longer shaping the rules and leading the economic debate, and we will also I suspect ask ourselves what all the fuss was about".

"Finally, and very briefly, debate in the Convention and in the Inter-Governmental Conference, and comment and discussion on those debates in many of the Member States, should remind us that we have a historic opportunity to mould the way that the European Union evolves. The issues that concern us democratic accountability, subsidiarity, defining where Europe really does add value are of equal concern to others. Were we to open our eyes wider, were we to listen a little harder, we would discover that we are not "loners", obsessed with political and institutional issues that register no blips on other radar screens. We have the chance to put a cogent and coherent vision of Europe's future, and the opportunity to win converts to our side provided we can convince them that we are committed to a successful Europe. First, though, we need to convince ourselves".

Patten finishes with what I think are very wise words. They are long gone now, lost in the fog of Brexit but true nonetheless.

"And that will only happen [committing ourselves to Europe] if we strip away some of the falsehoods that definitions of nationhood everywhere require. We should see ourselves as we really are. That way we have the chance to be more than we will otherwise become".