On Europe

1

THE PROBLEMS OF EUROPE

During my lifetime most of the problems the world has faced have come, in one fashion or other, from mainland Europe, and the solutions from outside it. That generalisation is clearly true of the Second World War. Nazism was, after all, a European ideology, the Third Reich an attempt at European domination. Against both, the resolve of Britain, of the Commonwealth and, decisively, of America were successfully brought to bear. A great victory for liberty was the result. The mainland Europeans benefited from an outcome which, by and large, they had not themselves secured: some have resented it ever since.

But my opening generalisation is also in a different sense true of the Cold War. Although it was above all in the Soviet Union, that is outside a narrowly defined ‘Europe’, that Marxism became the ideology of empire, Marxism too had European roots. Karl Marx was, it should be remembered, a European thinker in a line of European thinkers; he developed his ideas by studying the experience of Revolutionary France and, I am sorry to say, he prepared his works by courtesy of the British Museum, long before they took political shape in St Petersburg and Moscow; and it was finally the liberal democratic values of the English-speaking peoples, spearheaded from Washington, which proved the ultimate antidote to communism. For a second time – for a third if you go back further to the First World War, though the issues there are somewhat more complex – salvation came from across the Atlantic.

At a personal level, I am conscious that much of my energy as Prime Minister was also taken up with Europe – and, if I had my time again, still more would have been so. Of course, Britain was not in those days fighting a war against a European power. But there was an increasingly intense struggle, all the same – one which focused on issues of great national and international significance. And, looking forward into the century which has just begun, there is every reason to imagine that this clash of aims and ideas is likely to continue.

I want, therefore, to examine now in some detail what is at stake – in this chapter from a mainly global perspective, in the next from a more narrowly focused British one. Having sketched out the problems, I shall also suggest some possible solutions. These will, however, not by and large be directed at ‘Europe’. Too many British and other critics have spent too long trying to do that: it is, to speak bluntly, a waste of time, because, as I shall seek to show, Europe as a whole is fundamentally unreformable. My suggestions will thus be addressed principally to those who are still not fully party to the project, and thus not fatally compromised by it.

NEW STATES FOR OLD

For most of the Cold War period, the boundaries of Western states marked out on our atlases seemed remarkably clear, and seemed likely to last. In Asia, and still more in Africa, the situation was, of course, more fluid and confusing; though even there it was generally new names rather than new borders that appeared, as one after the other European colonies gained their independence. The greatest divide, though, was between communist and non-communist states, with the former, whatever their notional titles and dignities, falling under the sway of the Soviet Union or China, and the latter enjoying political sovereignty under the formal or informal protection of the United States.

Since the end of the Cold War, however, that easily identifiable and comprehensible pattern has radically, and probably permanently, changed. Recent years have seen more new states emerge in Europe than at any time since the 1918–19 Versailles and Trianon Treaties. Not that most of these were ‘new’ in the sense that they lacked political antecedents. But certainly in the former Soviet Union and in the Balkans the maps have been redrawn in ways that still leave politicians trying to draw breath, and cartographers in profit. This, then, has been one feature of modern times.