Timothy Garton Ash that is. Tim has a semi-reasonable column in the Grauniad today about the EU, Europe and all that. He nails the challenge in the sub header - "Our challenge to the anti-Europeans is: where's your story of the future?" and at the end:
Yesterday, I was answering questions from Polish Eurosceptics which could have come straight from the UK Independence party. These opponents of the EU are as much Europeans as we pro-EU Europeans are. In fact, in their very nationalism they are more characteristically old-European than they know. The difference is this: we new, sceptically pro-EU Europeans have a great story to tell - a story that is about the past but also about the future. Our challenge to these old, doggedly anti-EU Europeans is: we hear your story about the past, but where's your story about the future?
I am quite willing to meet that challenge, and will answer it lower down, but first I think I should like to point that Tim is guilty of both confusing Anti-Europe with Anti-EU and of doing the classic "post hoc ergo propter hoc" thing which he claims, or at least his comrades at the Grauniad do, is what the American Neocons do with regard to all the democratic revolutions breaking out all over the place.
To go for the second complaint first. Tim claims that the EU is a force for democracy within Europe giving the EU credit for everything from the end of Franco-ist Spain to the flourishing new Central and Eastern European democracies. I'm sorry to say that I simply cannot see how the EU caused the overthrow of Iberian fascism or Eastern European communism.
As for the first point, I am generally speaking anti-EU, I am not in any way anti-Europe. It would be hypocritcal indeed for me to be anti-Europe seeing as I live on the Côte d'Azur despite being a subject of Her Majesty. Indeed I'm not, as I believe I have said before, against the concept of the EU as a body, or even as potentially a federal superstate, in theory. But that theory would require it starting from a very different foundation to the one we see today. I am strongly against the bureaucratic, statist idiocy which is the EU as currently implemented and even more against the proposed EU constitution which seeks to define and micromanage the actual policy for the EU in all sorts of areas which should have nothing to do with a constitution such as defining as one of the EU's objectives "a highly competitive social market economy", whatever that means.
So, having defined what I'm against more or less, what am I for? I'm for a pan-European body, such as the EU, enforcing free trade and freedom of movement and that is about it. I think Europe needs to be treated as a single market for goods and for services, including jobs. I don't see the need for much else. As part of the the requirements for free trade I see a need for uniform patent, trademark and copyright laws with automatic pan-European applicability and as part of the requirements for free movement I see a need to have mutual recognition of educational and professional standards but I can't see the need for much else.
I'm for a CAP (and CFP) that involves a free market as well but otherwise I want them abolished. Subsidies are silly, stop paying them. If there is a market for the food then people will grow it. If not why pay for it? If individual nations wish to pay people to make the land look nice then that is entirely up to the nation in question, in much the same way that individual municipalities pay people to take the runbish away, pick up litter etc. Likewise I'm against the industrial regulation emanating from Brussels - to be honest I'm against said regulation no matter whence it emanates, but the EU ones seem to have less common sense and a worse cost/benefit ratio than most. I'm totally aganst the idea of a common European defense or foreign policy. I simply can't see the point and so on with most of the other initiatives that the EU proposes.
To put it simply I'd like to see a Europe with less red-tape, fewer politicians and and far fewer bureaucrats. Probably the simplest way to achieve all of these goals is to remove the EU root and branch and then replace it with the minimal agency required to oversee the free movement of people and goods. This means no "grand projects" but it would almost certainly do more for European economic growth than any current plan produced by the EU. After all during most of the 19th century precisely as Europe turned itself from a primarily agrarian economy to an industrial one this was pretty much the rule and during this period the average wealth and quality of life increased enormously.
My story for the future is economic growth spurred by open markets and competition. I'd like to see a Europe where people are richer than anywhere else in the world and I can't see a better way to do that than remove as many of the overheads as possible. Isn't that a great story?