Book Reviews. The Breakdown of Europe

Citation

Unwin, P. (1998), "Book Reviews. The Breakdown of Europe", European Business Review, Vol. 98 No. 6. https://doi.org/10.1108/ebr.1998.05498fab.015

Book Reviews. The Breakdown of Europe

Book reviews

The Breakdown of Europe

Sir Richard BodyNew European Publications1998ISBN 1-8724-1011-1£20

I do not like this book. To my mind Sir Richard Body's premises are erroneous, his arguments fallacious and his conclusions wrong-headed. On a conviction that humanity lives more happily in smaller units than large he builds the argument that the European Union is bound to end in failure and tears. It is tempting to dismiss him as nothing more than an obsessive who has long since lost all sense of proportion. But if I am honest I have to admit that I find it difficult to answer his case, point by point, head-on. Let me instead put an alternative argument, as over-simplified as his, to run in parallel with it.

We have to start where we are, not where we would like to be. We have been members of the European Community for a quarter of a century. Disengagement from it would demand of us a reversal unparalleled in our peacetime history. On the day after our departure our island would still lie moored 21 miles off the coast of continental Europe.

Most of the countries of that continent remain committed to enlarging and deepening the European Union on its way to "an ever closer union of the peoples of Europe". The nature of that union remains, pace Sir Richard, up for grabs, a matter for unwearying negotiations over the decades. Within those negotiations we can have our say ­ and quite often our way, for we have natural continental allies. But if we stand outside them we lose any opportunity to influence the outcome ­ an outcome which will affect us as much outside the Union as in.

The Union towards which Europe goes on moving could in time become the super-state which Sir Richard dreads. But it could equally turn out to be the "Europe of independent nation states" in which the present government says it wants to be a leading player. Or it could transmute into a Europe of regions, of the smaller units which attracts Sir Richard's favour. It could be a continent open to the rest of the world, as I expect and hope, or the tariff-protected Europe in which Sir Richard seems to half believe. Whatever shape it takes it is unlikely to be the uniform, regimented Europe which Napoleon might have built, or Hitler or Stalin, if they had brought their ambition to fulfilment.

Of course no one can guarantee that the European Union will take this form rather than that, any more than one can guarantee that the small nation states after which Sir Richard hankers will be Switzerlands rather than Serbias. But to a Briton with any national self-confidence the European game seems one eminently worth playing, and a game which the British have quite as much chance as anyone else of winning.

But Sir Richard Body, patriot as he is, lacks that confidence in his country's ability to protect its interests and advance a case in which it believes. Instead he is haunted by fears: of the future, of others' ill-intentions, of our very human nature ­ and of the continent of which, whether we will like it or not, Britain forms an inseparable part.

Peter Unwin