Joyce McMillan: World no longer stands on unity

The cracks are becoming more apparent, not only in the European ideal but also in UK union

AT THE excellent Wigtown Book Festival, a couple of months ago, I took part in a discussion with SNP MSP Aileen Campbell, and veteran Conservative Lord Fraser of Carmylie, about the possible nuts and bolts of Scottish independence. Many of the questions from the audience focused on whether an independent Scotland would eventually seek to join the eurozone; and I remarked – uncontroversially, I thought – that it seemed unlikely the single currency could survive, if Germany proved unwilling to bail out the weaker European economies.

Afterwards a young German in the audience came up and addressed me in petulant tones, saying, “Well, thank you for volunteering my country to pay off Greece’s debts for it. Why should we do that?”

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I answered that he might think about doing it out of basic human solidarity, and enlightened self-interest; unless, of course he believed everything he read in the papers about the “natural” laziness and corruption of Mediterranean peoples. He looked back at me as though I was speaking in some unknown tongue, then left.

And thereby, I think, hangs the whole tale of the gradual collapse of the European ideal, through which we now seem to be living; and, for that matter, of the increasing failure of positive unionist politics in the UK.

The Union between Scotland and England became a long-term success, after 1707, because the wealth of Empire made possible investment, modernisation and industrialisation on a previously unknown scale. After 1945, the UK developed a new progressive project, around the ideal of a comprehensive, cradle-to-grave Welfare State.

And in the postwar period, the great architects of European union also set out on a grand progressive project, trying to create a Europe of common citizenship that would never again collapse into war. The idea was not only to bind the national economies of the continent together so that war would become impossible, but also to offer a progressive social model to all citizens. And in the exemplary economic history of Germany, the country perhaps most faithful to that European model, there is ample evidence that it was well worth a try.

Now, though, both of those union projects are collapsing; and in both cases, the solvent has been the gradual rightward drift of governments which began, around 1980, to believe that progressive social projects were none of their business. The role of radical free-market economics in weakening the Union in Britain has been notorious, ever since the early Thatcher years. Bad-mouthing the welfare state, disempowering the trade unions, and talking a language of crass individualism that is anathema to a majority of voters north of the Wash, the Conservative Party since 1979 – and its followers in the Blairite New Labour movement – have provided the SNP with a steady drip-feed of new recruits and enhanced political credibility.

If the UK is going to live through the 21st century as a City-driven bankers’ paradise, with the largest wealth inequalities in the developed world, then a clear majority of Scots will want nothing to do with it; the cry will be “I’m a social democrat, get me out of here”, even if a vote for the SNP is the only way to do it.

In Europe too, though, the slow drift away from social democracy – in key countries like the Netherlands and France – has gradually destroyed the language of solidarity; so that now, Europeans looking for a strong collective identity, as people do, in bad times, are increasingly reverting to crude forms of right-wing nationalism.

The agreement struck among the other 26 member states in Brussels last week may not have been right-wing enough for David Cameron, who wanted to be free to treat bankers better, and ordinary workers even worse, than the EU allows.

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In essence, though, what the Brussels agreement does is to further undermine the whole ideal of European union, by creating a legal framework which effectively outlaws a social-democratic or Keynesian response to the present crisis, and commits every member nation to the very cycle of austerity and stagnation which, back in the 1930s, led to economic and political disaster. The idea that the peoples of Europe will tolerate this kind of reactionary and misconceived policy, applied by distant bureaucrats whom they have not even elected, is fanciful in the extreme; and political uproar across the continent, followed by a threatened breakdown of the entire European project, seems increasingly likely.

If leaders have one lesson to learn, in other words, from this tragic chain of events, it’s that politicians who want to pursue projects of political union should be careful to nurture, and never to abandon, the big progressive ideas of international co-operation, solidarity, and human development which alone generate solid and positive political support for such projects. They should remember, too, that a healthy dose of class politics helps to strengthen grassroots international links, and in tough times provides the only strong antidote to rabid populist nationalism.

And here in Scotland, finally, we should perhaps count our blessings; in that although we are moving towards a default politics of nationalism, with all the attendant moral and intellectual dangers, we nonetheless entered on this path in better times, for reasons which were broadly progressive.

Alex Salmond, in other words, is not Geert Wilders, the blatantly Islamophobic leader of the Dutch Freedom Party; nor is he Umberto Bossi, of Italy’s racist Northern League. And for that at least, we can be grateful; as we enter the white water of times that may see not only the breakup of the UK, but also the end of European union, in anything like its current form.

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