| Clear-Eyed Observation from a Political Analyst |
A Political Diary |
| Chris Bickerton , London School of Economics , June 17, 2016 |
The referendum is eight days away and unsurprisingly the Hong Kong Theatre at the London School of Economics' Clement Building is packed. An expert is to hand. Chris Bickerton is author of the European Union: A Citizen's Guide. It is a book small enough in size to be droppable in a pocket, but big in substance. From the podium he acknowledges the help and domestic support in its making. He was confident that the referendum would be called for September and its move to a midsummer date has meant a compressed time scale. The shrinking of the timescale by three months is serious for any author. For an academic, with the particular rhythm of the profession's year, it is especially so. Bickerton is a reminder as to why we have universities. His is a cool, succinct, probing intelligence, far remote from the last months of public hyperbole, selectiveness and side-taking. The European Union he presents is a hazy mirage. Viewed more closely in the company of this authoritative voice, it does not get any clearer. But it is an improvement on the clamour of the campaigns. He explains the reason. The Stayers were warned by focus groups not to make mention of the Union itself. The Union is a vote-loser, which explains its utter absence over the months past. Bickerton's perspective is precisely the reverse of those who claim loss of sovereignty. The Commission itself, through the lens of the political scientist, has been leaching power for a long period. “The Commission is weak because it does not have the powers of implementation and ratification”, he states. Those who trumpet a superstate, trampling on national democratic freedoms, exaggerate its power and authority. They ignore the small size of the EU administration and the central role played by national governments. Authority rests in the European Council and every participant is there by dint of a process conducted by a national state. Bickerton has small truck for the misty myth of a continent merging its many nationalities. The Easyjet model of an Italian pilot employed by a Greek entrepreneur taking the English to their French retreats does not extend far. The overwhelming bulk of Europeans live as, and where, their parents did. “We live in national societies,” he says, “the intermingling is very shallow.” His lecture and his book have a purpose. “My goal has always been to describe the European Union as it is and not as we may wish it to be.” The Union is a way of life and those with memories of the time before are few. But it does not excite. Its spokespeople are dull and its buildings all look the same. Its structure is unknown to all except its workers. “We think of it with a sense of unhappy fatalism”, he says. It is a genuine puzzle as to why it has achieved such a distance from popular sentiment. It is in part aesthetic. We like a politics that has a dash to it, with a dose of excitement and visual stimulus. What we get are identikit men going in and out of meetings. Its behaviour is not how Britain likes its politics. The verbal fisticuffs are eased away or conducted privately. In June 2014 one Chancellor and three Prime Ministers climbed into a small rowing boat on a Swedish lake. In a revealing simile the Briton declares his life jacket to be unnecessary as he can swim “like a Labrador.” The Union offers little to look at, so a boat outing gets amplified. The Labour party has hardly featured on television. The cream of old Britain has led; the voices are those of Eton, Balliol and Sandhurst. Bickerton too is located in an old Britain as a Fellow of Queens’ College, Cambridge is bound to be. But he does detail and numbers, areas where television is unhappy. The Commission’s headcount is a little below 25,000. The USA has a population around a third less than that of the EU; its Department of Commerce alone employs 44,000. But the Union is its own enemy in structuring complexity. It is a rare voter next week who could even guess at what distinguishes the European Council from the Council of Ministers. The author in his book puts in a friendly “Still Reading? Good”, and he is on to Ecofin, Agrifish, Coreper, parts I and II. He describes exactly the working methods of the Antici diplomats. Bickerton is a rebuttal to those who insist the cybersphere will reveal everything. The Cambridge scholar tells it plainly in a crisp book where the Internet does not. Institutions have their origins and Bickerton goes back to Monnet, Schuman and Delors. Chunks of recent European experience are unknown to us. In 1996 rates of interest in Bulgaria exceeded 300 percent. In 2013 Slovenia’s three main banks, all state-owned, collapsed. Some figures are straightforward. Labour mobility, Europeans at work in a state that is not their own, stands at 3 percent. 97 percent of the total working population lives at home. But history is also complicated. Economic integration is variable and Europe is compared with CARICOM, SACU, CACM and EACM, not to mention the bilateral agreements with Andorra, San Marino and Turkey. Bickerton touches deftly on the cultures that make the coalition of Europe. For the Mediterranean nations Brussels has a double identity. Firstly, it is rejection of rule by soldiers. Within living memory Spain, Greece and Portugal have all been dictatorships. More importantly, the EU is government of order and even-handedness. The Mediterranean wants government on the principles of Max Weber. “Spain is the problem, Europe the solution”, said Ortega de Gasset on his country’s accession in 1986. De Gasset is his country’s greatest philosopher. Europe is a philosophical furnace in a way that the USA is not. When Germany speaks of the EU, it is the voice of Hegel. The Commission is pure Descartes. Bickerton homes in on a debate between two living thinkers, Jūrgen Habermas and Wolfgang Streeck. The maintenance of Europe’s high standard of living and the extensive regime of social rights require, in the Habermas view, a supranational state. For Streeck: “Europe is more heterogeneous and more divided than ever. Differences between national societies are acute.” Habermas versus Streeck is a rerunning of Fichte versus Herder. Culture precedes politics. A six minute walk away from this hall is Lincoln’s Inn Fields and the former home on its north side of Sir John Soane. The house is home to Hogarth’s Election series of paintings. It is politics as raucous, noisesome, public and vital. Art does not teach but it makes the metaphors that we follow. France does Liberty storming the barricades and Britain does Hogarth. That meeting of the four premiers in the rowing boat on the Swedish lake was a tussle as to who would be next President of the Commission, a power in fact lost to the European Parliament. Had more noise emanated from the edifice of the EU there might have been less protest from Britain. The fact of a portable Parliament was not compromise; it was asinine. Bickerton cites the German sociologist Claus Offe who identifies the core dilemma, greater powers versus public resistance. “Europe is “entrapped”, he says, “unable to move forward, it cannot move backwards either.” Bickerton the political scientist ends with a sober diagnosis of the times. In Britain allegiance to party by class has evaporated. To try to beat UKIP on nostalgia is not enough. “Political competition is increasingly structured around twin poles of populism and technocracy”, says the political scientist. Books, and universities, are there to make us see the world more truly. The vote on June 23rd is a choice between the status quo and the new, the dimensions of which are entirely unknown. Book and lecture have a rattling sense of certainty, even as far as casting a doubt that perhaps the status quo might not deserve the shattering. But Bickerton leaves one question hanging. Decisions on health and education, foreign alliances and military campaigns are not in the domain of the Commission. In its absence, he asks, who will its excoriators find instead to blame? |
Reviewed by: Adam Somerset |
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