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It was actually a rather moderate mishmash of negotiating demands that Cameron presented in his letter to the European council president, Donald Tusk, and some of them could help the EU perform better. The trouble is the context, the sense that the UK is only looking to its own narrow interests – its entire policy dictated by pressure from Eurosceptics at home, while the rest of Europe faces this existential crisis. To win maximum support from his European partners, Cameron needs to show them that he cares about the fate of Europe, not just of Britain; but that is precisely what his Eurosceptic backbenchers, and the Eurosceptic press, frighten him away from doing. Here is Cameron’s European catch-22.
Let’s start with the “Dear Donald” letter and its four main points. Two of them, on “economic governance” and “competitiveness”, are entirely sensible; the third, on “sovereignty”, has half a point; while that on “immigration” spoils a serious argument by tying it to one parochial demand for reducing in-work benefits for the mainly eastern European migrant workers in Britain.
It is right that there need to be clear arrangements for relations between the currently 19 member states inside the eurozone and the nine outside, especially if the eurozone takes the necessary further steps to banking and fiscal integration. It’s also right that the EU could improve “competitiveness” – which should also mean jobs – by cutting red tape and creating a digital and financial single market. Mario Monti, the distinguished Italian economist and European, has been saying this for years.
The section on “sovereignty” is a funny old mix. There are several other member states who think there should be more subsidiarity and a larger role for national parliaments, but this can’t be done just for Britain, and in a few months. As for a “formal, legally binding and irreversible” guarantee that the UK is not committed to “ever closer union”, this is such a weirdly un-British, un-pragmatic, purely symbolic gesture to insist on.
Finally, what he says on immigration raises a big, important question – the impact of the free movement of EU citizens on poorer eastern and southern European countries, which have haemorrhaged millions of their most energetic young people – but then reduces it to a petty, discriminatory proposal about in-work benefits. [...]
British opinion is genuinely divided and referendums are risky things, because people often don’t answer the question on the paper; but I’m quietly confident that the Brits will vote to stay in. Many British pro-EU friends say, “That won’t resolve anything”, but I disagree. Sure, the Eurosceptics will go on being Eurosceptics, just as I will go on being pro-EU if the referendum goes the other way, but this popular vote will decide the issue for at least a decade and probably for a generation.
If Britain is to stay in, then it has a vital national interest in ensuring that the EU does as well as possible. And let’s be under no illusion: Europe is in a bad way. A senior figure in the EU told me the other day he thought that if Germany felt compelled to close its frontiers to refugees, there would be war in the Balkans. Slovenia would close its frontier (a razor-wire fence is already being built), Croatia would push the refugees back to Serbia, Serbia might send those troublesome Muslims to Bosnia, and you can imagine the rest. And that’s just one aspect of the European crisis: there’s still the eurozone, and the rise of Eurosceptic nationalism even in core western European states. [...]
So it is time we had some more of “What can Britain do for Europe?” Hearing British leaders speak in that way may also incline our European partners to be a little more generous on the niggly specifics of the British negotiation. And after all, the Battle of Britain was also a battle for Europe.