The great euro deception

The Great Deception: A Secret History of the European Union. Christopher Booker and Richard North. Continuum. [pounds sterling]20.00. xiii + 474 pages. ISBN 0-8264-7105-6.

'A slow-motion coup d'etat'. That, say Messrs Booker and North, is what the gradual assembling of a European government has amounted to. This superbly researched, implacably focused history charts the strategy of deliberate deception, created by Jean Monnet, into which successive British governments were drawn. The latest outcome is a constitutional treaty for a new State that the Daily Mail declared 'a blueprint for tyranny'. It is certainly a government of the bureaucrats, by the bureaucrats, for the bureaucrats.

In their analysis of the EU's history, the authors demolish many myths. The EU was not born out of the 1945 wreck. It had been planned from the 1920s. Tellingly, Monnet is compared with Le Corbusier and his wish to pull down old cities. '[Le Corbusier's] shining dream was of that supranational government of the future, run by technocrats, rising above all the messy complications of nationalism and democracy'. It is not true that Britain stayed 'condescendingly aloof' from the early stages of the European project. Britain remained profoundly involved at all times, 'seeking to assist and co-operate ... in every way'. Another myth is that the Common Agricultural Policy overcame food shortages. In fact, subsidies and technological innovation had already led to overproduction. Consequently, it was necessary for France to stave off British entrance until the CAP was set in concrete. After that, Britain could be admitted--to pay for the CAP.

The great doctrinal dispute was, and is, between supranationalism and intergovernmentalism. Monnet saw the latter as the great threat to his dream, and always headed off the serial British attempts to settle for co-operation between governments. He would introduce an initiative, apparently quite innocuous. Once accepted in principle it could gradually be expanded into a fully-fledged feature of the Community structure. The strategy of gradual and indirect advance, always leading to the non-negotiable acquis communautaire, overcame all obstacles. The British leaders, above all Macmillan and Heath, either engaged in deliberate deceit or failed to plumb the Community's plans. 'They continued to believe that the Community's central purpose was to promote co-operation. It was not and never had been. The agenda was subordination'.

The awakening of British leaders to the Continental reality may now be presumed. As early as 1987, Mrs Thatcher had said: 'If ever there was an idea whose time had come and gone it was surely that of the artificial mega-state'. In the same vein, William Hague, in 1998, said: 'I fear the European Union is in danger of accepting without debate a political destination agreed 40 years ago'. Then came Tony Blair, of whom the authors observe that 'power now passed to a leader for whom deception was so much second nature that it would become the defining characteristic of his government'. He, say the authors, 'was outplayed at his own game', and thus dominates the latest episode in this book's thesis.

Yet the main thesis is open to a counter-thesis. Suppose The Great Deception can be applied to the British side? The authors here often speak of the 'innocence', the 'naivete' of British leaders. Were they truly so innocent, and was John Major such a simpleton as to believe that we could be 'at the heart of Europe'? Is not the situation closer to Shakespeare's Sonnet 138?

  When my love swears that she is made of truth,
  I do believe her, though I know she lies ...
  Simply I credit her false-speaking tongue;
  On both sides thus is simple truth suppressed.

The outcome is now plainer than when this book went to press. The UK has succeeded in its historic objective, to neutralize the EU through expansion. Out of the Trojan Horse tumble Latvians, Czechs and Poles whose lancers once fought for France. The newly admitted country members are changing the character of the club--to the disquiet of its most elderly members. In return Tony Blair has given the Continentals a pledge of undying love--subject to a referendum. He might as well have called it 'a moat defensive to a house'. The long game looks increasingly like one that Britain is winning. As Sir Humphrey Appleby put it in the television series, Yes Minister, 'Britain has had the same foreign policy objective for at least the last five hundred years--to create a disunited Europe'. The further aim is to defer indefinitely a final choice between the U.S. and E.U. In this, Britain has taken the advice offered by Bernard Shaw, in Heart-break House. 'And what', asks Hector, 'may my business as an Englishman be?' The wonderfully-named Captain Shotover answers: 'Navigation. Learn it and live; or leave it and be damned'.

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