No book
since 1945 on the subject of Britain and its relationship with Europe has
received more adulation from supporters of greater political and economic
integration than Hugo Young’s 1998 classic: This
Blessed Plot: Britain and Europe from Churchill to Blair. Its central tenets deserve regular review as
the popularity of British Euroscepticism develops apace. Painstakingly researched and elegantly
written, it has both scholarly value and a fluent journalistic style that sets
it apart from other leading Europhilic histories such as Stephen George’s Awkward Partner (1990) Roy Denman’s Missed Chances (1996). The thrust of the argument is broadly similar
however and not hugely original.
In summary, it contains two core strands. The first is that the Europe issue has been dominated by elites, with public opinion ‘changeable, ignorant and half-hearted’, rarely achieving ‘what pollsters call salience’ (1998: 287). If public opinion ‘revealed a consistent pattern’, it was that ‘the people tended to go wherever they were led by the political class’ (508). In particular, one thinks of the 1975 membership referendum as a classic example in British politics of the power of political cueing by mainstream elites on a complicated, often abstract positional question.
Now, with
the possibility of another referendum by 2018 quoted by bookmaker William Hill
as a 50/50 ‘even money’ chance, the question of the strength of today’s main
party pro-EU cue is an interesting one, especially within the context of
declining political trust in Britain, and forms the subject of my own PhD
research. Evidence from the British
Election Study’s monthly survey of voter attitudes to EU membership since 2008
(see here), shows decline in the pro-EU
influence of the main parties on voter opinion on EU membership, controlling
for other causal factors in EU support such as individual economic and
immigration attitudes. Contrary to the Young view, voters are
becoming more independent of the traditional political elites in forming
judgements on Europe.
In 1970, Lindberg
and Scheingold argued that a ‘permissive consensus’ existed among European publics
where they deferred to elites on the question.
It was within this schema that Young developed his history of Britain
and Europe. Since the passing of the
Single European Act in 1986 and the Maastricht Treaty in 1992, passive support
for integration has been punctured into what Hooghe and Marks have termed a ‘constraining
dissensus’ (2005: 426) characterised by heightened issue salience around
periods of party elite polarisation.
Across Europe, pro-EU elites have repeatedly failed to carry public
opinion in referendum votes on further integration. For Liesbet Hooghe, ‘the era in which
relatively insulated elites bargained grand treaties in the shadow of
uninterested and generally approving publics has come to an end’ (2007:5). During the current financial crisis, pressures
of political divergence between Eurozone and non-Eurozone countries, combined
with economic failures associated with the single currency are presenting
further challenges to the remorseless functionalist logic that more integration brings
with it ever greater peace, stability and prosperity.
The recent
weakening of the 'pro-EU elite cue' might have two causes. Firstly it could be a result of the changing
supply in information to the public. Specifically, mainstream politicians in the
public mind are not now so associated with the case for continued membership
because they are not adequately making the argument. In their place, contrary messaging is
received by the public direct from a fragmentary media. These competing media cues instil public
blame of EU institutions for the crisis, because of the seemingly endless drip-drip
of bad news stories from the Eurozone.
Alternatively, and more seriously for the integrationist lobby, it could
be a matter of voter demand: the public are discounting what they hear from the
main parties when making increasingly Eurosceptic judgements because they don’t
trust those parties.
The second
strand to the overall Young narrative is the normative element, a highly
critical assessment of British political elite culture. Young is as gushing as his reserved, but often
haughty style permits about the triumph of Ted Heath’s resolute pragmatism in
gaining Britain entry to the EEC in 1973, ably supported by the influx of
pro-EC civil servants that populated the Foreign and Commonwealth Office in the
1960s. In unashamedly elitist - even
conspiratorial tones - he writes of bureaucrats like Roger Makins and Michael
Palliser that ‘the interests of their country and their careers coincided; it
was an appealing symbiosis’ (1998: 177).
However, other
than during this heroic plot of entry, for Young, British elites have generally
got Europe horribly wrong. The troubled
history with the Continent is traceable to irrationalism among the British
political class, possessed by cultural attachments derived from the country’s
exceptional history of war and empire.
Principled concerns over loss of sovereignty and national identity, made
Britain awkward, often arriving late at the European party or missing the boat altogether. For too long, he declared of British sceptics,
‘attachment to Britain’s cultural and historical differences got the better of
their political judgement’ (1998: 3).
And here is
Claudia Trauffler’s main beef, set out in her book
review of Young’s work for the LSE’s EUROPP blog, 15 years on. His argument is still in play she thinks:
‘nothing has changed, it only got worse’ – to which I wonder what she thinks
happened in between under Blair? He was
Young’s great hope for a more visionary approach, but presumably let the side
down by not leading Britain into the single Euro currency. One should not forget how, at the time, opponents
of British adoption were lambasted with the Young-type invective of missing
opportunities and dwindling away influence.
Right now
however, Trauffler asserts, what British influence is left continues to ‘ebb
away’ with David Cameron’s awkward and confrontational style. Not a month after his ‘threat of divorce’
speech in January, ‘Britain was outvoted in Brussels on a piece of financial
services legislation for the first time in political memory… The plot has never
been more present’ she says, being part of a long line of attitudes dating back
to the post-war years, ingrained as it is the British political psyche.
Her fears that the Young analysis needs reviving should be allayed. It never went out of fashion. His core assumptions provide the bedrock of much subsequent discourse on the subject today, bleeding into academia’s generally sniffy response to the recent rise of UKIP and the dominant media narrative of the EU issue as a question of party management, largely detached from public concerns. A couple of Young’s verses have merely been tweaked, but the chorus remains the same in explaining British Euroscepticism: the public are largely disinterested or ignorant whilst Eurosceptic elites are nothing short of possessed. With this underlying disdain for public attitudes on the EU as superficial, any policy repositioning by parties in response to UKIP is liable to be seen as ideological commitment rather than a strategic response to electoral incentives. Public contempt for the main political parties, universally agreed to be embodied in the rise of UKIP, has apparently little relationship with a largely elitist integrationist policy on Europe over the last 40 years – a tacit assertion surely worthy of further research.
Young had chimed with the times of the late Eighties and early Nineties, focusing on what Menno Spiering has called ‘literal Euroscepticism, a long-established wariness not just of European integration, but of all things European’ (Harmsen and Spiering, 2005: 146). In examining the likes of Bill Cash, he diagnosed an extreme case of a national sovereignty obsessive, indicating ‘a weakness for nostalgia’ bordering on dependence. Peter Mandelson recently used a similar line to deny substance to Euroscepticism: ‘the problem we face in this country’ he concluded, ‘is not Euroscepticism at all, but Europhobia – it is a little Englander mentality, a harkening back to a past glory’ (Landale, 2013).
The
difficulty with this cultural take is that it is largely static. It struggles to fully explain increasing
Euroscepticism as a response to dynamic political and economic
realities, particularly during the present financial crisis. It is also a rather tired and disparaging view
on British cultural attitudes to Europe, vulnerable to suggestions that Britain
has moved on, in a more post-material, cognitively mobilised direction. Haven’t we been holidaying across Europe for
decades now, and love Champions League football, even idolising foreign players
in our own Premier League? And surely we
no longer draw on the experience of war to describe European political institutions
as a German racket?
Reading the
array of recent academic literature that is critical of Euroscepticism, one
senses that the Young chorus of unconcerned, ignorant publics and dysfunctional
elites is just too orthodox to question, and too obviously a cheap and easy
sneer for Europhiles to ignore. Rather
than fundamentally reappraise it in the light of new circumstances, authors prefer to give it some new ballast, a
little more floating time in the stormy sea in which the European integration
project battles. The public may continue
to oppose Europe, or at least support UKIP on grounds of nationalism or polite xenophobia
during difficult economic times (Ford et al, 2011), but for Eurosceptic elites,
there is a new, far more addictive, economically ideological strain to their
obsession. They are ‘falling hopelessly
in love with a distinctly American, liberal model of capitalism whose stress of
deregulation and creative destruction has long stood in stark contrast to the
supposedly sclerotic version popular on the Continent’ (Bale, 2012).
Tim Bale’s ‘etiology
of an obsession’ within the Conservative Party on Europe is the Young
approach reincarnated; the current exposition of Euroscepticism as delusional. Replacing the cultural attachments of elites
for ones of economic ideology it is hoped, might give the Young thesis a new
lease of life within the context of financial crisis. He argues that ‘true believers’ in
Thatcherite ideology rather than ‘prosaic pragmatists’ have come to dominate
the direction of the debate, carrying with them a baggage of resentments still
felt towards the pro-EC Tory assassins of their folk leader in 1990. Opposing Maastricht (on sovereignty grounds)
was the soft ‘gateway drug’ (the political equivalent of cannabis) ‘that set
the Conservative Party on the road to the hard stuff to which it is now utterly
addicted’. Euroscepticism has assumed ‘an unstoppable logic all of its own’. In a similar vein, Tony Blair recently called
Euroscepticism a virus and ‘the right have got it bad… (it) makes you want to
take positions for the sake of asserting them, when a rational analysis says
you don’t need to be in that position’[i].
In seeking a
‘holistic, nuanced and interdisciplinary approach’ to the rise of British
Euroscepticism (again, largely ignoring the role of public attitudes on party
positioning), other neo-Youngites emphasise the conducive nature of the British
political environment to Eurosceptic ‘drug-taking’. The usual target here is an inflammatory
press, brimming with EU scare stories, and institutional arrangements such as
parliamentary candidate selection and the adversarial nature of British politics,
with its numerous opportunities for factions to score political points
(Aspinwall, 2000; Sitter, 2001; Usherwood, 2002). Structures make the country sick. For Simon Usherwood and Nick Startin (2013).
Euroscepticism has become a ‘persistent’ and ‘embedded’ phenomenon, where a rational
public debate on ‘the Union’s values’ has become difficult. The problem isn’t the power of the
Eurosceptic case but a failure for these arguments to be engaged with
institutionally ‘through a more inclusive and popular form of integration’.
So just who
are the addicts here? Young and his
disciples would maintain that Eurosceptics elites are hooked on either the past
or economic ideology, obscuring them from a rational appraisal of the merits of
European integration and its values. The
public are also duped, in part not caring, in part deceived by their prejudices
that find expression in hostility to immigration and a vapid political distrust. What is yearned for within this analysis is
elite leadership on Europe that puts the rational case within a new
constructive engagement, a call that Tony Blair made in his final interview as
prime minister: ‘The British people are sensible enough to know that, even if
they have a certain prejudice about Europe, they don’t expect their government
necessarily to share it or act upon it’ (Garton Ash, 2007).
But perhaps,
in this startlingly frank summary of the false consciousness theory, the real
roots of British Euroscepticism are to be found. It is this patronising elite attitude that is
as much the cause of Euroscepticism as the cure. The goal of greater European union has itself
become a compulsion, exogenous of changing factual circumstances in Europe and
various economic health warnings about the Eurozone, and ultimately in denial
of validity of public attitudes. This
disjuncture has only served to weaken political trust, which in turn has
undermined the power of the pro-EU main party elite cue.
Despite the
Young analysis, it increasingly looks like the public will eventually have the
final say on Britain’s membership of the EU, and their voice is likely to be
more independent of views of the main political parties than it was in 1975. The plot changeth, and the Young analysis,
being ultimately a normative argument about the merits of integration, lacks
the scope to understand it. Not only has
British public Euroscepticism hardened, the ability of pro-EU elites to contain
this opposition has never been weaker.
Bibliography
Aspinwall, M. (2000).
Structuring Europe: Powersharing Institutions and British
Preferences on European Integration. Political Studies, 48:3. Pp. 415-42.
Harmsen, R and Spiering, M eds. (2004). Euroscepticism:
Party Politics, National Identity and European Integration. Rodopi, Amsterdam.
Hooghe, L and
Marks, G. (2005). Calculation, community and cues: Public Opinion on European integration. European Union Politics 6(4): 419-433.
Hooghe, L
(2007). What Drives Euroscepticism? : Party-Public Cueing, Ideology and
Strategic Opportunity. European
Union Politics, 2007 8: 5.
Inglehart, R. (1970). Cognitive
Mobilization and European Identity. Comparative Politics , Vol. 3, No. 1
(Oct., 1970), pp. 45-70.
Sitter, N (2001). The politics of opposition and European Integration in Scandinavia: Is Euroscepticism a government-opposition dynamic? West European Politics, 24:4. Pp 22-39.
Young, H. (1998). This Blessed Plot: Britain and Europe from
Churchill to Blair. Macmillan.
[i]
Tony Blair, Business for New Europe event: ‘Europe, Britain and Business’,
Chatham House, 28th November 2012.
