Shirley Williams

This Charter88 Sovereignty lecture was given on 15 June 1992

There is a famous poem by Thomas Hardy, written during the First World War, entitled " At the Time of the Breaking of Nations". I was reminded of that title when I read about Mr. Gorbachev's futile warning to the Soviet republics: " You are disintegrating while Western Europe is integrating".

Today, as we see the terrible and long-drawn out suicide of Yugoslavia & suicide neither the European Community nor its member-states have been able to prevent or even influence, it is clear that disintegration in Europe is not limited to the C.I.S. But after the outcome of the Danish referendum on the Maastricht Treaty, how sure can we be that Western Europe is integrating?

The Maastricht Treaty was the high water-mark of European integration so far. The Danish rejection, albeit by a tiny majority, is not a temporary difficulty. It is a serious set-back in a process that has become deeply flawed. That process itself must be addressed if the Community is to survive and flourish.

It was extremely difficult for Governments to reach agreement on the Maastricht Treaty; hence it is both complex and in places contradictory. But it did produce some worthwhile advances, like the extension of co-decision-making and majority voting to new areas, and the staged progress towards a European central Bank.

These are worth voting for. Indeed, if the Maastricht Treaty is not ratified by the other eleven members, there is a real danger that the fabric of European integration could unravel. With the lesson of Yugoslavia before us we cannot risk that. The Community is the reason that Western Europe, since the Second World War, has held together, burying the old spectres of war and national hatreds. Nevertheless, there has to be a second complementary treaty on political union before long, and it must be drawn up in & much more open and democratic way.

Maastricht's weaknesses are, first, the lack of any adequate democratic accountability in the inter-governmental structures that deal with such sensitive political topics as internal security, organised crime, terrorism, defence and foreign policy. Here the British kept supranationality at bay at the price of further widening the democratic deficit.

The second weakness is in the area of monetary and economic policy, where the European Parliament is given no significant role either over the community's revenue raising or in discussing the criteria to be applied to the 'convergence' requirements - criteria that stress price stability to the exclusion of any reference to unemployment or economic activity. The framers of Maastricht felt little obligation to explain or consult with the community's citizens, and that failure helps to explain the Danish referendum result.

Only a much wider body than the European council and the commission, a body in which the European Parliament and the national parliaments are represented, is likely to ensure that the community's institutions are democratic and accountable. Indeed, when the community does move on to political union, and it will, there should be a constitutional convention whose deliberations are open and extensive. Two hundred years after the United States drew up its constitution, is democratic Europe incapable of involving the representatives of the people in the design of their own future?

The long debate about Britain's membership of the community has been based on some curious assumptions. successive British Governments have battled to stop new functions being transferred to the community, beyond the bare minimum required for the establishment of a single market. That battle has been conducted in the name of democracy, of opposition to the centralised bureaucracy of Brussels, its secrecy and so on. Yet remarkably little concern has been shown by our Governments about democratic control of the community itself.

The even greater irony is that British Governments, not least the Thatcher administrations, while accusing Brussels and M. Delors personally of bureaucracy, centralisation, secrecy, lack of accountability and other abuses, have been guilty of every one of these things themselves. It is hard to think of a more centralised, secretive democracy than our own.

The real debate therefore is between democratic and accountable government at every level, European, national, regional and local on the one hand: and, on the other, executive power that has grown, is growing and ought to be diminished.

The Maastricht Treaty extended the community's reach into new areas, but it did so by strengthening the council of Ministers more than the European parliament. Two of its three "pillars" were intergovernmental structures rather than community ones - cooperation in foreign policy and defence, and cooperation in internal security matters. On neither is there an adequate system of accountability to national parliaments or anybody else.

Our Government speaks of subsidiarity in the European context, and complains of Brussels centralism. It never seems to occur to it that Westminster is far more centralising than Brussels, and fails to practice the subsidiarity it preaches. Local government and county government have been deprived of many of their responsibilities, and everything they do is closely controlled. Pressure for regional autonomy in Scotland and Wales is resisted on the grounds that such autonomy would threaten the Union.

The weaknesses of our unwritten constitution are thrown into high relief by the process of pooling sovereignty in certain areas that follows from the treaties establishing the European Community and the Single Market. These weaknesses are in no way consequences of that process, for they long predate it. But they have become more noticeable. We, British citizens, have become more aware that other European countries are run very differently, and not always less well, than we are.

In theory the transfer of sovereignty to Brussels can be reversed, in practice it is impossible to see how it could be done. Britain is deeply involved in the community's internal market, has become increasingly dependent upon internal community trade, and has seen her trading ties with the countries of the Commonwealth weaken. The City of London conducts much of its financial business in Europe. Sterling is now linked, through the ERM, to the Deutschemark, not to the dollar. only in the area of defence and foreign policy is Britain still in some ways closer to her old American ally than to the rest of the community. Even then, British Governments recognise that what influence they have on Washington relates directly to Britain's membership in the Community.

The logic of the single market is to extend the " acquis communautaire" to more and more areas what political scientists call the dynamics of integration, or, more prosaically, the spillover effect. A truly free market is one in which all countries compete on a level playing field. Indeed, in the modern world of rapid and easy communications, the implications go further still. countries themselves are superseded by the need of multinational companies for a global market. The private sector therefore becomes the moot powerful driving force for supranationalism. Hence the pressures for harmonisation of indirect taxes, limits on the ability of any one country to use exchange rates or interest rates to gain advantage, calls for a common monetary policy, and even for convergence of fiscal policy, that heartland of Parliamentary sovereignty. Article 99 of the Maastricht Treaty could not be more clear, when it calls for control of the money supply and of foreign exchange operations by a European central Bank, insofar as that is necessary for the achievement of the single market.

In its crablike approach to federalism, the European Community has also accepted rigorous criteria for economic convergence as well as a greatly diminished area for fiscal sovereignty. Under the Maastricht Treaty, member-states committed themselves to move towards a European Monetary union in three stages, narrowing the differences between them on budget deficits, public debt and inflation, and accepting very conservative norms for policy.

The role of national parliaments is bound to be diminished by those norms, combined as they are with the independence of the proposed European Central Bank.

That would matter much less if the European Parliament acquired the powers over fiscal and economic policy lost at the national level. In the name of opposition to federalism, however, the House of Commons has refused to agree to greater powers for the European Parliament, thereby ensuring the widening of the democratic deficit. Other national Parliaments, notably those of Germany, the Netherlands and Italy were willing to support greater powers for the European Parliament - but not us.

As a result, the Maastricht compromise extended the co-decision-making procedure to some new areas where majority voting in the council now applies, but did not tackle the questions of the accountability of the Commission, nor the undemocratic way in which the Council of Ministers operates. No wonder that among the independent-minded Danes, some opposed the Treaty just because it fell so far short of their own criteria for democratic government.

It is strange that Mrs. Thatcher, who was a strong advocate of the single market, either refused to see or failed to see these consequences. The free movement of capital and labour, goods and services, is bound to challenge the claims of national sovereignty. The capitalist world moves inexorably towards globalisation. One of the great illusions of our times is that political institutions can be insulated from the market and vice versa. The single market was bound to have political consequences; the Maastricht Treaty was a none-too-successful attempt to deal with some of them.

The Council of Ministers, on which all member-states of the European Community are represented, is as obsessively secretive as the British Government itself. Such is the lack of interest in political gossip about the community that the secrecy is rarely penetrated by leaks to newspapers of the kind that relieve the gloom of secrecy in Britain. The Council meets in secret, deliberates in secret, and does not publish its minutes.

Yet part of the time at least, it behaves like a legislature, discussing proposals from the commission, deciding whether or not to adopt them, and considering how to respond to the European Parliament's amendments. The lack of any open discussion makes it very difficult for European Parliamentarians or for national Parliamentarians to monitor what is happening, or to influence it. This situation becomes more serious as the "acquis communautaire" is extended to new areas, like the environment and social affairs. Parliaments should insist that the Council meets in the open when discussing the European Parliament's amendments to proposals for directives and regulations.

National parliaments, including our own would gain greater influence over Ministers, and over the Council of Ministers, by working more closely with the European Parliament. Indeed, Joint committees of M.E.P.s and national M.P.s on European matters could be much more effective than either can be separately. Of course it will be argued that such a proposal is impractical, but the argument is unconvincing. Meetings of such joint committees could be built into Strasbourg's timetable, as well as Westminster's.

Curiously enough, the least accountable areas of European policy are the parts that remain outside the "acquis communautaire" and are inter-governmental, in that sovereignty clearly resides in the member-states. This is the shadowy area occupied by the Trevi group, Europe's Ministers of the Interior, who seek to coordinate policies on terrorism, organised crime, immigration and related areas.

No-one can deny that such inter-governmental coordination is essential in today's world. But it is also true that some degree of accountability to national parliaments is essential too, for this is an area where civil liberties can be very much at risk. Recent reports suggest that, much influenced by Britain, the Trevi group may recommend something very like the official Secrets Act, permitting the classification of a wide range of official material, and providing no public interest defence for whistle-blowers.

The recent toughening up of policies on asylum, in Britain and elsewhere in western Europe, has, it is alleged, made it possible for victims of torture to be deported back to the countries where they were tortured. Protection for the right of immigrants to a hearing against refusal of entry is weak or non-existent. Yet in these inter-governmental structures, Parliaments have little or no influence. Such structures are outside the community, therefore the European Parliament has no jurisdiction, and they are intergovernmental, so that national Parliaments have only a very restricted scope for surveillance over them.

So, to sum up, what do we need? In Britain, we need a Bill of Rights. We need to entrench the European Convention of Human Rights into British law; we need additional sanctions against racial and other forms of discrimination; we need a Freedom of Information Act; we need judges drawn from a much wider section of society and trained for their new responsibilities; we need a much amended Official Secrets Act, limited to protecting national security; we need to respect the principle of subsidiarity, not Just as it affects Britain's relations with the European commission, but as it affects Scotland and Wales in relation to Great Britain.

We need a workable form of proportional representation, not just for reasons of fairness, but also because, without it, unrepresentative groups will be able to dominate local government, as they did in Liverpool, thereby giving central government a powerful argument for an otherwise quite unjustified degree of control over local decision-making.

We need to move much of the current burden of legislation from the House of Commons to regional and local government, thereby making two other reforms possible: a smaller House of Commons of perhaps three hundred members, better served and better staffed than at present, and time for proper discussion of legislation, with the guillotine never used other than in circumstances of national crisis.

In the European Community, Britain should press for the co-decision-making procedure, in practice a veto, on all Community law where a qualified majority of the council suffices for adoption. We should accept the direct election of the Commission's President, or the confirmation by the European Parliament of a President seeking a further term, as in the case of M. Jacques Delors. Each Commissioner should be individually confirmed by the European Parliament, which should also be able to dismiss individual Commissioners. National Parliaments should insist that the Council Of Ministers meets in the open when acting as a legislature, and publishes minutes of its meetings.

The Community budget, which sooner or later will have to be increased to reflect the needs of the southern states and Central/Eastern Europe, should be under the close supervision of the European Parliament, and of a strengthened Court of Auditors ( one of Maastricht's achievements that shouldn't be lost) . The distinction between optional and non-optional expenditure should be abolished as the Common Agricultural Policy is reformed. A joint committee of European and national Parliamentarians should oversee the raising of revenues; at present, by using an automatic mechanism for the share of GNP each country contributes, the community escapes Parliamentary control at either level.

The European Community is not yet a satisfactory democratic structure, and it lacks any proper definition of what it is to be a European citizen surely something more than a crimson passport and the right to establish a business anywhere in the Community. The Community has developed on economic rather than political lines, so that the citizen is defined as a factor of production rather than as a person with political, cultural and even spiritual needs.

The excessive concentration on economic and financial matters, to the virtual exclusion of the rest, drains the European community of symbolic or emotional meaning. It is not easy to feel passionate about the ecu. In contrast, the symbols and images of the United States carry great emotional power. The United States is the country of a civil religion, in which loyalty to state and loyalty to nation coexist happily with one another.

The Danish referendum result has at least concentrated the minds of politicians in all twelve member-states on the future of the community. The lesson of that result is that the people of Europe cannot be taken for granted. The Community, if it is to flourish, must develop more effective means to communicate with them and to consult than intermittent ad hoc referenda.

For our fellow human beings in the European Community are not mere economic factors, just producers and consumers. They are citizens possessed of rights, not least the right to vote. In your invitation, this lecture was entitled " Is there democratic life after Maastricht ?" Reverse the question. Without democratic life, Maastricht is a dead end.

A discussion followed the lecture with Carol Tongue MEP, Graham Mather, Tony Blair MP & Shirley Williams