Let’s build an alternative Europe: The Conference of European States (Chapter 1)

It is Saturday morning, 25 June 2016.  We all know that BREXIT has taken us into uncharted political territory.  Even “Article 50” is a tortuous clause: it does not signal a clear way procedural path ahead.  We are all faced with unprecedented legal problems: we should feel free to invent new solutions…  My suggestion is that we should draft, and propose for adoption by the other 27 EU member-states a new EU Constitution – with no supra-national elements.

If the new legal entity were created, most of the existing regulatory provisions of the EU could be transferred to it, sustaining the key achievements of the EU to date, while changing its future processes.

This new entity should be given a new name, dispensing with supra-national jargon – I suggest  “Conference of European States”.  It would be a new association of member-states, formed by contract (i.e. a new Treaty, by consent replacing all existing EU Treaties).  The new CES would simply be an association of sovereign states, agreeing to cooperate with their neighbours within its framework, and acknowledging the acceptability of further agreements, either of all its members or of bilateral or multilateral arrangements between members (e.g. the current UK/France border control agreements, or the special terms accorded to Irish Citizens by the UK).  The CES would have an administrative secretariat, but no “law-making” powers: it would be constrained to proceed only by contract (i.e. treaty-making processes).  The CES would have no professional “senior civil service” of its own: its senior administrators would all be seconded to the CES, and continue to be paid by, the member-states themselves: their duties and loyalties to the CES would be secured by internal management processes.

The CES would have no elected Parliament – all of its enforceable norms would be underpinned by contract, not by statutory fiat.  It would have a Council, political delegates appointed by the member-states, to oversee its day-to-day business.  The CES would have no “Court”, although the CES treaty commitments would be justiciable in the Courts of each member-state, as at present.  Disputes between CES members would be resolved by political negotiation, not by judicial judgment.   The CES would have none of the trappings of “statehood” – no flag, no anthem, no President.  There would be a triumvirate of three CES “Speakers”, senior politicians to speak on behalf of the CES when necessary or appropriate, but these would rotate periodically, nominated by the member-states.

I suggest that the primary funding mechanism of the CES should remain (as at present) the diversion of a “share” of the VAT revenues of each member-state – which is a fair and sensible procedure.   As for currency arrangements, I recognize the importance of the Euro and that the new CES would have to retain some “currency management” functions and responsibilities.   But these currency support arrangements should be hammered out by agreement between member-states.   Some members (e.g. UK, Germany, possibly France) might prefer to go-it-alone, sustaining the £, and re-introducing the Franc and the Deutschmark: others might prefer to create and support new currencies (e.g. Mediterranean or Nordic or Slavic currencies) with varying local support arrangements – there is no reason why such variety should not exist within the CES.  The development of a single currency was never a prerequisite of European unity – it was merely a talismanic symbol of unity, an aspirational gesture, seeking to give the impression of “national” solidarity, without the fact.  Within the CES framework, of course, the former members of the present “Eurozone” would remain free to enter into a specific new agreement to manage the Euro as an independent currency.

Finally, the new Treaty would not include any attempt to secure agreement of the separate elements of (a) the free movement of labour or (b) the “Schengen” abolition of border controls.  These (like the search for a single currency) have bedevilled the development of “Europe” for many years.  They are very different in their origins and political significance.

(a)  Free movement of labour:  this was a piece of fuzzy thinking from the beginning.  It was a straight “read-across” from capitalist economic theory – “What is a “free market?  It requires the free availability and movement of all the factors of the economic equation – capital, goods/services, and labour”.  But that equation never did make political sense:  human beings are not to be commodified, like capital or goods and services – they are themselves the prime movers in the economic process, not commodities to be manipulated within it.   The citizens of any state should be free to decide on those to be permitted access to their sovereign territory – that is axiomatic to the contemporary concept of statehood, and the European treaties have not recognized that.  The CES Treaty should simply omit the “free movement of labour” – indeed, the new Treaty should not attempt to incorporate any specific economic theory.

(b) Abolition of Border controls: “Schengen”   This measure emerged much later, like the single currency, as a bit of talismanic institution-building “before the fact”.  To the scheming logicians of Brussels, Schengen became symbolic, a demonstration that the EU displayed this feature of single statehood – no “internal” borders – even though it was not yet a State itself.  But that arid logic failed to recognize the reality of “state adherence” among the peoples of Europe: at personal, grassroots level, territorial affinities remain strong, and Schengen offends that proprietary sense of territory.  These customary affinities can in due course be overcome (witness the sloppy border controls between the UK and Ireland) but that is a very gradual process.

That is the first stage of my post-Brexit strategy:  we should seek to achieve agreement on the outlines of a new Conference of European States.   This would acknowledge the democratic legitimacy of the Referendum result by seeking (within the Article 50 process) to replace all the objectionable features of the present EU, and replacing the EU with the CES.   We should then negotiate the transfer all relevant regulatory controls of the EU to the CES, with the necessary drafting changes.  We should then make it clear that, wherever consistent with CES principles, member-states were free to negotiate sub-treaties among themselves (on currencies to be adopted, or internal border controls).

I believe that the CES formula would prove attractive to certain other current EU members, and that it would be possible to establish a new lower-key, less autocratic and less bureaucratic, alternative to the present institutions.  We should first seek agreement among ourselves and sound out possible CES-supporters among other EU member-states, and then make an “Article 50” application.

Roger Warren Evans

Swansea  Saturday 25 June 2016

roger@warrenevans.net     Tel  0044-1792-366134  –  23 St Peters Road  Newton  Swansea SA3 4SB