A Free Trade Area?
Europhiles would like us all to believe the EU is no more than a benign club of nation states who have chosen to come together to form a trading area between themselves, a free trade area that each sovereign nation state controls for its own benefit, only agreeing to those rules which suit it.
Those who believe this are living in cloud cuckoo land, and either deceive themselves or seek to mislead the rest of us. They simply do not understand the difference between the EU and a free trade area. The EU is not a free Trade area at all, it is in fact a Customs Union and there in lies the basic problem for Britain and the sovereignty of the British people to elect and to dismiss our law makers.
The differences, as I understand them, between a Free Trade area and a Customs Union are set out below….
The European Coal and Steel Community (ECSC) It was the Treaty of Paris (1951), which established the ECSE. Its signatories were France, Germany, Italy, Belgium, the Netherlands and Luxembourg – the “Sixâ€. The Treaty came into force in 1952 and lapsed in July 2002. In the early 1950s, ministers from the six members of the ECSC drafted a constitution for a new form of democratic government to control the planned European Defence Community (EDC). Monnet had intended that the EDC would be a parallel organisation to the ECSC. This so-called European Political Community (EPC) would be able to levy taxes and would establish a Common Market. The collapse of the EDC, voted down by France led to the EPC being shelved. But not forgotten.
When Monnet and Schuman were planning the structure of the union they did consider a free trade area but rejected it because Monnet`s had experienced the problems such an organisation could bring when each country was fighting its own corner, and their intention was to eventually grow the Union to become the government of the whole of Europe, so they opted for a form of Union that would enable that growth, a Customs Union.
In a Free Trade area, countries decide to create an area of trade between them and to lower or remove the tariffs and obstructions to trade between themselves. Internally this can be taken as far as you like, up to a point, you can have free travel, exchange of goods etc. for this to work each country would have to remove the trade barriers to others in the group, but their trade with other countries outside the area would still have the barriers each country decided to place on trade. In addition, of course each country would gain from tariff costs they collected from their inward trade.
A customs Union on the other hand is an agreement where the outside trading barriers are centrally controlled for the whole group and of course, the tariff costs or earnings on trade are centrally collected and passed out to the countries within the group. This requires a central organisation to carry out the work of setting the external barriers and handing out the proceeds.
It is that central organisation which is the EU in this case.
Of course it is possible to extend the powers of that central organisation, from its perspective, the more powers it has the better it will be able to conduct its work to help remove the obstruction to trade within the group and conduct a more powerful outward policy. The 1986 Single European Act and all the treaties are internal treaties not external, the basic construct of the Union remains the same.
The problem is to decide how much power that central organisation should have; One would have though that a leader of a sovereign nation joining such a union would have ensured that the powers of the nation state and the central organisation would have been clear. The federalists of course because their aim is to have one government for Europe will not accept any limit to the possible power the centre may gain.
We now have the situation in the EU that the central organisation is beginning to use the powers it has been given, to extend its own powers into other areas, the ECJ is well known for extending the central powers at the expense of the nation state, beyond that which the states have themselves agreed.
A further method is to take one small power in one area and extend that power to others, take harmonisation for instance. Harmonisation may be needed in a small number of cases but is not needed in the majority, what is needed is for each country to recognise the goods from all other countries, Mutual Recognition would entail no more than, say remove internal rules in each country that would stop a good from a member country being imported. Harmonisation is different it is the central organisation saying which goods may or may not be traded; it also sets the standards of those goods, (necessary in some cases but not most). From the central organization’s point of view, it also has the added benefit of extending it remit into the internal rules of member countries, thus increasing its own power over the member countries.
I believe that we have reached and passed the point when the central organisation is becoming far too powerful and is directing the countries, it is no longer the servant but the master, others will disagree and point to areas where the central organisation could work better if it was granted more power and more autonomy. But the only powers available to the central organisation come from the members, obviously if the powers of the centre are increased the powers of the members are diminished, like sovereignty you simply cannot give away governmental powers and at the same time retain them. The problem for us the people is that for every power that is passed to the EU we loose some of our sovereign power to control our own government
