eurealist.co.uk

The Conservative party are echoing the views of many when they say they want to work to create a different direction for the EU. They say they would like an EU of Nation States, an EU that respects the existing national boundaries and has fewer areas of competence, and an EU that actually adds value, by doing what the states have asked of it better, rather than just claiming it does.

It should however be noted that this has been the professed goal for a very long time, I believe Mr Heath also professed the desire to be in the Project so as best to affect its direction. We have been blessed with being at the top table, at the heart of Europe, on the train, on the bus and making sure that we are not left behind, in order to protect our national interests, ever since Britain first joined.

Yet if we stand back and actually look at the EU of today we will see an entirely different, more encompassing and much more integrated union, than the Common Market we joined in 1971.

It might be an interesting exercise for all of those who are still today proclaiming the possibility of reforming the EU, to study the effectiveness that policy has had in forming the EU we see today.

From my position I feel quite confidant in arguing that the professed policy has had very little discernable effect on integration. All we could see is a slowing down of the inbuilt motor of integration in some places, that is until a new British administration has fallen into line, and a few treaty clauses that indicate the desire of Britain to place its own national sovereignty in one or two areas beyond the reach of the integrationist driving force.

Yet step by step on every front the EU is becoming ever more integrated and that is despite the professed desire of many leading politicians in Britain for a different kind of EU.

If we are to believe the professed intention which is to create a different type of EU, then we also are forced to conclude in reality that policy has been nothing but an abject failure. Not one single area of government power has been ring fenced from interference by the integrationists, everything is still on the table for further international measures to come later.

We are still in the realms of make believe and pretend the Conservative Party which if pressed will describe itself as Eurosceptic; says the European Union should be a partnership of sovereign states. Co-operation between nation states, based on consensus, should be the foundation on which European relations are developed. Further political integration within the European Union, however constituted, should be opposed. The party has an internal organization; The Movement for European Reform, which says it wants to develop and promote ideas for the creation of a more open, flexible European Union, as an organization of nation states.

One would have thought after thirty years of absolute failure, those proponents of change to a less intrusive, more open, less integrated EU; an EU of the nation states would begin to question the good judgment of continuing to peruse the same unreachable goal. When quite obviously the real EU is travelling in wholly the opposite direction and has a completely different objective. Moreover an objective which has its own momentum, that has already revealed its innate aptitude to roll over whatever gets in its way.

What seems to be missing is the basic understanding of the EU, what it is, and what it intends to become. A basic misunderstanding which would be surprising to anyone who had read the Treaty of Rome back in 1971, but is totally incomprehensible today when we have already experienced the power of the EU to integrate its Member States political institutions.

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Conservative party, Nation States, EU of today, European Reform
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