David Steven wrote in the Slugger O'Toole blog: "(…) Today’s global challenge recalls the predicament facing the European continent at the beginning of the 20th century. Then, the first period of globalization came to a swift and unexpected end. It took two world wars, and the intervening depression, to put the world back on its feet. The European Union was a response to this devastating failure, fulfilling Churchill’s vision of “a kind of United States of Europe” structured to allow its citizens to “dwell in peace, in safety and in freedom”. Moreover, he said "Now we need the European Union to act once again as a platform for achieving security and prosperity (…)" According to David Steven "Lisbon’s most important reforms will begin to sort out Europe’s ability to interact with and influence the rest of world."
Jim McConalogue from The European Journal replied: Lisbon is not about representing a grand schema of globalisation – if anything it is a regional protectionist arrangement which has closed out developing country markets for decades, particularly through the Common Agricultural Policy. Lisbon will do nothing to help this situation and will only make it worse.
You quote Churchill but his exact words were “We are with Europe, but not of it. We are linked, but not combined. We are interested and associated, but not absorbed.” He meant that states be democratically associated, and not absorbed into one superstate. Lisbon is a treaty for the absorption into a European federal superstate. Ireland must of course decide for itself, but Lisbon is a dangerous step towards an enhanced European superstate-building project.
I too am in favour of an articulated rather than a homogeneous Europe.
As I wrote in the Slugger comments:
IMO – the “kind of” qualifier that Churchill uses is an important one. I agree with Robert Coooper:
“Although there are still some who dream of a European state (which would be supranational), they are a minority today…The dream is one left over from a previous agre…It is curious that having created a structure that has transformed the nation state into something more civilized and better adapted to today’s world, there are still enthusiasts who want to replace it with something more old-fashioned… Nevertheless it is unlikely that the European Union, as it is at the start of the twenty-first century, has reached its final resting place.”
My main interest is in focusing Europe outwards on the great global risks – rather than inwards on its governance arrangements.
David, Thank you for this quote. My point wasn’t that you misquoted Churchill but that it puts his position in such a way that he might have supported the EU treaties (from Maastricht to Amsterdam to Nice to Lisbon), when I believe his principles should lead us to oppose them. I thought the alternate quote might add a different kind of reflection on matters.
There’s an implication I misquoted Churchill, so perhaps you’d like the full quote:
“There is a remedy which, if it were generally and spontaneously adopted by the great majority of people in many lands, would as if by a miracle transform the whole scene, and would in a few years make all Europe, or the greater part of it, as free and as happy as Switzerland is to-day. What is this sovereign remedy? It is to re-create the European Family, or as much of it as we can, and to provide it with a structure under which it can dwell in peace, in safety and in freedom. We must build a kind of United States of Europe. In this way only will hundreds of millions of toilers be able to regain the simple joys and hopes which make life worth living. The process is simple. All that is needed is the resolve of hundreds of millions of men and women to do right instead of wrong and to gain as their reward blessing instead of cursing.”