From 8 May to 23 June: a link which shows what matters

Seventy-one years ago today, something remarkable happened. Remarkable for Europe, or at least the Western bit. Remarkable even for the rest of the world, since it kept getting sucked into European quarrels.

What happened on 8 May 1945? The Second World War in Europe came to an end. That moment marked the end of centuries of conflict, constantly erupting anew, ever since the Roman Empire collapsed.

Field Marshal Keitel signs the military surrender of Germany,
ushering in seven decades of peace in Western Europe

Take the last three centuries. In the 18th, we got the War of Spanish Succession out of the way, only to see the outbreak of the War of Polish Succession twenty or so years later and, blow me down, a decade after that, the War of Austrian Succession.

Tired of this succession of wars of Succession, we next had a go at a war based on the passage of time – the seven-year war. After all, the thirty-year war in the previous century had been such a good lark, and this one packed in almost as much excitement in a much shorter time. It was also the first world war waged by the European powers, with major theatres in India and in North America (where the locals called it the French and Indian war).

We also had some impressive colonial conflicts, most notably between the British and the same Americans, with the French joining in to give their rivals across the Channel a bloody nose (which they successfully did).

Little more than ten years after that, we got stuck into the Napoleonic wars which managed to last nearly a quarter of a century and cover pretty much the whole of Europe, right out to Moscow.

That left people tired for a while, but we still managed some colonial battles within Europe – notably the Austrians in Italy, with the French getting involved. Meanwhile, the Prussians, beginning to exert their new-found power, fought the Austrians, the Saxons, the Danes – basically anyone who seemed in their way.

Which led neatly to the Franco-Prussian war. That meant France losing territory to the German Empire which, to add insult to injury, was proclaimed in the Hall of Mirrors in Versailles. The bitterness made inevitable the First World War (which was far from the first) forty years later; it didn’t get sorted out, so the Second World War broke out to wrap up the loose ends twenty years after that.

Those two wars were so close together that a great many fought in both. One of my grandfathers was in the artillery in World War One, taking an injury that gave him bother for the rest of his life; in World War Two, he was back in service but in the Fleet Air Arm, though serving on the ground, since he was too old for combat.

My other grandfather spent two years in gaol in the First World War, in company with Bertrand Russell among others, for refusing to fight. In the Second, however, as a Jew he felt he had to do what he could against Hitler, and joined the Air Raid Precaution service.

Through most of my childhood, I fully expected that when I reached adulthood, there’d be another conflict of this kind in which I, like my father and his father, would be called on to take part.

Well, it didn’t happen. Seven decades on from that remarkable day in May 1945, France, Britain, Austria, Italy, Germany have managed to remain at peace. Unheard of. Unprecedented.

Why is it so important for the rest of the world? Well, look at what happened in WW1 and WW2: so many other countries found themselves sucked in. Even those that remained neutral were affected by the disruption the world suffered, many having to impose rationing on foodstuffs and other essentials.

A French friend of mine was four when he saw his father for the last time. The Gestapo called to arrest him in 1940. The family never heard of him again.

He told me that story soon after the Euro was introduced. With tears in his eyes, he said that he would never have believed before that he would use the same currency as them, over there – gesturing towards the Rhine, just a few kilometres from his front door. He said it with a relief so strong that it bordered on joy. The Euro represented to him the latest brick in a wall between our nations and war – a wall built by tearing down the one that had previously separated the nations themselves.

That’s what we tend to lose sight of when we debate European construction in Britain. We talk about trade, or the movement of production and jobs, or immigration. We sadly don’t talk about all the good that has come from the longest period of sustained peace our countries have seen.

Make no mistake. The European Union is merely the expression of the efforts we have made over seven decades to secure that peace. To put an end to that long, dreary, destructive and bloodthirsty succession of wars that have afflicted us.

If on 23 June Britain votes to leave the EU, be under no illusion, it will be turning its back on all that painful work of peaceful construction.

Think of the bombing of Coventry or Dresden, of the extermination camps, of the Battles of Passchendaele or Jutland or Cassino or the Bulge, of the A-bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, and ask yourselves: is that really such a smart move?

Greece and the EU: who's been betrayed by whom?

It seems that Jean-Claude Juncker, President of the European Commission, feels betrayed by the behaviour of the Greek government.

The purpose of a union is to create something that is greater than the sum of its parts. By pulling together, the nations of the European Union agree to work together, giving up some of their individual freedom of action, because they believe that in joint effort they can achieve more.

Within the Eurozone, the bonds are even closer, since the countries have given up control over their own currency, a major sacrifice when it comes to combatting financial difficulties.

Part of the bargain is that if any constituent of the Union gets into trouble, the Union as a whole rallies round to help. Now, following the financial crash of 2008, five EU nations, all within the Eurozone, were particularly harshly affected. These were the so-called PIIGS: Portugal, Italy, Ireland, Greece and Spain.

Several years on, all but Greece seem to have weathered the worst of the pressure. That’s not to say that they’re doing well. No one in the Eurozone is doing well. It’s stagnating as a whole,but that’s a not unexpected result of the austerity economics it has imposed on itself. Austerity cuts people’s spending power, so demand goes out of the economy and, as day follows night, the economy fails to grow.

Greece however is in a far worse state than the others. The EU, the International Monetary Fund and the European Central Bank, clubbed together to provide it with funding and to buy it some debt relief, but only at the cost of an even harsher austerity programme than the other nations underwent. As a result, unemployment rose to one in four of the workforce and, far from growing, the economy has shrunk by a quarter. A catastrophe.

Instead of banding together to help its weakest member out of the mud, the EU has inflicted on Greece policies that could only drive it far deeper still. While its membership of the Euro denies Greece the classic solution of devaluing its currency, as Larry Eliiott explains in The Guardian.

Guardian photograph from Athens:
graffiti expressing increasing anti-Euro feelings

So the EU has achieved precisely the opposite of what is intended in a Union.

The result is that it now looks increasingly as though Greece will, as long feared, have to leave the Euro, and perhaps the EU too, if only to have any chance of working its way out of the mess it’s in, with even a shred of dignity left to it.

Make no mistake about it. It would be extremely painful for Greece if it came to that. But it would be a disaster for the EU and the Eurozone. Greece is the first test of the capability of the Union to stand by a member that is in real trouble. They’re on the brink of failing that test. That inevitably raises the question “what is the EU for? If it can’t even rescue a relatively small member from penury…”

Angela Merkel enjoys a high and deserved reputation for her statesmanship. But it is she, and Germany more generally, that has led the campaign to inflict the harsh regime on Greece which it is now rejecting. If she can’t magic some solution out of the chasm in front of her at the moment, her legacy may be that of the leader of Europe who saw the experiment of union founder.

Larry Elliott’s article calls what we are facing now a “Sarajevo moment”. The assassination of the Austrian Archduke in Sarajevo in 1914 initially seemed to be a relatively minor event in a distant place. But within weeks it had engulfed the whole of Europe in the torment of the First World War.

The exit of Greece from the Union might be another minor event, but it will be a critical step in causing the EU project to start to unravel. The Eurozone will have shown that it is incapable of solving a problem within its membership. And the EU will have shown that it can’t look after its constituent nations.

Those of us in Britain who want the country to remain a member of the EU will find our arguments for staying in weakened in the run up to our promised referendum. And Eurosceptic movements in other European nations will also gain momentum. The impact on the Union could be lethal.

Someone has certainly betrayed the ideals of the European Union here. But, Mr Juncker, I’m not sure it’s Greece.

Cameron takes on the Eurobullies: a cabby's view

Emerging from a London restaurant recently and looking for a taxi, Danielle and I were delighted to see one for hire just across the street. I hailed it, but with no luck: the driver simply didn’t see us and drove on.

It was no great blow since there was sure to be another along in a moment. But as we started walking we were surprised to see a young man running towards us.

‘Did you want that cab?’ he asked.                              

‘Well... yes,’ I told him a little perplexed.

‘It’s waiting for you at the corner,’ he replied.

And it was. The young man had flagged it down for us. A completely gratuitous act of kindness that was as pleasant as it was surprising.

That however proved the high point of the experience. We’d barely been under way a minute or two before the driver asked us, ‘So that Cameron, eh? Were you pleased with what he did?’

There's a question I’ve never been able to resolve to my satisfaction about London cabbies. I mean, they take that immensely taxing qualification the ‘Knowledge of London’. If you see somebody travelling the streets of the town on a small motorbike with a clipboard fixed to the handlebars, it’s almost certainly a trainee cabby ‘doing the Knowledge’, trying out all the routes, noting the one-way systems and the hold-ups, cramming for a tough exam. It can contain questions such as ‘it’s 5:00 p.m. on Tuesday. You have to get from Claridge’s Hotel to Liverpool Street Station. What’s the quickest route?’ and the candidate has to provide one that takes account of likely traffic difficulties, road works and the time of day.

I’ve always admired London cab drivers for having got through such a gruelling test, though the real value of it was only brought home to me in the back of a Paris taxi. I had just watched the driver spending ten minutes leafing unavailingly through a book of street maps, only to end by asking me ‘do you know where it is?’

What I haven’t understood is whether the ‘Knowledge of London’ test also includes questions designed to weed out anyone marginally to the left, politically, of Francisco Franco. There was a time when London cabbies, if they saw white faces in the back of the cab, would open a conversation with some overtly racist statement. These days they’re more circumspect, preferring to use code and talk about ‘immigration’ instead. And certainly on matters of economics and finance their admiration for Thatcher is only limited by a sense that she was a little too pink for them.

So the driver was calling on us to join him in unbounded admiration for David Cameron’s courage in standing up to the bully boys of Europe. There seems to be a fairly general view in this country that by exercising Britain’s right of veto against plans to amend EU Treaties to allow fiscal harmonisation within the Eurozone and save the Euro, Cameron has taken a position somehow analogous to that of Britain in 1940: you may remember the David Low cartoon of a British soldier on a rock in a raging sea shaking his fist at a stormy sky and shouting ‘Very well, alone’. Ah, glorious days.

Spirit of Cameron?

Trouble is, back then Britain really was standing alone against a vicious dictatorship that had violently broken the bulk of Europe to its will, and followed up its triumph with further brutality at least the equal of any previous tyrant’s, backed by far more effective technology.

What Cameron has done is say ‘no’ to a group of partner nations who are in desperate financial trouble and have at last woken up to the need to do something serious about it. Most of my compatriots seem to think of this act as heroic; all I can say is that their idea of what makes a hero is very different from mine. 

At any rate, I’m pleased that there’s been some decision by the Eurozone nations to act. Not that ‘decision’ and ‘action’ are exactly the same,  and it’ll be interesting to see if they can really take the plunge. If they do, they’ll have demonstrated the old truth that crises can be opportunities: it was always a matter of some doubt whether you could have a common currency without political union. The Eurozone may at last be moving towards some degree – maybe a sufficient degree – of political union in a way it probably wouldn’t have had the courage to do without the crisis.

The ideal would have been to act with Britain; to fail to act would have been disastrous; to act without Britain is only a second-best solution, but a good second best, and it at least has the merit of getting a disruptive and obstructive presence out of the process.

And what about Britain itself? Cameron said he wielded his veto to protect the City of London. So here’s one irony: the City is doing just fine, paying its leaders the kind of eye-watering bonuses that should have gone out of fashion with the financial crisis – for which they were among the chief culprits. And the other irony? If the Euro comes through its current problems, with fiscal union of its member states, it will be immeasurably strengthened. And the financial centre of the Continent will be drawn inexorably to Frankfurt.

So Cameron, by ensuring that Britain will not be represented at the meetings where this future will be planned, has sealed the lingering decline of the City of London he was ostensibly defending.

Our driver felt that Cameron deserved congratulation. Proof, if any were needed, that though the cabby’s Knowledge of London may well have been excellent, I certainly wouldn’t turn to him for advice on either politics or economics. Even though he seemed to expect it.