The Very Slow Motion Break-Up of Western European States?

The Sunday Times this weekend reported complaints that Gordon Brown is doing himself no good by surrounding himself with Scots. The moans come mostly from Southern English Labour MPs fearful of losing their seats. 

Do the Scots Run England?

It is true that the defence of an unpopular Government on the Today Programme is disproportionately likely to be heard in a Scots rather than an English accent.

Hearing Scots accents in charge while half of Scotland inclines to independence and the Scottish population as a whole is less than London’s is not likely to endear New Labour to a rather irritable Middle England.

There are four Scots in the Cabinet but they are all in senior positions (Prime Minister, Chancellor, Defence, International Development). 

There are 23 full members of Cabinet. Scotland is (in population terms) about 8% of the country. So, Scots members of the Cabinet are 17% of the whole.

This is not a truly outrageous figure by any means, but probably just a little disproportionate. Certainly there is little room to add a fifth Scot and maybe the two most important positions in the land under Scots leadership is a bit too much to stomach as the economy gets worse.

The wider political problem is that a bit of disproportionate response in favour of the Scots Labour Party helps dampen any Scottish centre-left leanings towards independence.

The English might be irritated at strong Scots accents advising them on tax policy and on Iraq, but they have never really made it a political priority, at least until now - perhaps not even now.

What is different today is that the country appears to the Southern English to be going to hell in a hand basket. 

The Scots also offer their people more social benefits (such as payment of student tuition fees) and marginal voters in the South may add this to the charge sheet of a Scots Labour clique which protects their own but not 'us'.

The English MPs believe, probably rightly, that the matter is just one of some marginal adjustment, having a major English hitter displace a Scot, not necessarily in a job but certainly as a voice on Radio 4.

Of course, they are turning to the new Party kingmaker, Jack Straw, who is rapidly succeeding to the roles successively of Robin Cook and John Prescott as liaison between factions and as calmer of passions.

But what is happening inside the Labour Party, although it should not be exaggerated, is also indicative of a much wider trend across Western Europe, a sort of slow motion revival of an awareness of regional rather than specifically ethnic identity.

The Wider European Trend

This is the serious flip side of our more flippant commentary on the Eurovision song contest. It seems to pay, in Europe, to be very, very big like Germany or a small quasi-ethnic 'niche' state. The mid-sized states seem to be paying out and not getting so much back.

The growing crisis in Belgium between Flemings and Walloons should be noted in this context.

This is only one, albeit the most serious, of a number of ethnic squabbles and demands for separation inside the pre-1914 early modern states that threatens to see them lose relative significance within the ‘European Federation’ as regionalism takes hold. 

Scotland is certainly expected to intensify its demands for independence but equally interesting are the arrests of very senior Basque separatists, a sign of the weakness rather than the strength of the French and Spanish states. A few arrests may not much affect sentiment.

France protects Spain because it is a line of defence against other potential regional revolts, in Corsica, Britanny and other traditional cultural centres, that are much closer to home.

The sundering of Wallonia from Flanders may well create pressure on it to try and join France which will be severely resisted on grounds of cost (the region will need major economic subsidy) but also precedent.

After all, if Flanders and Wallonia can become independent or be reassigned to other states, the implication is that Bretons and others may also become independent or join other nations as popular will dictates.

Meanwhile, as with the UK's New Labour Party, the centre-left Socialists in Spain try to hold down regional separatist aspirations within a general model of sustaining a broad national class-based coalition that is opposed to localist petit bourgeois aspirations.

The eventual arrival of a national-conservative Government, much as in the UK, may well fuel separatist feeling in Catalonia as well as in the Basque country and then Galicia, in turn, may react – as Wales might react to Scottish independence.

Of course, the rise of the Lombard League did not trigger a new Sicilian or Calabrian revolt but only because Forza Italia managed to reintegrate the old Christian Democrat consensus around a wider national resistance to the Left - and because organised crime preferred the old system.

But, nevertheless, the tendencies to petty nationalism are there in Italy as in Spain, France and the UK. The planned war on Italian organised crime by the Western security establishment increases rather than diminishes the chances of its turning to regionalist political ends.

German Exceptionalism & Economic Drives

Only in Germany does the nation resist centrifugel tendencies, thanks to a combination of the Lander system, the exclusion of minorities as territorial blocs after two major military defeats and a strong sense of a unified national German identity.

If anything, the problem is reversed. German economic power is quietly 'colonising' the little countries on its borders. This may be the source of a different set of resentments in years to come, especially if the logic of Russo-German entente comes into play.

After all, many small states did not free themselves from the Soviet yoke to become immersed in a Russo-German economic condominium and they will want the EU to restrain these two major powers in due course.

In terms of national cohesion, the classic Atlantic powers may be at the start of a process that could put them under terminal threat from the political imps let loose by the European Project – a process set off not so much by the collapse of Yugoslavia as bythe Lombard League.

It is not just about some atavistic desire for identity but about economics. The Scots, for example, are distinctly non-racist or ethnicist although we do see, elsewhere in Europe, the emergence of a rather nastier populist revival of some dark thinking from Europe's past.

Identity elements in European politics are largely directed at the anxiety over the arrival of Muslims in a Judaeo-Christian continent with Enlightenment characteristics. Sometimes, the language used is close to that of the 'yellow peril' of the first third of the twentieth century.

The Netherlands and Denmark have developed 'far right' (actually ultra-liberal) movements that tell us a great deal about local anxieties in small countries about the effects of modernisation.

The 'fascistic' and hysterical attacks on Romanians, with organised crime elements involved, show a State that is not in full control of its public order situation.

But, these are still the exceptions within Europe, the populist outrage of noisy minorities rather than expressions yet of popular sentiment. After all, the Polish Right did not manage to last so very long in power and Italian neo-fascism won't last long without economic successes.

More typical is the belief that small nations, from Hungary to Scotland, from Ireland to Catalonia, should make their own economic and social policy decisions within wider EU frameworks.  The argument is generally not with the EU but with London and Madrid.

Power Shifts Up And Down

London and Madrid (less so Paris) have to compromise constantly to give the regions some sense of their importance to the point, as we have seen in the British case, of irritating the core national vote.

To hear the Southern English moan about the favouritism given to Scots is no different in essential political principle to Soviet Russian complaints about the favours given to Central Asians or current Chinese irritation with the lack of gratitude from Tibetans (as China sees it).

Empires are held together by redistribution from the centre to the periphery so that the less tangible advantages of free trade can accumulate back to the centre - actually the very centre, such as the State or the elite in the City of London - and then trickle back into the heartlands.

The problem is that the EU, not the early modern Western state, is now the empire. As EU rules start to limit the more obvious national subsidis and central tax rates fall under popular democratic pressure, peripheries see far more advantage in cutting out the middle man.

The political and economic logic of the EU is that it is an empire of small states, not large ones, in which, ultimately, even the German Lander are just components of the whole. It was a trajectory marked out from the day Germany abandoned the Deutschmark for the Euro.

The main Western powers, led by both France and the UK, will fight to resist the inevitable but the decades to come must see these States come to terms with EU democratic deficits and there is no solution that does not decentralise or centralise away from the mid-level.

Once democratic deficits become critical, mechanisms must emerge either to lock boundaries as they are under a US-style constitutional settlement (leaving many anomalies and petty resentments) or re-think boundaries through transfer of powers to regions.

Eventually, Western states just start to atrophy, remaining as ceremonial centres with minimal powers much as monarchies have done in the past. Unlikely? 

Give it fifty years and the increased centralisation of security and energy decision-making and the extension and maintenance of common tax standards - and larger nation states, to survive, will either have to submit or withdraw.

Perhaps France with its rigid republic tradition can stay whole and perhaps England, with our without the Celts, can spin itself off into independence again but Spain and Italy must be on a trajectory towards increased regionalism in the long run.

The Irish Referendum on Lisbon

This is why the Irish Referendum on the Lisbon Treaty contains a degree of piquancy for observers. The Irish are pragmatically pro-European because Europe has been good to a small country, largely because the Irish have cleverly worked the pre-Lisbon system.

The Lisbon Treaty is an attempt to make the EU workable by limiting small state powers but the paradox is that existing small states are disadvantaged but not so much that new small states would not wish to aspire to the same status under a protective EU.

After all, if small states are now closer to regions, then regions may aspire to be small states - and eventually the sheer number of small states and their resentment of bigger power 'fixes' leads logically to small states demanding further changes.

Lisbon is interesting because it may remove some of the 'political arbitrage' advantages that worked for Ireland, especially in tax policy. The Referendum decision is a judgement on whether a strong Europe means a stronger or weaker Eire and what timescale will matter.

If the Lisbon Treaty goes through, it will probably be the last time a small nation can hold up European reform until that day when some constitutional settlement to deal with the perceived 'democratic deficit' and small states' rights finally emerges.

The 'big nations' have rubber-stamped Lisbon because it is not democratic and slows down centrifugel tendencies, but the fundamental remains: the EU, to fulfil its potential, does not need its founding members so much as it needs the support of the wider European population.

Back to Flanders

Geert Wilders, the Dutch populist leader, has already demanded in the Dutch Parliament that the Dutch and Flemish be asked in a referendum if Flanders should be attached to the Netherlands.

The Flemish extreme right is “all for it”. The ultranationalist Voorpost, close to the Vlaams Belang, would even like to see French-speaking Wallonia included in a unification of Belgium with the Netherlands in an excess of petty-imperialism.

A concept of a Greater Netherlands [so like the Greater Syria view of Lebanon] existed during the eighteenth and beginning of the nineteenth century but would, of course, only be acceptable to the Dutch if a Belgian split is absolutely unavoidable - and then only without the Walloons.

This is still the fantasy of a minority - but such fantasies would never have been discussed in any national Parliament anywhere in Europe as recently as two decades ago.

The breach between the two Belgian communities is approaching a point of no return. Alongside the handling of Kosovo, the Belgian crisis is fraught with implications for the nature of the European project and relations between its members.

All this is happening just as the Euro-elite are getting worried by the possibility that the Lisbon Treaty, tortuously negotiated and certainly bounced on the British people by their own Government at enormous political risk, might be kicked into the long grass by the Irish.

The British euro-sceptics are quiet, but it is the quiet of the tiger coiled to spring in the undergrowth and ready to move against New Labour's handling of the affair as soon as the Irish let the Persians through the Pass at Thermopylae.

The Tory Party is way ahead in the polls and is euro-sceptic. At least one major West European state may baulk at its own imminent, albeit very slow motion, dissolution, despite the safeguards allegedly and tortuously built into the new Treaty.

www.tppr.co.uk

[With thanks to Bood & Co. for drawing certain facts to our attention, although the opinions are entirely those of TPPR]