The end of Britain as a nation state? Not on your life, Mr Van Rompuy

By Daniel Johnson

The President of the European Council has finally revealed his true colours. ‘The time of the homogeneous nation state is over,’ declared Herman Van Rompuy in Berlin yesterday.

According to Mr Van Rompuy, the idea that a country can survive alone is not merely an illusion: ‘It is a lie!’

He has clearly never heard of the Battle of Britain.

Deluded: The blustering Belgian President Herman Van Rompuy

My first reaction to this latest diktat was to laugh out loud. This blustering Belgian, the grandest panjandrum in Brussels, is straight out of Gilbert and Sullivan.

‘President’ Van Rompuy and his British colleague, the EU ‘High Representative’ Baroness Ashton, cut richly comic figures on the international stage.

It is tempting to dismiss their empire-building as an extravagant but otherwise harmless pastime.

The trouble is that these Eurocrats not only waste tens of billions of pounds on their palatial offices and legions of flunkeys — they have real power, too.

The British public watched in dismay as, earlier this month, David Cameron was forced to back down from his promise to stop Brussels from increasing its already bloated budget.

The Prime Minister tried to present the deal he secured — reducing the 6 per cent increase Brussels demanded to 2.9 per cent.

But at a time when Britain is slashing its national budget by at least 25 per cent, even a 2.9 per cent increase in the profligate EU budget is indefensible.

Worse, Mr Cameron agreed to further treaty changes to placate the German Chancellor Angela Merkel, without securing any firm promise that there will be no new EU power grab.

Mr Van Rompuy’s Berlin speech appears to be the first shot in a new campaign to speed the transfer of sovereignty to Brussels — a transfer that was briefly interrupted by the defeat of the European Constitution and the Lisbon Treaty in successive referendums.

Not since the days of Jacques Delors, the French Commission President in the Eighties, have the Euro-federalists been so bold in setting out their agenda.

Opponents: Mrs Thatcher went down fighting against a federal Europe while the pro lobby have never been so bold since the days of French Commission President Jacques Delors

Although they failed then to extinguish the sovereignty of Britain and other nation states, it was a pyrrhic victory for the Eurosceptics, not least because they lost their greatest champion in Margaret Thatcher soon afterwards. Twenty years ago this month, Mrs Thatcher was deposed as Prime Minister by the Conservative Party after expressing her opposition to the single currency and a federal Europe in her inimitably direct way: ‘No! No! No!’

In the two decades since Mrs Thatcher went down fighting, the piecemeal transfer of power to Europe has ¬continued unabated.

The latest reminder of just how far that process has gone was the Government’s abject humiliation over the decision by the European Court of Human Rights that prisoners should be given the vote. Mr Cameron was said to be ‘exasperated’ and ‘furious’ at having to agree to votes for prisoners, but his hand was forced.

The economic crisis since 2008 has witnessed an attempt by Europe to get its hands on the City — the engine room of the British economy.

‘I want the world to see the victory of the European model,’ President Nicolas Sarkozy of France gloated last December, after the appointment of a Frenchman as the EU commissioner responsible for the City of London: ‘The English are the big losers in this business.’

Sure enough, since then, the EU has created three new authorities to regulate ¬banking, pensions, equity and insurance.

Their powers are limited but, over time, they will extend their control at the expense of our own regulators, until the City falls under European jurisdiction.

Last week, I was in Berlin to hear German and U.S. economists point out the danger of the economic recovery being stifled by over regulation of the financial markets at the behest of Brussels and Paris.

Britain, by far the biggest player in Europe, stands to lose most if the EU has its way.

It is a measure of President Van Rompuy’s confidence over this constant transfer of power that he is now openly calling time on the nation state and determined ‘to fight the danger of a new Euro-scepticism’.

Those of us who believe in our own country’s sovereignty, he implies, are deluded romantics with views which are outdated in a globalised world.

What, then, can David Cameron do about this new threat to the nation state — assuming, that is, that Nick Clegg and his fellow Lib Dems can be persuaded to keep their instinctive Eurofanaticism in check?

Leave aside, for an instant, the obvious injustice of an EU which is undemocratic and far from transparent assuming more powers over Britain.

The first argument that ¬Cameron should deploy has to do with the past.

History teaches us that nation states have always been the best guarantors of liberty, democracy, prosperity and the rule of law.

Only strong nation states have been able to defend their liberties against tyrants such as Napoleon, Hitler or Stalin.

An excellent example of what can go wrong in the absence of a genuine nation state is ¬Herman Van Rompuy’s own homeland, Belgium.

Unable to defend itself in two world wars, increasingly ¬dysfunctional as its Dutch-speaking Flemish and French-speaking Walloon citizens ¬gravitate towards Holland and France respectively, Belgium has little or no sense of identity or patriotism.

No wonder Mr Van Rompuy would rather belong to a United States of Europe.

The second argument in favour of the nation state concerns the present — in particular the -current predicament of the EU.

Shake on it: David Cameron should start wooing Chancellor Merkel, the most powerful voice in the EU

Since 1974, the share of world GDP represented by the 15 EU member states before the former Communist countries were admitted was 36 per cent. Today, that figure is 26 per cent, and by 2020 it is expected to be 15 per cent.

Such statistics give the lie to the claim that the European model is uniquely successful.

The EU was created to solve the problems of half a century ago, and today it looks increasingly old-fashioned, whether as an economic or a political system.

The truth is that it is Mr Van Rompuy who is deluded, for surely it is only a matter of time before the EU goes the way of other supranational empires, such as the Soviet Union.

David Cameron will need to show greater skill in building Continental alliances, but he will find that other countries share many aspects of the Euroscepticism that Mr Van Rompuy denounced yesterday.

Mr Cameron could start by wooing Chancellor Merkel, the most powerful voice in the EU, who has even demanded that bankrupt states such as Greece should lose their vote in EU councils until they put their house in order. There is little appetite anywhere in Europe for giving away more powers or money to Brussels.

It is high time that the British people were given a say in what happens to British sovereignty. A referendum on EU membership is the ultimate deterrent that David Cameron could deploy. Mr Clegg might object, but it used to be Lib Dem policy and the mere threat of a referendum would put the federalists to flight.

If Mr Van Rompuy wants a fight, David Cameron should give him one.