The EU and the conflict between Good Policy and Good Politics
- By Mitchell Blatt and Sumantra Maitra
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E-mail China.org.cn, October 29, 2014
Furthermore, countries like Greece, Spain and Portugal had deep-rooted structural problems in regard to their taxation laws, labor laws, land laws and inflation control measures. Greece's taxation data was hugely deviated, and Greece also suffers from endemic corruption. There is also massive labor mobility from the east to west, from eastern European countries like Bulgaria and Romania and even parts of Poland, which are not in an advantageous economic position when compared to countries Britain and Germany.
In theory, labor movement should bring workers where they are needed, and the added competition should help the economy. A unified economy, the argument went, would bring benefits to the whole of Europe, just like in large countries with massive internal markets like China, India, Australia, and the U.S. The problem is that Europe is not a unified country, and the cultural and structural differences within the EU undermine the effects of scale. The EU doesn't have a centralized political structure that can oversee and, most importantly, enforce broader taxation and fiscal policies. Nor does Europe have overarching linguistic and cultural unity. Furthermore, the distribution of wealth in Europe is extremely variable, jeopardizing the common cause. A blue collar British worker doesn't see the same kind of opportunities for himself in foreign countries that a worker from a poorer country might see in Britain. (UKIP leader Nigel Farage stated he wouldn't want Romanians as his neighbors in the run up to EU Parliament elections.)
Proponents of the view that the world is inevitably becoming more globalized say these problems are to be expected in the development of an institution like the EU.
"The problem is that many people's expectations about the EU are unrealistic. They expect it to be instantly harmonized," said Professor Robert Patman of international relations at the Department of Politics at the University of Otago. "But this is a relatively young historical creation. It's moving beyond the traditional idea of a state. It's sort of a post-Westphalian conception of the state. In many respects, many of the countries in the EU have seen their sovereignty boosted by membership of the EU."
It's hard to overstate anti-immigrant sentiment's influence on support for UKIP. UKIP ran an effective campaign for EU Parliament on the basis of the fear that migrant workers are taking British jobs. One billboard in the run up to the election asked, "26 million people in Europe are looking for work. And whose jobs are they after?" UKIP also claimed there is an extraordinarily high crime rate amongst Romanians.
Yet Prof. Patman pointed out, as has been noted elsewhere, that although there are 2.3 million EU citizens living and working in Britain, there are also 1.8 million British citizens living in other EU countries. Britain would lose a lot of the advantages it takes for granted today if it left the EU.
"It's easy to be critical, but Britain has done very well," Patman said. "Britain's economy has continued to improve since it joined the EU. It now has the seventh biggest economy in the world. What the UKIP people do not answer, not satisfactorily, is how are they going to replace, how are they going to find new markets for the 60 percent of their exports that currently go to Europe."
The Conservatives, Labour, and Liberal Democrats have all tried to paint UKIP as racist or insensitive, but UKIP has also pushed the Conservatives farther to the right. Conservatives are proposing human rights reforms that would exempt Britain from some rulings in the EU courts and make it easier to deport foreign criminals. Cameron promises a referendum on EU membership in 2017, and immigration reforms in the line of those enacted in Switzerland.
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