Norman was the only journalist at EU's birth Messina; in 1976 he partnered with a young Romano Prodi to survey Entrepreneurial Revolution - why sustainability depended increasingly on health of sme (small-medium enterprise) networks not big corporation and big bureaucratics
Here are more of Norman's surveys on how much more humanity could do with von neumann machines (norman was this tech wizard's biographer) - our forthcoming book on noeman's greatest end poverty hero has this trailer )- chris.macrae@yahoo.co.uk
From enemy she became lover
New Munich stands outside old
Munich, itself destroyed by
allied
bombs but now rebuilt. Lost
in this
new Munich’s glass and
concrete cor-
ridors stands a modest row of
semi-
detached houses, whose
improbable
name is Torquato lasso
Strasse. Who-
ever named that street must
have been
a European romantic wanting
to dress
up the common market's rather
drab
prosperity. Perhaps he was
thinking of
Tasso’s heroine in the “
Liberata,”
Armida, who advanced with
hatred
in her soul on the sleeping
Rinaldo, but
then without explanation or
warning :
From enemy she became lover.
At
the root of the dccidely unroinantic
commercial construction of
the com-
mon market lie two such
sudden
reconciliations, After the
war the
Oernan Armida embraced
France.
Now, even more suddenly,
neo-gaullist
France has embraced the not
exactly’
slumbering Rinaldo of Bexley.
The fight inside Britain over
whether
to “ join Europe ” has been
and still is
bitter but little thought has
been
given so far to what will
happen if the
pro-Europeans win, or indeed
to what is
already happening in a much
changed Europe. I'he purpose
of this
survey is to remedy that.
Both the
present and the probable
futures seem
far from what most
pro-Europeans
originally expected. In “I'he
Phoenix
is short-sighted ” (The
Economist,
May 16, 1970) Norman Macrae
des-
cribed the argument to which
vc have
all now become inured :
The greatest debate in
British histoiy at
present seems to be conducted
mainly
between inaccurate pedants
and unspcci-
tic romantics. The pedants
argue against
a decision that will affect
our descen-
dants for centuries by
composing wholly
erroneous micro-economic
equations
based on the 1969 off-farm
price of
butter. The romantics try 10
waft us
into a huge but
little-discussed con-
stitutional change »n
trailing clouds of
purple guff.
The time for micro-economic
equa-
tions and ]mrple gulT has
since been
left behind. Changing the
dollar's
value a fortnight ago against
every
European currency willy-nilly
thrust Europe's nations
closer together.
Today British entry begins to
seem a
minor event. That paradox has
been
put in an exaggerated way by
Mrs
Miriam Cainjis :
Within the span* of a few
weeks this
past summer Mr Nixon
announeed that
i* would shortly be visiting
the
People’s Republic of China, .
. . two
astronauts rode around on the
surface of
the moon in a contraption
looking not
unlike that used by the less
athletic
breed of golfer, and the
United Stales
blew a gaping hole in the
Bretton Woods
structure that has served as
the frame-
work f(jr the economic
relationships
among most of the non
-communist parts
of the world for the past 25
years. The
three events having,
apparently, nothing
to do with Europe have, in
all prob-
ability, a good deal more to
do w'ith the
shape ot Europe in the decade
ahead
than has our event [British
entry]
ostensibly designed to make a
major
impact on the character of
the Euro-
pean construction.
This survey does not indulge
much
in geopolitics, It concerns
itself only
with Europe and only with the
next
few \ears — ^with the
immediate after-
math). *n other words, of the
belated
completion of British entry,
and of the
.equally belated watershed in
postwar
history crossed by President
Nixon last
August 15th and December
20th.
The first of these, the 'impact
of British entry, could
splinter Europe
furtther or be the making of
it. The
second. Mr Nixon's home
truths last
Augu.st, opens up the question
of how
easy Europe will find life
with fewer
and less ceriain economic and
military
guarantees coming to it from
America.
The tempiation field out bv
both
events is for Europe to
return to its
old divided wavs, trusting to
luck that
the past 27 years of peace
and plenty
have somehow been ordained by
a
nuclear god to last for ever.
Agenda for change
This survey will look at the
changes in
the nature of commerce whicch
British entry into ine common
market
will confirm. It will also
look at how
Europe will use the econoimc
influence
which its wealth give n. in
an econo-
mic world whose big members
begin to
resemble competitive carbon
copies of
one another with little room
left for
trading give and take.
Britain brings
a financial way of looking at
business
that could make London into
Europe’s
New York, and Europe consequently
into a more real economic
entity than
Brussels alone could create.
Then the uncertain future of
Europe's relations with the
super-
powers, notably with America
and
therefore with the Soviet
Union, will
have to he considered. This
in turn
raises the problem of
Europe’s security
and defence.
All these together suggest
that
Europe will function at all
only if the
chemistry of its politics and
self-
interest is enough to bind
together
tho.e nationalistic atoms of
Germany,
France and Britain which have
spent
centuries flying apart. The
success of
this triangular relationship
will prob-
ably decide all.
It will not be achieved in
Brussels,
whose place as an autonomous
centre
of power is open to doubt.
So, before
plunging in, let us first
dispel this and
other common market myths.
What the EEC is not
Perhaps all of us most of the
time have
been misled by the common
market’s
own inner contradictions. Its
first myth
is to call itself Europe,
when it is in
reality a self-centred
customs union,
plus a self-centred farm
policy, put
together by increasingly
self-centred
individual governments. Its
joint insti-
tutions are peopled by
romantics who
are older than they were when
the EEC
was born in 1958, and whose
idealism
grows old with them. Most
confusing
of all, the common market
exists, is
indeed the only remotely
likely pan-
European structure in
existence, and
yet what makes it attractive
to late-
comers like the British is
the fact that
it barely does exist at all.
The Euro-
pean Economic Community (to
give it
its founding name which
Brussels,
typically, has now changed to
the more
grandiose, less accurate “
European
Community”) is an infant
creature,
barely formed. The point of
elementary
schools, says Paul Goodman,
the
American education!^, is to
undo
the damage done at home, so
the child
can begin to breathe again
and be
curious.” With Britain
joining, both
the Six and Britain are about
to leave
home and go to school to
mature
together.
British entry, the
consequences of
the Nixon package, the
Franco-
Cjerman argument have
combined to
make a busily ineffectual
shambles of
the common market at the very
moment when everyone had
expected
that the EEC would be allowed
to go
into a sort of collective
chrysalis,
inside which might be
generated the
European butterfly everyone
has been
waiting for. Instead, that
chrysalis is
being smashed open before the
meta-
morphosis of the creature
inside has
had time to take place. The
sight of
big countries squabbling is
entertaining
for journalists and
anti-marketeers, but
for very few other people.
The second
myth among Europeans is their
half-
boast, half-complaint that
Europe sinks
these difrerence.s best when
faced by
outside threats. Hungary,
Suez, fear of
American military withdrawal,
sheer
distrust of lohn Foster
Dulles's con-
tacts with Khrushchev over
Berlin, are
.said to have helped to get
the Treaty
of Rome off the ground by
195,8.
Likewise the invasion of
Czechoslovakia
in 1968 is supposed to have
helped
persuade de Gaulle that the
time was
come to talk to Britain
again. Or so
the argument runs.
Nearer the truth is that the
Treaty
of Rome got off the ground as
the
truncated commercial relic of
a much
grander dream — a political
and defence
community — and then more by
virtue
of Franco-^German accord than
because
of the existence of an
outside threat.
Even this latest year of
achievement,
1971, owes little to outside
threats. The
Six’s agreement on an experimental
try at monetary union was
reached last
February in a time of
relative monetary
calm. And when it was
confronted by
a threat from outside it
immediately
fell apart. It was settled in
the first
place by a Franco-German
deal. And
it fell apart when France’s
and
Germany’s interests fell
apart. Equally,
British entry was in the end
not
achieve because of the
pressure of an
outside threat. It was
achieved more
by the internal arguments
(some of
them strictly commercial and
vote-
catching) which were at work
in France
after de Gaulle, and it was
achieved
more particularly by the
revived
French neurosis about the
gathering
political strength of
Germany.
“ You ask what the common
market
is to us ? ” said the man
from Siemens.
“ It is very little more than
a machine
for making words.” It is a
harsher
judgment than the men in
Brussels
deserve. But it exposes a
third myth,
the confederal and even
federal dreams
of “ voung men ” now in their
forties
and fifties who grew up on
the gradual-
ist approach to a European
ideal put
forward by Jean Monnet,
Rolxirt
Schuman and Paul-Henri Spaak.
The
tale in Brussels is now no
longer, as
Mato, EEC, WEU,
Scaliger would have wi^ed,
“dealing
with the praises of brave
men.”
The dreams of the 1950s are
gone
partly because the 1950s are
gone.
They were, as Mr Callaghan
said this
October to the Labour party
in
Brighton, admirable ideas in
their
time. As usual when he is
power-
broking, Mr Callaghan made
half the
point. Ilie other half is
that as the
result of those dreams the
EEC now
exists in a somewhat
different form
from the old hopes people had
for
it. The day is receding when
Europe’s
soverei^ nations will allow
ithe E^’s
institutions to become
sovereign instru-
ments for a federal power.
A rule for newcomers
What is and will be confusing
for the
newcomer is that the EE£,
precisely
because it is such a slight
creation thus
far, will be described to him
in quite
different terms by different
people. As
a bright young Frenchman in a
place
of considerable common market
power
answered when asked whether,
in die
middle of a Franco-German
bust-up,
the common maiket could any
longw
be said to exist : “ So lon^
u we all
keep talking about it, it
exists.” Those
hoping to fathmn die common
market
should start with a single
rule : never
take on board what diey hear
or read
from Brussels imtil the idea
has been
thoroughly checked out in the
national
oqiitals. It almost always
turns out to
be different in Paris, Bonn,
Rome and
Ha^, which is s^ere the deci-
sions and the deals are made.
Not another America
A final myth is to imagine
that Euro-
pean unity will owe much to
the
pattern set a century before
by the
United States of America.
That Ameri-
can pattern, so fine at the
fume, is an
illusory one to copy today.
America is
having to cope wi^ the fact
that free
and capitalist continents,
even when
they speak a single language
(which
Europe does not), are not
easily run by
a single rentral government.
The one
telling point which the
British Conser-
vative party’s pet
anti-marketeer. Sir
Derek Walker-Smith, has made
all year
was when he taunted the
majority
lined up against him at the
party con-
ference with the remark : “
Super-
power does not seem to bring
super-happiness, does it ? ”
Europe has the resources to
become
an actual superpower but its
people
are increasingly unwilling to
allow &is
to happen. Why ? Rightly or
wrongly
Europe’s people do not fear
invasion
from outside. Rightly or
wrongly they
lose btde deep over ^e notion
of being
won to communism by Moscow-
financed subversion. Rightly
or
wrongly west Europeans,
though they
may cordially detest many of
one
another’s policies, no longer
expect to
go to war with one
ano&er.
Lastly, what made America one
were
the frontier tensions and
racial legacy
which led a northern, and
later a cen-
tral, federal power, at a
certain point in
American history, rightly to
impose its
will on socially r^ressivc,
disorganised
and hopelessly under-financed
local
“ states.” A social need for
one western
Europe does not now exist. If
that
need did exist some people
doubt if
the establishment of a
European
government would be the way
to satisfy
it, for it would be further
removed
from the plain citizen than
are the
already over-complex national
govern-
ments in Europe today.
Today’s mood
is very much against more
bigness and
centralisation. The myth of
the
dreamers is to think a single
entity
is being built. What is being
built is
a base of common interest
which may
one day be an entire
construction of
harmony. According to the
Oxford dic-
tionary, harmony is a “
combination of
musical notes,” not, as
harmonisers in
Brussels often seem to
prefer, a angle
boring sound.
The place to start building a
base is
at the bottom ->50 let us
turn first to
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