NATO EXPANSION IS NO PANACEA

New Times, 4 July 1997

The new British defence secretary, George Robertson, chose the right time to launch the government's strategic defence review – the morning after Boris Yeltsin, Bill Clinton and the leaders of the European Nato countries met in Paris to sign the security deal between Russia and Nato that will allow the alliance to expand eastwards, initially to incorporate Poland, Hungary and the Czech Republic.

The newspapers were almost unanimous in heralding the agreement as an historic breakthrough, not least because of Yeltsin's surprise declaration that Russia would remove the nuclear warheads on missiles pointed at Nato countries (a statement subsequently toned down by his officials to a promise no longer to target missiles at signatories to the deal).

There could not, it seemed, be a more propitious opportunity to start what Robertson said would be the most fundamental reassessment of Britain's security needs since the end of the cold war.

And indeed, there is much about the Founding Act on Mutual Relations, Co-operation and Security that is very good news. The agreement sets up a new Nato-Russia Council with a permanent secretariat, which will give each side a voice in the other's security affairs; and it suggests a long list of topics that the council might discuss, from conflict prevention and peace-keeping to nuclear safety and theatre nuclear missile defences. Nato has agreed to re-examine its "strategic concept", which has remained unchanged since before the collapse of the Soviet Union, and the Founding Act states that Nato has "no intention, no plan and no reason" to deploy nuclear weapons on the territory of new members. Nato will guarantee its new members' security by promising to reinforce their defences in time of emergency rather than with substantial permanent deployments of troops.

Yet there are also grounds for scepticism about the deal. For all the hype surrounding it, it could well turn out to be no more than an agreement to create a talking shop. Nato's declarations on nuclear and conventional deployments and nuclear strategy fall short of absolute promises. And the Founding Act is not a legally binding treaty: it needs no ratification, and it puts neither side under any obligation. Neither can veto anything the other unilaterally decides to do.

Of course, warm words count in international diplomacy, and it is better to have non-binding agreements than none. It is possible that the Founding Act marks the definitive end of the division of Europe created in Yalta at the end of the second world war, as French president Jacques Chirac said.

But it could just as easily be a harbinger of disaster. The success of the agreement depends crucially on Yeltsin's ability to sell it at home as a victory – which will not be easy. Nato expansion is deeply unpopular across the political spectrum in Russia, and the concessions that Yeltsin has wrung from Nato are too few and too small to guarantee the acquiescence of even liberal opinion. Nationalists and communists have already denounced the Founding Act as a capitulation.

The danger is that as Nato expansion comes closer, its opponents will gain the upper hand in Russia and do their best to block it, which in turn will push Nato to take a less friendly attitude to Russia, which in turn will lead Russia to flex its muscles in what it sees as its sphere of influence (particularly the Baltic states), and so on. Even with the Founding Act in place, Nato expansion could all too easily set off a spiral of mutual mistrust and military escalation every bit as dangerous as the one that characterised the cold war.

The best way to avoid this would be for Nato to reconsider expansion. Failing that, it is essential that Nato takes the sting out of expansion by taking the initiative in disarmament negotiations - particularly on nuclear arms, where progress is stalled by the Russian parliament's unwillingness to ratify START 2 (largely because of Nato expansion). One easy way to break the logjam would be a unilateral gesture by one of Nato's nuclear weapons powers. Now how about that as a fresh idea for the defence review, Mr Robertson?

ALL TO PLAY FOR IN FRANCE

New Times, 2 May 1997

French President Jacques Chirac’s decision to call a snap National Assembly election, with the two rounds of voting taking place on 25 May and 1 June, has put the parties of the left, the communists and the socialists, in a difficult position.

The two-round voting system means that both parties always do badly unless they reach agreement with one another about standing down in the second round. And this time, because of the rise of Jean-Marie Le Pen’s National Front, there are many seats where the left parties will have to agree on single candidates in the first round if the best-placed left candidate is not to finish third.

The problem, however, is that they disagree with one another on the most important issue in this election, European monetary union. While the Communist Party (PCF), led by Robert Hue, is against the single currency – as it has been all along – the Socialist Party (PS), led by Lionel Jospin, is broadly in favour. EMU was the brainchild of François Mitterrand and Jacques Delors, and the socialists cannot easily rat on it.

Under Jospin, a likeable 63-year-old who did far better in the 1995 presidential election than anyone expected, the PS has returned to its social democratic ideological roots after the ideology-free late Mitterrand years – and this has allowed it to move some way towards the PCF’s Euroscepticism. The PS has long argued for Europe-wide reflation, but in recent weeks it has taken to emphasising its concern about the strict rule in the Maastricht treaty limiting state budget deficits to 3 per cent of gross domestic product. Unemployment in France is running at nearly 13 per cent, and the socialists have come out against cutting spending to get the budget deficit down. As Jospin put it last month: “If, in respect to the 3 per cent criterion, it is necessary to impose new austerity measures on the nation, my answer is no.”

Rather than austerity, the PS is promising to create 350,000 jobs in the private sector by cutting working time and to subsidise another 350,000 in the public sector.

This programme – which is radically unlike Labour’s in Britain – would mean that France would not qualify for EMU in 1999. This in turn would at very least postpone the whole project and might just scupper it completely. It is no surprise that it is very much to the liking of the PCF.

Whether it goes down as well with the voters remains to be seen, however. Voters are worried about the effects of the deflation and deregulation required by EMU, and the centre-right government of Alain Juppé, which has made a priority of reducing the deficit rather than creating jobs, is highly unpopular. The two government parties, the Gaullist RPR and the centre-right UDF, are almost certain to lose many of the seats they currently hold in the National Assembly.

On the other hand, the right can afford to lose a lot of seats. Both left parties were routed in the last parliamentary election in 1993: in the outgoing National Assembly, the socialists have 63 seats and the communists 24 to the RPR’s 258 and the UDF’s 206. The left also has the problem that many voters disaffected with the government seem likely to opt for the far-right National Front, which has won several municipal victories in the south of the country in recent months – although its candidates will be to the left’s advantage where they get through to the second round and split the right-wing vote.

So a left victory is not impossible, just unlikely. But if it happens, the implications for the rest of Europe could be enormous. Watch this space.

LABOUR'S EUROPEAN CHALLENGE

New Times, 4 April 1997

A Labour government in London is not simply the last hope of everyone in Britain that has had enough of the corruption and incompetence of the Major government. It is what every single European Union government wants too. When Tony Blair wins office on 1 May the sense of relief in the chancelleries of western Europe will be palpable.

 If they knew the Labour leader better, they might be less enthusiastic. His view of the world, like that of his closest advisers – and of every other Labour leader since the war apart from Michael Foot and Neil Kinnock –  is disappointingly Atlanticist. New Labour has looked primarily to America, not Europe, for its thinking about policy and electoral strategy, and the would-be prime minister is ill at ease about the EU. He knows what the polls and focus groups say about the unpopularity of “Europe”; he doesn’t know European politics too well; and he doesn’t like the idea of winning what he thought was the key position just to find –  like Aneurin Bevan as a councillor in south Wales in the 1920s – that the important decisions are being made one rung further up the ladder.

 Nevertheless, the optimism of the west European political elite is justified. Blair might not be an out-and- out Euro-enthusiast or even particularly au fait with European politics. He is, however, not a pig-headed Europhobe – and his party’s pig-headed Europhobes have been in no position to cause him trouble. Indeed, he wants constructive engagement with Europe, and the mood in the Labour Party remains cautiously Euro-integrationist. A Blair government will not engage in the obstructive histrionics  that the Tories made their trademark under Margaret Thatcher and John Major.

So Blair is guaranteed an initial warm embrace from the rest of the EU. What then? Of course, nobody knows. But European monetary union will suddenly become crucial. If it goes ahead on time – which still looks likely, despite the difficulties of the German economy – Britain will probably qualify for first-wave membership. If it does and a Blair government joins, or says it will, Britain will be the toast of the continental European political class. But if, as seems more likely, Britain stays out, Blair will have his work cut out if he is to retain any credibility with other European governments, however good his reasons.

The problem, put simply, is that EMU has become the touchstone of commitment to the cause of a united Europe. The decision on joining a single currency has become more than a matter of hard-headed economics. It is also a political decision. To opt out is to damage the prospects of further European integration.

Which would be no problem if going it alone were an option for a Labour Britain. But it is not. Further European integration is essential if the EU is to acquire the powers Labour needs it to have in the spheres of economic, environmental and security policy.

So what can Labour do? Its best bet is to come up with a far-reaching programme for European integration that can be implemented whatever happens to EMU – whether or not it goes ahead as planned, and whether or not Britain is part of it. In particular, a Blair government should table proposals for a radical democratisation of the EU, based on a massive increase in the powers of the European Parliament, and should make clear its enthusiasm for reviving Jacques Delors’ “Eurokeynesian” plans for employment generation. This would not go down as well with other EU governments as an unambiguous commitment to EMU – but it would be a lot better than nothing.

NATO IS NOT THE SOLUTION

New Times, 7 March 1997

Anyone who suggested ten years ago that we would now be discussing the rights and wrongs of Poland, Hungary and Czechoslovakia joining NATO would have been ridiculed.
It was not quite the height of the cold war: the United States and the Soviet Union were negotiating seriously on nuclear arms, Mikhail Gorbachev had tentatively begun the  liberalisation of the Soviet Union, and at least some of the communist regimes of the Soviet bloc – notably Hungary and Poland – had relaxed their suppression of dissident opinion.

But the division of Europe between two hostile blocs, one dominated by the United States, the other controlled by the Soviet Union, seemed such an established fact that ending it peacefully appeared utopian even to those, like Edward Thompson and his colleagues in European Nuclear Disarmament, who most wanted it. The idea that NATO should expand to the eastern border of Poland hardly entered the mind of even the most militant western cold warrior.
Which only goes to show that the course of history is impossible to predict. The enlargement of NATO to include Poland, Hungary and the Czech Republic is now imminent. It is US President Bill Clinton's top priority in foreign affairs for 1997, and there is a remarkable degree of consensus across the political spectrum in Europe that it is a good thing. In Britain, it has the blessing of all the main political parties.

But is NATO enlargement really such a bright idea? There are good reasons for doubt. It will be difficult and expensive to integrate Polish, Hungarian and Czech armed forces into NATO's military structure; and enlargement will do nothing for the security of Europe's most volatile region, the Balkans. Most important, it is likely to have an unwelcome effect on Russia.
NATO was begun in 1948 as an anti-Russian alliance at a time when the west feared - with some reason – that Moscow would attack western Europe. Today, NATO says that it is no longer anti-Russian, and that Russians have nothing to fear from its expansion. But it is not seen that way by Russians, or indeed by most Poles, Hungarians and Czechs. The reason they want to join is to provide security against a future military threat from Russia.

These fears of Russia are understandable and legitimate. It is less than ten years since east-central Europe was under the Soviet yoke. Even if Russia today is not a threat, it could well be in the none-too-distant future. It retains substantial nuclear and conventional arsenals, which it has been less willing to dismantle of late than in the early 1990s; and it is anything but politically stable. In the next few years, it could certainly find itself with an authoritarian government, possibly with strong backing from the military, that plays relentlessly on nationalist anti-western themes.

The problem, however, is that expanding NATO eastwards makes it more rather than less likely that this will happen. Public opinion in Russia is running strongly against NATO expansion, and authoritarian nationalist politicians are already trying to exploit this for their own ends. The Russian parliament has refused to ratify the START-2 agreement on strategic nuclear weapons and the government is dragging its feet in other disarmament negotiations. There is a strong case for believing that the priority for European security is to  prevent Russia from turning nasty - and that the best way of doing this is to postpone NATO enlargement and use the good will this creates in Moscow to press for rapid and radical disarmament agreements.

This would of course necessitate some radical new thinking about creating a new post-cold-war security structure for Europe. One option that would certainly allay Russian fears would be expansion of NATO to include Russia. Alternatively, NATO could be recast as a strictly European alliance, excluding both the US and Russia but with non-aggression agreements with each: this would have the advantage of aligning Europe's security arrangements more closely with the political structures that will emerge in the early years of the next century as the European Union expands. Most radically of all, NATO could be dismantled and the security of Europe entrusted to either the European Union or the Organisation for Security and Co-operation in Europe.

All of which sounds ridiculously unrealistic and utopian. But in ten years' time, who knows . . .

SAFETY FIRST ALL ROUND

Red Pepper, March 1997

Tony Blair looks set to win the general election. That's good, but the left shouldn't expect radical change, says Paul Anderson

Labour has been ultra-cautious with its pre-election policy commitments for a long time now. Avoiding hostages to fortune was a crucial element of the pre-1992 campaign strategy – and John Smith as leader decided to make it the guiding light of Labour policy-making. Since Tony Blair became leader in 1994, however, "safety first" has been taken to new extremes in just about every area of policy.

ECONOMY
The priorities for Blair and shadow chancellor Gordon Brown have been to reassure taxpayers and to calm business nerves. They have repeatedly announced that they will run a tight anti-inflationary fiscal and monetary regime. In January, Brown promised not to change either the top rate or the standard rate of income tax – and said that, with the exception of the money he gets from his windfall tax on the excess profits of privatised utilities, he will stick to the Tories' plans for public spending for his first two years in office. That means a continuing clamp-down on public-sector pay and only small increases in spending on health, education and local government.

EUROPE
Policy on Europe has changed little since 1994 - although shadow foreign secretary Robin Cook has adopted a marginally more sceptical position on economic and monetary union than Labour had before. The idea of the EU running a counter-cyclical macro-economic policy, very popular with both Brown and Cook, has been downgraded, although this is in part because the Delors plan on which it was based was scuppered by the British government in the Council of Ministers.

WORK
Labour has stuck to its promise to sign up to the Social Chapter of the Maastricht treaty. But since 1994 it has watered down its commitments to rights for part-time and temporary workers and has abandoned plans to allow trade unions to engage in sympathy actions in certain circumstances. It has also changed its policy on its promised minimum wage: instead of announcing what it will be before the election, as in 1992, it will leave it up to a commission to set it afterwards at a "sensible" level.

WELFARE
In education, the key change since 1994 is that Labour has made it clear that it will not now abolish grammar or grant-maintained schools. In health policy, the party's opposition to the internal market and GP fundholding has softened. Labour will not now abolish Jobseeker's Allowance and go back to Unemployment Benefit, and its pensions policy is in limbo after last year's row at its party conference. The welfare state in its broadest sense is, however, an area where Labour could well prove radical in government. Its plans for "lifelong learning" and a "university for industry" are ambitious, and its "welfare to work" strategy for tackling unemployment contains much that makes sense.

CONSTITUTION
Changing the constitution was the one thing about which Labour under Smith was not ultra-cautious. Reformers looked forward to a Labour government legislating for a Bill of Rights, an elected second chamber and devolution to a Scottish parliament, a Welsh assembly and directly elected regional councils in England. Labour also promised a referendum on the electoral system. Now devolution to Scotland, Wales and the English regions will happen only if people vote for it in referendums, and Lords reform will be limited for now to removal of the voting rights of hereditary peers. There are persistent rumours, denied by Blair's office, that he has decided to ditch plans for a referendum on electoral reform.

ENVIRONMENT AND TRANSPORT
Labour has downgraded the profile of environment policy since 1994 – to the disappointment of green campaigners (see Charles Secrett in last month's Red Pepper) – but has not formally changed it. On transport, its key shift has been on what to do about the privatised rail network, where it is now promising something less than wholesale renationalisation.

LABOUR SHIFTS A BIT ON EUROPE

New Times, 5 February 1997

Shadow foreign secretary Robin Cook's remarks on the Dimbleby programme about a single European currency – that he would back Britain joining if it was working in 2002 – have been widely reported as a surprise shift in Labour's position on economic and monetary union. But they had been some time in the pipeline.

Although, so far, it has barely figured in the sparring of the run-up to the election campaign, the biggest headache facing Tony Blair is undoubtedly Europe – specifically, whether a Labour government will sign later this year sign up for the first wave of EMU.

Until some time last year – it is impossible to put a precise date on it – EMU seemed to most Labour politicians to be a rather distant problem. Of course, the 1991 Maastricht treaty laid down a strict timetable for creation of a single currency, with EMU itself beginning by 1 January 1999. That meant the member states of the EU making up their minds in late 1997 whether or not they wanted to join, with the final decision about who would be admitted being made by early 1998.

But after the turmoil in the currency markets of 1992-93, it seemed implausible that this timetable would actually be put into practice. Italy, Spain and several smaller countries looked unlikely to qualify for participation under the strict convergence criteria laid down by Maastricht, and it was by no means clear that France, Britain or even Germany would make it either.

With the Tories tearing themselves apart over Europe, it did not seem particularly urgent for Labour to come up with a hard-and-fast policy. The formula that the party had adopted in 1991, that it was in favour of EMU in principle but would join only if the conditions were right for Britain, appeared perfectly adequate to take Labour through to the election – particularly as it had been honed by shadow foreign secretary Robin Cook since late 1994.

Cook's line, that Labour wanted the proposed European central bank to be "accountable politically to make sure it pursues policies of growth and full employment" and that it insisted on "convergence of the real economy - of output, production and growth" before it would recommend British membership of EMU, satisfied all but a handful of the party's MPs and MEPs. Those of a sceptical disposition could take comfort in the qualifications; enthusiasts could point to the backing in principle for a single currency.

This has remained Labour's formal position, with the addition, last November, of a promise that a Labour government would put British membership of the single currency to a referendum if it decided that it was in Britain's interests to join.

All that Cook's remarks show is that he has prevailed in a behind-the-scenes argument at the very top of the party about how the position should be nuanced to take account of the facts that EMU is now very likely to go ahead on schedule and that most of continental Europe is prepared to go through almost any amount of hardship to be part of it. From early last year, Labour's 'big four' – Tony Blair, Gordon Brown, John Prescott and Cook – were forced into some serious thinking about whether Labour would go for EMU membership in its first few months in power.

Their problem was that each had a different perception of the issue at stake and a different instinct about how to deal with it. Brown was the initially most enthusiastic about EMU membership in the first wave. He was one of the architects of Labour's pre-1992 policy of backing British membership of the ERM (along with his mentor John Smith) and, for all his fiscal conservatism when it comes to running Britain's own economy, in his first years as shadow chancellor he gave strong backing to Jacques Delors' plans as President of the European Commission for a role for Keynesian counter-cyclical policy for job creation at a European level.

At the other extreme, Prescott was against the single currency on principle – a point of view he had not changed since the prospect of EMU first raised its head – although he was said by colleagues not to be particularly well informed.

In between Brown and Prescott were Cook and Blair. Cook, like Brown, was fully up to speed on the detail and was an enthusiast for European counter-cyclical economic policies. But he harboured doubts about whether EMU would work and was sceptical about Britain's ability to join in the first wave because of the amount of legislation it would require in the first year of a Labour government. He argued that Britain should not go into the single currency at once but should join later if conditions are right.

Blair took a position somewhere between Brown's and Cook's – but like Prescott was said not to be completely au fait with the technicalities. Although he is no anti-European, the Labour leader has never taken a great interest in European politics and feels ill at ease with the EMU argument. Perhaps understandably, he is more worried by winning the election than by what he does afterwards.

Attempts to reach a consensus at the end of last year resulted merely in the agreement that Labour would back a referendum but would not rule out being part of the first wave of EMU. Cook's public statement that Labour would probably not enter in the first wave but that it would be very difficult to stay out if EMU was working well in 2002 indicates that the stalemate was broken by Brown conceding the unlikelihood of first-wave membership in return for Cook becoming more enthusiastic about the benefits of EMU. It doesn't actually solve the problem of making the decision when the time comes – but it should preserve Labour's unity on Europe until the election. And that in itself is no mean feat. 

AGAINST EUROSCEPTICISM

Review of Changing States by Glyn Ford, Glenys Kinnock and Arlene McCarthy (eds) (Mandarin, £7.99), Tribune, 8 November 1996

Labour’s MEPs don’t get the attention they deserve. The European Parliament has long since ceased to be a mere talking shop: it now has considerable powers to influence decisions that affect us all. And Labour plays a major role in every aspect of its business. The party is the largest single national group in the Party of European Socialists, itself the parliament’s biggest party, and Labour MEPs hold a string of key positions.

Yet the European Parliament goes largely unreported by the British media, which still consider, entirely wrongly, that political life begins and ends in Westminster and that Europe is essentially a matter of foreign policy. In the Labour Party, MEPs are too often viewed, equally wrongly, as second-rate politicians with the cushiest jobs going.

This collection of essays by a group of 14 members of the European Parliamentary Labour Party should go some way towards changing all this. Between them, the authors, all from the pro-European (but not-quite-federalist) mainstream of the EPLP, cover just about every aspect of European Union politics, from economic and monetary union to consumer protection. No one who reads this book from cover to cover will come away doubting that the EU has to be at the centre of Labour’s political concerns.

All the contributions are intelligent, well-written and easy to understand – itself uncommon in writing about European politics – and the book sends a clear message to Labour’s leaders in Westminster as it prepares for power: flirt with Euroscepticism at your peril. It will not be easy in the heat of an election campaign for Labour to remain essentially pro-European. With Sir James Goldsmith threatening them from the right, the Tories are setting themselves up to run a vicious xenophobic anti-European campaign, and they will be given strong backing by much of the press. The temptation for Labour to respond by adopting a much more Eurosceptic line than it has taken for the past decade, particularly on the single currency, will be great.

That, however, would be a major mistake. As several of the authors argue, the EU needs to be reformed and democratised, and there are undoubted risks in economic and monetary union. But the risks that would be involved in Britain turning its back on Europe are greater. A “positive, proactive approach to Europe”, in the words of Glyn Ford’s excellent introductory essay, is the only option that makes sense. And, as Alan Donnelly and David Martin make clear in their respective contributions, that includes engaging actively in the negotiations leading up to the single currency and backing a massive increase in the powers of the European Parliament.