Europe - the great missed opportunity

When the historians come to write the obituary of the outgoing Labour government what will they say was the greatest missed opportunity of their 13 year reign? According to the New Statesman, Tony Blair told his friends, upon leaving office, that the greatest regret of his premiership was abandoning what his one-time mentor Roy Jenkins called the “breaking the mould” options open to him in the wake of new Labour's landslide victory in 1997.

Several of these options still remain open to Labour in its final months under Blair’s successor, Gordon Brown, including: the introduction of proportional representation for the Commons, a fully elected second chamber and a coalition with the Liberal Democrats. However, the single greatest missed opportunity that may never come by again, and by far Blair’s biggest regret, is the failure to overturn decades of British hostility to the EU.

In 2001, Tony Blair appeared to have successfully cemented Britain’s position at the heart of Europe. The Kosovo war had brought with it a mutual recognition by leading EU member states of the need for a single European foreign and defence policy to prevent the horrors of ethnic cleansing on their doorstep from ever happening again. Britain’s entry into the new single currency also seemed highly probable, if not inevitable, while the euroscpetic Conservatives were in disarray and languishing in the polls. So what went wrong?

Blair’s hesitation over the Euro was initially stymied by a lack of support from his then chancellor, Gordon Brown, and a threat to withdraw public support altogether by the Sun newspaper. Nevertheless, he planned to force the issue in a speech to the Trades Union Congress on September 11th 2001. However, his speech was never delivered as two airplanes were flown into the Twin Towers in New York with dramatic ramifications for British foreign policy thereafter.

9/11 similarly affected plans for a single European foreign and defence policy as the invasion of Iraq that followed led to the biggest rift in transatlantic relations since the fall of the Soviet Union as Britain prioritised its alliance with America over its relationship with Europe. However, it was additionally hampered by, amongst other things, a chronic underinvestment in defence by the big EU 3, Britain, Germany and France, and concerns in Washington over a potential threat to the remit of NATO.

However, the election of a multilateralist President in the United States and the onset of the Great Recession have gone a long way to mending relations between Britain and Europe. Indeed, as the world faces up to the grim reality that the biggest challenges of the 21st century, such as climate change, regulating the global economy and tackling the proliferation of nuclear weapons, cannot be combated by any nation state alone, there has never been a more important time for the UK to take a leading role in European integration.

Yet just as the conditions for rapprochement fall into place, a Labour government that for so long took the European Union for granted looks set to be replaced by a Conservative one that wants little or nothing to do with it. As a result, Britain will be consigning itself to isolation at the very moment it cannot afford to stand alone. What’s more, the rest of Europe will not wait forever.