Five Tangible Benefits of the EU

Rhetorical tricks don't always work the way you want them to.  Early on in the referendum campaign, before I had started thinking about it much, Nigel Farage was on the television. At this point I still found him refreshingly different from other politicians so I listened to what he was saying.  He said to imagine we were outside the EU.  Would we want to join?  It was a clever way of putting it because it implied that we obviously wouldn't.  It was very effective because it meant you had to either accept his  assertion or come up with a positive reason to join the EU.  So it was harder work to disagree with him than to accept his premise.


But as I say, it doesn't always work to rely on rhetoric.  I did start thinking and before long I had quite a number of reasons why a non-EU UK would want to sign up.  From that moment on I was out of the undecideds and into the pro-EU camp.  I always keep open the possibility that things might change or that I may have got it wrong, but I imagine that this is a view I will hold from now on.  Having been 12 when we joined the EU it had never really been an issue for me before.  But now that I have been obliged to take a side, it will take a lot to shift my opinion.

My personal euro-epiphany came back to me the other day when browsing Twitter.  Someone had posted a long quote from Jean Monnet - who is often credited with the foundation of the EU - in which he advocated avoiding democratic means for developing the union.  This sounded rather sinister.  I was curious.  But it is easy to take something out of context and make it sound bad.  There would also be a translation involved.  So as my French is good enough to read a novel in the original language I thought it should be good enough to suss out just what Monsieur Monnet was acutally saying back in the 50s.  First I had to find the source itself though, so I simply asked the person who had tweeted it.

To his credit he came back a few hours later and confessed that the quote was made up.  But while he was repentant about that he was still keen to criticise the EU and sent me a link to a long anti-EU piece that he had found on the internet.  The link is below. I don't recommend it as a piece of writing.  It is neither well written nor particularly well informed.  And worse than that, it is all the stuff you read again and again if you follow online debates about this issue.

But it did have one interesting bit towards the end.  It was basically a variation of Farage's question of why would anyone want to join the EU.  This time it was framed in a rather more concrete form.  It challenged EU advocates - specifically 'leftist' advocates - to come up with 5 tangible reasons to support the EU.  I don't regard myself as a 'leftist'.  Indeed I think the term is a deliberately vague and misleading one that can be used to disparage a set of beliefs without actually spelling them out.  But I digress.  The challenge was issued with, as in the Farage TV interview, with the obvious implication that anyone trying to come up with five tangible reasons to stay in the EU would inevitably fail.

As I say, it is basically a rhetorical trick. You don't need 5 reasons to do anything.  One compelling reason is enough.  But as it was I had no trouble with coming up with 5.  But before I get to that, the writer stipulated that these had to be specific and tangible and so not to include vague or idealistic reasons.  Well while I accept his challenge on his terms this doesn't prevent me also pointing out that the EU does have a great story to go with it.  When in history have so many disparate people come together peacefully to create a union where they put aside their differences and work together?  When in history has such a large part of the globe inhabited by some many former enemies come together and lived in peace for so long?  Even if the EU were to be dissolved tomorrow it would be impossible to dismiss this great and historic achievement.

Passport Power - Your EU Passport Is An Asset

It isn't something you often think about, but your passport is an asset.  It enables you to travel to places, and guarantees you a level of protection when you get there.  It is even possible to quantify which passports give you the most benefit.  The top one, according to an analysis reported on by the Telegraph, is a German one.  British and American passports follow not too far away at 3rd and 4th.  Obviously if Brexit leads to restrictions on movement - which seems to be something that its advocates regard as a positive thing - then a British passport will slip further down the list.

Economic - Scale is good

There are a lot of reasons that the United States is generally more productive per person than most European countries including Britain, and that Germany is one of the most productive countries per person in Europe.  But one is just down to size.  It is simply that if you have a big market you can benefit from economies of scale more easily.  If you make jam for the US you have 300 million potential customers, so you have a bigger tank and make more jam per worker.  If you just sell jam in the UK you only have 60 million customers so your costs are higher.

Freedom of Movement - We All Like Freedom

The idea that I could if I wished up sticks and move to Paris or Berlin and start working there is a nice feeling, even if I never take it up.  It is also good to extend the same opportunities to people in Europe to come here.  It is always good to get a diffferent perspective on things.

Stability

It's a sore point for someone with pounds in the bank at the moment, but the bigger your currency the more stable it is.  The Euro has had a lot of criticism since its introduction but the fact is it is a lot more stable than the currencies that preceded it.  This is really convenient
on a day to day level.  Having to take the variation of the exchange rate into account when making business decisions, and even when you are just having a holiday abroad is a sad way to expend your brainpower.  The odd time you get it right and come out on top is balanced by the time you lose out.  If you really enjoy gambling slot machines will always be available.

Smaller Government

I was quite surprised to learn that the European Commission employed less than 3000 people.  The reason I happened across this fact was when I was trying to find out if a query I was raising on some EU legislation would be likely to be handled by an expert in my field or a generalist.  It turned out that a lot of the legislation specif to my area was in fact drawn up in consultation with my trade body.  The UK has a bit of an inbuilt advantage in this area by virtue of English being the effective working language of the EU.  But the consequence of having a single regulatory body for the whole of the EU is that you only need one team of people to draw up the regulations.  One set of salaries for the whole continent is just the beginnng of the story.  It is obviously much cheaper not to have 27 sets of people doing effectively the same job.  But they also have more opportunities
for developing expertise and coming p with leigsilation that works across borders.

Small government is something that conservatives appreciate in principle, but it is also good news for people on the left as well.  It is never easy to persuade people to pay taxes, so the more that can be spent on goodies rather than administration the better.

Just one last point.  One response I can anticipate is that some of the benefits I am claiming could be contrived by mutual agreement between states.  You don't necessarily need an international organisation to put them in place.  This is true enough - but they are a sight easier when you have a common framework to work with.


https://www.opendemocracy.net/can-europe-make-it/shaun-lawson/just-what-is-point-of-european-union