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EU: Enlargement (EUC Report)

My Lords, I join those who have thanked the noble Lord, Lord Grenfell, and all the members of the committee for this helpful and reflective report. The committee has a distinguished membership with a lot of experience and I believe that the House is fortunate to have people of that calibre following European affairs so closely on our behalf. At the outset of my remarks I endorse what my noble friend Lord Dubs and others have underlined. I welcome the honesty of the committee in recognising that an obstacle to enlargement is the existing state of public opinion. I also welcome the candour of the committee in bringing home that one reason for this is the inadequacy of political leadership in explaining exactly what the community has achieved, what it means for the people of its members, what its potential is and in taking a positive approach to building it for the future, instead of that leadership wanting to come home from every meeting claiming how it has fought for our exclusive interests more successfully than anybody else. The community is not, was never conceived as being and must not be allowed to become just an administrative top-down arrangement. The quality of its democracy is crucial to its success. Perhaps it is worth pondering what we mean when we say that democracy is crucial to its success. The words flow easily, but what do they really mean? First, democracy matters in terms of the values and culture of the society of which it is the political system, but it matters equally because it is a sound step towards stability by ensuring the accountability of government. Therefore, when we talk about the importance of the quality of democracy in the European Union, that is not just a light refrain; it is absolutely fundamental to its effectiveness and sustainability. We all know—and the committee has certainly recognised it—that for most people in this country Brussels appears to be a remote, authoritarian body. We also know that if Brussels seems to be remote, the Parliament—whether it is in Brussels or under this absurd arrangement in Strasbourg, commuting backwards and forwards at God knows what expense to the taxpayer—is even more remote. The challenge is to bring democracy nearer to people. Here I want to take issue with Polly Toynbee. I do not often do that, but I read a recent article by her, and although I normally regard her as almost infallible as a political pundit I found myself very much in disagreement. She suggested that the recent elections in our country demonstrated not that people wanted localism, but that the voting system was unsound and what people wanted was proportional representation. I must not allow myself to be drawn into a long analysis. That is an unfortunate contrast; I think that they want both. I am certain that people want to feel that they have more influence and that decisions are made in a context which they can feel part of and understand. Let me go further. In recent years I have become convinced that identity matters desperately to stability in national and world affairs. People need a meaningful sense of identity. In its absence there is a danger of alienation. Therefore, I, for one, am a positive enthusiast for what the Government have done in terms of devolution. They have acted ahead of time, rather than finding themselves with an increasingly impossible unstable situation in the United Kingdom. It was imaginative and essential to our future—I sometimes wonder whether they realised just how imaginative it was. Of course, identity and devolution are not enough in themselves. The other reality that we are faced with is the world’s total interdependence, not least in the age of terrorism. We have a world in which international co-operation must be seen as not just a nice option but absolutely essential to the management of human affairs. Therefore, the challenge to political leadership is, having established a sense of identity, to lead people to support the international institutions and the co-operation which are essential if any of us are to have a future. In the sense of what I have argued, enlargement is to be welcomed. If I am committed to enlargement, there must be no question but that undertakings which have been given must be honoured. The instability and dangers that could be provoked by rejecting people who have set out upon a particular course in good faith, and by taking the ground from under the imaginative leaders who are trying to work for what we all want, is incalculable. I do not find myself in agreement with some of those who have spoken on Turkey. My thesis is that we, and certainly our children and grandchildren, need inclusive and not exclusive political institutions—institutions which face diversity and turn it into a rich and positive dimension of society, as distinct from something to be feared and rejected. Therefore, an increasingly democratic Turkey—of course there is a way to go yet—with an Islamic culture is going to be a positive asset for the Community as a whole, not least for the stability of our multicultural society in the United Kingdom. The Turkish army has given grounds for concern. Surely our message to the army should be, ““Please understand: it is because your country is an increasingly democratic country in which the army must be servants of the political order, and because it has a strong Islamic tradition—which we value—that we want you within the Community””. If the army does not recognise that then it had better be told in no uncertain language that the road that it is taking is the one thing that could wreck the progress of Turkey towards membership. My noble friend Lord Clinton-Davis spoke movingly about the values of the Community. It is good to hear that from someone who has been a Commissioner. There is one dimension to enlargement which we all have to take seriously; that there could be a tendency for the values to become aspirational rather than substantial. That is a possibility that we must not discount. For a number of years I have been on the delegation of the Council of Europe. I have no doubt that it has changed. Its culture now is more aspirational and rhetorical, rather than substantial in its commitment to the values about which we are speaking. While I am making this observation and talking about the experience of the Council of Europe in this context, I will make another observation. There is a temptation to see European Union institutions as preserving the human rights that we see as central. It would be a retrograde step to move away from the European Court of Human Rights as it is today. What might begin to happen is that members of the European Union would be seen as having a commitment to human rights and a court to underwrite them but that they did not apply equally to wider society in Europe, its fringes or beyond. The point of and strength of the court is that it has a wider application. The logic of how I see it all is that we should be more relaxed about the principle of a confederal rather than federal European Community, as we used to call it, because I want it to be strong and effective—a European Union of co-operating states with which ordinary people can feel a greater identity. Back in the 1970s when I was the Minister of State in the Foreign Office responsible for Europe I sometimes felt, with some sadness, that the European Parliament had gone down the wrong road—that it was a mistake to have a directly elected institution. It would have been better to have an indirectly elected Parliament. The responsibility is not soundly based. That might have been a better arrangement, but so be it. Whatever the intention was, it is perceived—if it is not all fear and reality—that we have parliamentarians who are not engaged with the daily reality of substantial politics in their societies. Parliamentarians in the individual member countries can make a lot of fuss, get a high profile and news coverage by being hostile to Europe and its institutions. I will finish by saying, with conviction, that I am certain that the way history will judge us all in this period of the 21st century is by how we build the European institutions—the way that the European Union adds to the quality of accountable government and democracy as I described it earlier, and to the effective contribution that Europeans are making to the stability of the wider world—and on recognising that the problems of our children and grandchildren, whether the environment, security or economic affairs, cannot be solved in a European context alone. They can only be solved in a global context. The test of the institutions, therefore, will be how they play in to the global institutions which have become so vital.