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EU: Enlargement (EUC Report)

My Lords, I wondered for a moment whether the noble Lord, Lord Judd, was going to take us on to the implications for British politics of the recent local elections. I am tempted to follow him for half a minute. For me, the most glorious point in those elections was watching the newly elected Member of the Scottish Parliament, the noble Lord, Lord Foulkes, saying, in an irritated fashion to a ““Newsnight”” presenter, ““But you have to understand: we have a four-party system””. I am glad that he now understands that, and I look forward to his altered behaviour the next time that he visits us in this Parliament. This was an extremely valuable report. It showed us a number of important issues, which I hope the committee will continue to study. Enlargement, it points out, has been a continuing process since the British application in 1961. I tell the noble Lord, Lord Stoddart, that I, as a young researcher, wrote an article in 1976 called ““Widening and Deepening””. It argued that widening—in those days, that meant taking Spain, Greece and Portugal on board—would necessarily involve deepening rather than the reverse. The issue of what the borders of Europe are has been with us since 1989. I then had the mildly painful experience of getting the LSE maps unit to draw some maps on European fault lines for a Chatham House paper and giving a presentation at Harvard. An elderly professor called Samuel Huntington got rather excited at one of those maps and reproduced it to demonstrate that Croatia is European but that Bosnia is on the other side in the clash of civilisations. That is one of the reasons why I very much hesitate to go along with the noble Lord, Lord Borrie, in suggesting that after Croatia we have a pause. That is the Catholic western Europe that some right-wing Americans and some in the Vatican wish us to hold to and which many of the rest of us wish to move away from as far and fast as we can. I am not at all sure that Cyprus is really in Europe, as one defines Europe. I am not entirely sure, if you want to be deeply geographical, that Iceland—or at least the western half of Iceland—is in Europe; it is certainly the other side of the Atlantic divide. We need to be very careful when playing around with these geographical ideas. We have had awkward states in the European Union for a long time. Many of us remember how difficult Greece was in its first 10 years of membership—it looked after its own national interests and did not think that it had anything to give in return. Sadly, Cyprus has now clearly taken on that role. That is part of the reason why we have to take much greater care in assessing the criteria for future accession. The report clearly says that the most recent enlargement has been an enormous success. The transformation of central and eastern Europe since 1990 has been astonishing. The support for economic transformation and the conditionality imposed on political and administrative reform has worked remarkably well. However, I think that we all accept that the transformation of Romania and Bulgaria still has some distance to go and that allowing those two countries to join the European Union, though necessary in order to maintain the pace of reform, strengthens the argument for much stronger mechanisms for scrutinising the implementation of EU legislation and the quality of courts and public administration post-joining in all member states. After all, this is not just a question of Romania and Bulgaria; the water standards in Brussels are in many ways lower than those in Warsaw because of the difficulty of the Flemish and French-speaking communities in sorting out problems of sanitation. The noble Lord, Lord Triesman, looks surprised; I thought that that was a well known fact. Agricultural funds in southern Italy have not always been distributed entirely without corruption; nor, indeed, have structural funds in Spain or fisheries policy in any country that one might care to name—not to mention the acceptance that cross-border smuggling between Ulster and southern Ireland was something that one could not prevent. We need stronger scrutiny. The European Parliament is beginning to address that; it could have a very useful role in that regard. We must also recognise that this involves not just the resistance among our publics to further enlargement but the resistance of many of our publics to eastern enlargement. That was a factor in the French and Dutch referendums—people felt that they had not been consulted about Poland, Hungary and the Czech Republic coming in and that that threatened their jobs and social welfare and would bring higher taxes. That was certainly part of the negative response to the constitutional treaty. There was a clear failure of political leadership and communication by all member Governments, including our own. But that is, of course, part of the greater failure of our Government to make any greater effort to carry their own public to understand the advantages of European integration. Further enlargement has some distance to run. The question is: how much further should it go? On the western Balkans, I argue, as do all of us on these Benches, that we have obligations that we must fulfil. I say in passing that my noble friend Lord Ashdown very much wanted to have been here tonight but, unfortunately, is attending a ceremony to unveil his own portrait in the National Liberal Club. I say to the noble Lord, Lord Stoddart, that we on these Benches used, jokingly, to refer to my noble friend as the viceroy when he was in charge of Bosnia; it was, after all, a protectorate—and, so far, it has been a relatively successful protectorate. Does one prefer to allow parts of south-eastern Europe to deteriorate into disorder or do we recognise that it is in our shared interest to help to reconstruct conflict-ridden societies and rebuild broken states and weak economies? That would allow us to stop transnational crime, drug smuggling and people smuggling—those are all things that south-eastern Europe and the western Balkans were exporting to the rest of Europe—and, over the long haul, bring those weak and small states into full membership of the European Union. We do not need to have deliberate pause after Croatia. There will be a natural pause, because the process will be long and hard—more like 10 years than five. However, the cost of leaving those countries out might well be too high, even though the process of bringing them up to the standards required for membership will be long and painful. We have all agreed that Turkey is a much more difficult issue. It is a far larger and much more diverse country. I remember at a conference in Istanbul two years ago that a professor from Ankara University said to us that we had to understand that there were four different societies in Turkey: there were half a million Turks who were fully part of the sophisticated cosmopolitan global society; there were 5 million Turks who were urbanised and educated, and would adapt very easily to European Union membership; there were 35 million Turks who were first generation in the cities; and there were a further 35 million Turks who were still in the villages and living in conditions, he said very brutally, that were not totally unlike those of Pakistan. Turkey is a very diverse society, which is developing very rapidly and which now has the least corrupt Government since the Second World War; the current Government have many very attractive features. I agree entirely with the noble Lord, Lord Judd, about the development of an Islamic democracy. I find deeply unattractive the army and those representatives of the deep state, who are nationalist, authoritarian and brutal in their attitude towards minorities and the Kurds in particular. I wish that Her Majesty’s Government had thought through more fully the implications of offering unconditional membership to Turkey at an earlier stage. As with so many other issues, this was an area in which Her Majesty’s Government took our policy from the Americans, who wanted us to offer membership to Turkey without thinking through its implications for the European Union. We must maintain negotiations with the Turkish Government in good faith, because the reform process is well under way, which means that we have to bring increasing pressure on the Government of Cyprus to fulfil their obligations as a member of the European Union on opening their ports to trade with Northern Cyprus. However, it is quite possible that the long-term process of negotiations with Turkey will not end in full membership. The question of the states beyond is more difficult. It is partly an issue of integration capacity and is certainly a question of relations with Russia. I very much hope that the committee will return to the issue of neighbourhood policy, into which it rightly states the European Union has not yet put much effort, nor has the committee defined what it wants neighbourhood policy to achieve. The report did not say, although I wish that it had, that the European Union needs a much more active approach towards the ““frozen conflicts”” in Moldova, Georgia and elsewhere, of which the noble Lord, Lord Dubs, spoke. We need a much better accompaniment to enlargement to provide the sort of partnerships that the countries around the EU, if they ever approach membership, will need to offer—and that will require 15 or 20 years or more. What about the institutional implications? Again, I welcome the report’s argument that we need some further institutional reform—not as an end in itself, but as a means of ensuring that a widening European Union retains the capability to take and implement decisions that represent the common interests of its members. The report makes the case, therefore, for an amending treaty and for some further extension to qualified majority voting. I note that; I trust that, when we in this House come in a few months to debate the proposals for an amending treaty, other Members of this House will take it fully on board. There will be real problems for the workings of the Council when there are 27, 28 or more members, and for the patience of representatives of larger states, because they will have to listen to the representatives of smaller states. I sometimes wonder whether our next Prime Minister will have the patience to sit and listen for long hours as the heads of Governments of smaller states, of which he is dimly aware, go on at great length. I wish that the committee had been a little more critical about the number of Commissioners, which is a taboo subject. We have to break that taboo. People in Brussels now say that no one will ever give up their Commissioner, but that is part of the treaty that we would wish to break. It is in Britain’s interest for there to be a small and efficient Commission, even if that means that, from time to time, there is no British Commissioner. I wish that the British Government would say so. The consensus of the report, which I welcome and with which I agree, is that we must be committed to a long haul in the western Balkans that ends in full membership, that we should maintain continued negotiations with Turkey, which is also a long haul that may or may not end in full membership, that we should strengthen the neighbourhood policy both to the east and the south, and that the necessary institutional changes must follow, including the extension of scrutiny to implementation within the EU after states have joined.