Hand of history holds back reform at the heart of Europe by John Laughland
Amid all the confusion over the budget discussions, one thing is clear: the European Union, like the Soviet Union, is structurally immune to reform.Tony Blair's latest pirouette around eastern Europe notwithstanding, it is already obvious that even if the CAP budget is trimmed around the edges, the basic structure of the policy, and of the EU's other policies, will remain unchanged. The EU will continue to spend about half of its £70 billion annual budget on farming, even though this sector represents a tiny fraction of the European economy. The main lines of the EU budget were drawn up after 1958. EEC negotiators suffered several heart attacks, one of them fatal, as they struggled from 1958 to 1962 to set the CAP in place. The decisions taken more than 40 years ago remain valid to this day.
The intractability of reform in the EU shows the hollowness of the claim that countries such as Britain gain "influence" by belonging to it. Influence is, in fact, systemically impossible within the structures of the EU. In order for any one country to obtain what it wants in negotiations with its EU partners, it is obliged to give something else away. In this case, Britain is likely to give away up to £1 billion a year from its budget rebate in order to obtain a modest reduction in an agricultural policy it would rather had never existed.
Rather than being able simply to take a political decision, therefore - whether to cut farm subsidies or increase them - all EU states are locked into a mechanism that reduces their scope for action instead of increasing it. As with any unwieldy organisation, the forces of reform are always structurally in a minority.
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