# Transcript

Paul Lewis

I’d like to ask you now, you’ve mentioned the term the ‘European Projects’ and effectively use that term to refer to the project of European unity unification launched by Jean Monnet in the 1940s. Where are we in terms of this project at the beginning of the twenty-first century? Robert.

Robert Bideleux

Well we’ve succeeded really against all the odds and all expectations in a way in creating a supranational European legal order, which is the most promising achievement, a much undervalued achievement, very much taken for granted. There is too much focus on what’s happened in the economic field which I don’t think is anything to shout about, we’re no more integrated economically now than we were in the late nineteenth century. But what is truly remarkable has been the creation of a supranational legal order putting relations between states, as well as within states, within a single overarching framework of law. And I think this achievement has deep roots historically as well as in recent sort of post-1945 experience, in that it has been the main way in which Europe, or Europeans, have tried to cope with their diversity, in contrast to other continents which have usually had a dominant power, usually an imperial power, and other states in so far as they exist as states or tributaries or subsidiary it’s still this dominant power. Europe has always been made up of plurality of small-and medium-sized states there’ve, been a few attempts to establish a single imperial hegemony but these have never succeeded, so that Europe had to try and devise ways of coming to terms with living with and making possible a peaceful co-existence of very diverse states as well as peoples. And Europeans have set about doing this by creating a state system and a legal order going back to the beginnings of the whole concept of international law, and […] and the accomplishments of the European Communities and latterly the European Union should be seen as a continuation of that, taking it a stage further to actually put all relations between European states within a single overarching legal framework, which doesn’t just apply to the current members of the European Union but now applied to virtually all the states of Europe in that nearly all the states of Europe are either aspiring to membership or have some kind of treaty of association with the European Union and these treaties tie or commit these aspirant states to adopting most of the acquis communautaire, the accumulated body of European Union law in their own domestic legal frameworks in order to prepare them for eventual membership. So that this has now become a unifying force and a very powerful one.

Mark Pittaway

I worry very much about the status of the current European Union project and I think as Hugh said earlier, there are different European projects. The current European Union project is in principle an attractive attempt to create a democratic supranational Europe, and that I think offers Europeans a much more attractive future than the alternative projects of fascism and certainly communism which have ravaged the continent during the past sixty or so years. What concerns me about the current European Union project is that to succeed it has to create a democracy which protects the rights of the citizen and, in other words it has to be explicitly supranational, and it has to command the loyalty of a range of diverse peoples. And I think we have seen over the past ten years or so that Europe has increasingly divided individual nations against themselves, and I’m not talking about Britain solely though Britain is a very interesting case of this but of France and of Denmark, and so forth.

I think the fundamental problem with the European project is the strategy with which it has been realised that you have economic integration first through creating a common market. You then move to superimpose on to that common market social regulation, and eventually you build political regulation. Europe I think has been seen overly technocratic, and it’s understood overtly in terms of economic cost and benefit and the reasons why sections of opinion in member countries support continuing membership is precisely for that reason. And I think if political union is to command greater loyalty, it is incumbent upon political leaders who support the European project to go out and sell the idea of a country called Europe that can command the loyalty of those people within the European Union, if that project is to succeed.

Hugh Starkey

Yes well I think actually the social project of Europe is extremely important and that’s, I think the price of the economic union of Europe is that because we’re a democracy we’ve got referendums as to whether nation states, member states, go forward to the next stage of integration and so on. So you have to be able to sell the project to the people, and the way you do it is to say okay, economic union may involve huge changes associated with globalisation and flexibility of workforce and so on, and so we will protect you as citizens we will protect your cultural identities. We say we will believe in a multicultural Europe, and we will protect your employment status or we will provide you with help for finding a new job if you lose your job as a result of the economic changes. And so, the price of the economic union is the social project and that’s why that’s so important, I think you have to be able to persuade people that the social project is what potentially will persuade people that the economic policy and the political policy is in fact worthwhile