14 April 2016
The Best of Both Worlds?
Why the French think we’d be mad to leave the EU.
by Richard Pooley
I spent some of my time in the early 1980s teaching English to foreign businesspeople in London. Nearly all of them were German, Swiss, Italian, Spanish, French or Japanese. One of the things I and my colleagues used to do towards the end of a course was to ask our groups to go out into the streets of Kensington and conduct opinion surveys on a topic that interested them. A favourite subject was the British view of the European Economic Community, the main pillar of what is now called the European Union. But before our German bankers, Italian shoe salesmen or French pharmaceutical product managers got to the main question, we would persuade them to ask a couple of warm-up queries. The first of these was: “Are you British?” In those far off days most of the people our clients accosted were indeed from the UK (the trainers stopped doing these Vox Pop exercises by the mid-90s; the probability of encountering a Brit on a street in central London during the day had become too low). The second question I got most of my groups to ask was: “Where is Europe?” Not one British person ever answered “It’s here.” Instead, they would look puzzled, try and work out where south-east was, point in that direction and say: “It’s over there.” This shocked the Germans, amused the Italians and bewildered the Japanese. The French shrugged. For them this answer proved what they already knew: the British did not think of themselves as European and were only in the EEC because of the economic benefits it brought to the UK, still to most of our clients “the sick man of Europe.” Those French businesspeople, like their German and Italian colleagues, were themselves enthusiastic supporters of the EEC and many assured me that ever-closer union between the ten member countries would bring about even greater prosperity.
More than thirty years later, what do the French think of the European Union and of a possible Brexit? I have been trying to find out by asking our neighbours and friends in France. I can’t claim this is any more scientific than those vox pops my students did in London but the views I have been getting are fairly uniform: the EU has failed the people of Europe but the Brits would be foolish to leave.
Thomas, a self-employed Corrézien businessman, expressed eloquently and volubly the general dislike of the EU. The EU, he said, was for the élite, which he defined as big business, bankers and national politicians. What exercised him most was the way this élite had ignored the wishes of ordinary Europeans. As proof of this he cited what had happened when EU bureaucrats and politicians tried to establish a European constitution to consolidate in one document the various EU treaties. This had been drafted between 2002 and 2004 by a committee chaired by ex-French president Giscard d’Estaing. But it had been rejected by 55% of the French who voted in a referendum in May 2005 (the Dutch also voted against it the following month). However, two-thirds of Parisians voted ‘Yes’. And two years later the Treaty of Lisbon was signed. The treaty included many of the key points from the rejected constitution – e.g. qualified majority voting, a more powerful European parliament. This time the élite, which for Thomas includes Parisians, did not ask the French people for their opinion. Thomas and another two friends were adamant that it was because the European élite continue to behave in this undemocratic way that the Front National in France and extreme right-wing parties elsewhere have grown so much. The FN’s stated policy is to restore the French Franc, withdraw from the Schengen area, leave the Common Agricultural Policy and make French law once again superior to European Union law. Over 30% of French people voted for the FN in last December’s first round of regional elections.
In fact, there were two Parisians in my survey who Thomas, I am sure, would consider members of the élite. They are a married couple. Martine is a scion of a one of the most notable families in our part of France. She works as a librarian for a prestigious university in Paris. Her husband, Michel, has just retired from a similar job. They come back to the village at Easter and in the summer. Martine still believes that the EU can be what her father told her the original EEC was: “for Europe and the Europeans.” But it does need to be reformed. Michel believes such reform should be radical and must take account of the wish of European people to take back control from Brussels.
Nearly everyone I spoke to hankered for the days of the original EEC when there were just six members. It was easy for the six of them to reach a consensus. “We are similar cultures!” Thomas said.
And Brexit? Not one person I asked thinks the British will vote to leave. One, another Martine, a nurse, said the UK got more money out of the EU than it put in. Why would it give this up? When I told her that the UK is a net contributor to the EU’s budget, she refused to believe me. Her husband agreed with her. The owner of a successful boutique characterised British behaviour in the EU as “sitting in the corner and doing what they want to do”. She thought it better for the EU if the UK remained, and reckoned the British would realise that it was in their best financial interests to stay. Michel stated that the EU was not working well; but it was not broken. “Better a bad marriage than a divorce.” Why don’t the British stay and fight to reform the EU? They would find that most Europeans, certainly most French, would be fighting for the same reforms. Thomas seemed to speak for all of those who I interviewed: “You have the best of both worlds. No euro, no Schengen but all the financial advantages of the common market. You would be crazy to leave.”
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