Letter from America: Europe is needed as never before by David Miliband
Twenty years ago, Nick Butler and I conceived the CER as an antidote to the fustiness that we felt pervaded too much of the debate about the future of Europe – notably in London but also elsewhere. We felt that a new generation of Europeans, born after the war and ready to think in new ways about Europe, needed to make their voices heard. We were convinced that Britain could do better than fight a ‘beef war’, and that the EU would benefit from positive British engagement. Fast forward 100 issues of the CER bulletin, and some things have changed. Enlargement has turned from dream into reality, and Europe is stronger for being wider. Just look at how policy on Russia is now much better balanced than it was 20 years ago. The euro has turned from dream into…well, into a huge challenge for millions of unemployed in southern Europe. Germany has moved from being a new country finding its feet to the first among equals. The CER has proven itself to be ahead of its time, and ahead of the debate, on many issues, from economy to environment to crime to institutions. In 2000, its report ‘EU 2010: an optimistic vision of the future’ called for the creation of an EU foreign policy chief and an external action service, combining the resources of the European Commission and the Council of Ministers, to increase Europe’s heft in the world – and now they exist. Whatever the complaints about the current set-up, they are at least there to be improved. Every year from 2000 to 2010, the CER
published its ‘Lisbon scorecard’, analysing the progress – or lack of it – that EU governments had made in implementing their commitments on structural economic reform, undertaken in Lisbon in 2000; if governments had done more, the eurozone would be in a happier state today. In ‘Will the eurozone crack?’, in 2006, the CER forecast that the diverging competitiveness of northern and southern Europe would subject the eurozone to hugely painful stresses. The CER’s friends dismissed this as doom-mongering or ‘eurosceptic’ but in fact it was prescient. I now live in New York and perhaps distance does bring perspective. For the American political and economic elite, European co-operation may be a disappointment, and sometimes a puzzle, but it remains a necessity. And while British euroscepticism may in some quarters be considered understandable, the europhobia that leads some people to advocate British withdrawal from the EU is perceived to be bizarre and dangerous. In the same way that