BLAIR’S BRITAIN, 1997–2007
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with Turkey. As it is charged to do, the Commission provided much of the
policy lead in respect of both enlargement rounds – notably through the
compiling of detailed annual reports on the preparedness of applicants
for accession, coupled with recommendations on action to be taken by
the EU – but the UK government was the strongest advocate in the
European Council and Council of Ministers for moving forward at a
rapid pace.
A particular problem that arose in respect of enlargement was the government’s decision to grant free access to the UK to CEEC workers on
their countries’ EU accession in May 2004. Most other EU member states
erected transitional restrictions of various kinds (permanent restrictions
were not permitted) but Blair, though subject to pressures from some
Cabinet colleagues and hostile tabloids to adopt exclusionist measures,
insisted that ‘open not closed’ was the right approach. He appears to have
done so partly on principled grounds, but partly also because as a leading
advocate of enlargement he would not have been well placed to be seen to
be acting in a restrictive manner. When, two years later, the accessions of
Bulgaria and Romania approached – they joined the EU in January 2007 –
Blair flirted with granting free movement to their workers too. However,
on this occasion, in the knowledge that the earlier ‘let them come’ decision
had resulted in the arrival of far more CEEC workers than had been anticipated, and faced with overwhelming opposition in Cabinet, especially
Footnote 16 ( cont. )
Stern Report on climate change commissioned by the Blair government has been seen as
influential on EU policy in this area.
17 Although, the issue is less than straightforward, in that enlargement is also generally supported by federalists.
from the Home Secretary, John Reid, Blair conceded that temporary
restrictions should indeed be put in place.18
The second specific policy success was in playing a leading role in
advancing the prominence on the EU’s agenda of the further opening and
liberalising of the Single European Market (SEM). Although in theory
the SEM was supposed to have been ‘completed’ in 1992, the fact was that
by the late 1990s all sorts of internal market barriers were still in place –
including major impediments in respect of services (which account for
almost 70% of EU gross domestic product), public procurement (which
account for about 15%), and movement of labour. Blair was active, both
in the European Council and in bilateral meetings with other EU leaders,
in promoting the need for remaining market barriers to be removed. In
so doing, he contributed significantly to the impetus that led in March
2000 to the so-called Lisbon Agenda, under which the EU leaders committed themselves to adopting measures designed to make the EU
economy the most competitive economy in the world by 2010. In the
event, this ambition proved to be over-ambitious and was subsequently
scaled back during the Lisbon Agenda’s mid-term review in 2004–05.
Nonetheless, although not as much progress as Blair would have liked to
have seen had been made by the time he left office, significant advances
had occurred in respect, for example, of the opening up of competition in
certain key services areas – including the crucial area of public utilities.
The third specific policy success concerns reform of the EU’s treaties.
Since the mid-1980s there has been a pattern of treaty reform rounds
being held every five years or so. During Blair’s premiership there were
three such rounds: the end of the 1996–7 round that resulted in agreement
in June 1997 on the Treaty of Amsterdam; the 1999–2000 round that produced the Treaty of Nice; and the round that started in 2002 (if the convening of the Constitutional Convention is taken as marking the starting
point) that resulted in the 2004 Constitutional Treaty and the June 2007
European Council agreement on the guidelines for the IGC that would
draft the Constitutional Treaty’s successor – the so-called Reform Treaty.
British government policy in each of these rounds was consistent: to be
willing to accept certain limited reforms that were deemed to be necessary
for the smooth operation of the EU – including some extensions to the
availability of QMV in the Council – but to be resistant to the extension of
supranational EU powers and operating practices in such sensitive areas
18 This account of Blair’s position on CEEC workers is based largely on information provided to us by a senior Downing Street official.
as taxation, social welfare, and foreign and defence policy. For the most
part, these policy goals were achieved, with nothing of major significance
in any of the three treaties or in the June 2007 agreement to which the government was deeply resistant. Indeed, there was much in the treaties and
the agreement that was welcomed, not least the marginal shift in the
Constitutional Treaty, which was confirmed in the June 2007 agreement,
away from supranationalism towards intergovernmentalism.
The highly controversial Constitutional Treaty was, indeed, widely portrayed in the European press as a famous victory for Blair. In France, the
view developed that British influence had resulted in a treaty that was so
neo-liberal in spirit as to actually pose a threat to the French social model.
In fact, the Treaty was no more neo-liberal, no more Anglo, than any previous EU treaty, but that this view was widely held was testimony to perceptions of Blair’s stance and influence. Certainly the perception was a
factor in the French rejection of the Treaty by referendum in May 2005.
The irony of this was that, together with the Dutch rejection a week later,
it saved Blair from having to honour his promise to hold a referendum on
the Treaty: a referendum that he almost certainly would have lost.
Labour’s failures
Policy orientation failures
At a general level, Blair’s policy ambitions towards Europe were not fulfilled in three major respects. The first two of these concerned the influence and position of the British government in the EU and the other
concerned the place of Europe in British politics.
Regarding the influence and position of the British government in the
EU, Blair was not, of course, the first Prime Minister who wanted to see
Britain being a lead player. In their different ways, all prime ministers
since Britain joined the EC have harboured such hopes, rhetorically at
least. Even John Major, for all his internal party problems with
Eurosceptics, expressed his desire to put Britain ‘at the heart of Europe’.
But, since the establishment of the European Communities in the 1950s
the so-called Franco-German axis had been central to the driving of the
European integration process. Founded on well-established structural
working relationships between the two governments, and for many years
also close personal relationships between the French and German leaders,
many of the EU’s major initiatives over the years have owed much to close
Franco-German conciliation. Blair recognised that h
e could hardly hope
to break into this alliance on a full and consistent basis, not least because
of Britain’s continuing non-participation in the single currency system,
but he did see leadership opportunities being presented by establishing
close relations with the French and German leaders. To this end, in his
early years in office he strongly courted both President Chirac and
Chancellor Schroeder. With Chirac, this courting was successful early on
and played an important role in easing the way to the 1998 Saint-Malo
Agreement, which saw the British and French governments lay foundations for what was to become the fledgling European Security and
Defence Policy (ESDP) by sinking some of their long-held differences
about defence and agreeing that the EU should develop a (limited)
defence policy dimension. However, the initially warm relationship
between the two gradually cooled, to the extent that in October 2002
during difficult European Council negotiations on reform of the CAP
Chirac reportedly told Mr Blair: ‘You have been very rude and I have
never been spoken to like this before.’19 With Schroeder, there was some
initial joint thinking on social democracy/Third Way ideas, but this did
not in the event produce much and the two men never established cordial
personal relations.
But in seeking to establish a leadership role for himself and Britain,
and more broadly to advance Britain’s interests in the EU, Blair never
over-relied on France and Germany. He recognised that different
member states could be allies on different issues. Accordingly, he pressed
ministers, Labour MPs and MEPs, and civil servants to establish bilateral
relations with their counterparts in other member states wherever possible.20 As Julie Smith has put it, under Blair Britain practised a ‘promiscuous bilateralism’.21 This practice resulted in several of Blair’s closest
working relationships with other heads of EU governments being with
centre-right rather than centre-left politicians: with Chirac on defence
policy in the early years; with José Maria Aznar, the Spanish Prime
Minister, in helping to set the agenda for the March 2000 European
Council meeting that launched the Lisbon Process; and with Aznar again
and also the Italian Prime Minister, Silvio Berlusconi, on Iraq.
19 ‘Chirac and Blair Trade Insults over Farm Reform’ by Toby Helm and Philip Delves
Broughton, 29 October 2002, www.telegraph.co.uk/news/main.jhtml?xml=/news/2002/
10/29/neu29.xml (accessed 10.04.07).
20 See Julie Smith and Mariana Tsatsa, The New Bilateralism: The UK’s Bilateral Relations
Within the EU, (London: Royal Institute of International Affairs. 2002).
21 Julie Smith, ‘A Missed Opportunity? New Labour’s European Policy 1997–2005’,
International Affairs, 81(4), 2005: pp. 703–21.
The other policy orientation policy regarding Britain’s influence and
position in the EU that must be judged to have been a failure was the
non-realisation of Blair’s hopes to be able to take advantage of Britain’s
position as the most Atlanticist of the EU-15 (pre-May 2004) member
states. He believed that privileged relations with the US could be used to
further Britain’s standing in the EU, especially in the foreign and security
policy areas. Yet rather than Britain’s special relationship with the US
helping matters, the evidence suggests that if anything the close personal
ties Blair cultivated with Presidents Clinton and Bush made some EU
leaders, especially Chirac and Schroeder, very wary of British government
intentions. It is true that towards the end of his premiership this became
less of a problem – with most of the new member states being strongly
Atlanticist and with new leaders coming to office in several EU-15 states,
including Germany – but in the early 2000s it certainly damaged Blair’s
standing with some key heads of EU governments. The close relations
with Bush were viewed with particular suspicion given that, on assuming
office in 2001, Bush quickly showed – by, for example, announcing that
he would not be seeking to ratify the Kyoto Protocol or to support the
International Criminal Court – that he was not prepared to consult in a
meaningful way with European allies and was willing to be isolationist in
pursuit of US policy goals.
Blair appears to have believed that by staying close to Bush he could
restrain the US from over-aggressive unilateralism, but there is little evidence that he succeeded in doing so – or, indeed, given Bush’s policy orientations and Blair’s limited policy delivery capacities, that there was ever
any realistic prospect of it being possible.22 Riddell probably overstates
the case when he alleges that by late 2001 Blair was ‘trying to be both a
messenger between Europe and the United States and a missionary
around the world on part of President Bush’,23 but there is no doubt that
this is how he was widely perceived. When, in 2002–03, the prospect of a
US-led invasion of Iraq, with or without explicit UN authorisation, began
to loom, the EU-15 governments divided into two camps, with Blair the
most active EU leader in the pro-invasion camp. With this policy, Blair
destroyed any hope of providing a bridge between Europe and America.
Regarding the place of Europe in British politics, Blair had hoped to
defuse it as a divisive political issue and to make the nation more com22 This view that Blair was unrealistic in his hopes of being able to influence Bush is forcibly
argued by William Wallace, ‘The Collapse of British Foreign Policy’, International Affairs,
82(1), 2005: pp. 53–68.
23 Riddell, ‘Europe’, p. 368.
fortable with Britain’s EU membership. The issue was indeed sufficiently
defused not to feature as much of a vote-shaping issue in either the 2001
or 2005 general elections, despite Conservative attempts – especially in
2001 – to make it so, but this was not because the issue of British membership did not continue to divide British opinion. Rather it was because
on the one hand none of the major parties actually advocated withdrawal
from the EU, and on the other hand the edge was taken off the two
European issues that could have been electorally salient – British membership of the euro (in both elections), and British ratification of the EU’s
Constitutional Treaty (in the 2005 election) – by Labour promises of
referendums.
But though Europe was largely defused as a significant electoral issue
in the 2001 and 2005 general elections, it was not so in the 2004 European
Parliament (EP) elections when, with the use of proportional representation removing much of the ‘wasted vote’ concern that is such a problem
for smaller political parties in general elections, the United Kingdom
Independence Party (UKIP) won 16.8% of the national votes cast
(2.7 million votes) and 12 of the UK’s 78 seats in the EP.
The UKIP vote has to be seen in the context of the fact that by the time
Blair left office Britain was no more reconciled to EU membe
rship and
the British people were no more recognising the benefits of EU membership than had been the case when Blair was elected. This is clearly demonstrated in the twice-yearly public opinion surveys that are conducted on
behalf of the European Commission in the member states: in response to
the standard question that appears in all of the surveys – ‘Generally
speaking, do you think that the United Kingdom’s membership of the
European Union is . . .’ – in the spring of 1997 36 % said ‘a good thing’,
26% said ‘a bad thing’, and 27% said ‘neither a good nor bad thing’; in the
autumn of 2006, 34% said ‘a good thing’, 31% said ‘a bad thing’, and 27%
said ‘neither a good nor bad thing’.24 The ‘good thing’ figures were higher
for a while in late 1997 and in 1998, which led Blair and some commentators to think a referendum on the euro might have been winnable had one
been held then, but they were not sustained. Although Blair himself continued into 2003 to take an optimistic view on the possibility of being
able to win a vote on the euro, from around 2000 most commentators
thought this was nigh impossible, as later they thought similarly in
respect of a referendum on the ratification of the Constitutional Treaty.
24 Eurobarometer, numbers 47 (published November 1997) and 66 (published December
2006) respectively. Accessible at: http://ec.europa.eu/public_opinion/standard_en.htm.
Given the persistent and seemingly deep-seated nature of Euroscepticism in the UK, which most of the media helps to maintain and promote, it is questionable whether a Blair-led government could have done
much to turn public opinion around. But, there was only a modest
attempt on Blair’s part to try to do so. It is true that in his public statements on Europe he would assert his Europeanism and his commitment
to a Europe that went beyond a mere trade area, and he would also
emphasise the opportunities provided by Europe. So, for example, in
perhaps his most celebrated speech on Europe, which was delivered to the
European Parliament in June 2005 at the beginning of the UK Presidency,
he stated:
I am a passionate pro-European. I always have been. . .
This is a union of values, of solidarity between nations and people, of not