Anti-Climacus

MORE ON THE EU: Will Hutton, who is hardly as much of a Euroskeptic as I am, gets a good sense of what is going wrong with the EU right now. To wit:

"Thus the accession deal essentially casts the people of Eastern Europe as second-class citizens, as they are all too bitterly aware. It will be ten years before they fully qualify for every EU programme because, given our stance, the EU's budget will not allow more - they will get only a fraction of the cash that Ireland, Greece, Spain and Portugal have received. The hope is after this protracted transition they will still become equals, and that in the meantime the flood of inward investment capitalising on their low wages and access to rich EU markets will boost their growth rates and living standards sufficiently to compensate....

But even if they maintain growth rate rates twice that of the West, it will still take 30 years to close the gap - 30 years before we can seriously contemplate putting in place common EU standards, processes and rules. Any hitch, though, and even that optimistic prediction would fall. In the meantime, Western Europe has to contemplate the newly-embedded inequalities with which it has to live and which it is unwilling directly to relieve - and still devise a way of driving an idea of Europe forwards.

In some respects, it would have been better to have solved this problem before accession (even delaying or phasing it), but that was politically impossible. What now has to happen is that we have to devise a way of governing a political jurisdiction with widely varying degrees of economic and social integration. The only solution, and the one to which the European constitutional convention is heading, is a really robust statement of what makes Europe distinct - a declaration of values - and which gives it common purpose despite enormous diversity. And if a member state does not want to sign up, it can and must leave."