The Sussex European Institute was able to provide the new well-equipped Conference Centre suite at the University of Sussex as the venue for this seminar, where some 40 members and guests met.  The Seminar also commemorated François Duchêne, a much respected member of the Sussex branch of the European Movement , who died in 2005.

With the EU now expanded to embrace 27 countries the overall issue was the convergence of neighbour countries on the EU. The Sussex European Institute was much involved in studies of European integration.

After the Treaty of Lisbon there were short, medium and long-term issues.

Short term     The current situation echoed the economics of the 1970s, when “stagflation” hit the developed countries. Any period of low growth would cause major problems for politics throughout Europe. Growth in China was a major factor in the world economy. But Chinese production had become virtually integrated with consumer demand in the US and in Europe. Any slowdown would eventually affect China, unless it were prepared to open up its own highly compressed domestic economy.

The EU budget was nominally planned up to 2013. In the UK the net contribution to the EU was usually about 1% of national GDP. Curiously, during the Thatcher period, only Eurocrats in Brussels took any serious interest in Labour local authorities – there had been no interest from London government administrators. Now under a Labour government there was a risk of these local authorities losing interest in EU structural funds if the UK was seen only in the role of a contributor.

Medium term     Energy and climate change. The EU was leading in the preparation for low energy and low carbon policies. Carbon trading on a global scale may be a political compromise, but the ‘selling’ of negative carbon amounts seemed bizarre.
Future increasing demands for energy meant the use of either coal or nuclear energy. There was new focus on research and development in carbon capture technology.

In the medium term the impact of the emerging economic powers would be felt. It made good sense for economic negotiation with China to be at a pan-European level.

Long term     Europe as a whole would be living with relative economic decline. The working population was expected to fall by the year 2050 to around 50%; or would fertility increase? The EU 27 countries would make up 500 million out of a global population of9 billion. If there was not increased productivity, then there would be inevitable economic decline. This implied for the need for longer working lives.

Some questions that were raised in the discussion that followed:
*   Are we currently at peak oil production, hence rapidly rising prices?     “High oil prices are God’s way of telling you to change your technology.”
*   Will the next generation, self-indulgent and unhealthy, die faster?    An increase in the death rate would indeed delay economic decline, but Jim Rollo thought the greater economic effect would derive from lack of personal savings in the next generation.
*   Was there any prospect of global rules?    The current climate change awareness illustrates a wider problem. It is easier to stop people doing things. In the long run it may become clearer that selfish interest is best served by co-operation.

What kind of Europe did we want? Wider or deeper? Attitudes to this question would govern relations with the EU’s eastern neighbours. There was need for a radical revision of neighbourhood policy.

Although there was little actual trade between the EU and COMECON, the significance of the eastern neighbours was that they hosted pipeline routes for oil from the east.

The three chosen countries were facing severe problems in establishing their independence: nation-building; sever economic collapse; problematic relations with Russia; and authoritarian governments.

The GDP per capita in Ukraine was $2830, and the country was in a phase of negative economic growth. Dr Copsey believed the conventional view of an east-west divide within the country was irrelevant. Both Ukraine and Belarus continued to suffer the aftermath of the Chernobyl disaster. Belarus was one country which persisted with a centrally planned post-Soviet economy. Moldova was obsessed with the Transdnestr problem, characterised by the predominance of organised crime in politics. Of all geographically European countries it had the lowest GDP. All three countries have to face the issue of democratisation, potentially leading to economic involvement with the EU. The current EU Neighbourhood Policy seemed to require these countries met conditions similar to negotiating the acquis, but without any serious promise of accession.

It seemed likely that when migrant labour from Central Europe dries up, as those countries economies become more equal, the three eastern countries could become valuable sources of cheap migrant labour.

“Absorbability”  was a theme in the questions that followed Dr Copsey’s presentation – how well had the EU adjusted to its most recent expansion? The evidence suggested that the 2004 enlargement has been a genuine success. In considering further expansion it might be a matter of legal and ethical issues versus economic pragmatism.



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Integrating European issues into domestic politics has proved to be no easy task. Paul Taggart described three periods:
* permissive consensus – the electorate permits developments to happen; elites propose, democratic consensus allows.
* 1992-2007 saw a decline in ‘permissive consensus’, an increase in the use of referenda, and the need to face the implications of populist rejection.
* subsequently there has been a retreat from ‘plebiscitary politics’, withdrawing from referenda as a democratic method. When the French and Dutch voted ‘no’, these were votes against local political issues, but motivated by the loss of stable employment, against economic liberalism and by a nostalgia for national sovereignty. Only Ireland would now risk a referendum on the Lisbon Treaty.

Euroscepticism had remained stable in the 1996-2007 period, in the range 10% to 17%, neither declining nor increasing. Major political parties rarely adopted euroscepticism – in all parties, both left and right, it occurred on the fringe. It tended to be used as a way of protesting on other issues. Opinion polls in advance of the Irish referendum had demonstrated a great deal of indecision – 34% for, 31% against and 34% undecided. Clearly there was a risk of one state holding Europe to ransom, and there appeared to be no contingency plan for rejection.

In all countries the problem was that Europe was an issue of low salience to voters. It was difficult to identify any specific controversial issue, and a general assumption that the EU was here to stay, like a national health service.

In the lively discussion that followed, participants argued on several issues.
*   Surely the transfer of sovereignty was a legitimate use for a plebiscite.  Paul Taggart questioned whether sovereignty was a genuine concept in any contemporary context – for instance, climate change was beyond the concept of sovereignty.
*   The European Parliament had become more significant and more effective, but how could voters be persuaded to participate in European parliamentary democracy? Paul Taggart advocated integrating European issues into domestic politics. Would that dilute understanding of European issues? They could best be seen in their impact on local economics. But the complexity of European issues fed the need to over-simplify – that is where the challenge lay. In the UK, the character of adversarial politics meant that both major parties avoided exposing Europe as a political issue. The “democratic deficit” was already embedded in UK politics, and implied here a need to change the domestic political situation first.
*   There was little political education apparent in schools. This suggested there were no foundations on which to build mature political involvement. A Citizenship agenda had been introduced into the schools curriculum, but there was a long way to go in allowing time for exploring complex issues. Academics and researchers, also, perhaps did too little to communicate more widely.

Claude Moraes has been a Labour MEP for London since 1999.  He opened by saying it was unusual for him to talk to a pro-European audience.  He often had to remind people that European integration had started in the aftermath of appalling genocide and the economics of starvation after World War 2.

The real issue in migration had not yet got across to most people. The issue was the psychology of migration. A stark example came recently from Italy, where the government wished temporarily to pull out of the Schengen Agreement, because the free movement of Roma from Romania was politically unacceptable. Yet the EU means free movement of workers. In the UK acceptance of the issue had been eased by introducing registration of workers to ensure labour exploitation was avoided. Up till 2004 the UK was largely dealing with Commonwealth migration. New European migration was seen as another wave of the same immigration.

In the recent Crewe and Nantwich by-election, a clear disaster for Labour, a very high Polish migrant population had done much to revive the economy of the area, yet they did not have the vote. None of the election parties even mentioned the issue in their campaigns.

Curiously, in Spain the largest single immigrant community has been the British, and they are the least integrated. It seemed ironic in the context of the UK now requiring English language competence for immigrants. The proposed points system for immigrants was irrational, doing little to filter the young, bright and useful. He advocated that the European Movement should establish its own “narrative” for the politics of migration. “It’s a twilight world”, he said – even publishers were inhibited from bringing out books on migrant themes.

Any of his colleague MEPs had to answer to two whips – the Socialist group in the European Parliament, and to 10 and 11 Downing Street, worried the European Parliament might promulgate unacceptable laws. Occasionally the UK was in the vanguard. For instance, the rights of agency workers was a key issue for migrants. Yet the directive had been blocked for over two years. MEPs sometimes had to see the bigger picture, not necessarily supported by domestic politics.

Why is European Parliament political work not more widely publicised?
What was being done about poverty on the eastern European borders?
Or about desperate migration from sub-Saharan Africa?

Claude Moraes set out to answer a group of questions. On publicity: the problem lay with our domestic politicians, who avoided raising European issues. On poverty-motivated migration, he was concerned that Denmark had recently set a dangerous precedent, describing new migration laws there as the first racist laws since Nuremburg. In general everyone should be concerned about the role of the media. For example, the new Services Directive had major implications; yet they had been ignored by the media, and were really only known internally by the public services unions.

The apparent lack of visibility of MEPs had been exacerbated when the number of UK MEPs was reduced to 74. Their contact time was spread too thinly. The proportional representation system adopted for electing MEPs has the effect of alienating them from their constituencies, yet UK democracy has always historically been based on individuals representing their constituencies as well as their parties. In both the South-East of England, as much as in Scotland, distances were too great.

Was their any forecast data on forced migration and asylum? Migration was likely in the future to be massively affected by climate change, since Europe would be cooler. Europe was also the only continent with a rapidly ageing population. Even if avoided now, the next generation will certainly have to face a critical problem. “There is no silver bullet for migration.”