Does Unity Flow Only One Way in the EU?

Thanks to the New York Times, I’ve found out about a very strange new fact about the Euro, the supposed single currency of the nascent state of Euroland.  Actually, it turns out that the Euro is not a single currency at all. The Cyprus version of the Euro is only a partial member of the Euro. It has all the disadvantages – the fixed exchange rate, set to suit others, the total lack of national control. But it lacks some of the alleged advantages. Its currency is not truly compatible with, or equal to,  those of stronger members of the Euro zone.  Would the US dollar be a national currency if you couldn’t transfer large sums out of, say, Louisiana, to any other state? Would the Pound Sterling be a national currency if there were restrictions on how much you could send or carry from Glasgow to Plymouth?

 

And I wonder if the rules now in place in Cyprus will be much more widely applied within the next five years . Here’s the NYT account, also published in the International Herald Tribune. http://www.nytimes.com/2013/07/10/world/europe/currency-controls-in-cyprus-increase-worry-about-euro-system.html?pagewanted=all&_r=0

 

There are many interesting aspects to this, especially since it’s clear that the Eurofanatics have by no means abandoned their hopes that Britain will one day surrender its own currency and join the Euro (don’t rule this out. The economic and political decline of the coming decade, mainly severe inflation, will make all kinds of unthinkable things thinkable).

 

Cyprus (and Greece and some other countries) are still  in the Euro because of political imperatives. The EU project could not be seen to be retreating. They are not in it for economic reasons, as continued membership is deeply damaging to their economies and societies.

 

I wonder if that other totem of Euroland, the Schengen agreement which abolishes borders, has a similar one-way capability. Will it be the case that people travelling from the core countries will be able to cross freely into the outer Eurozone, and settle there,  while those in the outer zone won’t be able to settle in Germany and France?

 

And what about the huge problem of illegal migrants into the EU, crossing into Greece and Bulgaria from Turkey, into Italy from Albania,  or into Spain via its African enclaves at Ceuta and Melilla, or arriving as boat people, from North Africa to Lampedusa and Malta, or directly into Italy? I see that Malta has a grave crisis of migration once again, having been told by the EU Commission that it cannot send boat people back to Libya, in which case I rather suspect that the migrants will be informed by someone or other that there is no border between Malta and Italy. In fact there is no border (apart from the sea) between Malta and Brussels. Only recalcitrant Britain ( joined, of necessity, by Ireland, which I suspect would like to sign up to Schengen, but can’t if we won’t) still maintains border controls within the EU. And, as we know, those controls are a good deal weaker than they should be. Although we can still check passports, we are absolutely obliged to allow the holders of EU passports to enter our territory, for they have as much right here as we do.  But will the Northern European founders of the EU be limitlessly willing to accommodate these migrants? And if not, what then will happen to Schengen?

 

I myself think the Schengen Treaty is a bigger and more revolutionary enterprise even than the Euro, and I still gulp with amazement at such locations as the Brenner pass,  that ancient boundary between north and south, when I go from Austria to Italy without so much as a pause, or at the footbridge over the Rhine between Strasbourg and Kehl, which can be crossed without a passport, as if I were crossing the Cherwell from North Oxford to East Oxford (yes, this is how geography works in Alice in Wonderland's home town) , or when I rattle in the Prague Express down the lovely Elbe Valley south of Dresden, and suddenly  I am in the Czech republic without so much as an application of the brakes, only able to tell which country I am in by the signboards on the shops and bars. 

 

Abolishing borders isn’t quite like abolishing gravity. If you don’t have passport checks and customs, then people can physically cross them (I note that on those sleeper trains I used to take, that I wrote about here a little while back, you’d have to give your passport to the attendant the night before, and sometimes you’d be woken anyway, and if you were travelling eastwards, they’d wake you for sure at Warsaw Pact frontiers) . But it *is* like abolishing history, pretending that things are true which are not true, and that things are not true which are true.

 

After all, a simple reading of the history of World War Two, the supposedly virtuous war, begins (does it not?), with the violation of borders, first of Czechoslovakia, then of Poland, then of Belgium and Holland and France. So presumably it was fought by us and our allies to restore these borders, not to render them permanently obsolete? In which case why have they now vanished? I might add, for those who keep telling me that we were obliged to go to war in 1914 to guarantee the integrity of Belgium, that if the German Army decided to go to Brussels or Liege today, on their way to Paris, all they’d need to do would be to get on the train and go there.  So where did they put that integrity?

Ah, reply the EU supporters, but Schengen did not result from invasion, but an agreement between equals. Maybe so. I think you would have to study, in some detail, the mathematics of each border to work out if the countries on either side of it really were equals. Which way do trade, and money and people flow? Which way does power flow? Which country’s foreign policy is subject to which? In easy times, these things aren’t tested, though EU membership has devastated – for instance – coal mining and farming in Poland, deep-sea fishing in this country,  and is I think about to do grave damage to agriculture in newly-joined Croatia. In difficult times, of unemployment and mass immigration, they are tested. I suspect we’ll see more and more of the sort of one-way unity they are suffering in Cyprus.