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A View from the UK and the EU
Michael Jay
years. I do not know how it is going to pan out, but one can totally understand that, sitting in Washington, this is where the threat and, if you like, the opportunity is. You can also see why the US wants to have a close alliance, or closer alliance, with India in order to set itself in a way against China. For the British it is slightly odd to see a special relationship between India and the USA. Isn't that what we are here for? Well, it was, but the answer is not any longer and we need to recognise that. To the south, Brazil is becoming hugely important as a global player, and this hasn't been mentioned yet. In fact, it is seldom mentioned here in Britain but I think it is enormously important. So you can understand, if you are sitting in Washington, that you are not looking much across the Atlantic: you are looking at China and India, and you are looking south to Brazil because that's where the opportunities, the threats, and the challenges lie. The trouble for us in Europe is that all this is happening when the EU is far from a monolithic bloc with a growing defence capacity, though it has economic strength, Back in the 1980s and 1990s, many Europeans thought wrongly that it was already a strong integrated bloc, and I think, equally wrongly, they now think it should become one. There is that kind of image of the EU still in people's mind which isn’t actually a reflection of the EU today. The EU is “a union of 27 very different sovereign member states” with some others keen to join. It is a free trade area, and pretty nearly a single market with free movement of people and capital. All that is so obvious but it’s no small achievement. It also includes a monetary union which is now under real stress and I can say, with the wonderful benefit of hindsight, how right Gordon Brown was to ensure that we kept out of the monetary union. But ten years ago, it would have been unthinkable for the German Finance Minister to say, as Wolfgang Schäuble said recently and I quote the FT [Financial Times] so it must be true: 'that should a Eurozone member ultimately find itself unable to consolidate its budgets or restore its competitiveness, this country should as a last resort exit the monetary union rather than remain being a member of the EU’. We were all brought up to believe that the economic union was absolutely irreversible, but here a German Finance Minister is envisaging the break-up of economic and monetary union. I think that, on the EU front, the future of the monetary union is absolutely crucial to the economic and political stability of the European Union. Preserving that has