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Cameron Promises Britons a Referendum on European Membership
Cameron Promises Britons a Referendum on European Membership
(about 3 hours later)
LONDON — Prime Minister David Cameron promised Britons a decisive referendum within five years on membership in the European Union — provided he wins the next election — in a long-awaited speech on Wednesday whose implications have alarmed the Obama administration and are likely to set the markers for an intense debate in Britain and across Europe.
BRUSSELS — The French are engaged in a lonely military adventure in Africa. The Germans are preoccupied with domestic elections rather than regional affairs. Unemployment in some countries is at historic highs and economies across Europe are still mired in recession.
“It is time for the British people to have their say. It is time to settle this European question in British politics,” he told an audience in London, raising fears in capitals as distant as Washington that a ballot could lead to Britain’s withdrawal from the union.
Now Prime Minister David Cameron of Britain has added to Europe’s malaise, vowing to reduce British entanglement with the European Union — or allow his people to vote in a referendum to leave the bloc altogether.
His pledge drew a sharp response from European leaders who accused Mr. Cameron, in the words of a senior German politician, of trying to “cherry-pick” the economic benefits of membership in the union without subscribing to the broader European project. Politicians in France and Germany said Britain could not have “Europe à la carte.”
The pledge from the British prompted swift retorts from France and Germany, which said no member has the option of “cherry picking” whatever European rules it wants to enforce. But it reflected a growing sense of unease, not only in Britain but across the Continent, that while the acute phase of the financial crisis has passed, the challenge to Europe’s mission and even its membership has not.
The United States has been unusually public in its insistence that Britain, a close ally, stay in the union, fearing its departure would heighten centrifugal forces that would weaken Europe as a diplomatic, military and financial partner.
Even the United States has injected itself into the matter, with an unusually public insistence that Britain, a close ally, stay in the union, fearing that its departure would heighten centrifugal forces that would weaken Europe as a diplomatic, military and financial partner.
President Obama recently told Mr. Cameron by telephone that “the United States values a strong U.K. in a strong European Union, which makes critical contributions to peace, prosperity and security in Europe and around the world,” a spokesman said.
With the threat of a sudden breakup of the euro zone appearing to recede in recent months, Europe has seen a resurgence of narrow national interests that risks swamping always-elusive common goals. The bickering is undercutting hopes in some circles that the struggle to save the euro had laid the groundwork for “more Europe.”
Mr. Cameron coupled his promise of a referendum with an impassioned defense of continued membership in a more streamlined and competitive European Union, built around its core single market underpinning the body’s internal trade. But he acknowledged the risks, saying any exit from the European Union “would be a one-way ticket.”
“As pressure from the financial markets recedes and a sense of urgency lifts, the appetite for serious reform is melting away like butter in the sun,” said Thomas Klau, head of the Paris office of the European Council on Foreign Relations. “Now that markets no longer hold a knife under leaders’ throats, they are slipping back into their normal mode, which is to manage their own immediate reality.”
“I know there will be those who say the vision I have outlined will be impossible to achieve. That there is no way our partners will cooperate. That the British people have set themselves on a path to inevitable exit. And that if we aren’t comfortable being in the E.U. after 40 years, we never will be,” he said. “But I refuse to take such a defeatist attitude — either for Britain or for Europe.”
For Mr. Cameron, with elections coming in 2015, that means heading off a challenge from the hard-right, anti-Europe U.K. Independence Party, known as UKIP, while shoring up support for his government, which recently admitted that its unpopular austerity program would have to be extended to 2018, analysts said. He is also anxious to avoid the sort of ruinous intraparty split over Europe that bedeviled the prime ministerships of two of his Conservative predecessors, Margaret Thatcher and John Major.
“And when the referendum comes,” he said, “I will campaign for it with all my heart and soul.”
That comes against a backdrop of declining public support for British membership in Europe — only 45 percent last year, down from 51 percent in 2011, in polls conducted by the Pew Research Global Attitudes Project.
The speech was a defining moment in Mr. Cameron’s political career, reflecting a belief that by wresting some powers back from the European Union, he can win the support of a grudging British public that has long been ambivalent — or actively hostile — toward the idea of European integration.
Mr. Cameron’s speech Wednesday in London calling for a referendum had been in the works for some time but, Mr. Klau noted, it was delivered at a moment when the European Union had begun to declare victory over doomsayers who predicted the common currency and even the whole union could crumble. This mood of calm, Mr. Klau said, has given leaders “the political space” to turn their eyes from Europe toward more pressing and, for politicians seeking re-election, far more important domestic concerns.
“We have the character of an island nation — independent, forthright, passionate in defense of our sovereignty,” he said. “We can no more change this sensibility than drain the English Channel.”
The decision by President François Hollande of France to send troops to Mali to halt an advance by rebels with ties to Islamist extremists reprises a long tradition of French interventions in its former African colonies — and has bolstered the Socialist president’s previously flagging popularity.
Coming a day after the leaders of France and Germany met in Berlin to celebrate a half-century of sometimes uneasy partnership, Mr. Cameron’s plea for acknowledgment of British distinctions seemed to reflect some of the deepest political and philosophical differences between London and Continental Europe on integration.
The French move has been supported by the European Union, whose member states share French fears about the spread of radicalism across the Mediterranean. But it has superseded the bloc’s own ambitions to become a serious player in global affairs and still left the French to fight mostly on their own. The union is sending some military trainers.
France wants Britain to stay in the European Union, both as an ally in security matters and as a counterweight to Germany. But France is also outspoken in its refusal to allow Britain to pick and choose its obligations. Paris objects not so much to a British refusal to take on new obligations, especially since Britain does not use the euro, as to any effort to repatriate powers already ceded to Brussels.
Europe’s economic troubles, meanwhile, are far from over, with much of the Continent expected to be in recession this year. Even Germany seems to be losing momentum — its economy contracted by 0.5 percent in the final months of last year. Elsewhere, unemployment is soaring to levels that could threaten grave social unrest, with more than a quarter of working-age people in Greece and Spain without jobs.
The French concern, shared by many others in and out of the euro zone, is that Britain will undermine one of the great, if unfinished accomplishments of the European Union, the single market in goods and services.
But the European Union, widely criticized as not doing enough to raise employment, has been struggling to put even its own economic house in order after leaders failed in November to agree on a long-term budget for the 27-nation bloc. Leaders will take another swipe at this divisive issue early next month.
“You cannot do Europe à la carte,” said Foreign Minister Laurent Fabius of France. “Imagine the E.U. was a soccer club: once you’ve joined up and you’re in this club, you can’t then say you want to play rugby.”
After being consumed for so long by efforts to salvage the euro zone, “leaders now think it is safe and are becoming perhaps too complacent,” said Charles Grant, director for the Center for European Reform, a London-based research unit. “The only time European leaders have agreed to take important steps is when there is a crisis. As soon as the crisis stops they relax.”
Chancellor Angela Merkel of Germany, who is often sympathetic to Mr. Cameron’s criticisms of European Union excesses, said she and her country viewed Britain as “an important part and an active member” of the European Union. The union, she said, “has always meant that we should find fair compromises.”
Germany, he said, has now backed away from tentative support for a change in the basic European Union treaties that could help the European Union forge common policies.
The proposed referendum is depicted by some here as a gamble by Mr. Cameron who may be calculating that Europeans value British membership so highly that they will accommodate his wishes for reform. On the other hand, if Britons choose to leave the union, they will be casting aside an engagement that has been a fundamental part of British policy for four decades.
Already distracted by national elections next September, Germany could turn even more inward-looking as Chancellor Angela Merkel seeks to overcome her party’s defeat over the weekend in a down-to-the-wire state election in Lower Saxony. She remains the dominant figure in German and European affairs, but the surprise election setback has dented her aura of invincibility.
A British exit would also mean the departure of a major economic and banking power, placing new obstacles between British businesses and their main trading partners across the English Channel and possibly diminishing Britain’s standing in the world. In his speech, Mr. Cameron acknowledged that “there is no doubt that we are more powerful in Washington, in Beijing, in Delhi because we are a powerful player in the European Union.”
Other leaders, tightly focused on their own domestic concerns, are stalling on critical decisions about how far they want to go in engaging with the union. President Bronislaw Komorowski of Poland, for example, said Wednesday said that his country should delay a decision on adopting the euro until after elections in 2015.
Mr. Cameron had initially planned to deliver the address in the Netherlands last Friday but postponed it because of the hostage crisis in Algeria.
While the Polish economy, the biggest in central Europe, has been spared the tumult that has afflicted other nations, opinion polls show flagging interest in adopting the euro. Less than a third of Poles want to ditch the national currency, the zloty, according to recent surveys. Farther to the east in Latvia, which plans to join the euro zone next year, support for the common currency has slumped to under 15 percent in a sign of growing unease with a “European project” that most Latvians had eagerly embraced.
He ruled out an immediate ballot, saying that the turmoil within the 17-nation zone that uses the euro currency, of which Britain is not a member, meant that the broader European Union was heading for sweeping reforms that his government wanted to influence.
Domestic politics have regularly trumped broader European concerns throughout the six-decade-long history of the union and its predecessor organizations, to the dismay of those who want to see Europe live up to a commitment in the 1957 Treaty of Rome for an “ever closer union.”
A referendum before those changes are made, he said, would present an “entirely false choice.” Mr. Cameron said he would seek a mandate at the 2015 election for a Conservative government to negotiate a new relationship with the European Union.
But Mr. Cameron’s pledge to hold a referendum on European Union membership threatens to elevate national political calculations over common interests to an extent that has alarmed even countries that often share British concerns.
“And when we have negotiated that new settlement, we will give the British people a referendum with a very simple in-or-out choice: to stay in the E.U. on these new terms, or come out altogether. It will be an in-out referendum,” he said.
Alan
Cowell contributed reporting from London.
Mr. Cameron added that he would complete the negotiations and hold this referendum within the first half of his next term, if he won, suggesting that the vote would take place in 2017 or 2018.
Speaking later during a rowdy parliamentary session, Mr. Cameron said the areas where he wanted to see change included “social legislation, employment legislation, environmental legislation where Europe has gone far too far.”
Mr. Cameron had been under mounting pressure from his Conservative Party to announce the referendum. Apart from a longstanding aversion to closer European integration among many of them, Conservative lawmakers are also concerned about a potential electoral threat from insurgent euroskeptics in the U.K. Independence Party.
Nigel Farage, the leader of the Independence Party, said Mr. Cameron’s speech had “defined the national debate about our place in the European Union. No longer can the case for British withdrawal be confined to the margins. The genie is out of the bottle.”
The referendum announcement seemed likely to broaden the catalog of tensions between his Conservative Party, the more pro-European Liberal Democrats — the junior partner in Britain’s coalition government — and the Labour opposition.
Nick Clegg, the Liberal Democrat leader, said Mr. Cameron’s speech was “not in the national interest” because economic recovery would be “all the harder if we have years of grinding uncertainty because of an ill-defined, protracted renegotiation of Britain’s status within the European Union.”
Ed Miliband, the Labour leader, said that the referendum plan would create uncertainty among investors and was a “huge gamble” for the economy. He taunted Mr. Cameron, saying that he feared euroskeptics in his own party.
But among grass-roots Conservatives, Mr. Cameron’s commitment to a referendum may be seen by his allies as enhancing the prospects for an outright victory in the 2015 election that would enable the Conservatives to rule without the Liberal Democrats in a second term.
In his speech, Mr. Cameron said public disillusionment with the European Union was at an “all-time high” in Britain, and “democratic consent for the E.U. in Britain is now wafer-thin.”
He said he wanted the European Union to be more flexible, acknowledge diversity among its member states, allow more power to be returned to its component nations and offer national parliaments a greater voice.
“Countries are different,” he said. “They make different choices. We cannot harmonize everything.”
Addressing foreign reporters in London, David Lidington, Britain’s minister for Europe, said an “overwhelming majority” of European Union nations wanted Britain to remain fully involved in the union.
“I am encouraged by the measure of overlap that there is between a lot of what we are talking about and a lot of the things other countries say they want to achieve by way of reform,” Mr. Lidington said.
Steven Erlanger and Scott Sayare contributed reporting from Paris and Victor Homola from Berlin.
