A global government would be an
Orwellian nightmare if not given legitimacy by nation states. And this is what is happening to the EU, with its 28 nations and growing
Nation states, are the EUs achilles heel. A country with a strong, confident
national identity does not thereby solve all its social and economic problems
but it has a template, an idiom, in which the discussion can take place and
which assumes certain shared norms and common interests. (A confident national
story is also a useful tool for integrating newcomers, a symbolic pathway to
belonging that is usually welcomed by new citizens.)
Most people even in a noisily varied
place like Britain still attach great importance to national symbols and
feelings: consider the growing significance of Remembrance Day.
Such a policy requires a clear
distinction between full and temporary citizenship with correspondingly
different rights and obligations, something that is anathema to human rights
philosophy.
The idea of freedom of movement is found
in the original Treaty of Rome of 1957 but it was never envisaged as the mass
movement that it became after 2004, with the accession of the central and
eastern European countries with average per capita income about one quarter the
average of the rest of the EU (it has also been substantially widened and
extended by the European Court of Justice in recent decades).
Freedom of movement at moderate levels,
like immigration itself, is a benefit both to the movers and the country they
move to. But the liberal economists and politicians who dominate the EU debate
gave little thought to large-scale movement nor do they seem to have realised
the extent to which they were eroding national social contracts.
For thanks to
the principle of non-discrimination between EU nationals the British government
has to treat a Spaniard or Latvian, so long as they pass a simple test of
‘habitual residence’, in all respects like a British citizen (except for voting
in national elections). That includes labour markets, the welfare state and
social housing. It is not even possible for national governments to offer
special employment incentives to its own nationals in areas of high
unemployment without offering them to all EU citizens.
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