The EU: An Obituary
by John R Gillingham
(Verso, £12.99)

THIS is an unusual book.

It puts a US free-market case for a British exit from the EU and argues that this could provide an opportunity for remodelling the union on more classically neoliberal lines.

It champions TTIP and castigates the EU for enforcing IT policies that hamstring the bearers of cutting-edge technology such as Apple and Google and claims that the EU ban on GM foods is counterproductive.

Two sentences sum up author John R Gillingham’s argument: “TTP and TTIP can create a new international context and set in motion a process that would open markets, restore growth, trigger a reconfiguration of the eurozone … If within the framework of TTIP the European Union can accommodate such an epochal change, it may survive as an institution — not, however, as an embryonic federal government but as a stepping stone to a new global order in which the role of the state is overshadowed by that of giant companies that shape the global economy.”

Where Obama threatened that a Britain outside the EU would go the back of the (US) queue, Gillingham argues that Britain would be best placed to fully participate in a new era of dynamic corporate growth.

What, therefore, does this book have to tell us about the current perspectives of US policy-makers? There can be no doubt about the dominant position, which is that of Clinton, Obama and the State Department. Britain is needed in the EU to cement its Nato alignment and, no less, as the European base for US banks, enabling them to continue their control of EU financial services without undue regulation.

Gillingham would seem to represent a strand of opinion that has always been present, but generally subordinate, particularly in the Republican Party. It is one of annoyance with the pretensions of the EU and in particular its interference with US trade.

Today it seems to reflect the exasperation of corporate leaders in IT, pharmacology and biotech at the EU’s covert protectionism and particularly at the slow progress of TTIP.

Gillingham, an academic historian, provides an interesting, if partial, narrative of the EU’s development.

The heroes are those who sought to maintain the free trade principles of the institutions established by the US at the end of the war.

These, the US-funded European Recovery Programme and Organisation for European Economic Co-operation, were intended to salvage free-market capitalism at a point of near collapse and particularly to facilitate western European, including German, rearmament for purposes of nuclear war.  

The villains are Jean Monnet and Jacques Delors, who abused these institutions in an unsuccessful bid to create a mercantilist super-state. Yet Thatcher figures as a heroine — her Single European Act of 1986 sought to re-establish free trade principles but was later subverted.

An unusual book, indeed.

Review by John Foster