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Contents Dedication 3 Acknowledgements 4 Foreword 5 Introduction 9 1 A Sense of Belonging 16 2 A Touch of History – The Eccentrics 25 3 A Touch of History – The Concentrics 37 4 A Touch of History – The Italian Exception 46 5 Authority and The Individual 50 6 Justice, Fairness and the Law 56 7 Doing Business 64 8 Language 69 9 Philosophy 73 10 Sense of Humour 76 11 Multicultural Society 80 12 A New Constitution – The Road Map to a Greater Europe 83 13 The Euro 102 14 The Chancellor’s Five Tests 116 15 Eastern Promise 122 16 Superpower versus Sovereignty 130 17 A Meaningful Foreign Policy 135 18 Reclaiming Europe 148 19 A Good European 155 Dedication For Alison who helped to make this country my home. For Jack and Sam, my two grandsons, whose lives will be shaped by the crucial decisions this nation is about to make. 3 Acknowledgements In writing this book I had help and encouragement from a great many people. Most significantly, Lord David Owen was first to suggest that I put pen to paper, read and critiqued the first draft. Janet Bush sourced the material relating to the economic aspects of the Euro and was hugely supportive throughout the work. John Wakefield made some useful suggestions anent the structure of the work. In acquainting myself with Roman and Common Law, Professor Andrew Lewis pointed me in the right direction as well as saving my blushes at some elementary errors in the manuscript even though he does not wholeheartedly share my take on the subject. Judge Dr Franz-Benno Delonge guided me through the intracacies of Bavarian judiciary practices. David Lascelles had a major input relating to all matters financial and acted as a very sound sounding board all along. Discussions with Professor Silvio Yeschua contributed to the formation of the chapter on Language. Above all, without the superb editing of Roger Hudson the book would not be half as fluent and readable as it is. 4 FOREWORD My acquaintanceship with Tom Kremer is of the slimmest variety. We may have played football together a few times in the twice-weekly pick-up games which took place in Hyde Park during the 1960s. It was one of the charms of these games that people came from all directions (Italians, Cypriots, Yugoslavs, Scots) and, as they used to say, from all walks of life (waiters, postmen, comedians, even writers). Loyalties were recruited randomly (by whichever side was a man short), but they were then fiercely engaged, until the game ended. We had no kit, no referee and the goals were between heaped coats. There were no lines on the pitch and all decisions were communally agreed, rarely with any dissent. These games testified, in their limited way, to the capacity of disparate people to observe rules which were never exactly spelt out and to act in conformity with what Montesquieu, in a grander context, called “the spirit of the laws”. Those who took the game too seriously, or expected deference to their fame and status (Peter Cook, for instance), rarely returned to hack another day. When asked to write this foreword, I had no idea who Tom Kremer was, or what he did, apart from playing football. I know now, from his text, only that he was born a Transylvanian Jew, is a successful game inventor and businessman, and has lived for at least fifty years in England. He now feels himself to be British, and is certainly a patriot when it comes to our institutions and unwritten laws. He has the fervour for Britain which converts have for new faiths, but lacks the aggressive certainties which mark the bigot or the fanatic. The strength of his arguments, for abstaining from any irrevocable commitment to much more than a European free trade zone, lies in the fact that they are neither monotonously polemic nor tiresomely equivocal. He has the dispassionate urgency and clarity of vision, which the intelligentsia of the Greek cities of Asia Minor had in the 6th and 5th centuries BC: like Thales and Herodotus, who were Hellenes with wide knowledge of the Persian barbarians, Kremer has experience of both eastern and western Europe, as he does of both sides of the Channel. He knows very well which he prefers, and for good reasons, but he has travelled widely and admires much of what 5 • Missing Heart of Europe • he nevertheless warns us is alien to British traditions of piecemeal social engineering, as advocated by Karl Popper in his seminal post-war work, “The Open Society and its Enemies”. The Open Society proceeds by debate, compromise and general assent; the Closed Society has an ideological agenda, and a pre-determined social structure and a dirigiste ruling class reinforced by a repressive apparat. Kremer does not, of course, pretend that any of the states of the European Union are unreservedly of the second kind, but he does note that the histories of, in particular, Germany and France, our two principal “partners”, cast a long shadow on their social habits and responses. The European Community is one more attempt, noble in conception, political in execution, which affects to start history yet again at a fanciful Day One. Even in democracies there are significantly different ways of doing things. British justice is founded on the Common Law, in which various precedents rather than a single inflexible “text” inform and inflect what goes on in courts where the judiciary is not a function of the government. Presumed innocence is a key feature in Britain, whereas the French have a system of “investigating magistrates” whose arbitrary findings – based often on the principle of intime conviction (i.e. a reasoned hunch) – it is the business of the defence to disprove. There is no necessary superiority in one method rather than the other, but they remain radically different and no amount of massage will reconcile them, any more than it will the empirical traditions of British philosophy, the a priori system-building of the Germans and the euphonious elaborations of French metaphysics. Although Kremer does not mince his words, he delivers his arguments with little stridency. He loves the Old Continent, but he loves it for its diversity and is alarmed by the attempt, made copiously manifest in Valéry Giscard d’Estaing’s draft constitution, to impose factitious uniformities. Giscard’s idealistic vision is decreed from above by a man with an intime conviction that he knows for certain what the peoples of Europe yearn to have (a federal state with a single taxation and foreign policy), without wondering for a moment whether those concerned should have any direct say in decisions about what is good for them. Kremer’s key insight is between “concentric” and “eccentric” states. In this he introduces a telling distinction between one style of Open Society and another, while never suggesting that today’s Germany and France are not democracies. The concentric state is governed by neo-Jacobins who concentrate power at the centre or by reformed authoritarians whose citizens – the Germans for clear instance – expect orders from above. The eccentrics, exemplified by the British, but including the Dutch and Scandinavians, are used to a society unbraced by bureaucratic rigidity and delay. In the latter, as in Perikles’ Athens, the citizens engage in a multiplicity of activities 6 • Missing Heart of Europe • and enterprises, all of which contribute to the quality of life and the prosperity of the state without being supervised by it. Giscard’s draft of the European constitution – with its affectations of Holy Writ, or even of Tablets of Stone, in embryo – arouses Kremer’s meticulous suspicion. He takes us through a good few of the clauses of what will, unless we are careful, determine Europe’s future and shows us, with polemic patience, that there is much to fear in such prescriptive didacticism. As a resident alien – albeit now a British subject – with first-hand knowledge of other European societies, Kremer is urgently aware of merits in the indeterminate nature of British institutions which, by virtue of not belonging to any overall written scheme, are allowed both to evolve and, within the limits of civility, contradict and challenge each other. Contradictions do not embarrass an illogical society, which has any number of quasi-autonomous businesses, societies, and even schools. Lack of uniformity is a mark of vitality. The twisted timber of humanity can never be comfortably suited by a system tailored with rectilinear formality. Such Procrustean schemes take for granted that one size can be made to fit all; or that all can be compelled to be of one size. Democracy not only thrives on but demands division. As the French philosopher Alain put it “Résistance et obéissance, voilà les deux vertus du citoyen. Par l’observation, il assure l’ordre, par la résistance, il assure la liberté ”. It might seem that we have nothing to fear from a French tradition which produces such a limpid expression of the need both to conform and to dissent. But would Alain have bothered to write it, had it been a truism? The French, in fact, associate obedience with the political Right and “resistance” with the Left. Envy and emulation work together in the national psyches of, in particular, France and Germany: the former is more ashamed than grateful of American aid both during and after the war, the latter, while marginally more grateful, wishes to be done with its half-century of probation and hopes that, enveloped in a new identity, it will be allowed to regain its central authority in European affairs.

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