Interview with György Schöflin

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The Interwiew was made with György Schöflin, Hungarian member of the European Parliament  at the 7th of September 2016.

1. Why has your country entered the EU?
I think the answer is simple; was there an alternative? We are talking about 2004. Actually the negotiations began. I think the answer was, this is not a question, of course you will enter the EU. For thousands of reasons.

2. What are the values of the EU?
Now that is a very contested area. There are people (there were not twelve years ago) who would say the values of EU are the human rights. I would contest that and as far as I am concerned the key value, the ordering principle is conflict resolution. If you know the history of Europe, then you will know that there was a great deal of conflicts. Conflict is normal. Conflict is natural, there is nothing wrong with it. How you resolve it, that is what the EU has done brilliant, most successful ever. Look at the history of Europe: constant killing, fighting etc. I can tell you about my own experiences on that regard. And that is one of the most important for you.

3. Why have they stopped the European Constitution?
Who is the they here? Who is the subject? Who stopped the European constitution? Well, the Dutch and the French. They are the guilty ones because they voted against the European Constitution in 2005. I do not know if that was what you meant by the question but this is the answer. So if you want to find people and say: ‘You are guilty for having stopped the European Constitution!’, then talk to the French and the Dutch.

4. What are the advantages of being part of the EU for your region/ country?
I think that follows from the first question, does not it? There are advantages in terms of transfers, regional development, being part of a larger market, there are security advantages, and then there are little things like Schengen, little things like Erasmus, ….. Trade, wealth, economy, education, law. Yes, I think that is the answer to that.

5. What do you think are the main problems of the EU?
My answer is, but you will have a different answer from other people, that the conflict resolution mechanism is not working well. Actually there is growing tension between the accumulation of power on the part of commission and the power of the member states. And there is no adequate mechanism for resolving these. I think ten years ago there were. Ten years ago it was possible to sit down and have very long, very boring discussions and then to arrive to a consensus outcome. Not happening. Let me give you one illustration. I do not know if you have ever heard of the European Citizens Initiative. Well, under the treaty which succeeded the failed constitution, the Lisbon Treaty article 11 makes provision for a million people from 17 members of the union signing some kind of initiative that would enjoin the commission to launch legislation to do with Europe. It has to be in conformity with the European values, you cannot demand capital punishment, hypnotically, I happened to be a parliament rapporteur on this particular instrument, and the commission is doing nothing. Not a thing and they say: ‘Well you know it is a young instrument it takes time to bed down’ This is waffle. They are not telling me the whole truth. The whole truth is they are concerned that inputs from bellow will not be of the kind that the commission wants. To which I would say I am prepared to believe this but that is actually democracy that you have to listen to the voice of those with whom you disagree. This is what concerns me, that there is a growing body of opinion that we do not really have to listen to society, to the people, to the voters. They can vote once every four years, once every five years. We are their lead, we decide, because we know what is good for you. I do not agree with this, I actually do believe that citizens are citizens because they have the right to a voice and as it so happens. Wednesday evening there is a plenary session in Strasburg this week, at the very but last minute I was told that I have to go to the plenary and speak what that is about and well they said it is about the slips between different bits of machinery, and that was about transparency. Transparency is one of the great Gods of European thinking at the moment. And in this transparency debate when I got up I actually did say because the vice president of the commission, Frans Timmermans, who is Dutch a Socialist was there too, relevant to the problem of transparency is the faith of the European Citizens’ Initiative, what is happening, he did not give me an answer but he got the message, at least he got the message. So why I am really getting out here is in terms of problems and concerns, difficulties and gaps that there is a growing gap between the power of the EU which is increasing enlarged and enhanced and what the actual citizens in growing number want. Is it the majority? Is it the minority? How to decide? but we concede that in a fair number of member states there is a currents of opinion with political articulation who are saying No to Europe. Most obviously France, the Nationalists. I think about Sweden and the Sweden democrats, who are viscerally opposed. Some of the Danish colleagues, they do not want the European Union, they do not want this kind of European Union. Or the chief item in evidence is Brexit…… In a way it is a kind of horrid facilitation. Here you have a clear majority who say: ‘We no longer want to be the members of the EU’: 42 to 58 majority. How to disentangle the United Kingdom from the EU? Forty- three years of membership has resulted in an enormous body of legislation. How do you actually take it out? What do you want to keep? It is going to be technical, but you did ask me about problems and concerns. If the United Kingdom wants to remain in the single market, the single market means that any entrepreneur registered in the EU can sell, perform economic activities in any of the member state without any further legal obstacle. And Schengen means that I can get into a truck in northern Finland and drive it to southern Portugal without being stopped.  The certificate of origin issued in Finland is valid throughout the EU and this is fantastic. It cuts the transaction costs enormously. If the United Kingdom, which is actually not in Schengen, but it accepts the certificates of origin, leaves the single market, it will have to conform to the European Union’s regulations without being able to say anything about it, this is a weird situation….Britain, the United Kingdom will actually leave this, but we do not actually really know what form that leaving will take. Prime Minister May has said that they article 15 under which a country can leave the EU will be triggered before the end of March, and then the negotiations will begin. I do not believe that they can negotiate the leaving within two years. So beginning of 2019 Britain leaves the EU, on what terms, within staying the single market, if it does, then it has to accept the four freedoms, freedom of goods, freedom of services, freedom of labour and freedom of movement. What the British do not want is that to a great extend the voting was about, the freedom of movement, to live there, because there are about 2 million non-British EU citizens who settled down in the United Kingdom in the last some years. These are not all from Central Europe. Approximately 1 million Poles, about 150000 Hungarians. Also the figure is never exact because people keep coming and going. Cheap airlines have made it perfectly possible. It is perfectly possible to commute between London and Budapest, it is really tiring but it is perfectly possible to do it. About a 100000 Portuguese, at least that many Spaniards, quite considerable number of Italians, but strange to say that the central Europeans are the ones who are regarded as a problem. Well, partly because they do settle in compact groups in a relatively small town. Let us say a town of 10000 people, if five hundred Poles live in that place that shifts, the cultural norms of that place and they do not want this. And then there is a counterargument, the freedom of movement of labour is good for you, because it makes everybody more competitive. But locally it impacts very seriously on the local labour market. And this is the difficulty there are parts especially in England. -You know that London is a beautiful place if you are young and rich, but if you are neither of these, then it is rather tiring. … - But if you move north from London then the extraordinary quality of London disappears, and you get into increasingly poverty stricken territories. Nobody starves. The social service network is adequate to ensure that, but it is full of the losers of globalisation. They were mobilised to voting against the EU, because ‘we want control’, it is a very successful slogan, EU rightly or wrongly was seen as the way in which they lost control. As far as labour migration concerned there is some truth in that. So that is a major problem, it is a considerable concern. how, what happens, what the answers are I do not know. But as a member of the Constitution Committee of the EU Parliament we are the lead committee on this, so we follow this very closely and if you are here in two or three years’ time we can see what the outcome is.

6. Why do you think it is important to develop an European identity?
You can’t, that is like sort of chalk and cheese, it is as fire and water, European identity is not a national identity. Can it be? Maybe it could have been in the 1950s arguably. What there is, is a national identity which will always include an element of culture and ethnicity and then there is a superordinate European identity which is overwhelmingly solid identity. There are people who are comfortable with transnational, supernational, global ways of doing things. This is by the way why English as a second language has become vital. In the early 1950s, 1960s French was still a much more important language than it is now. Much of the business was done in French. German was useful too. These days each country speaks English. …….. When you work in a member state the identity of that member state in whatever form is going to be more important. So if you may be at home with things European, you may indeed read newspapers in your own language and maybe in English as well, to that extend you are transnational. But attempts to create a European identity in the traditional way of national identity construction No. They failed. Is there a single European history? You know the answer is No. It is a multiplicity, a polyphony, a multivocality … What you can get is different perspectives; a Polish perspective, a Hungarian perspective, an Italian perspective whatever, you can play around with this. And there is a new concept in history, it is called entangled history. That you compare different national patterns in different countries to see what the commonalities are and the divergences. Jean Monet one of the founding fathers of EU, he was French, he said in retrospect maybe I should have started with culture but he did not, he started with coal and steel.

7. What kind of European Union do you want to have in the future?
I thought I made this clear, a one in which the identities of member states have a place, they are not subsumed into a brave vast European melange, especially because I have a suspicion that the smaller member states will suffer. If you are a member of a smaller language community, then it is that much more difficult to sustain your own language. Let me give you a concrete example. There are about 3 million Litanies, it is not a very large language community, when Lithuania became independent in 1990, one of the things they inherited was a nuclear power station. At that point the question arose in what language the nuclear power station should work Lithuanian or Russian. The technical language of nuclear power had never been translated into Lithuanian. So Lithuanian said we just leave it in Russian. That is actually a pragmatic solution……. So what kind of Europe do I want to see? As I said a one in which the concerns of the smaller the member states, the smaller language communities, the minorities if you like, are taken into consideration. All too often it happens that the decision taken by one of the larger member states and it is very difficult to argue against it.

8. What do you think about the increase of the countries involved in the European Union?
What I assume what this means is that existing member states will increase, in other words the existing member states, for example the existing Germany will become many Germanies. The existing France will become many Frances. I think it is most unlikely. I think the existing number of member states will stay at 27 minus one, the United Kingdom. I do not think that any other country will leave the EU. Denmark have a little wobble about this, but I think they have decided to look at how difficult Brexit will be, to see but that is OK. The EU can cope with that.