A strategy for decline – and a vision for renewal

Why, then, did David Cameron grab the referendum pistol and fire it when he did? It is instructive to re-read the 23 January 2013 Bloomberg speech (Cameron 2013), in which his referendum pledge was made. There was not a single mention of migration and, although the prime minister did briefly argue that “power must be able to flow back to member states” nor was there a reference to “taking back control”. In fact, the one issue which, above all others, drove Cameron to make his 2013 pledge was the eurozone; problems in the eurozone, he argued, were “driving fundamental change in Europe”, and it was both urgently needed and yet carried potentially heavy implications for the United Kingdom and its continued access to the single market. Alloyed to that was Cameron’s firm belief that “democratic consent for the EU in Britain is now wafer thin” and had somehow to be reinforced. Eurozone reform was vital, Cameron understood, but the UK could only agree to it (especially if it took the form of Treaty amendments) if the UK’s rights were safeguarded and if the British people had given their consent. It was the culmination of a 50-year conundrum for the British prime minister. Of the nine prime ministers who have held office since the UK joined the EEC in 1973, only two – Edward Heath and Tony Blair – fully supported the idea of British participation in European economic and monetary union, but all of them were condemned to spend much political energy and capital in managing the frequently fraught and fractious relations between sterling and the British economy on the one hand, and European economic and monetary integration as it progressed on the other.

Taking the longer-term view (as prime ministers rarely can), European monetary integration and the development of the euro is only one aspect – albeit an important one – of the world’s evolving monetary system(s). Sterling and the French franc have played their parts in that evolution, their recent histories having charted the declines of the United Kingdom and France from once being great imperial powers to still-important economies, although now shorn of empires and the power and influence that comes with them.