From the Tablet Archive: Preserving Europe is a moral necessity

For me, the question whether Britain should or should not stay in the European Community raises, above all, a profound range of moral issues. It is, of course, absolutely right that citizens should be reassured about more immediate questions—about future food supplies and employment and th\e economic prospects for their children and I do indeed think that all these solid material interests will be better safeguarded inside the Community than out of it.

But if I think about the question of preserving or abandoning our place in the European Community not only as a citizen but as a Christian, the deeper issues begin to take priority. Christians have, surely, a fundamental commitment to the belief that the ultimate nature and destiny of man must transcend the day-to-day issues of politics and it seems to me that at least three of the profoundest moral issues of our day are brought sharply into focus by the issue of Europe. I also believe they demand an answer that leaves us within the European Community and do not pull us out into self-chosen isolation.

The first issue is the care and stewardship that we have to give our physical environment. The issue is new to our consciousness. We hardly imagined, even ten years ago, that we might be gobbling up resources and fouling the environment on such a scale that the whole biophysical heritage of mankind—our soil, our air, our water—might be at risk. Now we know that, as members of the rich, industrialised segment of the world's peoples, we can, by demanding too much, wasting too much and polluting too much, make the planet ultimately uninhabitable for everybody. Particularly, if we decide on an all-out nuclear option for our electricity generation, instead of carefully restraining our incredibly wasteful uses of energy, we might litter the future with mounting wastes of radioactive poisons—caesium 137, strontium 90 which last up to'1,000 years or, worse still, the byproducts of plutonium with half lives of 25,000 years. All these indestructible toxic wastes from nuclear power, cumulatively growing in volume year by year, threaten our air, our soil and our oceans. They could leave a terrible inheritance of genetic damage and pandemic cancer to future generations— a fine inheritance indeed from those who call themselves members of "Christian civilisation."

Given this risk, I see no choice but to 'remain in Europe, working with all our strength to transform this vast industrial area into an energy-conserving, resourcesaving and pollution-free community. We cannot carry on the task alone. The poisons that pollute the Rhine end in the English Channel. A change of wind swaps the source of sulphurous rain— Birmingham or Essen—but it falls on us all alike. Above all, only a concentrated policy of energy-conservation, based upon Europe's still abundant conventional fuels, can hold back ourselves and our neighbours from opting for a massive commitment to nuclear energy and to building up a system which can blast the future genes of our continent and, through contaminated air and water, of the world at large. Outside the community, we shall have no influence on such fateful decisions. Inside, we can work for restraint, conservation—and survival.

The next great Moral issue is the still vast skew, in the world's wealth. It is as true today as it was in 1950 that 25 per cent of the world's peoples control and enjoy 75 per cent of the world resources. Europe and Britain are part of this privileged minority. But Europe, having performed with greater econqmic skill than we have since 1950, is now far wealthier, has a far larger market and far more to offer in potential aid to the poor of the world. In the next three decades, when world population will double again, three quarters of it among_ the poor, our human ability to avoid massive starvation starkly depends upon the rich lands getting to work now, in partnership with the poor lands, to share 'and develop capital and trade more evenly, grow more food, safeguard incomes and secure work and shelter to all the world's people.

Again, Britain cannot do very much alone. We may have been the wealthiest European nation in 1950. Now only Italy and Ireland are poorer than us within the Community. But Britain in Europe has already helped to ensure th4 the Nine, acting together, do much more collectively. The Lome Convention enables a much wider range of poor nations to benefit directly from Europe's economic polieieS of aid and trade. If we stay in, we can push the process steadily forward to greater justice and generosity. This is why, incidentally, every Commonwealth country urges us to remain in Europe. If we stay out, we will have to carry on our conscience, as Christians, the realisation that "we passed by on the other side" when we were offered a unique chance, together with our neighbours, to build a more 'just, a more generous, a really "new international economic order."

The last ethical dilemma I would underline is collective egoism. There is much talk of sovereignty and "losing" it to Europe. But the nation state is not a Christian concept. No group can arrogantly claim all rights, all demands, all loyalties in the name of its sacred sovereignty. For 400 years, Europe's nation states have rushed around the world, fighting each other, settling on other peoples' lands, colonising and precisely taking over 75 per cent of the earth's resources in the name of their own greedy, self-serving and thus, sacrilegious sovereignty. Moreover, they have fought against each other inside Europe and in this century alone unleashed the two most appalling wars in human history. National sovereignty and its blasphemous claims to total subservience wiped out the flower of Europe's youth after 1914. And in 1939 Moloch was at work again—with millions upon millions dead in Russia, in France, in Asia, in the concentration camps—all in the name of the "sacred claims" of the German and Japanese nation states.

"Today, in the age of potential nuclear war, no moral issue is more vital than to invent the end of absolute sovereignty and invent in its place the new cooperation of peoples." American federalism has become trapped in nationhood. Soviet federalism has never been loose from Czarist imperialism. China is a mighty single nation. Only in Europe can the values of the nation—variety, culture, tradition, loyalty—be transcended in "a wider community" which is not blasphemously sovereign in the old sense but post-sovereign in being open, sharing and supportive, a symbol not of hate but of love. The incredible reconciliation of France and Germany since 1945 is the first sign of a possible new "springtime of the peoples."

And if indeed it is the vocation of what was once called Christendom to carry forward this reconciliation to a wholly new kind of sharing and living in community, how can the Christians of Britain bear to be left out? We are offered another chance to build the City of Man on new foundations. Again, we must not "pass by on the other side."