The European election results showed euroscepticism rising across most of Europe. But the really shocking factor for the euro elites should have been the strength of the vote for the Front National in France. For the EU’s history – and its future – turns on France, writes Roger Bootle in The Telegraph.
The EU was first imagined and constructed by two Frenchmen, Jean Monnet and Robert Schuman, whose priorities were to end the age-old enmity between France and Germany and prevent another European war. The essential idea was to tie Germany into some European political entity.
Meanwhile, French power and prestige would be greatly enhanced by this unit because France would call the shots. So France shaped the EU in its interests – hence the appalling Common Agricultural Policy (CAP), designed to protect French farmers at someone else’s expense.
Why did Germany accept this? Because she was in a weak position. Although the German recovery from the ravages of the war was rapid, when the EEC (the early forerunner of what we now call the EU) was formed in 1957, Germany was far from being the economic powerhouse that she later became. More importantly, she was still overwhelmed by war guilt and faced with suspicion and even hatred in some quarters as a result of the war. She feared that she would be isolated as a pariah state.
Read more of this report from The Telegraph.