Editorial

Citation

(2002), "Editorial", European Business Review, Vol. 14 No. 2. https://doi.org/10.1108/ebr.2002.05414bab.004

Editorial

EditorJohn Coleman

Deputy EditorAidan Rankin

Sir Samuel Brittan's contribution to the present issue of this journal provides a clear but worrying perspective on the current state of the European Union. It highlights the deepest fault lines in the whole European project, which will inevitably be hugely magnified unless that process is itself marginalised by long transition periods and other obstacles. Brittan quotes Frank Vibert's recent publication Europe Simple, Europe Strong, which he says is an attractive blueprint for reform. It corresponds pretty well with the idea of a "Europe of many circles" on which this journal was founded, and with the forthcoming book, Questions of Identity, exploring the character of Europe. Edited by Christopher Joyce, Questions is due to be published by I.B. Tauris & Co. later this year.

Europe today does not need the negative sceptics but the positive prophets who will be unafraid to speak out and if necessary suffer the fate of the prophets of ancient Israel. A letter from David Colvin to The Times (16 June 2001) indicates the way things are moving:

The Prime Minister told The Times (Interview, 1 June 2001): "we absolutely have not and do not need to be a member (of the euro) to make our position strongly felt". As Ambassador to Belgium from 1996 to 2001, I found that to venture this position was to risk being branded a Eurosceptic. I am glad Mr Blair has given the lie to this accusation.

Mr Colvin goes on to point out that it took the USA 147 years to create a true single currency.

The other three articles indicate the kind of problems that Sir Samuel Brittan identified but within more sharply defined areas. Sir Julian Rose has been outspoken on farming, a subject of special interest to Poland, which he has visited on a number of occasions. Traditionally through its history since the times of Augustus and Virgil, Europe has developed some of the best farming practices in the world, which were sustainable and did not leave dustbowls for following generations.

The experiences of Dean Cartwright, a former university lecturer in business ethics, in Spain – 32 months in jail without trial or proper representation – reinforces the need to look closely at how we co-ordinate our different legal systems: the Common Law in the UK and Ireland and the Napoleonic Code in much of mainland Europe. The Common Law, of course, protects the rights of ordinary citizens though perhaps some exceptions to the rule have to be made in the case of terrorism or very dangerous crimes. This however should not be used as an excuse to take away the safeguards that English law provides. Here again the legal profession at all levels should not be afraid to speak out on this subject, following the example of the late Lord Denning.

Eve-Ann Prentice, a senior Times journalist and author of One Woman's War, deals with the subject of war in Yugoslavia and points out that Osama bin Laden is widely suspected of having recruited and trained the Mujahideen fighters in Bosnia during the 1990s. Like Nora Beloff, she describes the horrifying consequences of interfering in the quarrels of others without comprehending the full details on the ground. It is even more graphically presented in the film Yugoslavia: The Avoidable War. Neither Europe nor the USA is now being seen as having emerged entirely satisfactorily from that venture in foreign policy.

Those who are concerned about the moral state of Europe, particularly the churches, should certainly be raising their voices against much that is going badly wrong, not to condemn Europe but to put their full weight behind creating the kind of Europe that lives up to the best of its great Christian tradition, not to make it a moralistic or Pharisaic Europe but to realise what has simply been termed "the true Europe". John Ruskin would have understood the meaning of this term and surely applied what he said about the national situation in the late nineteenth century to the Europe of today. As he wrote in The Queen of the Air (1869):

Our national life is ended as soon as it has lost the power of noble Anger. When it paints over and apologises for its pitiful criminalities, and endures its false weights and adulterated food, dares not decide practically between good and evil and can neither honour the one nor smite the other, but sneers at the good as if it were hidden evil, and consoles the evil with pious sympathy, the end has come.