EUROPE UNDER CHRIST

Introduction: what this course of lectures has been about

In this programme of talks we have tried to deepen a Christian sense of Europe. We have looked at why it is necessary, particularly for Roman Catholics, to be enthusiastic supporters of European integration - including monetary union - as it has developed in the European Union, because the ideals which underlie this integration are essentially the tenets of Catholic moral teaching, and because of the history of Christianity in our continent and in this country. I decided to put this course on because I think this conviction needs to be celebrated and shouted from the rooftops as a spiritual and theological priority, and because many Catholics - somewhat to my surprise as a convert - do not accept this and are not even interested in dialogue or debate about the issue. The Holy Father has called on Christians in Europe to develop an ethic of unity, so part of what we have tried to do has been to celebrate the saints whom he has chosen to be Europe's patrons, and the values and teachings which marked their lives on earth; we have also looked at the ways in which the EU is likely to develop in the next few years because ten new states are due to join in 2004.

Tonight we shall draw the threads together at a critical time in the history of the relationship between Europe and the rest of the world, and a similarly critical time in the relationship between Britain and some of our most important EU partners, particularly France and Germany, as a result of the war in Iraq and the diplomatic activity leading to the war. We will also look further at ways in which characteristics of the ways in which Europe is run accord with the teaching of our Church (compared to the US), but at ways in which some present EU policies are at odds with Catholic teaching. Finally we will look at ways in which a common defence policy in Europe can be aligned more closely with what the Church teaches about war and peace.

The current crisis

This country is at war at present, in a conflict which has exposed serious divisions within Europe, as in the rest of the world and Britain itself. I am not going to rehearse at length the reasons why it does not fulfil the criteria of the Just War doctrine - which is why the Holy Father, Catholic bishops here and the United States, and many other Christian leaders here and all over the world, warned against it because of what we believe about war only being acceptable as a last resort. Opposition to it among Catholics and other Christians all over the world remains strong, reinforced by messages from the Christian community in Iraq itself. There was a large demonstration by Catholic bishops and priests in the Philippines recently and a Catholic bishop demonstrating outside the White House last week was led away in handcuffs. An eastern rite bishop in the United States stated that it would be a mortal sin to be involved in the war effort (The Most Revd John Michael Botean - see www.paxchristiusa.org). The war is unjust and immoral in terms of Christian moral teaching; our prayers for British servicemen and women, who may be related to people in this community, and for the people of Iraq (and we have parishioners here with family members in Iraq) are not lessened by this sense of outrage at what is being done. It also seems to me to be illegal in terms of international law, which means that it infringes another criterion of the Just War doctrine. None of this is lessened, either, by the terrible things which we are now seeing revealed about Saddam Hussein's regime (and organisations like Amnesty International which oppose the war were warning the world about his regime twenty years ago when this country and the US were arming him), or the jubilation of Iraqis at his gradual collapse - bad means are not justified by good ends.

But what we are really interested in tonight is the effect this has had on our place in Europe. When we look at this we need to be clear about one key facet of Christian moral teaching: that when we do something, our intentions, and the consequences of our action, have only a limited relevance as to whether or not that action is morally right. So it is never acceptable to do something wicked or sinful for a good reason - good ends never justify bad means. So to kill a terminally ill person because you want, in love, to spare that person suffering is still a mortal sin - your motives, however sincere, cannot make it right. This is why traditional moral theologians (and the Pope in his letter ten years ago, Veritatis Splendor) are so critical of consequentialist and teleological moral theories. So motives which people may have about freeing Iraq from tyranny do not in themselves justify acts of war. Similarly, the fact that some countries (for example, our EU partners France and Germany) may have economic interests in Iraq which may have been jeopardised by the war, or (in the case of France) traditional (Gaullist) suspicion of US policy, giving them the motives to oppose it, does not detract from the moral uprightness of their policy (indeed, almost exactly the same arguments about motive are laid at the door of the Americans).

The policy of France and Germany in opposing what has happened argued that the inspections needed more time, that it was too soon to go to war, that war should only be a last resort, is remarkably in line with Catholic teaching and the diplomatic policies of the Holy See (which has, of course, been more resolute in other ways since the Church has long opposed the UN sanctions against Iraq). It is tragic that the attitude of the Blair government (with others) has made it impossible for this policy in line with Catholic teaching to be the united approach of the EU: such resolution might have stopped the war. The point is often made that Blair is not isolated in Europe: among the present fifteen states, he enjoys the support of Spain, Italy and Portugal (at least), and among a number of the ten accession states who are joining the EU next year. This of course makes the problem much worse in terms of what we have been looking at on this course, greater European unity, but we should bear in mind that the leadership which Britain has given to these countries is surely crucial, and they might have reacted differently had there been a common approach from Britain, France and Germany. It is also true that there is enormous popular opposition to the war and to the policies of Aznar and Berlusconi in Spain and Italy. Although it was wrong of France to patronise the accession states for backing the US-UK line, the support for that line among them has been exaggerated and inaccurately reported - there are also many reasons why poorer, vulnerable countries are not going to want to offend the US at this stage.

In the horror of war it would be grotesque to suggest that a concept like European unity should be seen as a major casualty; but the damage, and some of the personal bitterness, has been striking and profoundly depressing. It is no accident, either, that many of the most vociferous supporters of the war are also the most trenchant critics of policies leading to greater European unity and integration (for example, much of the press and the leadership of the Conservative party): this is their day out.

But as I said last week in the discussion we should not despair or panic: there are certainly signs of that around, such as an incredibly pessimistic article by the former MEP John Stevens in yesterday's paper ('To Europe, via Baghdad, and reading the wrong map' The Guardian 7.4.03).There are signs that the leaders of this country, France and Germany want to repair the damage, as shown by Jack Straw's recent visit to Germany; even the Americans need some EU engagement in post-war Iraq, if only to save them some money; Hutton said on Sunday that the leaders of the political and business communities want to make sure that we do not get into this position again. The reason this is all so distressing is that the Church believes in multi-national, international structures as the best way to advance peace and justice - we have all invested too much in a united Europe to let it all collapse because of this. That is why I hope, for example, that commentators are right who say that after the war Blair will feel emboldened enough to work for a euro referendum in the near future (and also feel perhaps, that joining would mend some bridges). Sometimes a terrible, shocking situation can concentrate minds, so I would hope that the EU can move towards qualified majority voting on foreign policy issues in the European Council; moreover, in spite of the tabloid press, I have seen no signs here of the popular anti-French feeling that has been seen in the US.

In all these discussions I do want to warn against crude anti-Americanism. Although I am passionately opposed to American foreign and defence policy, we should not let this opposition degenerate: some of the finest critics of this war (Noam Chomsky, Gore Vidal, Kurt Vonnegut) just as the most brilliant critics of US nuclear strategy (for example, Germain Grisez) are American; as a Catholic I venerate the memory of Dorothy Day and Thomas Merton, who from heaven must view their country's actions with great sorrow. But the best of America is not represented by Bush, Rumsfeld and Wolfowitz.

It is therefore important that Catholics support efforts to repair the damage done to European unity and to the development of a common foreign policy.

The economic choice - Europe or America?

In the first two lectures I looked at some of the ways in which the economic culture in Europe is much closer to Catholic social teaching than the ways in which US economic policy has moved in the past thirty years, and that Britain needs to realise that its future lies not only within the heart of the EU but in the fullest appropriation of this culture, rather than trying to be a 'bridge' between Europe and north America. Many arguments to this end are to be found in Will Hutton's recent book The World We're In and his other writings. We cannot have it both ways in this country - the economic priorities in Europe and the US are now too divergent, and we have to choose. In Hutton's analysis (recently restated in an article in The Observer, 30.3.03) the neoconservative forces which have been gaining influence in business and academic life in the US for the last three decades now have enormous power within the Bush administration, which has led American policy in an appalling direction, especially since the events of September 2001:

'Even before 9/11 the Bush administration had signalled its intention to be unencumbered by - as it saw it - vitality sapping, virility constraining, option closing international treaties and alliances, whether membership of the International Criminal Court or the Kyoto accords on climate change. It intended to assert American power as a matter of ideological principle; 9/11 turned principle into an apparent imperative in order to guarantee the security of the 'homeland'.' (Observer article, penultimate paragraph).

This disregard for international structures and treaties not only sets the Bush administration at odds with the EU, the UN and the immediate post-war policy and achievements of the US itself, but with the teachings of the Catholic Church (particularly the present Holy Father) and the Holy See's diplomatic endeavours; so we must endeavour to disentangle Britain from this.

In Hutton's book he suggests that one reason for the differing views of the 'market' in Europe and America lies in our religious inheritance: on the one hand, medieval Catholicism, and on the other, the Puritanism of the first American settlers. The whole passage is too long to quote here and is worth reading in full, but here are some salient points:

'St Thomas Aquinas argued that part of the obligation of government was to regulate private property for the common good and that 'a Christian is obliged to make his wealth available for common needs.'
The European feudalism that grew up on a foundation of Christian beliefs thus had at its core the value system that would later give rise to notions of equality before the law and that the exercise of social privilege by the wealthy came with wider social obligations that went beyond charity...When barons died they could not expect their lands to pass to their sons without the payment of a levy, which today Europeans would call inheritance tax and American conservatives would describe as a death tax. The designers of feudal Europe understood it instead as a life tax - a tribute to the common weal as an acknowledgement that the holding of land was a privilege and that this payment on death was a key means of sustaining the life of the community...
And if anyone was in any doubt that the wealthy and propertied were not necessarily the possessors of virtue also, there was evident in almost every town and village the infrastructure of monastic life, where monks attempted to approach the divine by living in a community that produced and consumed no more than it needed. Some, like the Franciscans, went further, insisting that it was only through living in a community of poverty that man could hope to earn God's redemption...it was well understood throughout the middle ages that property rights were not absolute.
Feudal Europe was not a terrain in which individualism flourished, in particular over religion. The authority of church and state, backed by the nostrums of Catholicism (and eventually in England its compromise version in the Church of England), was suffocating. The English puritans who first settled America passionately believed that they could individually establish a direct relationship with God - and that God-fearing industriousness was the best possible route to God's favour...Property, ownership and the virtue of independence were indissolubly linked as part of God's plan -a world view that would find renewed legitimacy in the twentieth-century conservative idea that 'greed is good' and that the spirit of acquisitiveness benefits all. This is the first chasm between Europe and the US.' (The World We're In, pp.54-56)

In other words, the reasons why we should work for Britain - to realise its destiny as part of an integrated and self-confident Europe, with its own approach to a properly regulated market economy - are bound up with Catholic theology and history. Of course, as Hutton points out, there have been many points in American history where other forces have prevailed to constrain the cult of the individual, such as Roosevelt's 'New Deal' in the 1930s; but such moderating influences are scorned in the America of George Bush.

Some flaws in EU policy: trade and agriculture

I now want to look briefly at problems in some present European policies, from a Catholic point of view, which impair the EU's potential to be a force in the world for good. Some of these we looked at the lecture on the euro: a single currency needs to exist alongside fiscal and financial policies which aim to serve the common good, not simply the self-interest of nation states, as Jacques Delors realised long ago. But nation states have hampered the integration necessary. For Hutton, many of the flaws result from the influence on Europe of American (sometimes via Britain) ideas: he sees the commission as having been defensive in recent years and cowed by American ideology. As I have said before, the accession of the new states coming in next year must not be allowed to undermine the principle of solidarity and the obligation to help the poorest parts of Europe, in ways that have happened in the past.

From the Catholic point of view another major problem is the relationship between the EU and the developing world. As we were reminded last week, the EU is the largest single donor of humanitarian aid in the world. As with individual European countries, Catholic bishops have repeatedly called for this to be increased as a proportion of GDP (to 0.7%, as promised). This commitment must not be threatened by expansion or by economic problems resulting from the current war.

But more serious are problems with the trade system. Our aid agency CAFOD recently outlined the problem thus in its postcards Trade rules: crazy as flying cows? as part of its trade justice campaign:

'World trade rules are loaded against the poor. CAFOD is campaigning to change these rules so they work to eradicate poverty, protect the environment and ensure equal access to life in all its fullness. "World trade rules put the rabbit and the tiger in the same cage."
Stop dumping on the poor.
European Union agricultural policies cause hunger in the developing world. Because EU farmers receive subsidies, Europe agribusiness can sell food on world markets and in developing countries at less than it costs to produce - undercutting the poorest farmers. Economists call this "dumping". The EU must keep the promises it made to the World Trade Organisation (WTO) to cut subsidies that cause dumping of food.
Scrap the CAP!
The EU subsidises farmers under the Common Agricultural Policy (CAP). Only a few very large-scale farmers benefit from the CAP, but the subsidies harm many people across the world. Public money should benefit the public by encouraging environmental protection and rural development. The EU should start again, replacing CAP with a system that's fair to small-scale farmers everywhere...'

Of course CAFOD is not simply criticising the EU, but world trade rules in general. In many ways the CAP over the last forty years has achieved a great deal in many parts of Europe (by eradicating malnutrition and starvation), but it has been reformed in 1992 and 1999 and there is a general recognition that further reforms are needed. At a plenary meeting of COMECE at the end of 2000, agriculture was one of the issues the bishops of the EU addressed, in the light of the BSE and foot and mouth epidemics and growing concern for the environment. Over the years farmers in the EU have become prosperous from subsidies, but at great cost in terms of the environment (through intensive practices) and (as CAFOD pointed out) agricultural development in poorer countries of the world. So they call for a further reduction in subsidies, replacing them with direct payments to farmers linked to environmental protection conditions. The bishops call also for high quality and local production, even if this costs the consumer more: 'We encourage the European Commission to be courageous in its reform proposals.' While there are many complications ahead (how can the farmers in the new states share in subsidies in ten years' time if subsidies are being phased out?) there is a consensus among Christians and others that agricultural subsidies need to be replaced in pursuit of solidarity and the 'preferential option for the poor.'

Another flaw: 'Fortress Europe'

In this parish we work hard to dispel prejudice against refugees and asylum seekers and to provide them with material support. This reflects the generosity of our parishioners, our commitment to repeatedly expressed teachings from the Pope and the bishops and our willingness as Christians not to be led astray by a vicious tabloid culture. I don't need to go over the reasons for this teaching, but of course it has a Europe-wide dimension, and this dimension will become more acute after the enlargement next year; it also has a bearing on the current war. Of course in terms of immigration policy we are not talking simply about refugees coming into the EU from outside; there is also the issue of the free movement of peoples within the union. Most of the EU states have since 1985 been involved in what is known as the Schengen agreement, in order to abolish internal frontiers, and establish a common external border to the EU. The Catholic bias towards integration, and what we believe about the rights of movement which people have, would seem to commend this tendency, but Britain, Ireland and Denmark have not fully signed up to the process, because they did not wish to be committed to the free movement in Europe of nationals of third countries. Incidentally, although passport controls have disappeared or been reduced in many ways, it is actually harder to get one. Your Parish Priest and the Head Teacher of our primary school have been counter-signing UK passport applications for the whole of their professional lives in England, but since new regulations came into force last year they can no longer do this as citizens of the Irish Republic; I am therefore the only priest here who can do it (since Fr Victor is a Nigerian citizen) and I now have to add my own passport number to the applicant's form. (Since the lecture was given a parishioner has discovered that Irish citizens can sign UK forms and add their Irish passport number to the form)

Of course, the notion of free movement by EU nationals will change radically after expansion in 2004, and some people, particularly members of the Roma community from Poland, the Czech republic and Slovakia, who hitherto have been refugees coming into the EU, will be EU citizens with certain rights. Continuing instability in parts of Europe not in the EU, particularly in the Balkans, and in the rest of the world, particularly Africa, Afghanistan and Iraq, has meant that the whole EU has to respond constructively to the obligations of its member states under international treaties which protect the rights of refugees. In many countries across the present EU, far right political groups and gutter newspapers like the Daily Mail have carried out for many years a despicable campaign against some of the most vulnerable people in the world, feeding on prejudice and self-pity. The Catholic Church, both through the Holy See and networks like COMECE, sees this issue as central to how the European Union can recover and develop an ethical base in line with Christian teaching and the ideals of its founders: in the Europe of the late 1940s and 1950s, after the Second World War, people were much more sensitive to the sufferings of thousands of displaced people, and were conscious of the need to protect them. In the COMECE meeting at the end of 2000, this was another issue which the Church's pastors addressed. The key to Christian teaching about immigration and asylum is, again, the virtue of solidarity - if we respond virtuously, we can help those in greatest need and realise how much human beings depend on each other: 'Practising the virtue of solidarity towards those who come to Europe in search of a better life is a challenge for all of us, as Christians and as Europeans.' They call for a continuing adherence to the UN 1951 Convention on the rights of refugees, and make it clear that 'Refugees and asylum seekers should be received in conditions which guarantee respect for their human dignity, and their claims should be assessed according to procedures that meet the highest standards.' They quote the Pope's words in his 2001 World Peace Day message which stress that the Church recognises as a basic human right the right to emigrate: of course the exercise of this right needs to be regulated, but (as the Holy Father says), 'Before the manifold interests that are interwoven side by side with the laws of the individual countries, it is necessary to have international norms that are capable of regulating everyone's rights, so as to prevent unilateral decisions that are harmful to the weakest.' The Church is frankly uninterested in the tabloid distinction between economic migrants and those seeking asylum: the bishops call strongly for ethical common European rules.

Since the end of 2000 it is difficult to see signs that EU governments, and particularly our own, have listened to the Pope or the bishops: like other moral issues (such as the sanctity of human life) it is clear that this is a policy area on which we are clearly not speaking the same language as others. What is even more disturbing is the extent to which Catholics in public life all over Europe feel free completely to disregard the Church's teaching.

Defence - EDC or NATO?

The last issue about Europe's relationship to the rest of the world which I want to consider is probably the most controversial. This is partly because my analysis challenges the views of most of those who have in the past been considered pro-Europeans - for whom support for the EEC/EC/EU and NATO went hand in hand, and vice versa.

We saw in the first lecture how in the original vision of Jean Monnet in the 1950s there was going to be a European Defence Community. This was designed to handle the thorny issue of West German rearmament, which the French were alarmed about even after the Schuman plan. The Treaty of Paris in 1952 set up the community, but the nation states watered down many of its provisions, or failed to ratify it: a much looser grouping, the Western European Union, was set up and in 1955 West Germany joined NATO anyway (for the history see Dinan, op.cit., 26ff., and Monnet's biography). The affair showed the limits of idealism in the 1950s, especially since France was still holding on (precariously) to its large overseas empire. In the 1990s, after the first Gulf War, moves towards establishing a Common Foreign and Security Policy (CFSP) were made again, and the Maastricht treaty in 1993, bridging divergent views, allowed for 'the eventual framing of a common defence policy, which might in time lead to a common defence.' (J.4, no 17). Many of the practical efforts to put this into practice have been failures, particularly in the former Yugoslavia (apart from in some pockets, such as the town of Mostar), for the same old reason: the reluctance of national governments to give up independence of action in this most totemic of areas of their responsibility. Britain and France, burdened with oppressive military history, have found it particularly difficult. Although the Iraqi war has certainly created serious problems, we know that there will be a meeting at the end of this month in which France and Germany will discuss the creation of a new European defence identity. It is to be hoped that Britain will eventually join this.

The opponents of a common European foreign and defence policy or community fall back constantly on one refrain: that it would weaken NATO and the commitment of the US to the defence of Europe. At times (though not, probably, since Bush came to power) this view has not been reflected in the US itself, where many have wished Europeans to spend more on defence and become less dependent, but what I am really interested in is whether we in Europe should be in NATO at all, or dependent on its policies. Two years ago on our Lent course we had a lecture Christians and Nuclear Weapons. In that talk, and in other things I have written, I have tried to show that the Church's Magisterium has only ever accepted the possession of deterrent nuclear weapons as a short term measure (as indicated by the Holy Father in an address to the UN in 1981) pending disarmament, and that the best, mainstream, traditional Catholic moral theologians in the world (including some close to the Pope's thinking) have long since shown that the possession of nuclear weapons is immoral because deterrent theory inevitably entails an intention to do something which would always be gravely sinful and wicked - the deliberate killing of innocent people. The best expressions of this teaching are the seminal collection of essays Nuclear Weapons and Christian Conscience (ed. Walter Stein, London: Merlin, 1961) which includes contributions from the some of the most important English philosophers of the last fifty years such as the late Elizabeth Anscombe and her husband Peter Geach, and Nuclear Deterrence, Morality and Realism by John Finnis, Joseph Boyle and Germain Grisez (Oxford: Clarendon Press 1987). Although both books were written at different ends of the cold war, the strength of the moral argument remains unchallenged, as far as I can see - and nuclear weapons have not gone away. Indeed, some months ago, in a startling and chilling moment of candour, Defence Secretary Geoff Hoon suggested that 'battlefield' nuclear weapons might be used in Iraq.

NATO is a nuclear alliance. Its basic strategic plans have always entailed a willingness to use, under certain circumstances, various types of nuclear weapons, either under 'first use' policies or in retaliation against a similar attack. Therefore if we espouse the moral position which I have described, the most natural application of traditional Catholic moral teaching, then this country, and other European nations, should leave the NATO alliance, for we cannot renounce nuclear weapons ourselves and then expect others to 'protect' us by threatening their use. As the philosopher R. A. Markus wrote in the 1961 collection:

'...If we regard an act as criminal, we cannot wish that someone else should do it even if we stand to profit by their crime. We should therefore have to renounce all treaties and alliances based on a policy which has not renounced nuclear warfare... ...What we may not do is to want others to perpetrate a crime we have renounced...[we must] demand that there will be a withdrawal from N.A.T.O. - for N.A.T.O. is based on precisely this sort of commitment...' (pp.85-6)

The same point is made by Finnis, Boyle and Grisez in 1987: criticising the then (what a world away it seems!) Labour party policy, which was to abandon British nuclear weapons but remain in NATO, they say:

'That policy would not escape the guilt of the deterrent; it would include the intention that the Soviets fear the US deterrent, and so would endorse the immoral US intentions which create that fear.' (p.353)

The Church has hardened its opposition to nuclear weapons since the 1980s, partly because the end of the Cold War ought to have made it easier to eliminate them by mutual negotiation. Although there have been significant reductions, there are very few signs that NATO wants to be rid of them altogether - indeed the present US leadership is committed to developing a new generation of nuclear weapons. The Church worldwide has repeatedly called for verifiable and serious disarmament measures. Last October Archbishop Renato Martino, Head of the Delegation of the Holy See at the First Committee of the 57th session of the UN General Assembly on General and Complete Disarmament, made a forceful address to the conference in which he stressed Christian teaching that nuclear weapons are incompatible with peace: 'The Holy See has stated in this committee many times and repeats now: There can be no moral acceptance of military doctrines that embody the permanence of nuclear weapons. They are incompatible with the peace we seek for the 21st century; they cannot be justified. These weapons are instruments of death and destruction.' (L'Osservatore Romano 9.10.02) In this country, our Bishops' Conference has repeatedly called for British nuclear weapons to be brought into disarmament negotiations. There are no signs that either NATO or our government are taking any notice, another indication that Catholics should work for Britain and other European countries to be free from this alliance and form a common defence policy based on the structures of the European Union; if NATO is weakened by the war on Iraq (which personally I doubt) this would be an unintended good result of the war. Again, the opponents of such a policy are those whom we would expect: many of the most vociferous opponents of European unity and integration are the same people who have peddled the lies and wickedness of this country's nuclear deterrence policy for the last fifty years, which has so poisoned national life.

Conclusion: Europe as an example to the world

We have tried to cover quite a lot of ground this Lent. Remember that this course has been about Christian moral teaching - the virtue of solidarity, the key concept of subsidiarity, the struggle for peace in the world, and the ways in which we see these values in both the saints of Europe and the movement for European unity and integration since the Second World War. But we need to do a lot to share all this with others - talk about Europe, challenge the endless lies about Europe, buy your children or grandchildren little blue bears with gold stars, keep on playing Beethoven's Ninth Symphony - try and build what the Pope calls an ethic of unity. You may not think it's an easy time to do this: but when has it been easy?