PERSPECTIVE ON COMMON MARKET : Britain Must Be Part of the Core : Increased political cooperation should not mean a two-speed EC, with some ahead, others dragged along.

Britain’s place in Europe and her relationship with her partners in the European Community are understandably the subjects of anxiety and debate. But ancient loyalties and national identities are not threatened. While it is hard to foresee exactly how its institutions may develop, and harder still to say what the physical boundaries will ultimately be, there are those who will seek to exploit the discomfort of change, working on people’s fears.

One thing is clear. No member state wants to get out. And there are new generations of British voters who are tired of a political debate conducted in the language of nostalgia. They see their future in Europe and they want Britain to be Europe’s leader.

The EC was born of a vision that the divisiveness of European nationalism should never again unleash forces of destruction. But the competitive pressures of a shrinking world marketplace and Europe’s relative ineffectiveness in the face of competition from the United States and Japan prompted the Community to go further than a mere customs union.

We decided to create in the Single European Act a home market large enough to promote competition and enhance international standards. Thus the British government agreed to share sovereignty on a scale without precedent, not to reduce our influence but to extend it.

But there is a risk we would be foolish to ignore: a two-speed Common Market in which the enthusiasts drive ahead and the rest of us are dragged along behind. There will be those setting the rules and, by the very strength of their economy, dwarfing the remainder. We have to be part of the core of power, not on the periphery.

In practical terms each country retains a wide discretion of action. The rhetoric of continental political cultures is very different from the more matter-of-fact approach of our own, but we should not be fooled by it: increased political cooperation certainly, but not political federation.

No one is forced to become a member of the “club of Europe.” Not all can be accepted. There are rules to be followed. To influence the rules you have not only to sit at the table, you have to persuade your fellow members.

A strong and competitive free-trading market provides the most effective means of enabling free people to satisfy their wishes and needs. Britain can make a distinctive contribution. We can, for example, push our partners into extending privatization. We can aid the campaign against government underpinning of nationalized industries and other barriers that distort free markets.

When the original six established the European Community it reflected their national self-interests. Britain stood apart. As (Winston Churchill’s deputy) Rab Butler once said: “We just thought it wasn’t going to work. We were wrong!” We allowed Germany and France to mold agricultural arrangements to their advantage, not ours, because we refused to participate. We cannot afford to make the same mistake. We face some stark choices. Are funds to flow to Frankfurt or Paris and industrial investment to the Continent rather than here? Are we to cling to our own industrial standards and watch them eroded by those agreed by the Common Market, or are we to join actively in devising Europe-wide standards?

The wind and the tide know no man-made frontiers, so are we to remain indifferent to the environment of others, hoping we will be unscathed? When the world is searching for international cooperation in environmental protection, British experience should be at the forefront in creating the European model.

We can share the exploration of space or we can leave the race to others. We can sustain a civil aviation industry in European partnership, or go out of business and leave it to the Americans.

We can pool our research and development programs, to keep them credible in the face of ever-mounting costs of technological research, or we can try to go it alone. How many programs can Britain sustain alone?

At the heart of the debate is a failure to understand how the EC works. It is a group of nation-states, sharing sovereignty in the pursuit of collective self-interest, not a hidden plot to impose centralized European federalism. I do not believe President Francois Mitterrand will transfer the substance of power from the Elysee to a centralized bureaucracy in Brussels, or that Chancellor Helmut Kohl will exchange his country’s newly achieved sovereignty for that of a distant European parliament. The truth is that the European Community is a political marketplace--a process of wheeling and dealing--as well as an economic market.

There is one area, however, with which we must deal and that is the issue of democratic accountability. And we must avoid alienating the several national parliaments. I would like to see national parliaments drawn directly into EC decisions by sending representatives to a second chamber: a senate of Europe.

There are areas where the more effective management of Community resources demands more scrutiny by the European Parliament. But this is not an argument for an all-powerful centralized superstructure. I do not believe that the substance of European political decision-making will shift from the Council of Ministers.

The way to approach what is happening in Europe was set out by Winston Churchill as long ago as 1948. He said: “I have found it is often a mistake to try to settle everything at once. We know where we want to go but we cannot foresee all the stages fo the journey . . . . We ourselves are content in the first instance to present the idea of a united Europe in which our country will play a decisive part as a moral, cultural and spiritual conception to which all can rally, without being disturbed by divergences about the structure.”

Those words combine both the vision and the pragmatism that I believe the people of Britain want their leaders to display today.