Deep Christian faith which inspired struggle for Europe

WILL you be voting on 10 June? That’s the day when across the country there will be elections to local authorities and to the European Parliament.

Rumour has it you won’t. And, if past performance is anything to go by, neither will a large majority of people in this country. Archbishop Rowan Williams recently drew attention in a sermon in Cambridge to the apparent disconnection of people from what is sometimes described as ‘the democratic process’.

It’s becoming hard enough to get voters to turnout at a general election (the 2001 election produced the lowest turn-out since the First World War), harder to get them to the polling stations for local elections, and hardest of all to get them to vote in European elections. But these European elections will be taking place against a highly significant background. On 1 May the European Union celebrated its enlargement to include ten nations of central and eastern Europe, from the Baltic Republics in the north to Malta and Cyprus in the south, via Poland, Hungary, the Czech Republic, Slovakia and Slovenia. In mid-March changes of government in Spain and Poland revived active discussion of the proposed constitution for this enlarged EU. On 20 April, the Prime Minister announced to Parliament his conversion to the idea of putting approval of this constitution, when it reaches its final form, to the people of Britain in a referendum.

One of the reasons for our indifference to the European Union is the unrelenting barrage of anti-European propaganda which comes from part of our national press. Another is the apparent irrelevance of ‘Europe’ to life in the places where we live and work – and, of course, to British traditions of suspicion of the stranger, most sharply expressed in the profoundly un-Christian attitudes to refugees and asylum-seekers in government and the media. However, the European Union is a fact of economic and social life in our diocese. Many people in these three counties are employed by organisations whose headquarters are in mainland Europe or work for organisations which do significant business with the mainland. Probably many more of us have been on holiday to at least one of the countries of mainland Europe (that includes the Balearics, Sicily, Corsica and most of the Aegean). And a significant proportion of us has other European connections – through family, friends, neighbours, or (increasingly) through Church contacts. So, ‘Europe’ is not something from which we are, or can afford to be, detached. Despite the refusal of the commission, chaired by former President Valéry Giscard d’Estaing. To include a reference to God in the preamble to the draft constitution, the vision which provided the seed from which the EU as we know it has grown was a profoundly Christian one. Its aim was to promote peace and reconciliation between nations which had been at war with one another repeatedly during the previous centuries – and especially between France and Germany. Those who were at the heart of this project in its earliest days were men of deep Christian faith, such as the first Chancellor of West Germany, Konrad Adenauer, and the French politician, Robert Schumann. It is this, rather than Mrs Thatcher’s insistence on Britain’s budget rebate, which makes the struggle for Europe worthwhile and which will, I hope, encourage people to exercise their vote in the elections to the European Parliament.

Tony Dickinson, European contact for the diocese, urges us all to go out and vote on 10 June and remember the vision behind the Union.