PROPOSITION: THE E.U. WAS A MISTAKE

AFFIRMATIVE: Small States Are Best, and the E.U. Is Huge

- DANIEL HANNAN

SMALL IS BEAUTIFUL. That, in a nutshell, is the case against the European Union. If you want to make the same point in more grandiose language, you can quote Aristotle: "To the size of a state there is a limit, as there is to plants, animals and instruments, none of which can retain their natural facility when too large."

Here's one practical test of his thesis. Which states or territories have the highest gross domestic product (GDP) per head? Depending on whose measure we use, the top five are Qatar, Macao, Luxembourg, Singapore, and Brunei (according to Worldometer); Monaco, Liechtenstein, the Isle of Man, Bermuda, and the Cayman Islands (according to the International Monetary Fund); or the Isle of Man, the Channel Islands, the Faroe Islands, the U.S. Virgin Islands, and Guam (according to the United Nations). Notice what they all have in common?

Europhiles might object that the E.U. is not a state, and that the very presence of Luxembourg in one of those tables suggests that it can't be doing too badly. But look at the direction of travel. At first, the European Economic Community (EEC)the clue was in the name-could reasonably be described as an international association, focused on eliminating trade barriers among its members. True, it did so at the expense of trade with nonmembers. Unlike NAFTA or the European Free Trade Association (EFTA), the EEC was not a free trade area but a customs union, controlling all commerce on behalf of its members and artificially redirecting trade away from the rest of the world. Still, it was a club of nations rather than a superstate.

That changed when the Maastricht Treaty came into force in 1993. Suddenly, Brussels had a hand in almost every field of government activity: foreign policy, criminal justice, the environment, culture, immigration, defense. It was now that, in recognition of its vastly expanded ambitions, it stopped being the EEC and became the European Union.