The Spectator’s Notes | 2 June 2016

‘No one can seriously deny that European integration brought an end to Franco-German conflict and has settled the German question for good,’ wrote Niall Ferguson in the latest Sunday Times. I hesitate when confronted by such an assertion by such a learned professor. But I think I would seriously deny it, or at least seriously question it. Surely what brought an end to Franco-German conflict was the utter defeat of Nazi Germany. European integration was a symptom of that end, not its cause. As for settling the German question, isn’t it too early to say? The eurozone is the first large non-German area to have been dominated by Germany since 1945. It is a mess. In countries such as Greece, its travails (mass unemployment, prolonged recession) have provoked the first new outbreaks of anti-German feeling since the war. Modern Germany is definitely not engaged in the Griff nach der Weltmacht whose terrible effects a hundred years ago were commemorated this week at Verdun and in respect of Jutland. But by using the single currency as the lead weapon to advance European integration, the EU project has created a new disturbance of the European order. The EU’s disastrous solution, which will go ahead if Britain votes to remain (and possibly even if we vote to leave), is to deepen the eurozone further, with fiscal and banking union. Germany will shape this. More German questions are raised than are settled.

Mrs Merkel and President Hollande stood together at Verdun to symbolise their countries’ reconciliation. In 1984, their predecessors, Kohl and Mitterrand, did so hand-in-hand. Most people considered this very moving. A friend of mine privately asked Margaret Thatcher if she did not think so too. ‘No, I did not,’ she exclaimed, ‘Two grown men holding hands!’ I have recently heard that the Kohl/Mitterrand gesture arose because the two men were stranded on the field of commemoration with no interpreters.