Completing the free market

I’ll be spending a lot of my time on bilateral Hungary-UK issues over the next few years. But of course another important feature of my work will be our countries’ relationship with the EU and how the EU will develop. With that in mind I went to a well attended seminar on the EU’s future last week.

The seminar was very interesting and led by a fervent pro-EU integrationist who explained his opinion that the countries of Europe ought to give more of their national powers to the Union so that the organisation could respond better to international developments and serve its citizens better. He was particularly keen that the EU institutions should have more influence over social and taxation issues.

His presentation was interesting and provocative. But, as I said during the seminar, for me these are not the key elements in the immediate future of the EU: more important is completing and deepening the free market. By that I mean removing the barriers to trade which still exist within the EU between EU countries, reducing the bureaucracy which is associated with doing business internationally, and making sure all EU companies can compete for contracts on a fair and equal basis within the EU.

As I said in the seminar, in my opinion the most significant threat to achieving this is that our current economic problems, instead of encouraging us to speed that free market, slow it or even hold it back; and that protectionism (EU governments trying to favour their own companies over those of other EU countries) rears its head within the Union. What we need is free, transparent intra-EU and international trade. That’s what’s going to help the EU recover and generate growth. And that’s what’s going to bring prosperity back to EU citizens.

It was really encouraging to see the conclusions of last week’s European Council in which our leaders agreed that the EU free market should be completed swiftly and that growth will be our priority.  This is good news both for the UK and Hungary: two countries which rely on international trade for their prosperity. The freer and more transparent our trade, the wealthier our countries will be.