Global Policy Forum

By Sarah Lyall

"They make dreadful tea here," warned Roger Helmer, but neither did he much relish his cup of Euro-coffee, served in a snack area in one of the endless gray corridors of the vast Parliament building.

Helmer, a member of the European Parliament from Britain's Conservative Party, gesticulated at the table. "This is a metaphor for the European project," he said, using the word "project" to mean something like mind-control experiment. "You order a cup of coffee and they give you half a cup and you pay for the whole thing."

Complaining about the local hot-drink customs while wearing a loud checked sports jacket decorated with a big gold pin depicting the English pound, as Helmer was, is probably not the best way to blend in here at the heart of Europe. But conforming is by no means the goal of either Helmer or a small band of his like-minded legislators.

To the Euro-skeptics, as they are known (although they prefer to think of themselves as Euro-realists) the European Union and its institutional handmaidens - the European Council, the European Parliament and the European Commission - make up an unwieldy behemoth, a greedy giant leech that is steadily, stealthily sucking the national characters from its member countries. They see their job, however quixotically, as providing an opposing viewpoint to the grand European plan.

Given the scope of the projects going on here now, from the management of the new single currency to the inexorable process of expanding the union's boundaries eastward to the elaborate business of writing a constitution for Europe, these skeptics have a lonely task. But they bring an almost religious fervor to their contrarianism.

"National parliaments should deal with everything they can on their own," said Jens-Peter Bonde, a Danish member of the European Parliament, who runs SOS Democracy, a coalition of skeptical legislators. "Only in areas where we can't cope on our own, should we have common legislation."

You might ask what it is they are doing in Brussels if they mistrust it so much. "I often put to myself the same question," said Ole Krarup, a leftist professor of constitutional law at Copenhagen University, who also represents Denmark. "What am I doing here?"

He mentioned the Fifth Column, and said he saw himself as a sort of spy, ferreting out weaknesses and contradictions in the apparatus: "We are challenging the system from within."

Although the Euro-skeptics include Scandinavian socialists and French members of a countryside rights party, whose motto is jokingly said to be, "If it flies, it dies," they tend to be mostly from Europe's northern countries. These lands generally put more money into the union than they take out, as opposed to the more union-friendly Mediterranean members, net gainers from the system. The movement, such as it is, is most keenly associated with the British Conservatives.

This might well be because the British skeptics naturally stand out in this dazzlingly polyglot city. Or it could be that many Britons simply do not feel comfortable here.

Christopher Heaton-Harris, another Euro-skeptic, said he had a horror of "going native," as he puts it, conjuring up images of a time when he suddenly wakes up to find himself shouting "pronto!" into his cell phone, embracing the federalist dream, perhaps wearing cologne.

"In British circles, when new MEPs come out, they say, 'In a couple of years' time, you'll be fine - you'll fit in here,'" Heaton-Harris said.

Not him. "I consider myself first English, then British and then European. It's not that we hate the Europeans. It's just that we don't want to share the same political system or laws with them."

Britain as a whole remains broadly Euro-skeptic and public opinion polls repeatedly show a deep ambivalence about such issues as joining the single currency. Though the skeptics are popular at home, their visibility has proved galling to other Britons in the European Parliament, particularly to those British Conservatives who take a kindlier view toward the European ethos.

In Brussels, the British Euro-skeptics, who make up a third to half of the delegation of 36 British Tories, are regarded as alien infiltrators - "the awkward squad," as one member put it - who speak loudly and carry tiny, but very annoying, sticks. The Parliament has 626 members elected to five-year terms.

"They're eccentric, slightly mad and really irritating," said a commission official. He warmed to the topic, inveighing against the "nut case Euro-skeptics" who he said revel in planting damaging anti-European articles in Britain's rabidly skeptical tabloid newspapers. "It takes a lot of good news to overcome one piece of Euro-skeptic reporting."

Most of the Euro-skeptics admit that they have little chance of effecting any great change, although they point proudly to times they have blocked or modified legislation they considered obnoxious to British interests.

As for Helmer, "When he makes his points in committee, frankly, everyone laughs at him," a fellow legislator said. But he himself sees it differently, particularly during what he describes as typically back-scratching debates among the vast like-minded majority.

"Somebody gets up and says, 'I would like to thank everyone who contributed to this report, and I would like to say how jolly good it is, and that the fifth paragraph is particularly marvelous,'" Helmer said. "And then I get up and throw a spanner into the works."

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