The European Union: a trough to feed at

The European political class treats the continent as if it were one big happy family with a population gaily marching in unison behind its leadership. The truth, Dalrymple points out,

is quite otherwise, which is why an example must be made of Britain.

The more integration there is,

the greater will be the tensions, between and within countries. There is a class that benefits mightily from the present arrangements, which explains the paradox of Catalan, Flemish, and Scottish nationalism: for these nationalisms are firm adherents to the ideal of European Union, namely a dilution of national sovereignty even greater than that which their nations already possess. The leadership of these movements want their place not in the sun, but at the trough. They are pied pipers to their populations.

As José Manuel Barroso,

once president of the European Commission, former Maoist student leader and then Goldman Sachs executive (the thirst for power being the golden thread that runs through this diverse career) put it, Europe — using the word to mean the European Union, which is now more or less standard — is an empire, though of a new kind.

Perhaps not so new, says Dalrymple:

a Habsburg Empire without the charm and æsthetic sensibility. From the Right it is attacked as a socialist enterprise, from the Left as a neo-liberal one: corporatist is the word for it, that happy union between regulatory bureaucracy and large corporations.

Nella casa dei Fiamminghi

Dalrymple enjoys Simenon’s 1932 novel Chez les Flamands

La peine européenne forte et dure

Dalrymple writes:

‘Europe’—in the Soviet-style usage of the word now so common—does not mean peace, but conflict, if not war. We are building in Europe not a United States but a Yugoslavia. We shall be lucky to escape violence when it breaks apart.

• Europe is, so far, the consequence of peace, not its cause
• multilateral agreements have always been possible without the erection of giant and corrupt bureaucratic apparatuses that weigh like a peine forte et dure on Western European economies
• the maintenance of peace does not require or depend upon regulating the size of bananas sold
• the notion that were it not for the European Union, there would be war, is inherently Germanophobic—no one believes, for instance, that Estonia would otherwise attack Slovenia, or Portugal Slovakia.

Take Belgium. The country is composed of two main national communities—the French-speaking Walloons and the Dutch-speaking Flemings.

The division between the two is sharper than at any previous time, to such an extent that the country recently had no government for more than 500 days. No one in Belgium explains, or even asks, why what has not proved possible for 189 years—full national integration of just two groups sharing so much historical experience and a tiny fragment of territory—should be achievable on a vastly larger scale with innumerable national groups, many of which have deeply ingrained and derogatory stereotypes of one another.

‘Europe’

lacks almost all political legitimacy, which will make it impossible to resolve real and growing differences.