The perils of supranationalism

We are constantly being told that the ‘European project’ is one of peace. Dalrymple comments:

No doubt, after the second catastrophic war in the space of half a century, this is in part so, at least originally. No one could have wanted another Franco-German conflict. But it does not mean that the subsequent peace in Europe was caused by the European project. Other factors were far more important, indeed decisive:

1. The fact that Europe was in no condition to wage another war. The continent was in ruins, the Germans were disarmed, the Americans would not have stood for it, the Germans had changed. There was no revanchisme to speak of in Germany, as there had been after the first war.
2. To the east was the looming presence of what in the 19th century was called the Russian steamroller. Only it was infinitely worse than that of the time of Alexander I and Nicholas I, with a barbaric ideology that attracted the allegiance of a considerable proportion of the population, especially of that part of it — the intelligentsia — that ought to have known better. Only American power prevented the steamroller from rolling west.

Dalrymple says that even if the maintenance of peace was one of the aims of the European project,

this is a very weaselly way of putting it. Even without the European Union, Estonia would not attack Portugal, nor Belgium Slovakia. What is meant by keeping the peace is ensuring that Germany does not again attack France. (No one thinks that France would attack Germany.) Without the EU people thought — even Germans themselves — that Germany would be up to its old tricks. I do not believe this.

For François Mitterand, nationalism ‘means war’,

and this is true if by nationalism is meant an exaggerated and militant love of one’s country and a hatred of, or disdain for, all other countries, particularly neighbouring ones. Yet nation states — at least some of them — have been the only large-scale states able durably to protect the freedom of their populations.

And if nationalism means war, says Dalrymple,

it does not follow that supranationalism means peace. The EU may be a Yugoslavia in the making, without a Tito to hold it together.

Self-preservation of the European political class is at stake

Important (for good or evil) as Brexit may be to the future of Britain, writes Dalrymple,

it is not without its importance for the European Union. Indeed, it was always essential for the Union that Britain’s departure should be an economic disaster for Britain: for if it were not, why have a union at all?

It was therefore entirely predictable

that the Union should drive a hard bargain with Britain, even a bargain economically harmful to itself, provided only that it was worse for Britain. In the European Union, politics always trumps economics.

In Britain too,

political considerations were uppermost in the minds of those who voted for Brexit. They saw in the European Union a Yugoslavia in the making, led by a megalomaniac class without effective checks or balances.

The giant error that is the European Union

Dalrymple notes that proponents of the unitary European state

always talk about the European project. But they never tell you what it is.

In fact the European oligarchs are building

a new Yugoslavia,

or, if we are very lucky, a new Belgium,

a dysfunctional country that somehow functions.

But Dalrymple points out that

it is much harder when you have 27 countries.

The Eurocrats, he notes, are

determined to keep it together, because it is their jobs and their power that are in danger.

Plus,

nobody likes to admit that they have made a mistake.

The crumbling EU soft-dictatorship

Dalrymple suggests that many of the 52% who voted for Brexit in the UK European Union membership referendum might have done so

because they feared that the ‘European project’ was the creation of a vast sovereign state to slake the thirst for power of megalomaniacs of the political class, impossible of even minimal democratic oversight, a giant Yugoslavia.

The leaders of France, Germany, and Italy have said that they want to push forward to closer political union. Dalrymple comments:

Consider the following. The French government, whose legitimacy no one will deny even if he denies its competence, is attempting some weak reforms of the rigid French labour market. This has resulted in months of conflict and continued violence. But at least the reform is the work, or attempted work, of a French government. Imagine if the reform were imposed by fiat of a European government despite the opposition of the French government and members of the European parliament.

The unspeakable folly of ‘ever closer union’

Union with a man like you? Er, no thanks

Dalrymple suggests that many of the 52% who voted for Brexit in the UK European Union membership referendum might have done so

because they feared that the ‘European project’ was the creation of a vast sovereign state to slake the thirst for power of megalomaniacs of the political class, impossible of even minimal democratic oversight, a giant Yugoslavia.

The leaders of France, Germany, and Italy have said that they want to push forward to closer political union. Dalrymple comments:

Consider the following. The French government, whose legitimacy no one will deny even if he denies its competence, is attempting some weak reforms of the rigid French labour market. This has resulted in months of conflict and continued violence. But at least the reform is the work, or attempted work, of a French government. Imagine if the reform were imposed by fiat of a European government despite the opposition of the French government and members of the European parliament.

Why the British shunned the European superstate

Dalrymple writes that the precise nature of the so-called European Project is

never spelt out or even demanded.

However, the purpose of the project is clear. It is

the creation of a United States of Europe whose main object is to be powerful.

This empire-building, Dalrymple notes,

is the obsession of the European political class, not of most of the people.

To create a unitary European state in the hope that identity will follow

seems to me to court a Yugoslav-type dénouement.

In the halls of Eurocracy

Being a member of the European political class, writes Dalrymple,

means never having to say you’re wrong.

As a member of this self-perpetuating magic circle,

you don’t have to learn from experience, consider the evidence, apply logic, or worry about the consequences. There are always expenses at the end of the tunnel.

Like the white man who speaks with forked tongue,

or the Muslim permitted to use taqiyyah to mislead the infidel, the Eurocrat never quite means what he says or says what he means. What he says is compatible with almost anything, and this quality of emptying meaning from grammatically formed sentences full of polysyllables has been a characteristic from the inception of the European Union.

Dalrymple cites one of its founders, Jean Monnet, who said:

We want the Community to be a gradual process of change. Attempting to predict the form it will finally take is therefore a contradiction in terms. Anticipating the outcome kills invention. It is only as we push forwards and upwards that we will discover new horizons.

It would be wrong, says Dalrymple,

to conclude from this mixture of mystical exaltation and interdepartmental memo that Monnet did not know what he was about. He wanted a federal state of Europe, but knew that public opinion would not stand for it anywhere if it were spelt out in so many words (which is why he used so many words). Centralisation by stealth was what was needed.

Take Herman Van Rompuy. His electoral record, Dalrymple notes,

makes Stalin’s shine. Stalin received too many votes, Van Rompuy none at all.

Van Rompuy,

Monnet’s spiritual heir, grey of face, grey of suit, grey of speech, and grey of thought, declared national sovereignty in Europe dead. His position was that of a murderer who stands over his victim’s corpse muttering, ‘He’s gone, he’s gone!’

Dalrymple points to Belgium.

After 180 years of cohabitation, the Walloons and the Flemings cannot agree on common interests deep or wide enough to make a central government acceptable to them both.

One might have thought

that the failure of a country small enough to drive across in two hours to unite after nearly 200 years of experience of trying to forge a workable political identity would give the Eurocrats pause. One would be wrong.

The Eurocrat is

highly imaginative, if an ability not to draw the most obvious conclusions from the most obvious facts, but to draw quite opposite conclusions, counts as imagination.

About Belgium the Eurocrat would say

that the problem is the existence of Belgium, that if only the Flemings and the Walloons could be united administratively with the Lithuanians and the Greeks, the Belgian problem would be solved. Likewise Yugoslavia: If only it had been Euroslavia. The linguistic difficulties entailed are of no account, for everyone — everyone in le tout Bruxelles sense — speaks Engleurish, a kind of Esperanto with the beauties of the latter removed.

To the Eurocrat,

the Finns are really Portuguese, who are really Austrians.

All news is good news to the Eurocrat,

because whatever problem arises leads to the same conclusion: ever closer union.

One might have supposed, for example, that

the slight difficulties over the Greek debt would give intelligent and thoughtful people, and even unintelligent and thoughtless people, reason to wonder whether the single currency had been such a good idea. One would be wrong. In the halls of Eurocracy, they are like the Aztecs who thought that they needed yet more human sacrifices to defeat the Spaniards.

The work of supposedly necessary unification is being carried out by the European Commission,

a body with about as many checks and balances on its exercise of power as the Committees of Public Safety.

It is

carrying out a revolution, though strictly one from above.

Is it not obvious, asks Dalrymple,

that there was a connection between the vaunted unified banking market and the Greek swindle-cum-débâcle? How else would the Greeks have been able to borrow so much for so long on the same terms as the Germans, and reward their grotesquely inflated public sector so magnificently?

To the Eurocrat,

reality is what Nature was to the Marxists, an enemy to be wrestled to the ground, subdued, defeated, in order to yield what Man wanted.

Why, asks Dalrymple, does the Eurocrat

have this impossible dream?

Why does he

treat reality the way Dominique Strauss-Kahn is said to treat women?

The answer is that he is a

frustrated megalomaniac, resentful at the tiny scale of the national stage upon which he would have strutted if national sovereignty still existed.

In the old days, Van Rompuy, for instance,

could have been sent out as governor of an area of Africa 20 times the size of Belgium, impossible to drive across in two months, let alone two hours. Such a position would have been consonant with his estimate of his own talents: likewise with all the other Eurocrats. And this is another way in which the empire strikes back.

The Yugoslavia de nos jours

Koversada socialist naturist park in Istria, Vrsar, on the Dalmatian Coast of Croatia, Yugoslavia

For those, writes Dalrymple,

who have nothing but contempt for the European Union and the political class that has formed it, these are happy days.

Clear-sighted people have long realised that

• the single currency is unworkable without political union
• political union is impossible with even the most minimal democratic oversight, and is therefore essentially a fascist ideal
• in the end the so-called union will bring conflict and even violence

Having pursued, says Dalrymple,

the policy of après nous le déluge for so long, European politicians find themselves in a dilemma: they have to decide which kind of economic degradation to plump for. They can maintain demand for a time at the expense of the currency, or they can maintain the currency for a time at the expense of demand.

Monotony and feebleness of Eurofederalist argumentation

The best hope for the European Union, writes Dalrymple,

would be for it to eventually evolve into an enormous Belgium. More likely, it will evolve into an enormous Yugoslavia circa 1990.

The European political class and its intellectual cheerleaders

appear determined to produce one or the other. Whenever I listen to the defenders of the European Union I am astonished at the thinness of their argumentation and the ruthlessness of their determination.

Here are just three of the feeble and sketchy arguments:

1. European civilisation is superior to all others, for it is the only one that has ever accorded adult status to individuals. From now until 2020, 130m children will enter forced marriages. Without the indispensable infrastructure that is the European Union, Europe will be swept away by ill winds that blow from all directions.

Dalrymple:

Preposterous and cowardly. European civilisation predated the European Union by some years. The malign trend does not reach Europe from all directions—not from North or South America, for example, or Russia. The words are directed against Muslims, though there is not the courage to say so. There is no danger or prospect of forced marriage becoming general in Europe, nor is there any reason to suppose that a Europewide state would be better at preventing or prohibiting it among Muslim minorities than the present nation states are.

2. The only way of combating the kind of nationalism that led to catastrophic European wars is European federalism.

Dalrymple:

Absurd. There is no reason to believe that, but for the European Union, Portugal would attack Estonia, Ireland Luxembourg, or Greece Denmark. The only plausible candidates for a serious military conflict on the continent are France and Germany. What is really being said is that the European Union is necessary to contain Germany. This is to subscribe to the view of the Germans as eternal militarists, the inevitable enemy of France. I do not believe that but for the European Union, Germany would attack France.

3. The countries of Europe must unite politically in order to compete in the world. Large countries such as China, India, and the USA have clout; there is no place for small countries. In order to be of any account, European nations must forgo sovereignty and become part of a heftier entity.

Dalrymple:

This ignores

• the political difficulties of union
• the impossibility of making a functioning democracy of so many different nations
• the inevitable clashes of national interest that federalisation would entail

It also ignores the evidence that many of the most successful countries in the world are small. There is no reason why countries cannot cooperate, including militarily, without pooling sovereignty; such pooling as has occurred in Europe has held its prosperity back. The currency union without any kind of fiscal union has proved disastrous for several countries, and is economically deleterious for all. But the further step of fiscal union could only be imposed by an unelected, authoritarian bureaucracy upon countries unwilling to comply, and whose interests might not be served by compliance. Sooner or later, a federation would lead to war, or at least to revolution.

The arguments of the federalists

are trotted out with monotonous regularity, like the stories of someone with Alzheimer’s, and anyone who raises objections, however obvious and unanswerable, is immediately compared to a rabid nationalist, as if to be attached to a national identity were a symptom of hating everyone else. There are such rabid nationalists, to be sure. Forced federation is the best way of ensuring their increase in numbers and influence.

The badness of an idea

does nothing to halt its progress. Europe is sleepwalking (yet again) to cataclysm.