How very appropriate that tanks should have been rolling through the streets of Brussels on the day that Europe dismantled another pillar of democracy. The military display, as it happened, was commemorating Belgium National Day, not the triumphal march toward financial union, but the coincidence was one of history’s better jokes. Europe is now galloping toward the final realisation of its great post-war dream: the abolition of independent nation states whose governments are answerable to their own people.
It is important to realise what is at stake here. When you exercise your right to vote for one party or another in national elections, you are, more often than not, doing so on the basis of its fiscal policies: that is, what it proposes to do about tax and spending. There could scarcely be a more important function of the electoral process than this. If the government is not accountable to you for what it does with your money, and how much it will take from you to do those things, then what is left of your power as a citizen? In what sense is your consent to being governed required? If responsibility for these decisions is to be removed from the elected governments of individual countries and transferred to a pan-European entity, then we are setting out on a course with the most terrifying political implications.
There is nothing accidental about this trajectory. The Greek (and Irish, and Portuguese, and Italian, and Spanish) crisis has been useful, as everyone now seems to be admitting, as an accelerant: having to scrape a whole cohort of eurozone countries off the floor has simply made the “need” for financial integration undeniable. The logical conclusion of an economically illiterate project has been reached. No more messing with the will of the people: resentful Germans and rebellious Greeks will be equally overridden in the name of – what? An international welfare state in which wealth is redistributed not just from the hard-working to the non-working classes of one’s own country, but from industrious nations to failing ones. The traditional socialist model of the wealth of the richer being taken by the state to give to the poorer is being applied on a continental scale, with the inevitable result that southern Europe will become a permanent basket case, dependent indefinitely on “support” – cheap loans and periodic bail-outs – from the north. The governments of those dependent countries will simply be ciphers, as powerless as welfare recipients are likely to be in any system.
And what of their voters? They will scarcely be electorates in the true sense at all. Which is why the Greeks were rioting in the streets: not just because they saw their early retirement age and their casual attitude to taxpaying under threat, but because they recognised that their views would now be irrelevant to their fate. Which is pretty much exactly what was intended all along. Deriding public opinion by dismissing it as populist, ignorant and inflammatory is not an incidental feature of the European project: it is essential. The will of the people is not a mere irritant or an obstacle, to be overcome under the pressure of particular circumstances. It is inherently volatile and dangerous: a threat to the benign, enlightened governance which only an apolitical bureaucratic administration can deliver.
The post-war received wisdom was that the terrible international crimes of the first half of the 20th century were directly attributable to the existence of vainglorious nation states and their rabidly xenophobic peoples. Only the abolition of their sovereignty and the disabling of their popular will could rid the world of that terrible blood-and-soil mystical relationship between countries and their own populations. It is not surprising or discreditable that it was Germany itself – the most infamous incarnation of this historical tendency – that was so determined to extinguish the possibility of it ever recurring. The question is: does undermining the fundamental principle of democracy – that the legitimacy of government requires the consent of the people – make that more or less likely to happen?
If we are going to learn from history, we might look at what dreadful things have followed when populations felt outraged and powerless, at what happens when people come to believe that their own political elites are conspiring against them in a way that deprives them of any voice or effective veto. If the democratic levers of protest are unavailable or useless, then non-democratic ones come into fashion. Deny people the ballot box as an effective outlet for their dissatisfaction, and they will take to the streets, either to replace their government by force, or worse, simply to vent their inchoate fury. As often as not, that fury is directed against some hapless victim – a racial minority, a vilified internal “public enemy” or a perceived foreign menace – which becomes a magnet for mob hatred. The glimmerings already visible of extremist politics in Europe (sometimes in countries that have been traditionally liberal and tolerant) are alarming enough: they will be as nothing to what might be on the rise if this arrogant determination to remove the democratic accessibility of national governments is pursued to the end.
That brings us to what appears to have become the official policy of the Conservative leadership, as explained by George Osborne overleaf. Bizarrely, in a reversal of what has been Tory foreign policy for a generation, the party leadership is now urging Europe on toward greater and faster financial union. The superficial (and reasonably plausible) economic case for this volte face is that, at this stage, it is only by accepting full economic integration that the eurozone can survive – and our economic fate being dependent on the survival of the euro as a currency means that it is in our interests to encourage whatever is necessary to kee it viable.
But the political argument for this stance, at which Mr Osborne hints, is that a financially unified Europe would be so clearly unacceptable to Britain that it would provide a perfect pretext for renegotiating our relationship with the EU. So, in effect, we would be prepared to betray the self-determination of the nations of Europe for our own self-serving reasons. This is a cynical form of realpolitik: that we should sell the pass on other people’s democratic rights in spite of whatever dark forces may be unleashed. That is not, as I recall, the traditional British view of our moral role in the world.
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