The accidental dictatorship

"The decisions have been made for us. There is nothing left to discuss."

Douglas Murray was a guest of the British Council at a recent meeting in the EU Parliament. He records his impressions in the current issue of Standpoint.

Several people with impossible titles explained what the ensuing session would show. A very important man talked of the very important article in a very important treaty that would ensure everything needed to be done could be done. He was the Vice-President of the Commission or the Vice-Commissioner of the President. In Brussels, people can be called whatever they like to be called. I am confident that nobody outside the building had ever heard of him.

The treaty he was discussing had a clause on which he was particularly keen. Everyone talked about it. Yet I couldn't name it, and no one outside the parliament will have heard of it.

The vast building, replete with such people, put me in mind of T. S. Eliot's description of those who spend their days "dreaming of systems so perfect that no one will need to be good". If enough laws and treaties are passed then everything will be OK. Everyone agreed with that and only the details remained to be sorted out. Here was the concoction of a society in which you won't have to waste your time "pursuing" happiness. Here you will simply have to demand it.

And it wasn't just the future but the past that they hated. Everything about it was wrong. The important man explained how terrible and base we Europeans had been, how low our civilisation was while the others all rode high. Everyone clapped. We Europeans had been born into sin while everyone else had been born into innocence.

Realising with a start that I was sitting in a chamber full of well-remunerated masochists, I wiled away the time wondering when they would suffer the fate that all masochists finally meet: which is what happens when they finally encounter a sadist. As I ran over the enjoyably apocalyptic possibilities in my head, one thing was clear: the overwhelming sensation that an institution of government so monstrously unaccountable and unnatural which so hates and distrusts the people it aspires to govern is an institution that cannot last.

The day I was there, a new European President and Foreign Minister were chosen in a nearby room. Neither the people who did the choosing nor the people whom they chose could claim to have any approval from the people they claimed to speak for. Yet everyone in power, including all our major political parties in Britain, are in agreement that this is the way things should be done. As Heidegger once said, the decisions have been made for us. There is nothing left to discuss.

My emphasis.

If indeed the EU cannot last; if it collapses under the weight of its own contradictions; if the peoples of Europe tear it apart in defence of the liberties and identities they are being denied by an increasingly monolithic political class; if the current settlement come to an end, what sort of forces will replace it?

What always replaces repression?

Chaos. Anarchy. Dictatorship. The very things the EU was founded to abolish.

But the urge towards liberty and the assertion of identity are not to be denied. They cannot be. They are the essence of the human person and nature will have its way.

Those who deny these things because they can are sowing the wind. They will probably be dead when the whirlwind hits their victims.

The European State is in no way analogous to the United States of America.

Europe is enormous. Half a billion people some of whose cultures differ so widely from one another that the gulfs between them are almost unbridgeable. The member states do not share a single juridical culture, and the very process of imposing one militates against justice, creating victims and causing anger, as Geoffrey Robertson QC points out.

The USA came into being by the common will of a small population who shared a history and a culture, the majority of whom subscribed to a single programme of philosophical ideals and juridical principles. It had a unified economy and a single currency almost from the beginning.

These things made the young USA strong. The EU has none of the inherent strengths which the USA enjoyed from its beginnings.

The EU is inherently weak and built on sand. Therefore, to preserve itself as a polity, it has to bully its constituent peoples into common beliefs and practices which the political class believe, very wrongly, will unify the peoples. This is done by a coterie of administrators who are nameless and hidden but defended by the member states' governments who lie, in concert, to the peoples, telling them that this is not so. 'It is is a risible notion. The national, elected governments are in control.' They take the people for fools but they cannot hide from the people the self-evident truth that the emperor has no clothes.

This is extremely dangerous and cannot last. The only factor persuading the peoples of Europe against tearing the EU apart is fear. Fear of chaos and war. The big stick cowing the people. Hardly democracy in its flowering.

A person, or some persons, clear of mind and of benevolent intent, must assert the authority to persuade the European Union to reform itself, to limit is vaunting ambitions, and to liberate the peoples of Europe from itself before dark forces engage with the problem.

A peaceful community of free nations, of the homelands of very different but free peoples, is a great ideal. That is not what the EU has become.

The political elite must admit its collective philosophical and political error and change course, or the EU will end in tears.