In a Daily Mail extract from his new book, Daniel Hannan, MEP, makes a case against the EU. Not yet having read the whole book, I don’t know every angle of attack Mr Hannan chooses, though I suspect he doesn’t limit himself to just one or two.
But in the extract his principal objection to this hideous Leviathan is that it’s undemocratic. Hannan states that, as no pan-European demos exists, no pan-European democracy is possible by definition. Yet, though true, this is barely relevant.
“The EU’s founding fathers had mixed feelings about democracy,” writes Hannan. “In their minds, too much democracy was associated with demagoguery and fascism.”
If that’s indeed what they thought, then I agree with them, as I do with the claim by Jose Manuel Durao Barroso that “decisions taken by the most democratic institutions in the world are very often wrong.”
Barroso’s remark would be even more unassailable had he replaced ‘the most democratic institutions in the world’ by ‘every institution we’ve ever known.’ We aren’t in this world blessed by perfect institutions – errare humanum est, as Mr Hannan, with his multilingual erudition, would probably say. And he’d be right.
But then so are ‘the EU’s founding fathers’: too much democracy does lead to demagoguery and fascism, if we agree that state-enforced PC diktats are precisely the latter. In fact, too much of any form of government is a guarantee of tyranny, be that of one man, a small minority or, pace Tocqueville, the majority.
Moreover, this had been known for roughly 2,500 years before the world was blessed by the arrival of Messrs Schuman and Monnet. No less known was the only effective remedy against too much of anything: checks and balances, separation of power among various estates and branches of government.
This isn’t ideally achievable either: humans, and therefore institutions, are fallible. But it was Britain in the 18th and 19th centuries that came closer to the ideal than any other country ever has. So much closer in fact that the notion of checks and balances entered the political DNA of most Anglophones as it did not, for instance, of the Francophones or the people of Mitteleuropa.
The British genetic slate is being rapidly wiped clean of such sagacity. We too are vindicating the worst fears of those who realised that too much democracy was at least as dangerous as too little.
In common with most Western politicians, regardless of their ideological hue, Hannan too is conditioned to worship at the altar of democracy. Yet, as if in spite of himself, he pinpoints the real problem: “The EU is run, extraordinarily, by a body that combines legislative and executive power. The European Commission is not only the EU’s ‘government’, it is also the only body that can propose legislation in most fields of policy.”
There’s nothing ‘extraordinary’ about this. Continental European countries are viscerally alien to separation of powers, even though most practise it after a fashion. Yet such separation is not at all synonymous with our present democracy run riot, whereby every barely post-pubescent citizen is deemed fit to play an active part in the political process by casting a vote. Those who win a plurality, no matter how infinitesimal, of such votes then claim the kind of mandate that no British politician could claim 150 years ago.
No wonder this, in reality unchecked, system leads to government by demagoguery that so vexed ‘the EU’s founding fathers.’ I refer to such government as spivocracy, the rule of self-serving bureaucrats whose only discernible skill lies in their ability to put blocs of votes together by lying about their plans.
A spivocracy rules not by equity and consent, which was the prescription of our deepest political thinker Edmund Burke, but by making false promises and effectively buying voters with handouts. Replace ‘voters’ with ‘countries’, and this is precisely how the same principle is extrapolated to the supranational government of the EU.
That’s why, in Hannan’s words, “we now have the tyranny of a self-perpetuating, self-serving elite, all wedded by self-interest to the European project.” But we have it not ‘in place of democracy’, as he suggests, but in place of well-balanced national institutions governing by true consent freely given by the people, rather than tricked out of them.
Hannan obviously thinks that these are one and the same. Yet the Western political history of modernity shows that they are more nearly antithetical. True equity and consent, as Burke knew but we’ve forgotten, are only achievable in a state where the power of the people, projected through their elected representatives, is counterbalanced by the hereditary power of aristocracy and the unelected power of the monarch.
Referring to such a state as a democracy may be terminologically concise and popularly appealing, but it’s fundamentally wrong. And reducing it to unchecked democracy, as the West has shown, does lead to all sorts of unsavoury consequences.
Arguing against the truly awful EU from such a premise lays someone who, like Mr Hannan, is correct in his anti-EU animus, open to the pseudo-Burkean arguments by spivocracts like Blair. Hannan quotes him as saying, “The British people are sensible enough to know that, even if they have a certain prejudice about Europe, they don’t expect their government necessarily to share it or act upon it.”
The government, wrote Burke, is supposed to act according to the people’s interests, not necessarily their wishes. Tony and his ilk act according to neither – they pursue their own interests only. The way to make them act in the people’s interests is to have in parallel two powerful branches of national government not beholden to any party-political interests.
Such a government is impossible within the pan-European abomination even in theory, just as democracy is impossible there in practice. ‘The EU’s founding fathers’ knew this and yet used every subterfuge to trick or bribe 27 European nations into acquiescence. It’s for this reason, and not because they had reservations about democracy, that they were wicked. As is the Leviathan they’ve extruded out of their intellectual bowels.
Anyone who argues against the EU, even if he doesn’t do so quite precisely, ought to be encouraged. That’s why I’m going to get Daniel Hannan’s book (A Doomed Marriage, Notting Hill Books). After all, to paraphrase a hugely compromised adage, pas d’ennemis a droite.