If Le Monde were a British newspaper, it would be to the left of The Guardian and ever so slightly to the right of the communist Morning Star. In France, as she has always been, it’s mainstream. And in France, as she is now, EU’s second-in-command, Le Monde is the transmitter of marching orders.
So, before you march, sit up and listen: Europe must have a new ‘social contract’ resting ‘on three pillars: social democracy, most notably collective bargaining; economic government in the service of sustainable growth and full employment; and, above all, economic and social justice based on the politics of redistribution and social protection.’
Now the term ‘social contract’ was already nonsensical in 1762, when Rousseau coined it, and it hasn’t improved with age. A valid contract of any kind presupposes the possibility of enforcement by a third party. Since this doesn’t exist in a ‘social contract’, it’s one party, in this case the state, imposing its will on the other, in this case the individual. And that’s precisely how Rousseau explained it in Du Contrat Social:
‘The state should be capable of transforming every individual into part of the greater whole from which he, in a manner, gets his life and being; of altering man’s constitution for the purpose of strengthening it. [It should be able] to take from the man his own resources and give him instead new ones alien to him and incapable of being made use of without the help of others. The more completely these inherited resources are annihilated, the greater and more lasting are those that he acquires.’
That’s the good thing about totalitarians: they say what they mean. The bad thing is that people usually don’t take them at their word until it’s too late.
Now the above passage from Le Monde is a pseudo-political translation from Rousseau’s pseudo-philosophical. Let’s try to translate both into English.
1. ‘Social democracy’ is a meaningless oxymoron. No sizeable social group can be democratic – it’ll inexorably arrange itself along hierarchical lines. There is such a thing as political democracy, but that’s not what social democracy means. It means socialist democracy, wherein the adjective is everything and the noun is next to nothing. And socialism, if you strip the word of its mendacious shell, means the state riding roughshod over the individual. ‘C’est tout,’ as they say at Le Monde.
2. ‘Economic government’ means single government for the whole EU, including us. That particular buggy can only be driven by Germany, with France, as she forlornly hopes, riding shotgun.
3. ‘Collective bargaining’ in this context means unbridled power of the unions, something that is a huge contributing factor in France’s economic troubles. Applied to Britain as a EU member, it means that what was done by Margaret Thatcher will be undone by the single European state. And even our home-grown lefties grudgingly admit that in pinning back the unions’ ears, if nothing else, Lady Thatcher was right.
4. ‘Sustainable growth’, in its present usage, requires no translation. Everyone knows it means promiscuous and ever-growing state spending, which is to say something that is mostly responsible for our present economic disasters.
5. ‘Full employment’ means exactly the same thing. The only way a state, national or supranational, can guarantee this is by creating more and more public jobs for those who can’t find private ones. Result? Total, nay totalitarian, state power, otherwise known as socialism, otherwise known as social democracy (see above).
6. ‘Economic and social justice based on the politics of redistribution and social protection’ means taxing all hardworking people into poverty, ideally turning them, along with the laggards, into wards of the state.
Conspicuous by their absence in Le Monde’s dictum are words like liberty, consent, equity, justice. (Justice does appear, but it’s neutered and rendered meaningless by the modifier ‘social’.) Nor does one detect any opt-out clause: thou shalt accept Points 1-6 as they are or else. Or else what? I’ll leave that to your imagination.
In other words, using this utterly objectionable rag as its mouthpiece, the EU has issued the blueprint for its brave new world. Only it’s neither brave nor particularly new. We’ve already seen it all, during Russia’s attempt to unite the workers of the world and Germany’s previous attempt to unite Europe.
Then Messrs Lenin and Hitler kindly issued ample advance warnings, both in their books and their speeches. There was thunder in their pronouncements, for everyone to hear. And everyone heard – but no one listened: ‘It’s just idle talk, old boy, what? Campaign rhetoric, that’s all it is. These chaps are really like us, deep down…’ We all know what happened next.
Now yet again the bastards are screaming off the rooftops. Are you listening?