Why do they like the EU so much?

When in 2016 the people voted overwhelmingly for leaving the EU, the powers that be were aghast. If the same referendum had been held only among people wielding political influence, the result would have been a Remain landslide.

Our two main parties (as they then were) were in agreement. It’s likely that 70 per cent of the Tory bigwigs and 90 per cent of the Labour ones would have voted for keeping Britain in the EU.

Anyone who has followed the history of modern democracy knows that the will of the people is sacrosanct – but only if it doesn’t contradict the will of the establishment. If the latter can’t overturn popular vote democratically, it’ll try to do so perfidiously.

The Labour leadership, Remainers to a man, have tried both tacks. First, they followed the established EU practice of campaigning for a second referendum (Ireland, Denmark, Portugal and France will know what I mean). If people voted wrong the first time around, they must vote again and keep doing so until they get it right – such is the EU take on democracy.

However, that trick didn’t work for Labour – the 2018 election showed no public appetite for another plebiscite. Hence perfidy had to take over.

When Labour won the 2024 election, they immediately began taking incremental steps towards the back door of the EU, hoping to sneak in so gradually that in the end the people will be faced with a fait accompli.

The latest such step was announced the other day, with Starmer’s government agreeing to rejoin the Erasmus scheme, the EU’s student exchange programme. Britain left it when she left the EU, but while we were in it, twice as many foreign students came to Britain than went the other way.

The dubious privilege of rejoining will cost us dear: some £8.75 billion over the next few years. But that’s a small price to pay for an influx of Turkish students, who used to make up the Erasmus numbers in the past.

Our papers are bursting with all the lurid details and credible forecasts of what’s going to happen next. A customs union seems on the cards (not currently, according to a Labour minister), which is a proven stratagem for ushering in a single state.

The trick was first tried by Prussia in the 19^th century, when one German principality after another was drawn into the Zollverein union. The process culminated in 1866, and five years later Bismarck proudly issued the Proclamation of the German Empire. Germany became a single state.

The EU, initially a Franco-German project, followed the same gradual path, moving towards the Maastricht Treaty slowly but inexorably. The obvious objective is to create a single European state, and Starmer et al. are desperate to drag Britain into it.

What’s the attraction? The minuses are obvious: inability to control immigration even in theory (it’s not being controlled in practice now, but at least we have the mechanisms in place for some future sane government to activate), compromising national sovereignty; forcing Britain to function according to an alien legal system; curtailing free trade. But what are the pluses?

Economically, Europe is far from being the powerhouse it was in the 1960s, especially by contrast with the devastated British economy. Today, EU membership is more likely to be a millstone around Britain’s neck, rather than a lifejacket keeping her afloat. So what would we be trading our sovereignty for? A share of Continental incompetence to exacerbate our own?

Here it’s essential to understand the nature of the EU, its founding impulse and the place it takes in the political evolution of the West. I’ve analysed such issues in a couple of books, but the present format calls for skipping some intermediate steps. So please bear with me.

I believe that a longing for a supranational, ideally global, state is encoded in the DNA of post-Enlightenment politics, indeed of the modern civilisation the Enlightenment adumbrated. All Enlightenment projects have been sold to the public by false claims and slogans, with enough gullible people around to accept them as reality.

This goes for the founding oxymoronic triad of liberté, égalité, fraternité, where the middle element invalidates the other two. It goes for the underlying philosophical belief in the inherent, primordial goodness of man. And it certainly goes for the etymological promise of democracy: demos governing itself by vesting elected power in its representatives.

According to Hegel’s dialectics, a change in quantity will produce a change in quality. However, in reality burgeoning quantity subsumes quality: as the former grows, the latter diminishes.

The more widely fruit and veg are available, the less taste they’ll have; the bigger the concert audiences, the lower the level of performance – and the more people take part in politics, the worse will be the quality of both the electorate and the elected.

By atomising the vote into millions of particles, unchecked democracy renders each individual vote meaningless. What has any weight is an aggregate of votes, a faceless, impersonal bloc. Consequently, political success in democracies depends not on statesmanship, but on the demagogic ability to put such blocs together.

Tocqueville – and remember he was a champion of democracy – warned against this with his usual prescience: “I do not know if the people of the United States would vote for superior men if they ran for office, but there can be no doubt that such men do not run.”

When they succeed, our newly elected leaders fear they will be found out. Hence they strive to put some distance between themselves and the people who have elected them. They seek to remove every remaining bit of power from the traditional local bodies, which stay close to the voters, and to shift it to the central faceless elite, claiming all the time that the people are governing themselves.

The subsequent transfer of power to international bodies, which is to say as far away from accountability to the national electorate as geography will allow, is a logical extension of that process. This explains the otherwise inexplicable rise of the EU, for one has yet to hear any rational argument in its favour. 

Unfortunately, people tend to fall for post-Enlightenment rhetoric. One reads many well-meaning comments on the beauty of all European countries uniting in one happy family for the sake of peace, prosperity and overall goodness.

Those nice people don’t realise that the EU is a child of the Enlightenment, later Marxist, dream of a single world government. Instead of empowering the people, the idea is to enable a denationalised, unaccountable bureaucracy to lord it over helpless populations.

The EU also reflects the overall modern tendency to uniformity, which is a direct consequence of an overarching commitment to the advancement of the common man.

Again, this sounds lovely, but in reality that commitment amounts to truncating the social, cultural and economic pyramid, cutting increasingly large pieces off the top. This is noticeable in every aspect of modernity, from such trivia as clothes and food to culture and intellect in general. One can discern it in the extortionist taxation favoured throughout Europe. And it’s certainly noticeable in politics, with the collapse of the true party system.

More and more, Western parties resemble different factions of the same party, diverging only cosmetically in their philosophy or even specific policies. Hence, what we are witnessing all over the West is a rise of political outsiders seeking to circumvent and destroy the traditional party system. To some extent, this is an anti-Enlightenment tendency, but similar to it in its predominantly negative impulse.

For the time being, the greatest part of the political establishment stays within the post-Enlightenment mainstream, with its emphasis on centralism tending towards internationalism versus localism becoming nationalism at its extreme.

True to its origin, conservatism tends to reject most offshoots of the Enlightenment, starting with its rabid hatred of Christianity. In fact, the term ‘political conservatism’ was coined by Chateaubriand in 1818, during the Bourbon Restoration that tried, mostly in vain, to roll back the policies of the French Revolution.

That’s why conservatives dislike the EU, but unfortunately they share that feeling with fascisoid tyrants like Putin who equate the European Union with European civilisation, which they loathe. In fact, the EU isn’t Europe – it’s only a stage on the wrong road Europeans took some time in the past.

That road eventually leads not to liberty and prosperity, but to bureaucratic enslavement and hence penury. But few people realise this, which makes governments like Starmer’s possible.