Democracy went down in a blaze of glory last week. Both the German Bundestag and our own House of Commons put up one hell of a fight against the dying of the light. Maybe history will record that fact in an elegy on the demise of the great 18th-century experiment in government by the people: they were eloquent to the end. Because at the end, eloquence was all they had.Trying to hold back the resurgence of oligarchy
... derived from the Greek words oliÂgos,
a fewand the verb archo,
to rule, to govern, to command. Oligarchies are invariably effectual rather than established, to whit, they disguise themselves as other systems, working as the real government behind the face of of democracy, fascism, socialism, monarchy, or what have you...
-- the final dismantling of democratic responsibility in the governing of Europe -- has been looking pretty hopeless for a long time. That eruption of excellent rhetoric and faultless argument which sprang to the defence of the rights of the governed (and in Germany's case, of constitutional legality) made the loss seem all the more tragic, but no less inevitable.
I'm beginning to wonder why we have constitutions if we're going to spend all our time ignoring them...
So this is where we are. The agreed EU "stability union"I just heard Otto I chuckling in his grave...
triumphantly paraded before the media in Brussels will have the power to approve or disapprove budgets of countries in the eurozone -- that is, to vet and police them -- before they are submitted to the elected parliaments of those countries.
"We rule, you approve."
In other words, parliaments which are directly mandated by, and answerable to, their own populations will not control the most essential functions of government: decisions on taxation and spending. Even without the ultimate institutions of economic and political union, which still elude the EU, actual power over fiscal policy will be taken from the hands of national leaders. And if, as a voter, you cannot influence your prospective government's tax and spending policies, what exactly are you voting for?
Britannia being outside the eurozone, we will not have to present our fiscal arrangements for authorisation before submitting them to the scrutiny of our politicians (and their constituents).
But since our own economic recovery relies so heavily on the stability of the euro, we find ourselves (or at least, George Osborne has found himself) enthusiastically supporting this rape of democratic principle in countries which regard their freedom and self-determination as precious in much the same way, remarkably enough, that free-born Englishmen do.And among those hapless, soon-to-be-disenfranchised peoples, hatreds have been awakened that the EU was, ironically, designed to bury. The Greeks hugely resent what they consider to be the implicitly racist contempt of the Germans: the political opposition in Athens on both Left and Right rejects the idea of being "bailed out" of a crisis (with all the compliance that entails) that they believe to have been caused by the artificial constraints of euro membership rather than by national character flaws. Even their moderate spokesmen are beginning to characterise Germany's economic impositions as a revival of its wartime attempt at conquest.
This is the natural consequence of the European Union. If you're going to build a European nation then you're not going to have a German or a French or a Czech or a British nation. All will be subsumed into the new Holy Roman Empire.
But the new Empire's greatest weakness is precisely that willingness to trample over constitutions. It's also the product of a "constitution," to whit the agreements bringing it into existence. Until it manages to do away with the last vestiges of the historic European states it depends on the voluntary compliance of its members with its Imperial edicts. It has no legions to dispatch to enforce its will, and sanctions, as we've seen demonstrated time after time in the past twenty or thirty years, don't cut the Gray Poupon. That doesn't say that the legions won't come into existence at some point in the future, and that brings up the danger of the war the EU was supposed to render obsolete. Pretensions to universal dominion usually lead in that direction, or so the ghost of M. Bonapart informs me.