Janet Daley writes in the Telegraph that she believes the European experiment with democracy is over:
Surely on this, he suggested, we could all agree: it must be the goal of the great democracies to deal with those failed states that “injure rather than protect” their own citizens. This must be the shared moral obligation of the fortunate nations of the Earth, the great thing that unites, rather than divides Europe and America.
What we share – an unfailing belief in democracy – has to be deeper than any present disagreement.
This is all very fine and very eloquent. The trouble is that it is quite wrong. Europe (particularly in the incarnation of Mr Chirac) does not have a deep commitment to democracy, at least not in the sense that the English-speaking tradition understands it.
The American Constitution may have borrowed much of its frame of reference from French revolutionary ideals, but the historical outcomes parted company pretty quickly. The United States ended up with a federalised system and an iron-clad Bill of Rights while France was descending into the Terror. We do not have a shared reverence for the robustness of democratic institutions because, in continental Europe, democratic institutions have been anything but robust.
That is why the EU is busily moving away from the idea of government being directly and transparently responsive to the popular will.
Daley is wrong about a few things – for instance equating the American system with direct democracy. The reason why we have things like an Electoral College is because the Founders were (rightly) afraid that absolutely popular sovereignty was indeed a recipe for anarchy. America is not not a democracy – it’s a Constitutional Republic, which is a way of creating a legal firewall to prevent popular sovereignty from sweeping away the rights of the people.
The difference being that the American system allows for a much greater level of control than a Parliamentary system. Americans don’t elect parties, they elect candidates. Our system has survived relatively unchanged for nearly 230 years – by comparison every other government in Europe is but an infant. The French government is 50 years old. Germany has been reunited under one government for less than two decades. Eastern Europe has been free for only a little over one decade. The only system that has stood for as long as the United Kingdom, our closest European ally.
Daley continues:
Public opinion manipulated by national political leaders has to take the rap for the hideous events of the two world wars and the Cold War that followed them, and so they will all be cut down to size. Democracy is all well and good in its place but the power of the people must be sieved, regulated and heavily supervised if it is to come to the right conclusions.
It may sound apocalyptic, but I do believe that the democratic experiment in continental Europe, begun just over 200 years or so ago, is coming to a close.
The European Union is creating what it hopes will be a benign oligarchy. Real political power will reside once again within elite circles (as it does already in France) which will conduct their business in the corridors rather than in the assemblies.
Meanwhile, the United States will persevere with the belief, which Europe regards as crass, that giving ordinary people power over their governing class is the only hope for peace and security. Democracy, and what it entails, is not what unites us, Mr Blair. It is what divides us.
The EU is founded on two fundamentally flawed assumptions: first being the use of positive rather than negative rights. The US Bill of Rights does not give anyone any rights. They are presumed to be innate. The Bill of Rights restricts the power of the state to take away those rights. We have freedom of speech, not because the US government says we do, but because we’re born with those rights, and the Bill of Rights specifically prevents the government from taking away those rights (within reason – one’s right to free speech does not give one the right to use speech to harm another, so libel, slander, or giving military secrets to an enemy are not considered free speech under the Constitution).
By comparison, the massive European Constitution is a hulking monstrosity that promises the world to everyone. I’m sure buried in the convoluted language and numerous subclauses the EU Constitution gives everyone the right to a fluffy kitten on demand. (With an applicable feline VAT of course…) The problem being that the government most certainly doesn’t have the resources to provide everyone with housing, kittens, and health care, and it’s an outright lie to presume that they do.
Which means that the promises in the European Constitution are either meaningless or simply false. Giving someone a right to which the state has no ability to protect is utterly pointless. Yet that’s precisely what the EU does.
If the EU were ever held to its promises in any reasonable manner, the EU would go broke in a heartbeat. The average rate of unemployment in the Eurozone is nearly 10%. Economic growth is stagnant. Germany, once the strong man of Europe, is facing an economic and social crunch. Immigration left unchecked has created a nearly permanent underclass of increasingly radicalized immigrants, especially Muslims. The murder of Theo Van Gogh in Amsterdam and the recent German TV exposé of an imam pledging the destruction of German democracy has only highlighted the problems that are growing in the slums of suburban Paris and the mosques of Hamburg. There are Parisian suburbs that are as dangerous and radicalized as Fallujah – “no go” zones for French police that are often hotbeds of Islamic radicalism.
The social and economic trends for Europe are dire. The rate of economic growth cannot possibly meet the needs of the immigrant population nor pay for the extensive social welfare states common throughout Europe. The labor unions consist of an unelected kingmaker in many European countries. In France, the government is run by the énarques – a group of students from the École National d’Administration – a school that produces nothing but bureaucrats and functionaries.
Europe is increasingly divided along a class lines, with the technocrats at the EU running everything, and an increasing underclass formenting violence and social unrest – with the middle classes getting squeezed in between. The kind of oligarchy that the EU is creating, even if a benign oligarchy, cannot stand for long, especially not in an increasingly heterogenous population and an economy that can barely provide.
President Bush and Prime Minister Blair are rightly worried about the potential for democracy in Iraq. However, they should also be worried about the state of European democracy. The threat of a far-right takeover of European politics is troubling, with Pim Fortuyn and Jean-Marie Le Pen providing a preview of what such a backlash would mean. Even more troubling is a Europe that has fallen under the thumb of shari’a.
None of these nightmare scenarios need to come to pass. There is increasing skepticism over EU integration across the continent — and that skepticism is healthy. Blair should not be in any hurry to push the UK into the EU unless the EU shows a true committment to transparency and accountability in government. The status quo in Europe is not sustainable over the long term – the question is what will arise to replace it? If it is the “enlightened” oligarchy of the EU, the future of Europe could be dark indeed.
I’m not acutely familiar with the European political system, but it’s no secret that they’re approaching a pending crisis, at least financially. The conventional wisdom five years ago was that Europe’s impending demographic crunch was going to eviscerate their national well-being before America meets its Waterloo, but that was before George Bush happened. Now, this country is at far greater risk of short-term and long-term meltdown than our neighbors across the Atlantic.
Our most pressing vulnerability is a post 9-11 foreign policy worldview, embraced by a majority of the populace and our political leaders, is that the only appropriate place for those who disagree with our nation’s values is in a bodybag. Within a matter of months, we went from a sensible War on Terrorism destroying terrorist cells to a sweeping “axis of evil” agenda that has put the world against us at the same time as we’ve spread military forces as thin as possible. Aside from the obvious risk of direct attack this poses, it also raises our financial vulnerabilities as an increasing amount of massive debt is being financed by foreign governments, who could choose to make us hurt if they get pissed off enough by pulling their money out of our debt financing. It’s actually already happening on a small scale with our dollar plunging.
Even outside the context of foreign policy, our national financial situation is officially as bad as Europe’s. With twelve-figure deficits as far as the eye can see coming in conjunction with a massive entitlement funding gap, the radicals controlling our government plan to further erode revenue with permanent income tax cuts and proposals for national sales tax and/or a flat tax replacing the income tax. Meanwhile, we have more delusional fantasies of spending a bare minimum of $2 trillion to privatize Social Security, roughly half of which will end up in the pockets of stock brokers in Greenwich, CT. One would think reality would thwart such ambitions, but reality has never stood in the way of GOP ideologues in the past four years, so there’s little reason to believe they won’t continue to march off the cliff now.
Add to all this an employer-financed health care system on its death spiral, an increasingly prevalent nanny-state prohibition culture creating endless new underworld criminal activities (many of which ultimately finance the very terrorists we claim to be fighting a war against), and the winds of economic globalization stripping society’s least capable citizens from the option of making a living wage (all amidst cries from pajama-clad blogo-trash that their poverty is a “myth”), and you have a nation in far deeper crisis that any in Europe that come to mind. And at least for 51% of us, we deserve every bit of the suffering that’s ahead.