May 23, 2013
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I have always thought of myself as a European. At university I quickly learned that the formation of the “Western Mind” was a pan-European affair, from Galileo to Einstein, Descartes to Wittgenstein, Raphael to Picasso, Bach to Chopin, Cervantes to Proust. My first serious girlfriend was French and we lived for a while together in Paris. In the fifteen years since, I have worked and lived at various points in Italy, Germany, and Spain. All of this is courtesy of the title on my passport, above “United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland,” which reads “European Union.”
However, Prince Metternich was wrong when he said we would one day all call ourselves “citizens of Europe” (just as he was wrong about how to hold together the Austro-Hungarian Empire.) I am a citizen, a subject in fact, of the British Crown. And, as the Gospels note, no one can serve two masters, even a government.
The ultimate democratic unit is the nation-state. Yes, there are elections for the European parliament, but only a tiny minority of anyone’s electorate bothers with them, and only a tiny percentage of them knows what happens to those they elect afterwards. (They fly to Belgium, where they are highly paid to be bored and stymied at every turn by a bureaucracy so baroque and intransigent it would make Byzantium blush.)
I was deeply moved, and changed even, when I read the reasons behind men like Jean Monnet founding the European Coal and Steel Community in 1951 in an attempt to preclude another Franco-German war by unifying their heavy industries. I also remember Helmut Kohl speaking with sincere feeling of seeing, at age fifteen, a shattered Germany, every lamppost and tree with a soldier hanging from it, after his unit defending Hitler’s lair “The Eagle’s Nest” was disbanded and he spent weeks walking home through that global conflagration’s wreckage. The words “never again” still send a shiver and a stiffening down my spine.
However, this cannot justify a distant and arcane supra-governmental structure in which no single nation’s electorate can influence, but which can dictate both the interpretation of its member states” legislation and make it up as it goes along. It would go so far as to deny nations” rights to export proven terrorists to their less gentle homelands lest it breach their “human rights.” This does not breed harmony but disquiet and a contempt for authority, including for the governments which have ceased to bow to their true masters, the people, but instead to the mandarins and suzerains in their glass-and-steel palaces in Brussels.
When I was young, I remember seeing a pack of hounds hunting in the English countryside. Among them, certain young dogs were attached by their collars to older ones. I asked the Master of Hounds (the real “chief whip”) why this was. He explained it was so that the more inexperienced of the pair could learn how to hunt. However, he continued, if you left them attached too long, they would soon turn on one another.
I believe Europe has learned the lessons of its past aggression. Europe must now be allowed some of the liberties of adulthood so its component states can get up off their knees in their own way at their own pace. I do not know what shape such a future European Union should have, but certainly not the one its shortsighted and historically naive leaders seem to have forced upon it at the moment.
