While waiting for the end of week EU summit - and no, Bing didn't phone incidentally - my thoughts turn to what Europe is about. It's good to have outsiders; they force you to think. And I wrote the screed below.
It's funny, as soon as you write something you stop believing it - so it is in my case. After the piece defending Europe - and I sometimes wonder why I do this - I thought, this is complete nonsense. Anyways.
"...the EU is *not* an heir to the constructivist society of communist Russia, not an heir to the French revolution. It is not run by a revolutionary, unaccountable cadre of irreligious zealots and fanatics, all speaking French and producing pyramids of corpses in the abstract interests of Mankind. (The EU has never killed anyone, unlike the US.)
I used to think so, at university and living in the UK. Many British and American academics sitting in Oxford or wherever probably think so still, in their deluded fantasy.
But practical experience - occasionally useful you know, to have practical experience of something - of Brussels tells me it is ivery different. There are just too many checks and balances, too many different national interests, too many actors - the whole corporate, legal, NGO world is THERE, represented, including from the US. (And there are many nations and actors that are religious.. Others are not....it's not an issue) So many of them would cry foul at the slightest infraction on freedom. There are literally hundreds of meetings every day of expert groups, seminars, between all areas of business, finance, civil service and politics of mature democracies in the square miles that comprise the EU capital.
There is highly transparent decision making, monitored by the world's largest press corps. Everything is online, every commission official is contactable.
Everything has to go through multiple stages of verification. This is how the EU legislative process works: everyone has a say:
If you went to Brussels, and bumped in Mandela one day, the chairman of Texaco and ultracapitalist the next, a left wing NGO scurrying through the corridors on the third, and you spouted your stuff about the new Soviet Union, they would laugh at you. Elitist, yes.
But not totalitarian, not centralised. And it takes years to get a decision through that satisfies everyone.
It is the place of European - and globalised - dealmakers, got that? It is the City of London/New York Stock Exchange of world politics;Europe at the core, the rest of the world in concentric circles.The same international elite that goes to the city to make money goes to Brussels to lobby for financial legislation.
Every evening, the global elite with their briefcases get on the eurostar high speed trains back to London, under the channel, to Paris, to Dusseldorf....
Now my conceit about it being a Burkean aristocracy is this.
These "players" act in moderation to each other as aristocrats in the English parliament did of yore. The EU is not democratic - does not fish for the votes of the single mother of Birmingham or the Amsterdam ethnic street youth - it is no more a democracy that pre 1832 reform act England was. But aristocracies can sometimes make for better legislation, and make for better preservation of freedoms, and guarantee the rule of law, than democracies - especially populist democracies of interwar east Europe that persecuted Jews, or the revolutionary people's democracies that quickly turned totalitarian of France/Russia post 1789/1917.
In fact there are more checks and balances than in the modern UK. While British political instincts are good - its people are more tolerant and open to argument than continentals - the system at the moment is close to an elective dictatorship. That is, once elections are held, the ruling party and government always has a majority in parliament, MPs always vote with their government because they want jobs in govt. The revising chamber, the House of lords, is weak.
Tony Bliar has lost one or two votes in the last decade. It is not the same as parliament of Burke's era, when MPs were unwhipped and just voted with the best argument.
The closes approximation to the House of commons of say 1780 is actually the European parliament, where I have spent god knows how much time. Because MEPs (members of the European parliament) cannot get jobs in govt, I guess they are like the senate, they cannot be bribed into loyalty. They are a genuine revising chamber, looking at arguments on their merits. This is where reasoned, moderate Burkean rumination goes on.
Because of this elective dictatorship in the UK, I always tell lobbyists that if they want something done they should go to Brussels. Why? Because the effective British opposition at the moment is not the conservative party (which under the system always loses every parliamentary vote), it is MEPs and - above all - -those nation states who oppose those bits of legislation that, say, the British govt wants to introduce. Lobby for instance the French or Danish government; they have real power to oppose Blair. The British parliament does not.
As you know, European law precedes nation state law, it is an increasingly federal system, with nation states akin to US states, and Brussels like Washington. Probably sixty percent of legislation coming into the statute book of any given country come from Brussels; the rest are "local", ie nation state, issues. The nation state also has some powers to revise or adapt the general directives coming from Brussels.
But it is at the nation state level where the balance of power is dysfunctional. Ie the supra level is "balanced", and subject to checks and balances, it is when we get down to the UK level that we have elective dictatorship.
That is why Blair likes going to war. War is still a nation state issue. He has complete omnipotent powers here. More than he has about say, fish stocks or civil liberties.
