A State In Search Of A Nation: The Eu's Novel Internationalism

Sebastian Calvo New York 2008 [email protected]

A State in Search of a Nation: The EU’s Disembodied Internationalism The EU Constitution is the birth certificate of the United States of Europe. The Constitution is not the end point of integration, but the framework for - as it says in the preamble – an ever closer union. – Hans Bury, MEP 1

A small group of protestors waited in the rain outside No. 10 Downing Street to greet UK Prime Minister Gordon Brown on December 13, 2007, the day afer the Lisbon Treaty was signed by his Foreign Minister David Miliband. 2 They were there to remind him of the words in his Labour Party’s 2005 manifesto regarding the European Union’s Constitutional Treaty: “It is a good treaty for Britain and the new Europe. We will put it to the British people in a referendum and campaign whole-heartedly for a ‘Yes’ vote to keep Britain a leading nation in Europe.” 3 Brown responded by claiming the latest treaty is no big deal, not the Constitution at all. Besides, the document is too complex to be decided by referendum, he explained; better let the experts handle this one. 4 Unfortunately for Brown, earlier that year his fellow heads of state on the Continent were busy announcing that Lisbon represented a new dawn of European integration; the culmination of a process rudely sidetracked by French and Dutch voters in 2005 when they rejected the Constitutional Treaty. The Constitution had survived, they admitted, but under a new name designed to avoid the mistakes of the past: “The good thing about not calling it a Constitution,” former Italian Prime Minister Giuliano Amato said, “is that no one can ask for a referendum on it.” 5

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Quoted in Die Welt, February 25, 2005, available at http://www.europeannocampaign.com/351.html Officially “Treaty of Lisbon amending the Treaty on European Union and the Treaty establishing the European Community,” December 3, 2007, henceforth “Lisbon Treaty,” available at http://consilium.europa.eu/uedocs/cmsUpload/cg00014.en07.pdf. 3 Labour Party Manifesto 2005: Britain forward not back, p. 84, available at http://image.guardian.co.uk/sysfiles/Politics/documents/2005/04/13/labourmanifesto.pdf. Note: European national governments use public money and the state-sponsored media when campaigning for a “Yes” vote. 4 Brown signs EU Treaty as experts warn UK will surrender control of immigration, The Daily Mail, December 13, 2007. 5 Giuliano Amato, Speech at the London School of Economics, February 21, 2007, available at http://www.free-europe.org/blog/?itemid=397 2

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This confusion over whether the Lisbon Treaty is a constitution underlies a more fundamental question: the constitution of what? A new state; a new nation; a new people? International organizations have long had charters, by-laws, bureaucracies; only states have constitutions. Enoch Powell clarified the stakes of the contemporary debate in a series of addresses in 1976, sixteen years before the European Union (“EU”) existed, arguing that Britain’s decision to join the common market had been about more than economics – really “a battle over Britain’s national existence and Parliamentary independence;” and “a fight for the continued existence of a nation itself.” 6 He framed the question as a choice between life as European provincials or British nationals, for “the acceptance of a principle of a directly elected Community assembly means one thing: it means that the Community becomes a State…it becomes a sovereign entity in its own right.” Like the political battle over immigration for which he is inopportunely best remembered, Powell lost. Successive British governments, Labour and Tory alike, succumbed to pressure from public intellectuals, economic advisors, and that pretentious apathy known as the “movement of history” – the inevitability of it all, and signed on to the European project of integration. Were they right to do so? Or was Powell correct in arguing that the new transnational body, originally designed to link France and Germany economically and prevent another war, had overstepped its mandate and was now using subterfuge to usurp British sovereignty and create a federal state – a United States of Europe? My intention is not to offer a detailed history of the transformation of the European Coal and Steel Community into the current EU, in part because it is painfully boring (that being part of its genius), but also because its structural arrangements change every few years as new treaties are incorporated. It is enough to note that ever since the Treaty of Rome was passed in 1958 creating the European Economic Community, there have been a series of measures deepening integration: the Merger Treaty (1965) created a single Commission and Council, the former being an executive with legislative powers appointed by the directly elected Parliament; the latter comprised of national heads of state; the Single European Act (1987) formalized the internal common market; Maastricht (1992) created the European Union; Amsterdam (1997) advanced a limited common defense policy; Nice 6

Audio recordings of Enoch Powell’s 1976 addresses are available online at http://www.sterlingtimes.co.uk/enoch_test.htm. See “Radio Enoch 1” at 16:00 for the material quoted.

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(2000) reformed existing institutions and deepened integration; an altered version of the European Constitution (2004) reappeared under separate cover as the Lisbon Treaty (2007) and has been signed by all heads of state. It seems set to pass by national parliaments without referenda, though between 65% and 85% of voters in the member states want one. 7 Whatever the EU claims to be on any given day, a normative structure has emerged with definitive characteristics that can be analyzed and critiqued from the perspective of traditional political philosophy. That structure is designed to transfer governance from national democratic parliaments to an array of unaccountable bureaucracies, independent agencies and international courts. It is part of the great outsourcing of sovereignty that is increasingly replacing politics with administration and is aided by an ideology that has deligitimized the nation-state as the source of self-legislation. That ideology has been analyzed by writers such as Roger Scruton, who has offered a historically-informed defenses of the nation-state in response to the EU’s claim to have transcended it, and explored the philosophic shift in post-War democratic theory behind the European project. 8 My ambition is more in keeping with my limited talent: to show that underneath the postmodern aperçus, despite the assumption that “History” has ended, and behind the Kafkaesque impenetrability of Brussels, the EU has effectively already become a state – a state which, as the result of the contemporary dissatisfaction with political life and the repudiation of national and cultural exceptionalism – of diversity in the real sense of the word – is dedicated to something altogether different from self-government or democracy.

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Daniel Hannan, I hate to say ‘I told you so’, The Telegraph UK, June 24, 2007, available at http://blogs.telegraph.co.uk/politics/danielhannan/june07/itoldyouso.htm 8 See Roger Scruton, A Political Philosophy: Arguments for Conservatism, (London: Continuum, 2006).

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Politics: A Permanent coup d’etat Public opinion will be led to adopt, without knowing it, the proposals that we dare not present to them directly. All the earlier proposals will be in the new text, but will be hidden and disguised in some way. – Valery Giscard D'Estaing, July 2007 9

It is not difficult to show that the EU is not a conventional series of treaties binding states to this or that course of action under customary international law, for that was never its intention. The intellectuals and politicians behind the project have long maintained that this new order is post-Westphalian in downgrading the centrality of the nation-state yet seeks to universalize or unchain the democratic achievements associated with the traditionally territorial liberal democracies. But these same intellectuals have argued strenuously that the European project, while involving a novel cosmopolitan right – and a new monetary unit – does not entail the creation of a new state, but rather “a new legal logic that broke with the previous nation-state logic of international law.” 10 Officially, the EU claims to be sui generis, a project without precedent in human history; a voluntary political association that is more than a league of nations but less than a state – or something different than a state. Before delving into the deep waters of dialectics and democratic deficits of section two, let us make a mundane analysis of the structures that betray the EU’s statehood, first by very briefly looking at the 76,250 word Lisbon Treaty, and then by showing how EU law is interpreted to impact member states. The Convention of Rights and Duties of States, signed at the Montevideo Convention on December 26, 1933, is an accepted model of customary international law detailing the rights and obligations between traditional nation-states as parties to a treaty. The treaty defines as a person of international law as any entity that meets the following criteria: a ) a permanent population; b ) a defined territory; c ) government; and d) capacity to enter into relations with the other states. 11 Using the criteria in this authoritative document, there is no dispute concerning the EU’s possession of a permanent population and well-defined territory. Ever since the Schengen Agreement of 1985 abolishing internal border controls, boundaries have existed 9

Quoted on the effects of the Lisbon Treaty, See, Words of Warning, The Times of London, July 28, 2007, available at http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/comment/leading_article/article2155385.ece 10 Ulrich Beck, Nation-state politics can only fail the problems of the modern world, The Guardian UK, January 15, 2007, available at http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/story/0,,2240950,00.html . 11 See The Avalon Project at Yale Law School, available at http://www.yale.edu/lawweb/avalon/intdip/interam/intam03.htm

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between EU “territory” and that of non-EU neighboring states like Belarus and Moldova as totalities. Maps showing the EU as a territorial unit are available everywhere with the EU flag in inset, the same flag that has now replaced national flags on the websites of member states’ embassies. That territory’s population is the aggregate of the all the populations of the member states. The Lisbon Treaty makes this population real citizens of the EU “in addition” to their respective national citizenship. 12 This means the rights and duties normally associated with citizenship are in tension between two overlapping jurisdictions, and as EU law supersedes national law, national citizenship becomes akin to New York residency. This is the logical conclusion to the “free movement of goods and peoples.” This change is made explicit in the election of the new Parliament. The Maastricht Treaty that created the EU provided that "representatives of the peoples of the Member States” shall sit in Parliament, whereas under Lisbon they are "representatives of the Union's citizens.” 13 And why not? According to a comprehensive study by the German Ministry of Justice in 2007, 84% of legal acts adopted by the Bundestag between 1998 and 2004 originated in Brussels, prompting former President Roman Herzog to wonder whether Germany can still be referred to unconditionally as a parliamentary democracy. 14 When one considers that the unelected Commission, appointed by the Parliament, is the only body that can propose new EU legislation, Germany is another layer removed from democracy. In foreign affairs, the Lisbon Treaty gives the EU the following legal right: “The Union may conclude agreements with one or more States or international organisations in areas covered by this Chapter.” 15 This gives the new EU an international legal personality separate from and superior to its member states. The EU will have a foreign minister, a “High Representative,” with the power to negotiate international agreements on policy positions formulated by the 27 heads of state who comprise the Council. This removes the power of national parliaments to reject or ratify foreign agreements yet binds them to their content. True, Lisbon provides that if two-thirds of national parliaments reject the Commission’s legislation, the EU must reconsider it – though it can be reintroduced when a compliant party assumes power. It is an altogether different arrangement from that 12

Lisbon Treaty, Title II. Art. 8. Id. at Title II. Art. 9 A.2. 14 See Honor Mahony, EU threatening parliamentary democracy, Free Republic, January 1, 2007, available at http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-news/1767864/posts 15 Lisbon Treaty, Title II. Art. 24. 13

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promised in Labour’s manifesto: “The new Constitution strengthens the voice of the national parliaments and governments on EU affairs.” 16 The Treaty also sets out the principle, covered below, of the primacy of EU law over the domestic law of member states. Areas covered which the EU is authorized to negotiate and oblige member states include everything already a part of the acquis communautaire, along with new law-making powers in civil and criminal law, justice and policing, immigration, public services, energy, transport, tourism, space, sport, civil protection, public health and, of course, the EU budget. 17 In particular, the contentious issue of immigration and asylum seekers, an area of law intimately associated with sovereignty, is removed to Brussels and the EU’s network of courts. 18 These are all areas traditionally associated with a federal government, not an inter-governmental organization. Further, the treaty converts the European Council into a permanent EU institution instead of an inter-governmental summit of heads of state. The Council is to function as a cabinet for the EU government, obliged to “define the general political directions and priorities” of the EU. 19 This new EU government is led by a new office, President of the European Council, who is to “ensure the external representation of the Union on issues concerning its common foreign and security policy.” 20 The EU President will be appointed by the 18-20 Commissioners to represent a continental government of 450 million people, none of whom will cast a vote in an election. One of the leading candidates for this new office is Tony Blair, who clarified his and the EU’s view on popular elections and public opinion when he dismissed British objections to integration by claiming that the electorate “don't expect their government necessarily to share it or act upon it.”21 From the very start, integration has been presented as a matter of historical inevitability; something the average European should know better than to opine on. The EU has for years intended to create a corpus juris, a European body of criminal law that harmonizes national laws. Now, sovereignty resides to a large degree in criminal 16

Quoted in Supra no.3, p. 82. For the new areas of “competences” found in the treaty, I have relied on the analysis of Prof. Anthony Coughland of The Burges Group, Dublin. 18 Lisbon Treaty, Title II. Art.62. 19 Id., Title II. Art. 9 B.1. 20 Id., Title II. Art. 9 B.6. 21 Timothy Garton Ash, Like it or loathe it, after 10 years Blair knows exactly what he stands for, The Guardian UK, April 25, 2007, available at http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/story/0,,2065549,00.html 17

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law, for it is the law that touches the individual most intimately. This is recognized in the American federal system that still allows neighboring states to have divergent laws on capital punishment. All industrialized nations have signed trade agreements that remove their national jurisdiction over disputes arising between certain commercial actors to an international body like the WTO. This has facilitated trade through standardization and predictability of outcome, and is also reflected in binding arbitration under choice of law. But criminal law is an altogether separate matter, one in which nation-states zealously guard their right to determine extradition. A European corpus juris would represent the final harmonization of EU law and remove any doubts as to the creation of a federal state. The EU has already moved in this direction with the 2004 introduction of its European Arrest Warrant, which replaces extradition procedures between member states. Consider the Commission’s description of what the warrant accomplishes: In extradition procedures, the final decision on whether to surrender the person or not, is a political decision. The EAW procedure abolished the political stage of extradition. This means that the execution of these warrants is simply a judicial process under the supervision of the national judicial authority which is, inter alia, responsible for ensuring the respect of fundamental rights. 22

This statement captures a number of key elements of EU integration. The word “political,” for example, is treated as a problem to be overcome. Politics understood as the ebb and flow of compromise through which bargains are reached that represent competing interests is to be replaced, “simply,” by a judicial process that itself serves to advance the EU’s definition of “fundamental rights.” It is an axiom of federalism that political alternatives protect the individual better than uniformity; that competing layers of jurisdiction are a check on hegemony. The multiplicity of politics implies a multiplicity of interests that represent divergent visions of human ends. It is a defining characteristic of parliamentary democracy. The EU replaces this diversity with unelected judicial bodies committed to the ends of “ever closer union,” shielded from public opinion or elected national representatives. This substitution of politics with judicial administration is a hallmark of the European project and represents a shrinking of the political horizon that leaves individuals naked before the central authority, all mediation removed. The member states are no longer free to dispute the basis of the underlying crime for which their citizens are 22

European Commission, European arrest warrant replaces extradition between EU Member States, May 2005 (emphasis added), available a t http://ec.europa.eu/justice_home/fsj/criminal/extradition/fsj_criminal_extradition_en.htm

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being extradited. This means that a UK citizen can be removed to Germany for an act that is not a crime in the UK without UK courts being able to inquire into the validity of the warrant. It places the member states in the same relation to each other as American states in the federal system. If politics were a commodity, the EU would be one huge anti-trust violation. The national laws covered under the EU Arrest Warrant are augmented by those promulgated by the Commission and approved by Parliament. Like the laws of any federal government, they reach the individuals of the member states directly and do not require enabling legislation by the national parliaments. Under traditional international law, ius cogens, signatories to a treaty must pass domestic legislation giving life to treaty provisions over its own citizens. The EU replaces this with the “direct effect” doctrine. In the 1963 landmark case Van Gend en Loos v. Nederlandse Administrative der Belastingen, a Dutch merchant challenged a customs duty payable on products imported from Germany. 23 Article 25 of the then-operative Treaty of Rome prohibited duties on imports and exports having equivalent value between member states. The Dutch government argued that until it passed positive legislation implementing the treaty, European-wide regulations could not have direct effect on individuals within member states, and as such they could not sue their governments before the European Court of Justice (“ECJ”). As stipulated, the court referred the treaty-related question to the ECJ. The ECJ ruled that as it had been given the power to interpret the treaty on a reference from the member state, the substance of the law embodied in the treaty had direct effect on individuals within the member states. That is, by signing a treaty that made no reference to the effect which its provisions were to have on citizens of the member states, the latter had actually transferred decision-making authority from their domestic courts to the ECJ. Under traditional norms of international law, the domestic effect of a treaty is to be determined by the domestic constitutional law of each signatory. But this arrangement, the ECJ held, is too cumbersome to manage the common market. Unlike a trade treaty that is neither self-executing nor directly effective, the structure created by the European treaties is “a new legal order of international law.” 24

23 24

Case 26/62 (1963) ECR 1. Id. at 7.

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Loos established the principle that citizens of any member state have a direct cause of action against their own governments for the latter’s failure to comply with EU regulations or directives. The precedent is analogous to the Fourteenth Amendment that gives life to the Bill of Rights within each state and offers the citizens of New York a cause of action against Albany if the state fails to meet Washington’s federal mandate. The logic which denies the EU statehood status while amalgamating to it every power of a traditional federal state is beguiling: Community law is valid because the treatise say so and the member states ratified the treatise knowing this; the ECJ derives its authority from these same treatise, therefore its rights to interpret EU law follows consistently from the treaty; and since international law is valid and treatise take precedent over domestic law – and all EU treaties are self-executing – the ECJ’s decisions flow naturally from the will of the member state’s people. Note that the logic justifying the judgment in Loos relies on the norms of international law it seeks to supplant. This recurrent method of EU theorizing – to turn what is being transcended against itself – will also appear in the deconstruction of the nation-state. Loos is but one example of the over 97,000 pages of law and court decisions that comprise the acquis communautaire. The acquis is a fundamental principle of EU law dating back to the days of Jean Monnet. It is based on the dictum that once the supranational body has been granted a particular power or “competence,” it can never be returned to the member state. Power and sovereignty flow only in one direction. As these competences are ceded by treaty or directive – or through ECJ decisions like Loos – they are incorporated into the acquis communautaire and become binding forever on all members. The acquis “represents the sum of the treaties and the accumulated laws which have been acquired over the years as the Community’s inalienable possession.” 25 The acquis is non-negotiable, and countries can only be granted a temporary derogation so they may catch up and find ways to meet the requirements of precedent. Eventually, all citizens of every member state must be living under the acquis communautaire. In response to Euroskeptics in Denmark and the UK who threatened to derail the Treaty of Maastricht over inclusion of the acquis, Brussels introduced the concept of subsidiarity. It is not without irony that subsidiarity is derived from a twentieth century 25

Christopher Booker and Richard North, The Great Deception: Can the European Union Survive?, (London: Continuum, 2005), p. 129.

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Catholic doctrine holding that all decisions pertaining to political arrangements should be taken at the most local level possible. It a version of the old republican adage that matters are best handled by those closest to them, and that local communities have an absolute right to determine whether they will surrender some issue to a larger apparatus. Under the constitutional scheme of the EU, however, subsidiarity means quite the opposite, namely, that decisions are to be taken “at the lowest level compatible with the project of the Union.” 26 It is the unelected Commissioners, not local communities, who decide what falls within the project’s proper sphere. Effectively, this means the Commission has gathered all decision-making powers to itself and devolves to member states those it sees fit. It is a form of federal preemption that occurs even before there is a clash between national and EU law. The Lisbon Treaty betrays this: “Under the principle of proportionality, the content and form of Union action shall not exceed what is necessary to achieve the objectives of the Treaties.” 27 Unlike the U.S. Constitution, which in principle delineates the powers that belong to the directly-elected federal Congress and those that reside with the states or directly with the people, the EU that emerged after Maastricht and is strengthened by Lisbon tenders this decision to the unelected legislature/executive Commission. Formally, the EU’s supremacy over the laws of member states is more comprehensive than the federal Constitution’s over the states, for the ECJ is explicitly committed to the project of “ever closer union” – that is how “what is necessary to achieve the objectives” should be interpreted – and not, as is the Supreme Court, to the letter and spirit of a decipherable founding document designed to balance state and federal interests and fields. Like the EU arrest warrant, the direct effect doctrine, subsidiarity and proportionality are depoliticalizations of the relations between states designed to remove autonomy from national parliaments and judicial bodies and place them in a central administration that is superior to the nation-state. This is perfectly in keeping with the functions of a state that needs to “harmonize” the competing claims of its subjects. It is not the province of an inter-governmental body but of a government. If a series of treaties create a governing structure that is superior to national constitutions; if the executive and legislator of this structure are one and the same; if the 26 27

Id., p. 168. Lisbon Treaty, Title II. Art. 3b.4.

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primary forum of arbitration is devoted to the ends of the executive – to an ever close union – and not to a rule of law that also constraints that executive; if a parliament is directly elected by citizens of member states and limited to rubber stamping the legislation of the unelected executive; and, if the laws of the executive directly effect the citizens who voted for the parliament that appointed that executive – it is difficult to deny that a state has been created. But what kind of state? What does it want?

Philosophy: In Search of a Subject The EU is what Americans would call a shotgun marriage. Vladimir Bukovsky 28

An ideological defender of the EU would likely reply to the foregoing with complacent bemusement. “You are mired in categories of old and the false alternatives of the national gaze,” he may say; “you have shown nothing but your ignorance of what the EU is about.” And he would be right, for to understand the EU, one must go behind its legal framework and take in its almost metaphysical dimension. Beneath its structures lies a new narrative of the state’s relation to the nation and the individual inspired by a fundamental repudiation of politics. Always lurking behind these new theories is the twentieth century experience of destructive nationalism. Consequently, most theorizing about the EU is negative: it seeks to avoid nationalism and transcend the nation-state without always being sure what to put in its to place. “The true merit of the European project resides completely in its artificiality,” writes former Socialist MEP and leading postmodern intellectual Gianni Vattimo; “Europe is today the most concrete and visible manifestation of an antinaturalist politics; a vision of politics as a grand ethical project for the promotion of humanity.” 29 By “antinuaturalist” Vattimo means, among other things, that the EU’s starting point is a different plane than the natural ties that have traditionally bound people together. The ends of the project are not the promotion of the interests of Italians, who will need to be dissolved as a people, but humanity itself. Whatever may have been natural about these ties, about this nation, must 28

Quoted in Paul Belien, Former Soviet Dissident Warns of EU Dictatorship, The Brussels Journal, February 27, 2006, available at http://www.brusselsjournal.com/node/865 29 Gianni Vattimo, Intanto a Strasburgo: sguardo sull’Europa, L’Unita, January 24, 2002, available at http://www.giannivattimo.it/pubblicazioni/editoriale24.1.2002.html

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be transcended for the good of something larger than itself. In contrast to the organic view that “the essential thing about nations is that they grow from below, through habits of free association among neighbors, and result in loyalties that are firmly attached to a place and its history,” 30 contemporary talk of Westphalia as the starting point in the history of the nation is born less by an interest in historical accuracy than by the ideological need to find a way to remake Europe from the top-down and justify an EU that touches the individual qua individual, not as Englishman or Italian. Unlike traditional inter-governmentalism, the EU seeks to build on a different horizon than a federation of intact nations. Any possible return to a sense of “we the people” that predates the new state being constructed threatens the universally applicable assumptions that steer EU ideology into ever greater abstractions embracing an ever greater number of people. National particularism, even if enlightened to embrace universal ideas, remains the enemy of the project as a source of a possible return, of alienation. As Vattimo says, the project is artificial in its embrace not only of a new legal order, but also includes a political and social dimension implicit in the call to “harmonize” across Europe and remove frontiers. If the whole thing sounds a little more than Marxist, Vattimo is happy to clarify: “The European ideal is a valid, perhaps the only valid, substitute for the Marxist project for the construction of a unalienated society.” 31 Ulrich Beck makes explicit the movement to sever democracy from the context of the nation-state: “The decline of the nation-state,” he writes, “is really a decline of the specifically national content of the state and an opportunity to create a cosmopolitan state system.” 32 Beck claims the new order will be a system, but we have good evidence it amounts to a new state. The system he envisions is not an interlocking of nations into a NATO-like alliance, but the creation of a cosmopolitan state that retains the characteristics of a supranational body – a monopoly on politics and the legitimate use of force, and which manages competing claims from a centralized capital. The argument that a nation is better served by removing its jurisdiction to a new sovereign even more detached than its own state is not convincing. If the national content of the state is in decline, why not go down instead of up? Why not devolve political authority to units smaller than the nation-state? 30

Roger Scruton, The Nation-State and Democracy, The American Spectator, February 14, 2007. Vattimo, Supra no. 30. 32 Beck, Supra no. 10 (emphasis added). 31

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More interesting is the view developed by Martin van Creveld in a thoughtful lecture on the future of the state. Creveld argues that the modern state derived its legitimacy originally from its peacekeeping mission and only later found a nation appended to it: “Born out of civil war, originally the state was merely a machine for imposing peace and quiet. During the later years of the eighteenth century, though, it met with nationalism.” 33 For Creveld, the state is either antecedent to the nation or an entirely separate entity without any natural relation to it but the accidents of geography. He argues that the creation of larger transnational bodies offers regions the opportunity for greater autonomy, something that should appeal to Lombardians and Basques. This theory, sometimes called neo-medievalist, sees the EU as a kind of benign umbrella that can better carry on macro-politics and devolve authority back to the historic regions of Europe, creating a kind of patchwork where Italy no longer exists but Lombardy, Tuscany and Veneto each answer directly to Brussels. It is not an altogether unattractive idea. Creveld argues that the kind of nationalism that led to the destruction of the European balance of powers is not natural but arose as “a harmless nostalgia for one’s own native customs,” that was taken up by the state for its own ends. 34 His theory is that a new regionalism can give life to those sentiments while preserving peace and managing disputes between them without obliterating distinctions. For example, he thinks the changes brought about by globalization can be dealt with best at a very local level and not at the national level. One problem with Creveld’s view is its optimism regarding the designs of the EU on Europe. As its laws make clear, the EU is not designed to protect local autonomy anymore than national independence. The removal of the nation-state only puts the sovereign executive further from the region. Creveld writes: Even where regionalization has not yet started, as in Germany, it is very often being discussed as one way of responding to, and benefiting from the changes brought about by the European Union. The days when statehood necessarily meant a movement towards greater and greater centralization are clearly over. 35

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Martin van Creveld, The State: Its Rise and Decline, Lecture at the Ludwig von Mises Institute, October 16, 2000, available at http://www.mises.org/story/527 34 Ibid. 35 Ibid.

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But the EU represents the exact opposite: a movement in the direction of centralization that goes beyond that of the federal republic. If Bavaria feels suffocated by Berlin now, how will it feel when Brussels’ laws have direct effect on them? How will it petition for redress in a confederation of 450 million when its voice is already competing against 70 million? There is no indication that regional self-government will fare better under EU rule than under the Bundestag. The EU is not MERCOSUR or NAFTA; it is a new state. What Creveld’s view may ignore is the role culture has played in forming the current nation-states of Europe. Whatever the disputes between Bavaria and Hesse, Lombardy and Naples, there are linguistic and cultural reasons to assume the nation-state of Germany is distinct from Italy. The neo-medievalist view short-changes the achievement of the nation-state as a political forum for competing claims within a manageable context, one that it neither universal nor provincially small. As Roger Scruton puts its: “A jurisdiction gains its validity either from an immemorial past or from a fictitious contract between people who already belong together.” 36 That cultural precondition to the emergence of a self-legislating nation – the collective self-consciousness of a people who predate its form of government – is succinctly put in John Jay’s now heretical Federalist No. 2: “Providence has been pleased to give this one connected country to one united people – a people descended from the same ancestors, speaking the same language, professing the same religion.” Today’s European theorists deny the legitimacy of the pre-political associations and ties that remain a qualification to the emergence of a unified nation under a sovereign state – culture in the broadest sense. Culture divides as much as it unites. By definition, its power of cohesion is based on its exclusivity, which is why EU theorists dismiss genuine culture, associating it with nationalism or chauvinism, and place global civil society in its stead. Universal culture is no such thing, however, for if every single person does something the same, like breath, it is no longer a cultural phenomenon but simply a human trait; an observation of the way things are. The theory of the rights of man at the heart of the EU project has always claimed to be just such an observation, a discovery of reason or nature. Yet the rights that follow from this discovery still come from somewhere and require a state to give them life over someone. 36

Roger Scruton, The West and the Rest: Globalization and the Terrorist Threat, (Wilmington: ISI Press), p. 24 (emphasis in the original).

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The declarations that promiscuously emanate from the EU either assume cultural differences have been transcended or, more likely, are designed to breakdown the distinctions between nation-states by advancing the supposedly universal culture of natural rights. If a nation-state adopts a universal ideology – and the democratic principle tends in that direction – it simultaneously delegitimizes the particular political society that gave birth to it, for universal democracy cannot abide exclusion. This is one of the contradictions of natural rights, one the EU exploits to expropriate the functions of the state. Liberalism can become a disinheriting belief system: it turns on its origins because those origins are not as universal as its aspirations. By being more “inclusive,” i.e. more universal, the EU endows its project with legitimacy and simultaneously undermines the opposition by member states. In the light of universal democracy, the nation-state’s traditionalism, even if internally democratic, appears “exclusive,” i.e. bad. This results once universality replaces democracy as the legitimate political end and is reflected in the contemporary language of inclusiveness and anti-discrimination. It is on this plane that the EU claims to find legitimacy as an expression of a democracy that has transcendence its origins in the nation-state and severed itself from political life. An almost identical tendency is found among American neoliberals and neoconservatives, who have shown either indifference or hostility to the role of culture and history, whether Islamic or American, and an obsessive commitment to universality and homogeneity. Beneath “regime change” and the either/or speeches, neoconservatism is inspired by a universal vision of a hegemonic ideology that is completely transnational, in principle divorced from historical circumstances or physical reality. The project to democratize Iraq, whatever else, is also a project to spread a particular understanding of man’s place in the world and the individual’s relation to the state that is assumed to be interchangeable and applicable “to all men in all places.” 37 Any critic who asks for evidence that such men have ever existed is quickly removed to the margins of contemporary discourse. There is a fundamental difference, for example, between having a transcendent component as part of a nation’s self-understanding (as embodied in the Constitution and God), and in reducing the nation itself to nothing but that idea abstracted from the people-hood traditionally associated with a nation. Neoconservatism’s

37

See, inter alia, Claes Ryn, A Jacobin in Chief, The American Conservative, April 11, 2005.

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revolutionary reduction places an undue emphasis on ideological conformity and turns dissent from that ideology into something like treason. 38 Consider this extraordinary statement by one of the movement’s founder, Irving Kristol: “Large nations, whose identity is ideological, like the Soviet Union of yesterday and the United States of today, have ideological interests in addition to more material concerns.” 39 It turns out the Massachusetts Bay Colony was but a precursor to the Project for a New American Century. The end result of this policy has been to replace the ostensible defense of Western Civilization with the exporting of a specific late ideology of enlightenment that is adverse to any historically-dependent political phenomena. 40 From Thermopylae to One World. That ideology, however, may be less universal than theorists lead one to believe. In light of the customs and mores of traditional societies, or even compared with the negative rights expressed in the US Constitution, the cosmopolitan right behind Beck’s claim and Kristol’s globalizing project seem more like a secularist and constructivist radicalization of a very western European, mostly French and vaguely Marxist, culture of enlightenment. This is one reason Great Britain has always had a tenuous relation to the EU and until recently resisted its reach far more than Continental nations. Beneath the debate over the EU’s legitimacy is an older battle between the ideals of the French Revolution and English common law. Common law accounts for contingencies and accidents, experience and history. It builds from below on the assumption that what works for a jurisdiction may be particular to it – or it may not. Common law is grounded in what Aristotle called phronesis and is embedded in a historic and physical past, not in a priori abstract declarations. It assumes exceptionalism and a national context. Universal common law would be a contradiction in terms – common to whom? The end of common law remains selflegislation and the practical ways to preserve it within a defined jurisdiction. Czech President Václav Klaus worries that the process of harmonizing laws across Europe is really a form of “unification orchestrated from above and the birth of supranationalism.” 41 Europe does not need further unification, he argues, but a liberal 38

See, inter alia, David Frum, Unpatriotic Conservatives, National Review, March 19, 2003. Quoted in Patrick Buchanan, Where the Right Went Wrong, (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 2006), p. 40. 40 The extent to which Leo Strauss’s radical critique of “historicism” is behind this view is an interesting topic beyond the scope of this paper. Perhaps Allan Bloom’s exhortations to get beyond history and culture were meant for exceptional individuals, not a nation’s foreign policy. 41 Václav Klaus, Some Doubts about the EU’s Ever-Closer Future, Speech before the Bridge Forum Dialogue, Luxembourg, March 8, 2006. 39

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order. Klaus is lamenting the infamous “democracy deficit” without perhaps realizing that the EU is not primarily about democracy but about a specific form of universal progressivism. Democracy as self-legislation, dismissed as populism by EU elites, has the uppity gal to get in the way of this program. The seemingly superfluous distance between the citizen and the governing body that characterizes the EU is no mere coincidence or defect, but an inevitable consequence of the ideology behind the project: “The essential source of the success of European integration,” one reads in an EC white paper, “is it’s independence from national, sectoral and other influences.” 42 To speak of a democratic deficit is to miss the full meaning of the project; it is to buy into its rhetoric without noticing its essence. The EU is about getting beyond democracy and on with the task of codifying the end of history through administrative edicts of radicalized enlightenment. 43 Paul Belien believes the EU selected Brussels as its capital precisely because Belgium is a country inhabited by three nations – the Flemish, the Walloons and a German minority – and developed an ideology of “Belgicism” to hold it together as one country in the face of centrifugal forces. 44 He thinks this model underpins the attempt to separate the state from the nation and replace historical jurisdiction with centrally planned positive rights. Whether or not Belgium was an EU prototype, it does represent a multi-national polity held together by an ideology justified on grounds of common economic interests. The other model that immediately comes to mind, of course, is the Soviet Union. EU intellectuals know that a disembodied state cannot foster the loyalty of the traditional nation. As a Laputan island hovering above Europe, the EU will fail, for its success depends on the mechanisms and pre-political loyalties of the nations it seeks to subvert. Former Soviet dissident Vladimir Bukovsky argues that to solve this, the EU is following the example of the Red Revolution: “The ultimate purpose of the Soviet Union was to create a new historic entity, the Soviet people, all around the globe. The same is true in the EU today – they are trying to create a new people.” 45 The new people are to be held together by an ideology disguised as political correctness, which the EU is already enforcing through directives and laws. Bukovsky 42

Quoted in John Fonte, The Ideological War Within the West, Foreign Policy Research Institute, May 2002, available at http://www.fpri.org/ww/0306.200205.fonte.ideologicalwarwithinthewest.html 43 Alexandre Kojeve died in Brussels in 1968 while delivering a lecture before the EEC he helped create. 44 See Paul Belien, A Throne in Brussels, (London: Imprint Academic, 2006). 45 Bukovsky interview, Supra no. 29.

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believes the emergent human rights regime foretells a Europe of thought crimes and speech codes akin to the Soviet society he fled – a softer totalitarianism. How soft will depend on how far the process of an “ever closer union” extends. With the introduction of a corpus juris, a European-wide arrest warrant and the continental police force EUROPOL, Bukovsky urges a march on Brussels to stop further integration while it is still possible. But if the EU is becoming a superstate, how can one explain the willingness of leaders to surrender their national sovereignty and weaken their own power to legislate and shine on the national forum? One obvious explanation is the global stage the EU provides politicians from smaller countries. Portugal, for example, may project more of itself (and its politicians’ egos) through José Manuel Barroso’s post as Commissioner than it ever could as a non-member state. As a national leader, Barroso could never have met with the presidents of the United States and Russia on equal footing. As Commissioner of the EU, however, he heads a bloc of nations with a larger population than either of these world powers and a larger economy. Some commentators also see in this development an opportunity for political adventurers like Tony Blair to bypass the national democratic process and deflect criticism into the echo chamber of bureaucratic Eurospeak. When the national electorate complains that such-and-such regulation is suffocating national life or curbing freedom of speech, politicians can point to the “shared sovereignty” of the transnational body responsible for the offending law. Increasingly, the laws that most impact daily life are the result of consultations among the EU’s unelected bureaucrats This protects the provincial keepers of the member states from their electorate’s backlash in the same way the governor of Alabama can find shelter behind Washington’s overreach. Skillfully exploited, it can become an asset on election day: “And I will tell Brussels we will no longer allow…” In a world where administration has replaced politics, this can be a winning strategy. “Today’s celebration of global civil society is motivated by a loss of faith in the public,” writes Frank Furedi, “and by a search for new forms of authority that are insulated from popular pressure. Ultimately, the shift of authority from the national sphere to the global sphere

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represents the outsourcing of authority to the expert.” 46 The authority of the expert and the role of ideology meet in the new human rights regime.

The New Human Rights In varietate concordia (United in Diversity) – official EU motto

In charting the radical changes Blair’s government introduced to Britain, Peter Hitchens observes New Labour’s enthusiasm for Continental ideas of liberty and their consequent disdain for 800 years of common law. “For the first time,” he writes, “the British people would have positive rights, which sounded attractive, but actually converted this country from one where all is permitted unless prohibited, to one where all is prohibited unless permitted.” 47 Hitchens’s comment may seem exaggerated until one realizes the way the European Convention on Human Rights (“ECHR”) defines “rights.” The Charter of Fundamental Rights enumerates and defines, with some specificity, the rights of each individual. Though some of those rights are couched in the language of traditional negative rights, their specificity and scope create obligations on the member states to actualize them by doing something positive, and gives the court the right to sit in judgment of any violations. As Isaiah Berlin has noted about positive rights generally, this obligation creates a reason or pretext for state action against certain behaviors that would otherwise be allowed. 48 Positive rights have the tendency to curb the negative rights of others. These new rights place an extraordinary emphasis on groups and classes: ethnic and racial minorities, immigrants, homosexuals, and in the case of the EU, anyone or anything not associated with the traditional majority cultures of Europe. These laws are informed by a deep sense of grievance and, like the accompanying rejection of national legitimacy, center around the concept of non-discrimination. The endless battles against “racism and xenophobia” and other modern crimes like homophobia and hate speech, 46

Frank Furedi, A tyranny of experts, spiked-online, October 5, 2006, available at http://www.spikedonline.com/index.php?/site/article/3934/ 47 Peter Hitchens, The Abolition of Britain: From Winston Churchill to Princess Diana, (San Francisco: Encounter Books, 2000), p. 304. 48 See Isaiah Berlin, Two Concepts of Liberty, in Henry Hardy (ed.), Liberty: Incorporating Four Essays on Liberty (Oxford: OUP, 2002), p. 166.

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coupled with a progressive vision of marriage, family life, punishment and human freedom, allows the ECHR to supervise civic life within each member state by exerting its influence over national courts. 49 This regime is the most powerful legal mechanism delegitimizing nationhood and tradition across Europe. Its rulings become the Union’s acquis communautaire and have the effect of real law. Most of the transgressions it purports to remedy are thought crimes involving reactionary or nationalistic beliefs, sentiments already in decline which, like Goldstein’s heresies in 1984, seem to intensify each month. In an infamous case out of Sweden, national courts sentenced a Lutheran pastor to one month imprisonment under its domestic hate speech laws for delivering a sermon replete with Scripture that questioned the naturalness and morality of homosexuality. The court reasoned that “the right of homosexuals to be protected from such language outweighs the right to make homophobic statements in the name of religion.” 50 Same-sex marriage being legal in Sweden, religion – actually, only Christianity – must accommodate itself to the secular state. When the Swedish Royal Superior Court Göta hovrätt overturned the conviction, lawyers involved in the case commented that the lower court held against the pastor in anticipation of what the ECHR would have ruled. This man was sent to jail so a group of activists, none of whom were present when he spoke, would be “protected” from his words. His right to practice his faith – the faith that founded the nation the judges were born into – meant nothing. The pastor learned that in the new human rights regime, the secular or explicitly progressive claim always wins, for they are the inspiration behind the law. He also learned their therapeutic function is to rid the world of the “hate” caused by his “phobia.” Criminalizing hate is like criminalizing love, or inordinate love – say, the love for one’s own nation, which may also entail the new crime of xenophobia. None of these crimes are defined or can be defined outside the ideology that created them; they are the very definition of thought crimes. Recall the EU’s arrest warrant; the implications are obvious: the EU will have the power to arrest anyone in Europe for xenophobia, and once xenophobia is defined as opposing the project of “ever closer union” or the “multicultural” society – which is what some human rights experts

49

One example is an ECHR decision striking down a British law on corporal punishment under the rationale that parental spanking is recognized worldwide as a human rights abuse. See Fonte, Supra no. 43. 50 Filip van Laenen, Free Speech in Sweden, The Brussels Journal, December 3, 2005, available at http://www.brusselsjournal.com/node/538

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have indicated – everything else follows. 51 As one of Britain’s most perceptive observers has noted, “the EU arrest warrant will ensure that legions of euro-sceptics are dragged off in handcuffs to be tried for such a thought-crime by the judicial hit-squads of the new world order.” 52 Former dissident Bukovsky knows, as only a man who survived twelve years in Soviet psychiatric re-education facilities can know, the hidden meaning of the word Tolerance. Yet the project marches on: “Just as the secular state makes the exercise of different religions possible,” writes Ulrich Beck, “so too must cosmopolitan Europe guarantee the coexistence of different ethnic, religious and political forms of life across national borders based on the principle of cosmopolitan tolerance.” 53 It is unclear what Beck means by political forms of life, but it suggests something different than the constitutional guarantees of a traditional liberal democracy, which stop short of giving quarter to a political form that is incompatible with its ruling principles. The problem of ends surfaces when two political forms of life vie for tolerance. Balancing interests in a constitutional manner, for example, is guided by the ends that society seeks to promote, ostensibly freedom that does not violate the negative rights of others. But international human rights law posits tolerance as the end of society. What happens when the two collide? How does a court deal with a petition from gay activists who want to parade through a Muslim neighborhood whose residents want to live under Sharia law? Who is to be tolerated and who is to tolerate? Is Sharia law one of the political forms Beck wants to

51

This has, in fact, already occurred in Britain. In 2007, blogger Ray Paul was called to answer a new charge, “Stirring up Racial Hatred by displaying written material,” for publishing immigration and crime statistics, investigating the connection between recent immigrants and the drug trade, and opining that Britain may become an Islamic state – all the while receiving death-threats from Muslims immigrants. See, inter alia, Police lie in wait for blogger accused of stirring up racial hatred online, Bedfordshire on Sunday, January 14, 2008, available at http://www.bedsonsunday.com/bedsonsundaynews/DisplayArticle.asp?ID=248045; and, Phyllis Chesler, Interview with Lionheart, January 9, 2008, available at http://righttruth.typepad.com/right_truth/2008/01/interview-with.html. Compare this to the silence over the threatening demonstrations outside churches and national buildings with placards reading “Behead those who insult Islam” in the wake of the “Danish cartoons” in 2005. No UK or EU authority has charged those men with “hate speech.” 52 Melanie Philips, Goodbye habeas corpus, Daily Mail, December 13, 2001, available at http://www.melaniephillips.com/articles/archives/000781.html 53 Ulrich Beck, Supra no. 10.

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protect? Is it a human right based on some complicated argument about selfdetermination? 54 In the clash between multiculturalism and feminism, some European elites have already abandoned the sisterhood for the burqua. After a wave of brutal gang rapes of Scandinavian teenage girls by Muslim immigrants were (belatedly) reported in 2005, Professor of Anthropology Unni Wikan said Norwegian women must take responsibility for the fact that Muslim men find their manner of dress provocative. Since these men believe women are responsible for rape, she stated, the women must adapt to the multicultural society around them. 55 Some already have: a group of traumatized Swedish teens has devised a modern chastity belt to protect them and their friends against rape, while others have resorted to dyeing their hair black or wearing hijabs to avoid detection by would-be rapists in the multicultural paradise. 56 None of this has prompted the attention of the Swedish human rights establishment that sentenced the pastor, the ECHR or any other international human rights court. Laws designed to combat “hate speech,” on the other hand, are invariably used to prosecute native Europeans who speak in politically incorrect ways about Islam or immigration. When the 20-year old daughter of a Muslim immigrant warned Scotland Yard she feared her father would murder her in an honor killing, the police refused to investigate on account of cultural sensitivity lest they be brought before a human rights tribunal. 57 The girl is now dead – but the officers were spared the indignity of “Islamophobia.” Yet, a year earlier, this same police force saw it fit to arrest a 14 year-old white girl at her school on suspicion of “racism” when she asked to be assigned to a lab

54

For examples of human rights doublethink over Islam, See Bat Ye’or, Eurabia: The Euro-Arab Axis (New Jersey: Fairleigh Dickinson, 2005); Melanie Phillips, Londonistan (New York: Encounter, 2007); and Bruce Bawer, While Europe Slept (New York: Broadway, 2007). 55 Sharon Lapkin, Western Muslims’ Racist Rape Spree, FrontPage Magazine, December 27, 2005, available at http://www.frontpagemag.com/Articles/Printable.aspx?GUID={3261BB96-7E07-4CCE-9DE8C2F7FB854E51} 56 See Fjordman, Muslim Rape Wave in Sweden, FrontPage Magazine, December 15, 2005, available at http://www.frontpagemag.com/Articles/Read.aspx?GUID={08C88AE6-74B3-4627-B42C-63E068365F58}; and, Swedish girls design anti-rape belt, The Local, November 22, 2005, available at http://www.thelocal.se/article.php?ID=2546 57 How Cultural Sensitivity Killed Banaz Mahmod, Free Republic, June 12, 2007, available at http://freerepublic.com/focus/f-bloggers/1849794/posts

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table with students who could speak English. 58 She was interrogated by the local constable and eventually released. The right to religious conscientious objection is another ancient freedom under assault by the new human rights regime. According to the EU Network of Independent Experts on Fundamental Rights – one of the many roving bodies that advices the Commission and Parliament – the right to abortion is a fundamental international human right, whereas the right of a doctor to conscientiously object from performing one is “not unlimited.” This tension erupted in a dispute between the government of Slovakia, a member state, and the EU over a proposed treaty with the Vatican guaranteeing that Catholic doctors in Slovakia not be legally obliged to perform abortions or assist in euthanasia. In December 2006, the Network advised that if doctors were granted this right – which many also considered part of their Hippocratic Oath – Slovakia “must ensure that an effective remedy should be open to challenge any refusal to provide abortions.” 59 Two months later, under further pressure from the EU regarding its traditional views on euthanasia, assisted suicide and same-sex marriage, the minority Slovak government fell and abandoned its proposed concordance with the Vatican, and therein national protections of conscience. 60 Such is the fate of self-government in the EU. George Weigel captured the essence of the new progressive regime after contemplating La Grande Arche de la Défense, the huge glass structure in Paris that houses the International Foundation for Human Rights. He asked: Which culture would more firmly secure the moral foundations of democracy? The culture that built this stunning, rational, angular, geometrically precise but essentially featureless cube? Or the culture that produced the vaulting and bosses, the gargoyles and flying buttresses, the nooks and crannies, the asymmetries and holy “unsameness” of Notre Dame and the other great Gothic cathedrals of Europe? 61

The justice dispensed by the ECHR, the IFHR and the other acronyms that suffocate political life is a new type of power, one that derives its authority from a disembodied 58

Schoolgirl arrested for refusing to study with non-English pupils, Daily Mail, October 13, 2006, available at http://www.dailymail.co.uk/pages/live/articles/news/news.html?in_article_id=410150&in_page_id=1770 59 E.U. NIEFR, Opinion No. 4-2005: The Right of Conscientious Objection and the Conclusion by the EU Member States of Concordats with the Holy See, December 14, 2005, available at http://www.reproductiverights.org/pdf/CFR-CDFopinion4-2005.pdf 60 Paul Belien, The Other Culture War: EU Brings Down Slovak Government, The Brussels Journal, February 9, 2006, available at http://www.brusselsjournal.com/node/794 61 George Weigel, The Cube and the Cathedral: Europe, America and Politics Without God, (New York: Basic Books, 2005), p. 1-2.

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sphere of international human rights law detached from any national context and exercised by an unelected caste of judges, itinerant prosecutors and human rights lawyers like Cherie Blair. Politics, law and civil society have all suffered from this attempt to redefine the exercise of power, and the people of Europe, reduced to provincials, seem powerless to break the Faustian spell over their leaders.

A Note on Perpetual Peace Did you know the EU has prevented war between member states for 60 years? – banner on the EU’s official website “Europa” The very success of NATO, together with the invincible strength of the USA, provided the conditions for Europeans to argue that war and nationhood were obsolete. – Peter Hitchens 62

There is, of course, another way; a different arrangement of international relations that preserves the nation-state as the home of self-legislation yet introduces enlightened standards of conduct between states and even addresses violations of accepted norms of genuine human rights within illegitimate states. Immanuel Kant proposed such a system in Perpetual Peace, a work which, though often cited by apologists for an EU superstate, in fact contradicts their fundamental assumptions. Kant’s proposal to establish a league of nations that could settle conflicts and prevent wars, a pacific federation, operated under the traditional model of the nation-state. Central to his idea is the requirement that the nations involved have a republican constitution, which he defines as the separation of powers between executive and legislative. 63 This kind of government ensures the state will remain responsive to the will of the people and be headed by a fellow citizen – not by an owner of the state who can push it into war. Secondly, the international arrangement he envisions is only between sovereign states and does not entail the creation of an international state, which would be a contradiction because “the idea of international right presupposes the separate existence of many independent adjoining nation.” 64 Kant’s goal is a federation of peoples, which he 62

Hitchens, Supra no. 48, p. 49. Kant, Perpetual Peace, in Hans Reiss (ed.), Kant: Political Writings (second edition) (Cambridge: CUP, 1996), p. 99 &101. 64 Id., p. 113. 63

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juxtaposes to a scheme that would weld them together as one unit – precisely what the EU advances through its “ever close union.” And herein lies the key difference between Kant’s conception of civil society and citizenship and that of the EU: Kant wanted to extend the scope and boundary of the enlightened citizen’s loyalty so it would embrace an ever greater number of people without turning on itself – without repudiating its own nation and replacing it with something disembodied or foreign to it. The EU, like the USSR, seeks to supplant national loyalty altogether and replace it with something else – itself. Whereas Kant sought to widen national loyalties, the EU means to erase them. Perpetual Peace even issues a warning against the type of superstate jurisdiction personified by the EU. The state of war that exists between nations outside a league, Kant says, is preferable to: an amalgamation of the separate nations under a single power which has overruled the rest and created a universal monarchy. For the laws progressively lose their impact as the government increases its range, and a soulless despotism, after crushing the germs of goodness, will finally lapse into anarchy. 65

The EU bears a striking resemblance to this universal monarchy. Whether the project is desirable may not be a relevant question for long, for even a mistake becomes a fact with the passage of time. The people of Europe can still stage a Waterloo and reclaim their inheritance and birthrights. Nothing indicates they will. The ideologies of national repudiation and universal anti-discrimination have undermined the moral foundations of the nation-state and replaced autonomy with correctness. Among today’s New Class Europeans, to speak of birthrights is to dabble in fascism; to insist on self-government is dangerous populism. The EU is built on the assumption that everything that came before it was mistaken, or incomplete, or a stage in a movement in its direction. This revolutionary ideal negates the past and consciously seeks to break with historical time. This also lets us know the project will fail – its very “antinaturalism” will destroy it, for history does not end and the present is built on the past. What the ideologues behind the EU loathe most – nature, history and differentiation – will survive them.

65

Ibid.

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