Читать книгу The New Totalitarian Temptation - Todd Huizinga - Страница 6
ОглавлениеThis is a book about the European Union, an organization that is exceedingly opaque, dauntingly complex and full of mutually opposing currents and interests. It is not surprising that the EU is poorly understood. But a grasp of the EU is necessary in order to understand international affairs, the global economy and the world’s most important alliance – the transatlantic alliance between North America and Europe. This book is not an “EU for Dummies;” nor is it a handbook that would explain the bureaucratic machinery of the EU institutions, or the technicalities of the EU treaties. Rather, it is a sketch of the EU’s essence: what kind of organization the EU is, how it is understood by those who are committed to the European idea, what its reason for being is.
Current events have made it more crucial than ever to understand what makes the EU tick. What are the ideological roots of the eurozone crisis? Why do so many EU leaders seem willing to risk exposing their people to more jihadist terror and to invite a potentially unmanageable de-Westernization of Europe by opening the floodgates to immigrants from a burning Middle East? And finally, what does all of this imply for the United States and Europe, the transatlantic alliance, and the world at large?
In dealing with these questions, this book is meant to sound an alarm. It is written out of great admiration for Europe, in the hope that Europe’s postwar democracies and the Western idea of self-government rooted in truth will not be lost to a new ideology – the soft-utopian ideology of global governance that has become the EU’s driving force.
THE SOFT UTOPIA OF GLOBAL GOVERNANCE
The European Union, rising from the ruins of two devastating world wars, embodies a longing for a world of peace, prosperity and stability. It is more than just a free-trade area, a customs union or an international organization through which the member states pursue their national interests. It is meant to be the harbinger of a new era, in which a cosmopolitan and harmonious Europe provides the model for a worldwide system of supranational governance. In this new world order, power is to be wielded not primarily by national governments on behalf of national electorates, but by an ever-thickening web of international organizations administering a growing body of international law and regulation, purportedly in the interests of a global citizenry.
The EU is, in effect, a “soft utopia,” engendered in the birthplace of the “hard utopias,” the antihuman ideologies that led to immense misery, death and ruin in the twentieth century. Unlike the hard utopias of communism and fascism, the EU has no political prisons or secret police. Despite its own deficiency of democratic legitimacy, it has helped foster the worldwide spread of democracy, free markets and the rule of law since its inception. Like communism and fascism, however, it is in essence a utopia – a political construct that seeks humankind’s ultimate purpose in a better-than-possible world created by politics. It puts politics before people, as it seeks to remake human beings in the service of its political project rather than to adapt the project to human beings as they are.
But the EU does not seek to realize its dream by force; it is too comfortable and too relativistic for that. The European idea itself remains amorphous, and its underlying ideology vague. There is nothing jagged or sharp-edged about the EU.
THE ENDLESS BECOMING OF THE EU
Despite the soft edges and vagueness, it is not impossible to delineate the EU and describe the essence of its soft utopia. The first thing to understand is that the EU cannot be defined in familiar categories, in the way that one could define the United States as a nation-state with a constitutional liberal democracy, for example, or the United Nations as a global international organization functioning as a forum for cooperation among its member states. The EU is sui generis. It is far more powerful than a traditional international organization, and its members are far more politically and economically integrated, but neither is it a European superstate. It is like nothing that has come before it, and, more than sixty years after the establishment of its first predecessor, the European Coal and Steel Community, the EU is still evolving, still in the process of becoming. And no one really has a particular end state in mind.
In fact, the EU has been in the process of becoming for so long that many believe the very essence of the EU is process – constant motion and change. Many commentators have said that the EU is “postmodern,” not only in the sense that it heralds a new, peaceful world beyond the modern world of nation-states and balance-of-power politics, but also in the way it exemplifies process rather than outcome, diversity rather than singularity, dialogue and open-endedness rather than conclusion, becoming rather than being. If nothing else, the EU is a fascinating and quintessentially European mind game.
But when all the vagaries, blurred distinctions and fuzzy edges are stripped away, the EU is essentially the following: a constantly evolving union of twenty-eight Western and Central European nation-states in which the governing and intellectual elites, in the interest of realizing an unprecedented degree of peace, stability and prosperity, are pooling, and thus relinquishing, significant elements of the member states’ national sovereignty, and doing so over the heads of their national electorates. The EU aspires to function as a model of global governance on a continental scale. Thereby, the most ambitious among the EU elites and acolytes aim to lead the way into a new world order in which wars will be unthinkable, or at least very rare.
Preventing war has been the noble obsession of the EU and its predecessor institutions from the beginning, since the European Coal and Steel Community (ECSC) was launched in 1952. Its members were Germany, France, Italy, Belgium, the Netherlands and Luxembourg. The essence of the ECSC was its supranational character. By vesting the ECSC with substantial authority over the coal and steel industries of its member states, the founders hoped to bind those states’ economic interests together and thus foreclose the possibility of yet another war arising out of national rivalries, especially between France and Germany. The ECSC was also an elitist project. The general citizenry was not consulted.
The ECSC was supported and fostered by the United States, which had lost hundreds of thousands of young men fighting two brutal wars on the European continent, and which, as the postwar guarantor of the free world’s cohesion, wanted to be sure that Germany and France would never go to war again. In fact, Americans were very active in pushing sometimes reluctant Europeans to support the ECSC. The United States would continue to be a significant engine promoting European integration, although the Americans, like the peoples of Europe itself, never understood exactly what it was they were supporting.
The ECSC was the first milestone on the long institutional road to the EU, which did not officially come into being until 1993. The immediate successor of the ECSC, the European Economic Community (EEC), was established in the Treaty of Rome in 1957. The treaty’s preamble begins by expressing the signatories’ determination “to lay the foundations of an ever closer union among the peoples of Europe.”1 The concept of “ever closer union” has been the primary motivating force of the EU ever since, and its careful formulation exemplifies three key characteristics of the EU: it is visionary and purposeful, but also vaguely defined.
With few exceptions, the most ideologically committed EU policymakers have always been visionaries. They have acted upon a vision of a Europe that would rise above the Europe of nation-states. Whether those nation-states would disappear into a European superstate, or continue to exist but be united through their common membership in a pan-European sovereign entity, the vision has always involved bringing about a radically new European order.
The vision is connected to a purpose. The EU’s objective is to establish a permanent peace and preclude the possibility of war on the European continent. Thereby, the EU aims to function as a model for – and thus help bring about – a global order of peace, justice and stability.
Beyond the desire for peace and amity, the EU’s vision and purpose are unclear. Just as the phrase “ever closer union” is vague and open-ended, the means of achieving this ever closer union and what it will look like when achieved are ill-defined, while the motives and the driving ideology remain amorphous. But this vagueness is strategic: it has served to maintain relatively constant forward movement toward realizing the vision, and has done so in a twofold way: (1) by bringing in governments and elites of diverse views and visions, while placating everyday citizens who would not accept a vision that gave a subordinate place to the nations and cultures to which they naturally rendered their primary allegiances; and (2) by preserving the EU’s room to maneuver and evolve, even while no one really knew exactly what it was becoming.
The crucial importance to the soft utopia of remaining ill-defined can hardly be overstated. European elites themselves are engaged in a perennial debate that can be summarized as: What is the EU, and what do we want it to become? To dismiss this ongoing debate as merely European navel-gazing is fundamentally to misunderstand the EU.
The basic disagreement goes roughly as follows: Is the EU essentially a customs union, a single market and a forum to enhance political cooperation among sovereign nation-states, or is it something that will ultimately subsume within itself the bulk of the sovereignty and independence of its member states, thereby prefiguring a true system of global governance? This disagreement often plays out along national lines, because of the different histories, interests and cultural values of the various EU member states. Take the three largest member states as examples: Germany, France and the United Kingdom.
In Germany, the vision of a unified Europe transcending the Europe of nation-states has always exerted a strong attraction. The Germans, admirably, have been wrestling with their nation’s history as the cradle of Nazism and the homeland of the perpetrators of the Holocaust for almost seventy years now. Patriotism has a bad name. It means something different to Germans than it does for perhaps any other nationality in the world. Even the general population of Germany – despite habitual grumbling about Brussels and a great unwillingness to be the payors of Greece and other eurozone members threatened with insolvency – is reflexively in favor of the European Union, and of giving up a significant degree of national sovereignty to the EU. In Germany, being a good person means being pro-EU, because being pro-EU is widely assumed to be synonymous with being pro-European and antinationalistic. Such a person has learned the moral lesson from Germany’s horrible past. He shares in the passionate determination that war should never again arise from German soil.
The French have a different view of the EU. For many it is a vehicle to increase French influence in Europe and the world, to minimize the American footprint in Europe, and to give outlet, in the spirit of the French Revolution, to the ideals of liberty, equality and fraternity. The French also stand to benefit from the EU in a way that is ironically reminiscent of the old balance-of-power politics of nineteenth-century Europe: the EU binds their rival Germany, and serves as an instrument for France to bend Germany to its will. Thus, whereas the French sometimes seem almost as committed to the ideal of supranationality as the Germans, French culture and history and France’s traditional rivalry with Germany militate for supranationality as a means to promote French interests and French national grandeur. In contrast, the Germans’ dedication to supranationality functions as a renunciation of any and all attachment to German national greatness.
The typical British attitude toward the EU differs greatly from that of either the French or the Germans. The English value their singularity and their national sovereignty, based partly on geographic isolation from the daily affairs of the European continent. They take pride in their history as the oldest continuous democracy in the world, and in the achievements of the British Empire. With this history coloring their perspective, the British are generally more attuned than other Europeans to the EU’s lack of democratic accountability, and they are more protective of their national sovereignty against encroachments from Brussels.
SUBORDINATING DEMOCRACY AND BENDING REALITY
In this book, we will engage in case studies that illustrate the EU’s nature as a soft utopia. We will see how, in the dogged pursuit of a more integrated Europe, EU leaders have overridden the will of the voters, rewritten history in their own image, and subordinated the merits of fundamental policy decisions to the far-off and ill-defined goal of achieving the European dream.
First, we will look at five instances of voters rejecting comprehensive new EU agreements in referenda. The salient fact is not that the voters rejected these agreements, but how the EU responded to these votes. In three cases, in Ireland twice and in Denmark once, the EU refused to accept the will of the voters. Instead, it forced second votes and applied massive pressure so that the voters would “get it right” and vote yes. In the other two instances, the failed referenda in the Netherlands and France in 2005 on whether to accept the “European Constitution,” the EU did not demand second referenda – because French and Dutch leaders had made unequivocal political commitments to accept the results, and because these votes occurred in larger and older member states with more weight in the EU. What the EU did to overcome the will of Dutch and French voters was simply make some cosmetic changes to the rejected agreement, rename it and get it passed as a treaty, which unlike a “European Constitution” did not require the approval of voters in most member states.
Second, the debate about whether to include a reference to Europe’s Christian heritage in the EU constitution grew out of an attempt to rewrite Europe’s history in the secularist image of the majority of EU enthusiasts. The attempt was successful – the draft constitution contained only a severely watered-down reference to Europe’s “religious” roots.
Third, European monetary union, the introduction of the euro, is the most momentous example of a policy decision made not on its own merits, but in pursuit of the utopia of a politically integrated Europe. It defied basic economics to introduce a common currency to countries with radically varying levels of productivity and economic development. But the decision was taken, in the words of some of its most enthusiastic supporters, explicitly because they believed a common currency would prove unsustainable without political integration. Thus, it would ultimately force Europeans to accept a politically integrated EU. But that didn’t happen. And with the 2008 global financial crisis that began in the United States and the ensuing sovereign debt crisis in the eurozone, economic reality asserted itself. Massive bailouts were necessary to avert sovereign default in Greece especially, but also in Ireland, Portugal, Spain and Cyprus. As of this writing, the survival of the eurozone is by no means certain, regardless of encouraging words emanating from Frankfurt and Brussels.
Beyond the specific issues of a common currency and repeating referenda, the EU’s utopian ideology affects all areas of policy and practice. The EU’s approach to human rights is perhaps most emblematic in that, like the ideology of global governance, it is transformative and liberationist. The global governance movement seeks to transform the world by liberating peoples from their traditional primary allegiances to local communities and nation-states with a common history, culture, language and values. Likewise, the primary objective of the globalists’ human rights advocacy is to liberate individuals from the mediating institutions, such as family and church, that are associated with traditional, community-based, locally rooted life and that imply an objective moral code based on an essentially unchanging human nature. In the globalists’ view, human nature is malleable, and individuals should therefore be free to transform themselves, to define and redefine themselves as they wish, unfettered by community, tradition or inherited values.
The belief in the liberationist and transformative right to define oneself and to determine for oneself what it means to be human is especially apparent in the areas of LGBT rights, women’s rights and children’s rights.** The EU’s approach to each of these priority areas kicks against the traces of traditional views on human nature and on the importance to the individual of deference to family and church and other time-honored institutions – especially those institutions that imply a commitment to an authoritative moral code revealed by God or transmitted through religious tradition, an acceptance of the limits of human knowledge and capability, and skepticism toward transformative globalist ideologies.
“LGBT” is the abbreviation for “Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual and Transsexual.” But the terminology in this arena is fluid. Sometimes, the term is expanded to “LGBTI” to include intersex people.
Neither the global governance movement nor the human rights movement associated with it accepts, in principle, any limits handed down by tradition or by the human experience of reality. Just as global governance, heralded by the EU, can bring about a utopia of peace and prosperity for the human collective, so can unlimited choice and absolute autonomy for individuals allow every person to remake and redefine him- or herself at will. This belief has clear implications for the classical rights, such as freedom of religion, which are based on an anthropology that is less fluid and much more compatible with the idea of objective truth. Thus, we will also examine the state of religious freedom and the threats to it in today’s European Union, especially the growing use of antidiscrimination and hate-speech laws to suppress faith-based views or practices that conflict with the EU’s conception of human rights.
THE TROUBLED WATERS OF TRANSATLANTIC RELATIONS
Unfortunately for the transatlantic alliance, and for the worldwide spread of democracy and prosperity that the partners in the transatlantic alliance have worked so hard to realize, the EU’s soft utopianism has profound implications for its relations with the United States. In the short-to-medium term, appearances can be deceivingly placid. After all, the Europeans are our best friends in the world. We are bound together by history and by commonalities in our culture and values. But the Europeans can also be our most tenacious antagonists. Anti-Americanism is an inevitable outgrowth of the European idea. As the world’s most powerful nation-state and one that jealously guards its national sovereignty, the United States by its very existence stands in the way of the EU vision of a world that has evolved beyond the nation-state. The same goes for Israel, which suffers unrelenting EU hostility largely because the existence of a democratic and proud nation-state, and moreover a country grounded in an essentially ethnoreligious view of nationhood, flies in the face of the EU’s supranational, postreligious and postethnic vision for the world. The fact that Israel dares to be fundamentally Western and yet rejects much of the EU’s perspective on the world inflames EU ire.
Naturally, fissures and imbalances are developing constantly in the complex U.S.-Europe relationship. What has often gone unnoticed is that many of the more serious tensions have resulted from the fundamental contradiction between the United States’ concern to safeguard its national sovereignty and the EU’s advocacy of global governance. This has been the key point of friction in the U.S.-EU dispute over the International Criminal Court. Even the near break between the United States and many EU member states over Iraq during the George W. Bush years had much more to do with this fundamental difference in worldview than most observers realize. Throughout the war on terror that began on September 11, 2001, many in Europe have opposed U.S. policy primarily on global governance grounds – they opposed the U.S. decisions to open the Guantanamo prison and to invade Iraq without a UN mandate, and they continue to oppose unilateral anti-terror actions by the Obama administration. Even as the civil war in Syria spreads to Europe in the form of an uncontrollable refugee influx and deadly terror attacks on European soil, a robust military involvement of EU forces other than the French in Syria appears unlikely to most and unthinkable to many.
Another enduring source of transatlantic tension is that the United States remains deeply shaped by traditionalist Christian faith, while secularism pervades Europe. Global governance and secularism are more closely connected than is immediately apparent, and this book will delve into the connection.
After pondering these aspects of soft utopia in the EU’s past and present, we will turn to the EU’s future. Today the EU is at a crossroads, having been shaken to its core by the eurozone crisis. Will the policy response meet with success? If so, it could prove to be a Great Leap Forward toward the soft utopian European dream. The policy response is now shaping up to be a transfer of an unprecedented level of sovereignty from the member states to the EU in the areas of banking policy and regulation, budgetary and fiscal policy, and economic governance. What does this mean for the European idea on the one hand, and for the EU’s already considerable democratic deficit on the other hand?
Or will the policy response prove unfeasible? Will EU leaders continue to talk European unification, but inevitably, out of the nature of things, act in their own national interests? Currently, the UK is acquiescing to the EU’s policy response to the eurozone crisis while declining to participate itself, being a nonmember of the eurozone. The British are talking seriously of repatriating powers that have previously been ceded to the EU, and might even withdraw from the organization. Could this mean that the EU will essentially break up, with the UK and perhaps others in its wake either limiting their participation in the EU to certain policy areas or leaving altogether?
In addition, there are portentous questions related to demography and migration, brought into stark relief by the migration crisis of 2015 and the terrorist attack on Paris in November. Will postwar European social democracy prove unsustainable given the demographic trends in Europe today? How will the EU cope with the unprecedented influx of migrants from a Middle East that is collapsing into chaos? Was the savage ISIS-inspired massacre of 130 innocent people in Paris only a foretaste of how a growing, strongly anti-Western Muslim population will change Europe? What are the implications of all this for the transatlantic alliance? Despite Europe’s manifest problems, are the EU and its soft utopia winning the war of ideas even in the United States? These are the questions we will examine in our appraisal of the EU’s future.
FILLING THE VOID
A final, crucial point about the European Union: the EU’s global governance ideology grew partly as an answer to the devastation of European wars, but also in response to a spiritual void. In essence, it is post-Christian. The loss of a religious sense of purpose has left a hole in the European soul, which is being filled for many by a belief in the vision of supranational governance. In today’s atheistic Europe, to put one’s faith in global governance and a united Europe is often a subconscious attempt to recover the hope for redemption from this vale of tears, from the world as it is, without appealing to God. The soft utopia that is the EU might be considered the natural, almost inevitable face of Christendom gone apostate.
The resort to unrealistic secular dreams in the absence of religious purpose is doing tremendous damage to democracy and the rule of law. But it’s not too late. With persistence and determination, the EU can be reformed. A democratic Europe of sovereign nation-states can be restored, and the United States and Europe together can renew the West’s commitment to self-government.
* “LGBT” is the abbreviation for “Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual and Transsexual.” But the terminology in this arena is fluid. Sometimes, the term is expanded to “LGBTI” to include intersex people.
