When will our leaders face up to the truth that the
EU is a gigantic sham?
The ideas behind the
European project look even more hollow in the wake of the devastating
terrorist attack in Paris
By Janet Daley7:08PM GMT 21
Nov 2015
What is left of the European
idea? Whatever indeterminate reassurances emerge from however many EU
“summits” on security and shared intelligence, everybody must
know that Paris was the end.
The disastrously uncoordinated
response to the refugee crisis had already discredited the notion
that this was a unified federation in which all member states had an
equal voice. The grand verbiage of solidarity and cooperation simply
dissolved when faced with a global humanitarian disaster –
precisely the sort of event which the whole edifice was originally
constructed to avert. And then, with Paris, it became horrifyingly
obvious that the open borders policy – the most sacred of the EU
founding principles – was unsustainable. As Abdelhamid Abaaoud and
his army of butchers had clearly known all along, and the
migrant-traffickers were able to promise their desperate customers,
once you set foot on the holy ground of Europe you may as well be
invisible.
"Why couldn’t the
EU... produce a realistic plan for securing its external borders and
dealing with the migrant influx?"
The failures of intelligence –
about which European security agencies are now so exercised – may
have been egregious but they were also inevitable. How can you track
suspected terrorists across a continent which has not only dismantled
boundaries but deconstructed the apparatus which allows nation states
to monitor transit across their territory? When individual member
states can unilaterally throw out the most basic agreements – as
Germany did with the Dublin rules on asylum-seekers – why should
anyone expect consistent, reliable cooperation on
intelligence-gathering across national borders? Let alone any
coherent, mutually agreed stand on the policing of external borders.
After all, if there was such profound disagreement on migrant numbers
– as there was between Germany and Hungary, for example – how
likely was it that there could have been a policy on controlling
external borders that would be acceptable to all member states?
The shambles that was the
migrant crisis was predictably exploited by terrorists, but the chaos
itself might have been avoided if separate nations had been dealing
with migration instead of being forced to accept the consequences of
the EU’s failure to act. All attempts to institute some organised
response to mass migration collapsed with mortifying speed. Remember
the “re-location” solution, complete with enforced quotas on
member countries? That was met with outright refusals – and anyway,
nobody had bothered to figure out who would enforce the
“enforcement”.
Then there was the attempt to
bribe (sorry, to offer aid) to African countries in return for taking
back their nationals. The sum on offer was not nearly sufficient to
solve their problems of poverty, said the African leaders
unsurprisingly. (Not that anybody had considered the problem of
forcibly deporting unwilling African migrants back to their home
countries, even if their leaders had accepted the cash.) By the end,
even smugly liberal Sweden was saying that it could not cope and
would be – guess what? – restoring border checks “temporarily”.
It’s important to remember that, even before Paris, the president
of the EU Council, Donald Tusk was declaring apocalyptically that
Schengen was under existential threat.
Now, the outrage over what the
open borders principle made possible – the untrammelled movement of
organised murderers into and out EU countries – is being appeased
with emollient talk about how Schengen might be limited to a smaller
number of states or be modified to allow random checks of
individuals. But the talking shops of EU ministers can churn out as
many of these mock solutions as they like: governments are still
(mercifully) accountable to their electorates. They will do whatever
their people believe to be necessary for their own security, and they
will be justified in doing that.
But it is not only the free
movement of peoples and goods (which turned out to include
Kalashnikovs) which has come into question. Along with the right to
“tighten” France’s borders, whatever that turns out to mean in
practice, François Hollande also demanded – and got – permission
to ignore EU budget limits so that he could increase government
spending on security and defence.
So, to return to my original
question: what’s left? If national borders may be reinstated by
individual governments either with hasty barbed wire or officially
reconstituted checkpoints, and EU budget rules can be thrown out
whenever circumstances require, what does the authority of the EU
Commission and Council and Parliament amount to? Possible answer: a
largely useless, self-perpetuating, massively overpaid bureaucracy
presiding over Potemkin institutions whose deliberations count for
nothing when the lives of real people living under real governments
are at stake.
It comes down to this: why
couldn’t the EU with all its self-important, overweening
officialdom produce a realistic plan for securing its external
borders and dealing with the migrant influx? Possible answer: because
that would have involved exactly the cooperation, solidarity and
mutual support that the EU was supposed to represent but which we now
know evaporates under pressure.
The conclusion is inescapable:
the institutions of the EU are not fit for purpose and its conception
of democracy is a sham. There is a good reason why member states
cannot simply put aside their own interests and the concerns of their
own populations for the sake of a Europe-wide policy: because their
internal democracy is the real thing.
The governments of France,
Sweden, Hungary, Austria, Bulgaria – all caught up in this chaotic,
and now terrifying situation – are responsible in the most direct
and incontrovertible sense, to their own electorates. It will not do
to condemn this as “populism”. To accede to the wishes of your
own population, or even to grant that their anxieties are not
groundless, is the proper business of democratic accountability. If
elected governments dismiss the resentments of their populations,
then those populations will dismiss them. And if voters become
sufficiently alienated from all the decent political parties, they
will turn to the indecent ones.
"How do you subsume
the contradictory wishes and needs of different countries, each with
its own mandated government?"
This is serious. Even in the
liberal fastnesses of northern Europe there are growing neo-fascist
movements. Perhaps the EU has failed to realise how much people value
the hold they have over their own elected politicians.
So surely David Cameron has
missed the real opportunity of the moment with his list of four
demands (three of which are platitudes and the other one sounds like
an opening gambit) for a renegotiated relationship with the EU. It is
not just the UK’s position that needs to be reformed: it is the
nature of the relations of all the member states with their
transnational, over-arching institutions. The dream of the EU
architects – to abolish individual nation states with their
separately elected governments – cannot be openly admitted because
it was never agreed to by the peoples of those nations, nor would it
ever be.
So the crucial question cannot
be put: how do you subsume the contradictory wishes and needs of
different countries, each with its own mandated government, under one
super-European authority which has no democratic mandate at all?
As it is, the leaders of some
of those states will simply go rogue when it suits them, dismissing
the agreed rules and then perhaps, at a time of their choosing,
reinstituting them with impunity. Or else all the leaders will simply
ignore rulings which they see as unworkable and unacceptable to their
own people. Surely this has become untenable. It isn’t the future
of the UK’s membership that needs to be re-thought: it’s the
whole European project. Perhaps Mr Cameron might argue that we should
stay in – as he seems determined to do anyway – precisely in
order to participate in this reconstruction which even the principal
founding nations seem ready to accept is necessary.
The
Schengen Agreement
Photo credit: Alamy
What is it?
An agreement, signed
in 1985 in the town of Schengen in Luxembourg, to remove border
checks within Europe. It means anyone, regardless of nationality, can
move freely between member states without showing a passport or visa
Who is a member?
Not the UK. But most
EU states are in, as are Switzerland, Iceland and Norway. In total,
26 countries comprising 400 million people
Why is it under
strain?
Terrorists and mass
migration. Police checks have been brought in on the Italian border
at the request of Bavaria, amid a wave of non-EU migrants attempting
to reach Germany. Angela Merkel warns the system will be pulled apart
unless countries share asylum seekers. And Belgium wants more ID
checks on trains in the wake of the Thalys train terrorist attack
Are checks legal?
Police are allowed
to make targeted 'security' checks on the border, and states can
impose border controls in an emergency or for major events for up to
30 days. But permanent, systematic checks on passports are forbidden
What does the
European Union say?
Jean Claude Juncker,
the European Commission president, says the system is non-negotiable,
irreversible, and the EU's greatest achievement
What do Eurosceptics
say?
"Schengen has
now hit the buffers of the real world and is falling apart,"
says Nigel Farage, Ukip leadereDoJobRkVTZ2owcqBNtQ5UN-Wp">
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