17 December 2015
The Monopoly On Violence
Brussels proposes to arm itself for our protection
by Neil Tidmarsh
This week, the European Commission president Jean-Claude Juncker proposed an EU paramilitary force to police the EU’s borders. It would have the authority to intervene in a member country without permission from that country’s government. The plan (backed by Brussels, Berlin and Paris) will be put forward at this week’s two-day EU summit.
The question here is not whether this is a good or bad idea in itself. Elsewhere in this issue, Shaw Sheet argues in favour of sensible internationalism and the need for trans-national action in today’s world. Earlier this year Mr Juncker floated ideas for an EU secret service; many people who found them sinister at the time (or even downright frightening, given the hot water he got into about the secret service of Belgium when prime minister of that country) may well think them entirely sensible now, in the aftermath of the recent tragedies in Paris.
The question is rather whether and how such a plan would be given the necessary democratic approval. The EU is proposing to give itself an armed force which it can deploy in member countries, in defiance of the wishes of those countries’ sovereign governments if necessary. Such a force would only be legitimate if established by and operated with the permission of the citizens of the EU. Is the EU intending to seek that endorsement? How will it go about securing that approval?
The precedents do not bode well. The infamous and ill-fated EU Constitution proposed an EU armed force; but the promised referendums were cancelled after just two countries voted against it; sneakily, the Constitution (minus the defence clause) was then changed to a Treaty and forced through by the heads of state over the heads of their citizens. And then there was that panic-stricken summit hard on the heels of the credit crunch, where the head of every Eurozone state would have been stampeded into surrendering a slice of their country’s sovereignty to the Central Bank if Mr Cameron hadn’t had the courage to remind them that they weren’t authorised to give away what belongs to their electorates (though one head of state – only one! – did have the decency to say that he’d have to get the permission of his electorate via a referendum first).
And here we are again, with another panic-stricken but arguably sensible proposal threatening to cut corners because of the seriousness of the situation it is trying to address, and probably doomed to failure because of it. The corners it is threatening to cut are important ones, but ones for which the EU has previously shown little regard; they are the democratic rights of the citizens of Europe. They shouldn’t be the corners of the European project at all, but its very core. The fact that they aren’t at its core explains to some extent why it has failed in every one of the crises which have tested it recently – the economic emergencies of the southern members, mass immigration, Russian assertion and Middle Eastern chaos. If it had built itself in step with its citizens’ wishes instead of arrogantly ahead of them, then it would have the necessary cohesion and legitimacy to pursue more rigorous and effective solutions. Instead, it is now having to resort to seat-of-the-trousers fire-fighting policies many of which seem to arrogantly ignore the will of the people.
As it is, the EU feels that it cannot go backwards now, but only forwards towards that ever-closer union. More power to the political masters, less to the individual states and even less to the individual citizens. In any civilised country (with the curious exception of the USA), the state must have a monopoly on violence; this is usually taken to mean ‘the state as opposed to the individual citizen’, but equally could mean ‘the state as opposed to some supra-state authority’. So the EU would argue that it must turn itself into a state if the bodies necessary for the safety and prosperity of Europe such as the proposed armed border-guards are to be established. But is this what the people of Europe want?
The Times quotes sources from countries in eastern and southern Europe condemning the plan as “incompatible with democracy”. Poland’s foreign minister Witold Waszczykowski said “For it to be a structure independent from nation states is astounding… an undemocratic structure reporting to no one knows who”. The MEP and Conservative spokesman on European defence Geoffrey Van Orden described it as “the thin end of a very dangerous wedge.” It would indeed be a relatively small step from an armed border guard to an actual army.
But to speculate on the ways in which such a force could be misused by an unscrupulous European authority in the future would be to digress. The immediate danger is, of course, that many citizens of Europe now feel excluded from power and denied their democratic rights, and are turning to questionable parties which invitingly promise to restore them. The prime example is last week’s regional council elections in France; the National Front would have gained at least two of the thirteen regions if the Socialists hadn’t joined with the Republicans to keep them out. If the votes for the nation are considered as a whole the National Front are now running more or less neck-and-neck with the two mainstream parties.
The democratic deficit is one of three areas which David Cameron should be pushing the EU to reform (the other two are its lack of transparency and its financial irresponsibility) but inexplicably he isn’t. If he were, then Europeans of goodwill inside and outside the UK, inside and outside the Brussels bubble, would be cheering him on in a way that they aren’t at the moment.
Incidentally, today is the anniversary of the Boston Tea Party, and this year is of course the anniversary of Magna Carta. Both remind us of what happens to arrogant political elites who believe they can deploy armed forces on what they consider to be their own territory and in what they consider to be their own state’s good, without first securing the will of the people.
