24 September 2015
DECLINE AND FALL?
by Neil Tidmarsh
This week, the EU struck yet another blow against democracy in Europe. An EU ‘qualified majority vote’ has imposed compulsory immigrant quotas across the zone (though not in Britain, which has an ‘opt-out’). In other words, the giants France and Germany have forced the smaller countries of Eastern Europe to obey their will.
The question here is not whether quotas for refugees are right or wrong. It’s whether it is right or wrong to impose them on sovereign states against their will. The contradictions in that sentence, its illogicality, would seem to suggest the answer. If something can be imposed upon a state against its will, then that state is not sovereign. It could be argued that ‘majority rule’ is how things get done in a democracy, and tough luck on the minority – but that is to treat the EU as a state in itself rather than as a collection of sovereign states.
We shouldn’t be surprised. The EU has shown itself willing to sacrifice democracy in order to get its own way more than once before. Sometimes that sacrifice could at a stretch be excused for practical reasons (the imposition of unelected economic czars on states with ailing finances, for example; it seemed to work in Italy, sort of). Sometimes the sacrifice is inexcusable on any grounds (remember the Constitution which the EU pushed through as a Treaty instead, after cancelling the referendums which threatened to reject it?). And 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 stand up and effectively say “Hang on a minute. We’re not authorised to give away what belongs to our electorate. You’d be like butlers giving away your employers’ family silver.” (Though one – only one! – head of state did have the decency to say that he’d have to get the permission of his electorate via a referendum first.)
Europe cannot turn its back on the refugees. But that does not mean that the anxieties of the Eastern European countries should be ignored. They look at countries already embarked on brave, generous and praise-worthy multi-cultural courses and see (obscuring the positives) riots in the banlieues of France, home-grown terrorists committing atrocities in Britain, and jihadists rejecting the liberal humanism of the West to go and fight for violent fundamentalism in the Middle East.
The fact is that immigration on this scale is unprecedented, at least in Europe in modern times. No one knows what the consequences will be for the countries which accept them, what the effect will be on the culture and society of the European nations. Comparisons with the refugee crises of the two world wars are invalid for two reasons. First of all, those were crises of the existing populations of Europe moving around within Europe, not of even more people coming into Europe from outside (a sealed bottle simply being shaken up, as it were, rather than a bottle of water having more water poured into it). Secondly, the wars had depleted the populations of Europe, so the problem was even less one of accommodating increased numbers (the shaken bottle had been leaking, so there was even more room for the turbulent water left inside).
The president of Hungary, and indeed of those other dissenting states along the Danube – Serbia, Croatia, Romania, Bulgaria, Slovakia, the Czech Republic – may well think that a better historical analogy comes from their own back yard: the mass migration of the Goths into the Roman Empire in AD376, pushed west across the Danube by the advance of the Huns coming west across the Dneiper. And that didn’t end well for the Roman Empire – its military defeat by those very Goths at Hadrianople in AD378 was the beginning of its Decline and Fall.
Perhaps this current refugee crisis has already begun the Decline and Fall of the EU. One by one its corner-stones are being discarded in a panic attempt to deal with the situation. Two weeks ago Germany tore up the Dublin agreement, whereby responsibility for refugees was fixed to the country first processing them. Last week Germany and other countries tore up the Schengen agreement by imposing frontier controls between member states. This week other countries have followed their lead. And this week’s attempt to impose solidarity by introducing compulsory quotas looks as if it will do just the opposite – undermine solidarity. “As long as I am prime minister, migrant quotas will not be implemented in Slovakia” said Robert Fico, prime minister of Slovakia. “The migrant crisis could truly threaten the existence of the European Union” said Miro Cerar, Slovenia’s prime minister. “The EU has to work on trust and that has been badly wounded in recent days” a senior diplomat was quoted as saying in the Times. “If it is a mortal injury then the future of the union itself is under threat, beginning with Schengen.”
It’s no surprise, either, that the EU’s institutions, in their characteristically myopic and self-regarding way, seem unaware of these ominous developments and blythly carry on with their job of spending Europe’s money on themselves. A few months ago, MEPs awarded themselves an extra €18,000 a year each in allowances for assistants, increasing the annual staffing budget to €275,000 each. This means that an additional 300 offices will have to be built – on top of the €124 million 12 storey block for assistants which is currently under construction. Over just two decades, €3 billion has been spent on the parliament buildings in Brussels; but an unpublished report commented on in the Times this week says that the assembly only has “a useful life of 20 years” and insists that it will need a complete overhaul in the very near future. The parliament’s buildings in Strasbourg were purchased for £500 million eight years ago; but they are unoccupied for nine months of the year (though MEPs trek from Brussels to Strasbourg once a month – how much does that cost us?), and now there are plans to build a new centre there to publicise their work, which will cost over €20 million if its model, the Parliamentarian in Brussels, is anything to go by.
Brussels fiddles while the EU burns.
