Europe needs a re-enlightenment
by Marc Glendening, DM Campaign Director
published in The EuroRealist: September 2005

The floodgates of democracy have truly burst open. The stunning victories for democracy that were recorded in the recent French and Dutch referenda on the European Constitution will lead - whether the political elite likes it or not – to a major re-examination of the purpose and desirability of the EU in its entirety.

For 30 years the political class and big business have tried to prevent any serious discussion about this key issue. They have said that there was ‘no alternative’ to being inside the EU and that ever greater political union, including the single currency, was ‘inevitable’. Anybody who dared to challenge this view was smeared as an out of touch extremist motivated by ‘racism and xenophobia’. This strategy of political intimidation now lies in tatters and with, or without, the participation of the pro-EU elite a war of ideas on this issue will now happen in earnest across our continent.

The Democracy Movement is trying to play its part in forcing this much needed, long overdue, debate through its new campaign entitled Vision Europe. We are proposing that the EU be replaced by a new forum facilitating voluntary, purely inter-governmental co-operation called the Europe of Democracies (EoD).

This would fuse the roles of the European Free Trade Area and the Council of Europe. National parliaments would become legally supreme once again. EoD would thus have no law- making powers. Governments could not be tied into supporting collective positions on, say, foreign and defence matters they had no wish to contribute to. It would be a trading area, not a customs union. Countries would be at liberty to decide for themselves their trading policy with other nations. So, obviously, goodbye CAP.

Decentralising powers away from Brussels back to the national parliaments is a necessary, if not sufficient, step towards the re-democratisation of Europe. Other reforms need to be implemented, including possible greater use of referenda, ‘citizens’ initiatives’, for the balance of power between the people and the political elite to be shifted in the interests of the former. However, the French and Dutch results now give us a real opportunity to reverse the tide and bring about a democratic ‘re-Enlightenment’ in our continent.

"The opportunity now exists for a
Re-Enlightenment; a revival of the idea that those of us low down the political food chain should be given the opportunity to hold our rulers to account and freely determine our own destinies."

My basic thesis is this: The democratic idea was born in part because of the development of scientific knowledge and the re-discovery of the classical period that undermined the world-view of the Medieval period. This was an outlook based on oppressive religious superstition and the related idea that human society should be based on a strict political and legal hierarchy. Hence the doctrine of the divine right of kings to rule and aristocratic feudalism.

The European Enlightenment, which culminated in the late eighteenth century, established the revolutionary idea that the physical world was based on scientific laws and that human beings could come to understand their physical environment through the application of the power of reason. We, Enlightenment thinkers such as Hume, Voltaire, Diderot, Turgot and many others argued, were not the passive victims of strange mystical, supranatural forces and traditions that could not be questioned. Human beings, uniquely, had the power of rational investigation and capacity to make free choices, to shape within the bounds of physical possibility our own destinies.

This intellectual revolution then gave birth to the idea that all individuals should be equal before the law, that there should be free discussion of ideas, and that all members of a community should be able to give political expression to their beliefs through a democratic process. Societies should not be considered the exclusive private property of their monarchs.

In the context of Britain, Oliver Cromwell had helped to establish this progressive position a century earlier. Nationalism became strongly connected to democracy because if citizens could choose who their rulers should be and hold them to account periodically, so to should they be able to decide within reason the boundaries of their political communities.

The Enlightenment became firmly linked with the anti-imperialist struggle. Greeks saw no reason why they should be forced to continue living under Ottoman rule, Italians, Hungarians and Slavs rose up against the Hapsburgs, and the Americans fought a war of independence against the British Crown. The Enlightenment gave rise to democracy and to national diversity. Those of us fighting EU colonialism, I want to argue, are part of this noble, broadly liberal tradition in European thought.

However, some later Enlightenment thinkers contributed to the rise of a quite different, sinister political tendency that we are fighting today. The origin of this movement lies in the misapplication of the concept of reason. The belief was that the methodology of the physical sciences could be applied to human affairs. A technocratic elite, empowered with a scientistic approach, could ‘plan’ social progress so long as they had sufficient central control and the political power to make things happen and force non-conforming individuals into line.

This authoritarian mindset led to Robbespiere’s Terror. Napoleon Bonaparte’s regime became the lodestar for this new manifestation of political elitism. The Prussian philosopher Hegel articulated how a state in the modern, post aristocratic, Europe could combine the semblance of being democratic while giving real control over its citizens to a secretive political/bureaucratic (but not social, hereditary) elite.

Political diversity, the natural by-product of liberal democracy, thus came to be seen as dangerous. The role of government was to direct, organise and where necessary coerce in order to fulfil the collective – and ‘scientific’ - objective.

"As left-wing academic and cultural commentator Frank Furedi of the Institute of Ideas argued in the aftermath of the French and Dutch referenda, the EU supporting political elite fundamentally mistrusts the choices ordinary people and therefore want to limit popular decision making."

Just as what might be described as the ‘neo-Hegelians’ came to see free individuals as a threat to the organised construction of society, so too, especially after the advent of the First World War they came to view individual nation states as a threat to World peace and order, as John Laughland has argued in The Tainted Source: the undemocratic origins of the European idea. Diverse, independent nations needed to be disciplined like unruly individual citizens through the imposition of a higher, overarching authority that would force them into line.

The aim was to replicate at the international level the idea of the corporate state: a controlling body that would bring the divergent interests together and force them to reconcile their differences for the greater good as defined by the state elite. It is perhaps no coincidence that the European Commission was originally named the ‘Higher Authority’.

In 1926 the precurser to today’s European Movement was born and held its first major event in Vienna. First in Italy, then in Germany, and then in Vichy France, fascist governments came to power committed to the idea of uniting Europe politically and preventing, ironically given the terrible mayhem and slaughter they were responsible for, another major European war.

While fascism became terminally discredited after 1945, the idea of a Pan-European state, again very ironically, gained political momentum culminating in the creation of the Coal and Steel Community/EEC/EU.

It is no coincidence, as documented by Laughland, that many of the major supporters of this organisation had been involved in pre-war fascism to varying degrees: Paul-Henri Spaak, the Belgian who chaired the inter-government conference and produced the ‘Spaak Report’ that resulted in the birth of the EEC had been a member of the Nazi Belgian Workers party.

Robert Schuman, like Spaak hailed by the EU as one its ‘founding fathers’, was a member of the French assembly that voted for its own dissolution and the transfer of dictatorial powers to Marshall Petain. He then served as a Vichy minister.

Francois Mitterand, another former Vichy official and later socialist president of France and was one of the principal supporters of the Maastricht treaties and drivers behind the single currency.

Jacques Delors, president of the European Commission in the 1980s had been a member of a Vichy paramilitary youth group.

Likewise, Valery Giscard d’Estaing, later to become a conservative president and the principal author of the European Constitution, was also a former open Petainiste.

Of course, in the change political environment of today’s Europe, the ‘neo-Hegelians’ have had to adopt a much more politically mainstream and less overtly anti-democratic mode of justification for a Pan-European government. Of course, they genuinely do not perceive themselves to be neo-fascists. Unlike their more traditional authoritarian counterparts, they are not in any way motivated by anti-semitism or racism of any kind. They tend to use the language of ‘democracy’ and ‘human rights’. Occasionally, the cat is let out of the bag.

The neo-Hegelians should not be seen as being fully totalitarian, but, in essence, can be considered to be part of an illiberal ‘counter-Enlightenment’. They are better described as ‘post-democrats’ rather than full on anti-democrats. However, just like Hegel, they are happy to see real power reside primarily with a largely unaccountable elite.

The Commission is, of course, unelected and its members enjoy immunity from prosecution (just like Europol agents). Overtones of the pre-Enlightenment feudal, aristocratic order. This body includes hundreds of sub-committees that members of the European Parliament, let alone ordinary EU citizens, are not allowed to know the composition of. The Council of Ministers meets in private and 80% of its business is in fact conducted by civil servants (COREPER). It is an offence under article 108 of the treaty to in anyway try and lobby the European Central Bank.

Leaving aside the EU’s real-world undemocratic structure, a transnational authority, disconnected from a citizenship with a common sense of belonging or identity, speaking over twenty different languages, and without a single national media focus to help the process of holding decision makers to account, will never be properly accountable. That’s just the way the neo-Hegelians like it.

As left-wing academic and cultural commentator Frank Furedi of the Institute of Ideas argued in the aftermath of the French and Dutch referenda, the EU supporting political elite fundamentally mistrusts the choices ordinary people and therefore want to limit popular decision making.

He cites as an example of this elitist mindset Chris Bryant MP, chairman of the Labour Movement for Europe, who said after the results: "I confess that I am not a big supporter of referendums. I believe that they are especially inappropriate when trying to deal with the intricacies of creating a treaty".

Andrew Duff MEP, who asks us to believe that he is a ‘Liberal Democrat’, was equally dubious about the benefits of allowing his fellow citizens the opportunity to give their verdict on constitutional issues: "the experience [of the French and Dutch referenda] begs the question of whether it was ever appropriate to submit the EU Constitution to a lottery of unco-ordinated national plebiscites".

Likewise Tory Ken Clarke MP and New Labour economics guru Will Hutton in The Observer also questioned the wisdom of giving people outside of the political class a vote on the EU Constitution. Louis XIV and Charles I come to mind.

Like most illiberal ideologues, the neo-Hegelians believed that as night follows day, their centralised vision would come to pass. Each incremental act of economic union, such as the Single Market, would precipitate a further act of political integration, such the single currency, and so on until a de facto and de jure single state based in Brussels would be established.

This was Jean Monnet’s so-called ‘neo-functionalist’ strategy for integration, a prime example of technocratic, scientistic, thinking. Remember, for people with this mind-set, ordinary people outside of the hallowed elite are analogous to pawns on a chess board who can be deterministically engineered into thinking and behaving in a pre-ordained way. They don’t really think we have free will and this leads to terrible miscalculations on their part.

The French and Dutch voters, employing their innate powers of individual reason and choice, refused to go along with Giscard d’Estaing’s centrally (and undemocratically) conceived Constitution. The neo-Hegelian project is now in crisis, the ageing, rusting old battle ship with the enormous turning circle that is the European Union is listing badly. Without the new political powers Brussels was anticipating, the euro will soon confront big problems.

So, the opportunity now exists for a Re-Enlightenment, a revival of the idea that those of us low down the political food chain should be given the opportunity to hold our rulers to account, exist on the same legal plain as them, and freely determine our own destinies. Replacing the EU with something like a Europe of Democracies and national independence is, however just one aspect of this liberal objective. Democratic revitalisation & restructuring needs to take place within our own countries as well - the local political elites also need to be brought into line.

But liberating ourselves from Brussels colonial rule, just as earlier generations of Europeans successfully defeated other forms of imperialism, is the necessary condition.

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