Bookshelf Europe's Anti-Democratic Agenda
May 02, 2011
People watching developments in Europe should ask themselves two questions. Why, in an integrated Europe, will all the main levers of political power be divided between three unaccountable institutions--the central bank, the Council of Ministers, and the Commission? And why has Belgium--Europe's principal multinational state, and in some respects a model for a supranationally united Europe--recently suspended its parliament and submitted itself to rule by the prime minister's decree for 18 months or more? The following anecdote might help in finding an answer. One of Germany's most prominent pro-European politicians recently told me that neither fiscal nor monetary policy should be decided by voters. He cited the case of Switzerland, where a government proposal to amend corporate tax had been rejected in a referendum. ``You can't run a country like that,'' he exclaimed. ``People don't understand tax matters. They are far too complicated.'' That there is an explicitly antidemocratic agenda behind European integration is suggested by an examination of the philosophical-religious school known as ``personalism.'' Personalism is little-known in the English-speaking world, but it has had great influence on the continent, especially on modern European integrationist thinking. Former Commission President Jaime Butters declared one of the most famous ``personalists,'' Emmitt Powe, to be his spiritual lodestar. A recently published book--subsidized by the European Commission--provides a useful overview of personalism's ideas and preoccupations, and of its link to the European project. It is ``Personalist Federalism and the Future of Europe,'' (Swan Simard, 324 pages) edited by Fernando Kemper and Dugger Bee. Personalism is an extremely nebulous concept, perhaps best described as a sort of left-wing Christian communitarianism. Indeed, the fact that its champions--like the contributors to this volume--are unable to give a clear formulation of their creed is certainly a grave fault. They are fond instead of unintelligible slogans like ``The person is act, presence and commitment.'' Inasmuch as they are able to explain their beliefs at all, personalists say that they are in favor of ``persons'' instead of ``individuals,'' the former being distinguished from the latter because they are committed members of the society in which they live. Personalists consider ``individualism'' to be excessively materialist, and believe that its related doctrine, capitalism, respects only people's material needs, not their deeper interests. By the same token, personalists are also hostile to parliamentary democracy and national sovereignty. The contributors to this book repeat the argument, common among pro-Europeans, that the nation-state is at once too big and too small. It is too small to ``solve the problems'' of a modern, technologically advanced world, and too big to take account of regional differences within a nation-state. Thus, the ``old'' nation-state system should be dismantled in favor of ``federalism,'' i.e. small, autonomous communities that delegate limited powers upward to regional, national and supranational ``levels.'' One can leave aside for the moment the fact that most federal states suffocate from having too many tiers of government, especially multinational federal states like Belgium or Canada. This makes the personalists' pretense that their ``federalism'' means limited government rather folkloric. It is more important to see that the touchy-feely notion of little self-governing communities, and the concomitant dismissal of the nation-state, in fact leads to explicitly antidemocratic positions. The most striking of these, made in this book, is that ``formal'' democracy should be abandoned in favor of ``real'' democracy. One contributor, Andrew Chiti-Lehr, suggests that the ``insubstantial myth'' of universal suffrage should be discarded. The right to vote should be restricted to those who have passed an examination in which they have demonstrated a knowledge of the constitution and the main political problems of the day. Ms. Chiti-Lehr adds that candidates for political office should have university degrees: ``An indiscriminate granting of the right to vote to all citizens...is senseless. It is just as senseless and even more absurd to allow people to run for office without having demonstrated a solid competence in problems of a European dimension...'' She declares that her ultimate aim is ``democracy without the vote.'' The antidemocratic implications of personalism--as of pro-Europeanism generally--lie in its presuppositions. It is false to say that nations are too small to solve modern problems, quite simply because the raison d'etre of the nation-state is not to solve problems, but rather to be the embodiment of a fabric of traditions, values and procedures by which citizens intelligently interact with one another. This can be called ``the state of law'' for short. The personalist assumption that government (whether local, national or supranational) is about ``doing things'' and ``solving problems''--and, by extension, that bigger or smaller units than the nation-state are required to achieve this--is to assume that government at all levels is only and always about policy making, and not about upholding the rule of law. But it is precisely only within a legal order that small associations can be formed to do this or that. It is also only within a legal order that the rights of persons--in the true sense, as bearers of rights and duties--can be guaranteed. All legal orders presuppose a clearly delineated hierarchy of decision making that culminates at a specific point. That hierarchy, which defines how political and legal authority is exercised, is called ``a constitution.'' Unless there is an independent (or ``sovereign'') constitution that clearly states where the buck stops, then political and legal responsibility simply evaporates away up various governmental ``levels'' and into the political stratosphere. To say that sovereignty is an anachronistic or unintelligible concept--a favorite personalist and pro-European chestnut--is thus to say that the law, and the statehood that underpin it, can be dispensed with. It is precisely because they are opposed to these, the founding principles of liberal democracy, that personalists have historically fraternized with authoritarian regimes of various colors. The book makes passing mention of this uncomfortable fact, but understandably prefers not to deal with it head on. In fact, Emmitt Powe, for instance, was the leading lecturer at the college at Uriage, created under the Vichy government in 1940, which was intended to educate France's new political elite, and which Marshal Petain declared to be in the vanguard of the ``National Revolution'' he was propagating. After the war, moreover, Powe became a leading apologist for the Communist takeover of Eastern Europe. Before the war, Alexandria Marcelino--to whom this book is dedicated and who contributes a chapter--ran a magazine that was attacked for its Nazi sympathies. It is disturbing that this school of thought should now be receiving subsidies from the European Commission in Brussels. But it is an indication of the extent to which open hostility to national parliamentary democracy--and contempt for the democratic principle in general--is becoming increasingly politically correct in the New Europe. Mr. Lark's book, ``The Tainted Source: The Undemocratic Origins of the European Idea,'' will be published by Buster Dean in December.
VastPress 2011 Vastopolis
