By John Daniel Davidson
Monday, June 27, 2016
Amid all the hysterical reactions to Brexit, we should
all take a step back and consider what the European Union is, what it implies,
and why a nation like Britain might not want to be a part of it any longer.
Sometimes, there are good reasons why the supposedly enlightened progress of
history is stopped in its tracks now and then, and Britain has plenty of good
reasons for turning away from Europe.
On the most basic level, Britain’s vote last week to
leave the EU was an assertion of national sovereignty and democratic
self-governance against a system designed to erode and undermine those things.
The prospect of an economically and politically
integrated Europe isn’t new, of course. It reaches at least as far back as the
First French Empire and the Napoleonic Wars. But in the modern era, the vision
of European unity has always gone hand-in-hand with the erosion of national
sovereignty and democratic rule. In order for it to work properly, it had to be
imposed by force. That’s why the idea of an integrated European economy wasn’t
taken seriously until the continent was at war.
Germany’s Mitteleuropa Was A Precursor To The EU
In September 1914, just weeks after the outbreak of World
War I, German Chancellor Bethmann Hollweg approved a secret document outlining
Germany’s provisional war aims. The so-called Septemberprogramm stated the general aim of the war was “security
for the German Reich in west and east for all imaginable time.” To achieve this
security, a number of military measures were laid out, including vast
annexations of territory in France and Belgium, and imposing a war indemnity
upon France designed to prevent it from investing in rearmament for decades.
But it wasn’t just a military document. The truly
innovative proposition of the Septemberprogramm
was the creation of a “central European economic association through common
customs treaties, to include France, Belgium, Holland, Denmark,
Austria-Hungary, Poland, and perhaps Italy, Sweden, and Norway.” This was
Hollweg’s modification to the decades-old concept of Mitteleuropa, which first emerged in 1848 and envisioned a European
continent united by a series of interlocking trade agreements.
The goal of the German Mitteleuropa plan in 1914, however, was more menacing. Its purpose
was, quite simply, German economic and cultural hegemony. The point wasn’t
cooperation, but exploitation. If Germany won the war, it could impose an
integrated trade block on Europe by force.
Germany lost the war and never got the chance to realize
Hollweg’s Mitteleuropa scheme, but
the idea didn’t just disappear. Indeed, after WWII, European economic
integration became an imperative. It was thought that the only way to prevent
future German aggression was to unite Europe under the twin aegis of France and
Germany, and forge what Winston Churchill in 1946 called, “a kind of United
States of Europe.”
The EU Is Nothing
Like America
Over the ensuing half-century, this idea gradually became
a reality, culminating in the formal creation of the EU with the signing of the
Maastricht Treaty in 1992, which came into force the following year. A common
European currency, the euro, was introduced in 1999, and in 2004 the EU
enlargement admitted ten new countries, mostly from eastern Europe, in its
single largest expansion in terms of population and number of states.
Europe became an economically integrated continent, but
like Germany’s original vision for Mitteleuropa
during WWI, the EU is not a democratic institution. It has only been able to
function without resort to force because member states have denied their
citizens any say in how the EU governs them.
Americans in particular misunderstand the EU if they
think of it like a European version of the U.S. Congress. Unlike Congress, the
EU is essentially a body of unelected bureaucrats wholly unaccountable to
voters in EU-member countries. Instead, a small army of regulators in Brussels
promulgate rules and regulations that govern not just trade policy but also
immigration, welfare, and myriad other aspects of public life.
Because Europe is not a fully united political entity,
the EU isn’t really a representative body in the way the U.S. Congress is. In
fact, members of the European Commission (the executive branch of the EU),
which is comprised of one commissioner per member state, are bound by their
oath of office to represent the general interest of the EU, not the interest of
their home state.
Over the years, the EU has encroached more and more on
the sovereignty of its member states, especially in periods of crisis. The
Eurozone crisis forced Greece to surrender its fiscal sovereignty in exchange
for a German-led EU bailout. The ongoing migrant crisis has foisted huge
numbers of refugees and asylum-seekers onto member states that have had little
say on whether to admit unprecedented numbers of foreigners.
But of course this erosion of national sovereignty is
necessary for something like the EU to work. A supranational institution like
the EU was always going to require that individual member states relinquish
their sovereignty—first on fiscal and trade policies, and eventually on a host
of other matters.
Multinational
Political Unity Requires Force
With Brexit, Britain has decided it doesn’t want to do
this anymore. From an historical perspective, Britain was never comfortable
integrating with Europe. When Churchill called for a “United States of Europe,”
he never intended that Britain would be part of it. “We British have our own
Commonwealth of Nations,” he said, and called for Europe to emulate Britain in
that regard. In a letter to Charles de Gaulle in 1944, Churchill wrote, “This
is something you ought to know: each time we have to choose between Europe and
the open sea, we shall always choose the open sea.”
If Britons are skeptical of the EU, perhaps it’s because
Britain knows something about keeping together a multinational political
entity. After all, the British Empire was forged and maintained through the
force of arms. As Americans, we should understand this. Our own unity was
purchased at the cost of war, first with Britain and then among ourselves.
As for Europe, Churchill understood what Chancellor
Hollwegg understood in 1914, and what many Brexiteers understand today: that
economic integration requires political unity, and multinational political
unity requires something more than the promise of good trade deals. Eventually,
it requires force.
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