By Brendan O’Neill
Thursday, March 03, 2016
On 1 March, Brendan O’Neill
spoke to the Brexit Society at Cambridge University. Here’s what he said.
The Brexit camp has asked the
BBC to do it one, pretty small favour in the run-up to the EU referendum: to
differentiate between ‘Europe’ and ‘the EU’. To encourage its reporters to say
‘Europe’ only when they are referring to the vast continent we live in, and to
say ‘the EU’ when they are referring to the Brussels-run union of 28 member
states.
And the BBC has refused. Or it
has at least failed to clarify when these two very different terms may be used
by its staff. This means the BBC has implicitly given a nod of approval to its
reporters to say ‘Europe’ when they really mean ‘the EU’.
Some observers think the Brexit
lobby is mad for asking for this clarification from the BBC. A writer for
the New Statesman said it showed that some people will find
bias in the most innocuous of things. In other words: chill out; it is not a
problem for the national broadcaster to use the terms ‘Europe’ and ‘the EU’
interchangeably; stop making a fuss about nothing.
But I think the BBC’s
unwillingness to maintain a distinction between ‘Europe’ and ‘the EU’ is
actually very revealing, and worrying.
It speaks to one of the worst
aspects of the debate about the EU: the conflation of the Brussels-based
oligarchy with the continent of Europe; the mixing-up of the small,
unaccountable cliques who peer down at Europe from their air-conditioned towers
in Brussels with Europe itself.
Think about some of the phrases
that could potentially be uttered by BBC reporters if they use ‘Europe’ for
‘EU’. They could say that the people of Peterborough, one of the most anti-EU
parts of Britain, are ‘against Europe’. They could say that people in
Warrington, the seventh most Eurosceptic part of Britain, ‘hate Europe’ or are
‘voting to get out of Europe’.
But of course they’re doing no
such thing. Britain isn’t leaving the continent of Europe. That isn’t what
we’re voting on. And these people in Peterborough and Warrington might love
Europe. They might holiday in Spain, have friends in France, love Swedish TV
dramas. Many, if not most, of them won’t be anti-European — they’re just
anti-EU.
The Stay campaign’s habit of
conflating ‘Europe’ and ‘the EU’ means that those who are anti-EU can be easily
depicted as anti-Europe, as xenophobic or nationalistic. These people’s political outlook
— their dislike of the way Brussels can impose its writ on nation states — is
reduced to a prejudiced outlook, a simple case of being anti-Europe. Their
politics is pathologised, turned from opposition to a political system into
opposition to a whole continent and its cultures and peoples.
This is why we so often see the
term Europhobic. This word explicitly pathologises people’s dislike of the EU.
It treats it almost as a mental illness: a phobia is an irrational fear.
The Guardian recently
said that ordinary people’s Europhobia has been ‘pandered to and fed by Tory
leaders’. So there’s a strange, fearful mob out there and the Tories are
recklessly stirring it up. This week, a writer for New Europe magazine
listed ‘Europhobia’ alongside ‘xenophobia, nationalism, Islamophobia and
racism’, as values that are ‘alien to our postwar European culture’.
See how casually criticism of
the EU, opposition to the Brussels oligarchy, is reduced to a phobia, an ism,
something which goes against the ideals of Europe itself.
We must challenge the cynical
conflation of ‘Europe’ and ‘the EU’, and we must challenge the pathologisation
of Brussels’ critics. Because, to my mind, the EU and Europe are not even
remotely the same thing. Actually, I’d go further and say that the EU grates
against everything that is brilliant about Europe. The EU is an ugly,
illiberal, undemocratic blot on the wonderful continent of Europe. The EU is a
stain on the best, most inspiring values of Europe and its peoples. It is the
EU that is anti-Europe.
I love Europe, but I hate the
EU. I consider myself a European. I don’t have any special emotional attachment
to Great Britain. I love London, but I’m kind of Irish, and if I could afford
it I would live in Paris.
My argument for getting out of
the EU is not a Little Englander one. It’s not because I think Britain is the
best country in this continent. It’s not because I love the pound or the Queen.
It’s because the EU is detrimental to the whole of Europe, and particularly to
two incredibly important values that European peoples have in various ways been
fighting for for hundreds of years: democracy and liberty. The EU is
anti-democratic and illiberal.
Supporters of the EU tell us it
is an inspiring union of the European peoples. Nonsense. It is a union of
European elites who want to avoid their peoples. The EU is the
mechanism through which national governments outsource various powers and
decision-making processes to distant, aloof, mostly unaccountable bodies like
the European Commission and the European Court of Justice.
The true instinct behind the
Brussels machine is not to bring Europe together. It is to absolve national
governments of the burden of having to consult us, the plebs, about important
political and social matters, in favour of allowing various experts and cliques
in Brussels to discuss and shape such matters on our behalf. The EU’s fuel is
not cosmopolitanism — it’s democracy-dodging.
From the outset, the EU has not
been the embodiment of people’s will — it has been a struggle against people’s
will. The 1992 Maastricht Treaty that founded the EU as we know it was only
just approved by France and was rejected by Denmark. And of course, John
Major’s Tory government refused to put it to a referendum. British people were
co-opted into the EU without our explicit say-so.
Almost every time they have
been asked about the EU, people in Europe have said ‘We don’t want it’. In
Ireland in 2001, voters said No to the Nice Treaty. In 2005, the new EU
Constitution was rejected by voters in France and Holland. EU bureaucrats then
denounced the French and Dutch as ‘ignorant’ and ‘xenophobic’. One MEP said it
was mad to subject something as important as the EU Constitution to the
‘lottery’ of public opinion.
The European Commission
responded to this French and Dutch disobedience by renaming the EU Constitution
the ‘Lisbon Treaty’, which EC vice-president Margot Wallstrom admitted was
‘essentially the same proposal as the old constitution’. Only this time people
wouldn’t be asked to vote on it, because, in the words of Nicolas Sarkozy, ‘a
referendum now would bring Europe into danger’. So democracy is dangerous; the
people’s will is a threat to the EU project.
In 2008, the Irish were
permitted to vote on the Lisbon Treaty. And they said No. They were slammed and
defamed by Brussels bureaucrats and forced to vote again. Under the pressure of
the EU’s economic blackmail, they said Yes second time round.
The EU is not an expression of
European people’s will. On the contrary, it has been constituted time and again
in direct opposition to people’s will.
The hostility of the EU to
national sentiment and democratically elected governments can also be seen in
its constant hectoring of the governments of Eastern Europe.
In 2006, the elected prime
minister of Slovakia was instructed by Brussels to challenge political
extremism in his country and repress certain political ways of thinking or risk
being found in breach of EU regulations. In 2006, the prime minister of Poland
was forced by Brussels to declare that his government was not homophobic or
anti-Semitic and that it would not bring back the death penalty. In 2011, the
EU pressured the Hungarian government to rethink its new constitution.
In 2000, when the far-right
Freedom Party won 27 per cent of votes in Austria, enough to enter into a
coalition government, Brussels imposed diplomatic sanctions on Austria. There
would be no ‘business as usual’, the EU decreed, so long as the Freedom Party
remained in government. The Freedom Party that had just been elected by huge
numbers of Austrian people.
Brussels’ lecturing of Eastern
governments doesn’t only expose the anti-democratic instincts of the EU — it
also gives the lie to the idea that the EU has united the nations of Europe.
Actually the EU has nurtured divisions, primarily between the apparently
civilised west of Europe and the allegedly dark, twisted east of Europe which
must constantly be corrected, but also between the supposedly industrious north
and the apparently lazy, financially reckless south. The Iron Curtain is back,
and the north-south divide is back, in a new, insidious way.
The Brussels oligarchy’s view
of democracy as dangerous became most apparent in 2011. In that year it worked
to impose technocratic governments in Greece and Italy and to import a gang of
bankers and bureaucrats to Dublin to keep a watchful eye on the Irish
government and its austerity measures. It rode roughshod over democracy, and
effectively installed benign tyrannies.
Mario Monti, the unelected technocrat
charged with running Italy on behalf of Brussels, actually boasted about the
aloofness of his regime. He said: ‘The absence of political personalities
removes any ground for disagreement.’ This is what the EU and its lackeys
really hate: politics, personality, debate, disagreement — the lifeblood of
democracy. They far prefer the rule of experts, the coolness of technocrats.
And their fanboys in the media
agree. In 2011, the Guardian published an article headlined
‘In defence of Europe’s technocrats’. It argued that ‘temporary technocrat rule
may well be… acceptable — perhaps necessary — at a time of crisis’. Here we
have an explicit defence of the destruction of democracy; an open, unabashed
argument for the rule of the unelected. And it comes, not from the far right or
neo-fascists or other extremist groups that we’re constantly told pose a threat
to European values, but from so-called liberals, from supposed EU
cosmopolitans.
Some people argue that the EU
is our best guard against the kind of tyranny Europe experienced in the 1930s
and 40s. Yet as they say this, Brussels installs unelected leaders, blackmails
elected prime ministers, describes democratic referendums as a ‘danger’. Under
the cover of keeping at bay the tyrannies of the past, the EU constructs a new
kind of tyranny.
The vile attacks on the voters
of France and Holland and Ireland, the dictating to the elected governments of
Eastern Europe, the enforcement of technocratic oversight in Greece and Italy….
none of this is accidental or merely a response to particularly tense,
crisis-ridden moments in recent years. Rather, it is in the very nature of the
EU to be suspicious of or outright hostile towards the views and attitudes
and will of European peoples.
Indeed, the EU has shaped itself
precisely around European elites’ feeling of exhaustion with the democratic
process. The EU is the means through which politics can be done in a distant
and post-democratic way. And to this end, at the very top of Brussels, there is
the EC, a body that is emblematic of the EU’s agitation with democracy. This
executive body, responsible for proposing EU legislation, is unelected. It has
28 members, one for each member state, who are nominated by the member states.
You have no more power to get rid of this clique of commissioners than you have
of walking on the Moon this evening. They are beyond your reach, yet they make
laws that impact on your life. That is fundamentally contrary to democracy. It
cuts against the basic democratic principle that we should consent to the
institutions that rule us.
The EU doesn’t only trash
democracy. It restricts liberty, too. This vast oligarchical entity is,
unsurprisingly, hostile to the idea that people should be free to think and say
what they please and to live their lives as they see fit so long as they don’t
harm anyone else.
The EU does not trust you
plebs. It continually passes rules or laws that seek to govern your minds and
lives. It tells all national governments to restrict speech that incites hatred
‘based on race, sex, religion or nationality’, an explicit attack on freedom of
speech. It has seriously discussed outlawing the denial not only of the
Holocaust — which would be illiberal enough — but also of various other crimes
against humanity. This would massively dent academic freedom and historical
debate.
Its illiberalism is often mad
and petty. It has banned chocolate candy cigarettes on the basis that they
‘appeal to minors’ and could be a gateway to real smoking. It has passed
regulations designed to protect ‘vulnerable consumers’ — that is, stupid
ordinary people — including by restricting the advertising of formula milk to
new mums, who, in the EU’s eyes, should be breastfeeding and not arrogantly
making their own parenting choices. It wants to ban diabetics from driving. It
enforces controls on products that use a certain amount of wattage, in an
attempt to make us uncaring idiots more eco-friendly, whether we want to be or
not.
The EU thinks our nationally
expressed political will is dangerous, and it thinks it is dangerous to leave
us to our own devices, to let us say what we want, buy what we want, behave as
we want. This is an institution designed to circumscribe your democratic rights
and your everyday ability to run your life.
It goes against what it means
to be European. For hundreds of years, through democratic upheavals,
revolutions, struggles against arbitrary power and struggles for enlightenment,
the peoples of Europe have sought to gain greater control over both their
nations’ political affairs and their own lives. The EU undermines both of these
things, both democracy and individual liberty. It is against the gains of
history. It is against Europe. It is against us.
As someone who considers
himself left-wing, I’m horrified that lefties are often at the forefront of
defending this elitist institution. It is an historic black mark against the
reputation of the left that it has been the chief cheerleader of an institution
that undoes so many of the great gains of past radicals and progressives.
We must leave the EU, in order
to start the process of recovering our democratic clout. But we must do more
than that: we must also encourage and offer solidarity to other European
peoples who want to leave. Too much of the current debate is focused around,
‘What will happen to Britain if we leave?’ My concern is what will happen to
the other European peoples who will remain stuck in this awful institution. We
must fight with them, alongside them, and create a new and real unity across
Europe: a union not of elites who distrust the people, but of peoples who have
had more than they can take of the elites.
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