By Cameron Hilditch
Tuesday, February 02, 2021
Ever since the coronavirus first arrived in Europe, the
European Commission has been pouring gasoline all over its own reputation. At
the end of last week, the bureaucrats who run the Commission finally lit the
metaphorical match and wreathed the entire European project in the fires of their
own incompetence.
For the last five years, the British and Irish
governments have been at each other’s throats over Brexit. The same is true of
Leavers and Remainers within the U.K. itself. The militant wings of Protestant
unionism and Catholic separatism in Northern Ireland, meanwhile, have literally
been at war for most of the last century. And yet, in the space of a few hours
on Friday, the European Union managed to unite all of these factions in
opposition to itself.
The Commission (the executive branch of the European
Union) is panicked by how far the EU has fallen behind both the United Kingdom
and the United States in the race to vaccinate the public. Because the EU
didn’t place any orders for the vaccine from suppliers until three months after
the British government did, Europeans are now watching millions of vaccine
doses manufactured in Europe being shipped across the channel to Great Britain.
Pfizer and AstraZeneca, both of whom manufacture large
quantities of the vaccine in Europe, are contractually obliged to fulfill the
commitments they made to Her Majesty’s Government before prioritizing EU contracts,
which were purchased much later. Ironically enough, the European Union appears
to be “at
the back of the queue.”
On Friday, the Commission announced its plans to remedy
this situation by way of export controls. Restrictions would be placed upon
Pfizer and AstraZeneca’s ability to ship vaccines to countries outside the EU.
Retroactively violating the principle of free contract in this way would have
been bad enough in ordinary times. But in present circumstances, such a plan is
simply unconscionable. The Commission was essentially threatening the U.K. with
a vaccine blockade at a time when hundreds of vulnerable Britons are dying of
COVID-19 every day.
And it gets worse.
In order to put its export controls in place, the EU was
planning to trigger Article 16 of its Withdrawal Agreement with the U.K.
Article 16 is a kind of break-glass-in-case-of-emergency measure that pertains
to Northern Ireland. It would allow the EU to set up customs infrastructure on
the Irish border (the only land border between the U.K. and the EU) in case of
an extreme emergency. The Commission clearly thought of its own inability to
procure enough doses of the vaccine as such an emergency because it signaled
its intention to impose the export controls in question across the Irish
border.
To understand the depravity of this move one really has
to appreciate the EU’s political use of the Irish border during the Brexit
negotiations that consumed half of the last decade. EU negotiators repeatedly
proclaimed that requiring regulatory checks at the Irish border would be an act
of supreme irresponsibility. It would imperil the hard-won peace in Ireland by
pushing the question of Northern Ireland’s constitutional status back to the
forefront of the Irish mind, goading and cajoling dormant terrorists back into
activity in the process. The EU used the widespread popularity of the open
border in Ireland to press for the U.K.’s perpetual submission to the EU’s
regulatory and customs regime. Since Northern Ireland had to stay in regulatory
alignment with the Irish Republic (an EU member state) in order to secure
peace, and since Northern Ireland is in the U.K., the whole U.K. had to stay
within the EU’s regulatory framework after leaving all of the institutions that
write the regulations. This syllogism is so fatally flawed that even the EU
itself didn’t really believe it, as I wrote about here.
It was a cynical political play used in an attempt to bureaucratically annex
first the entire U.K. and then, once that failed, just Northern Ireland. No
invading armies, just invading regulations: a gentler kind of tyranny.
That the EU’s priestly caste thought to violate the
hallowed shibboleth of “peace on the island of Ireland” last week at the first
sign of political difficulty is a welcome development. It has exposed the great
game of political football they’ve been playing with that battered little
country for years and which, please God, they’ll never be allowed to play
again.
Happily, no sooner had the Commission’s ossified
apparatchiks announced their planned export controls on Friday than the entire
civilized world came down on them like a ton of insufficiently regulated
bricks. The respective prime ministers of the United Kingdom and the Republic
of Ireland immediately alerted the Commission to their fury, while Arlene
Foster, the First Minister of Northern Ireland, called the plan “an act of
aggression.” Tony Blair, former PM and one of Brexit’s most ardent opponents,
called the EU’s behavior “very foolish,” and the International Chamber of
Commerce actually wrote a letter to the president of the EU Commission, Ursula
Von der Leyen, imploring her to reconsider and spelling out the manifold
catastrophes that could emerge from a disruption to global vaccine supply
chains. The Spectator has compiled a list of tweets
from the European Union’s most vocal supporters, condemning the Commission’s
actions in the harshest terms. The compilation is astonishing to read, though
perhaps not quite as astonishing as this
excoriating editorial from The Observer, which was a pro-EU paper up
to this point. The Leave vote in the 2016 Brexit referendum won 52–48 percent.
If the referendum were held again today, the Leave margin of victory would
probably expand considerably.
By Saturday, the Commission had backed down, calling its
original plan a “blunder.” Britain’s trade secretary Liz Truss told the BBC
that Boris Johnson’s government had “reassurance from the European Union that
those contracts will not be disrupted.” She went on to say that “we’re pleased
that the EU admitted that the Article 16 invocation . . . for the border in
Ireland was a mistake and they are now not proceeding with that. . . . It is
vital we keep borders open and we resist vaccine nationalism and we resist
protectionism.”
It’s worth considering for a moment just how the European
Union arrived at such an obviously calamitous decision in the first place. At
every step of the EU’s response to COVID, we see not just individual
incompetence (although there’s plenty of that) but the consequences of a
technocratic, centralizing, dirigiste ideology, which has played itself out in
such a way as to expose the endemic shortcomings of the whole European project.
When the coronavirus first appeared in the Western world
last spring, the Commission allowed four EU member states — Germany, France,
Italy, and the Netherlands — to lead negotiations with potential suppliers. In
June, however, Von der Leyen and her health commissioner, Stella Kyriakides,
changed their minds about this approach.
Their reasons were neither medical, nor scientific, nor
even logistical. They were political. Von der Leyen wanted to involve all 27 EU
member states in centralized vaccine-acquisition negotiations to demonstrate
the unity and solidarity of the EU single market. Those negotiations proved
unwieldy and ground to a halt. The EU AstraZeneca contract negotiated by the
German, French, Italian, and Dutch delegations was ready for signature in June.
Von der Leyen’s ideological U-turn on negotiation tactics stalled the signature
until August. During the intervening three months, AstraZeneca was busily
preparing to deliver tens of millions of doses to the door of 10 Downing
Street. Vulnerable Europeans unnumbered are now six feet under because Von der
Leyen and her fellow Euro-federalists were wedded to a grandiose vision of
deracinated Belgians, Greeks, and Lithuanians walking hand in hand into a
post-COVID age singing “We Are the World.”
The whole case for the EU was that the pallid globalized
benevolence of a senescent Bonapartist technocracy would be a greater boon to
the human race than the liberal democratic nation-state. But the nimble
regulatory freedom of a post-Brexit U.K. and the contrasting sclerosis of the
emergent European superstate has brought about a state of affairs wherein thousands
of vulnerable people are alive in Great Britain who would be dead if they lived
on the Continent. The EU’s “founding fathers” — men like Altiero Spinelli and
Jean Monnet, who sought to rescue the world from democracy — would have been
appalled.
The Commission has tried to shift the blame for Europe’s
vaccination failures onto the drug companies themselves. Von der Leyen pointed
her finger last week at the technical problems AstraZeneca has had with the
vaccine yields in their European production facilities. “The companies must
deliver,” she said. When asked about Von der Leyen’s complaints during an
interview with the Italian newspaper La Republica, AstraZeneca CEO
Pascal Soriot was somewhat bemused. He noted that the U.K., the U.S., and
Australia had all faced similar issues with yield. But “the U.K. contract was
signed three months before the EU contract,” he said, “so with the UK we have
had an extra three months to fix all the glitches we have experienced.” In
other words, the European Union has no one to blame but itself. Von der Leyen’s
decision to pause Europe’s COVID response for three whole months so as to turn
it into a cosmetic staging post on the road to a United States of Europe is
what is daily costing Europeans their lives.
The EU’s disastrous response to COVID and its ill-advised
but short-lived flirtation with a medical blockade should, perhaps, be taken as
a providential warning to those of us who’ve recoiled in horror at the populist
turn in American politics. The European Union is an experiment in
anti-populism. Its institutions were conceived and constructed to insulate
those who wield political power from the will of popular majorities to the
greatest extent possible in the modern world. If populism were the source of
our present discontents, we should expect the EU to look like a shining city on
a hill. But it’s clear that these people haven’t the faintest, foggiest clue
what on earth they’re doing. In the last analysis, there’s simply no important
political question in today’s world to which the European Union is the answer.
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