The EU and UK never understood one another
Continental Europeans and Britons never saw eye to eye on the EU, and the case of Poland shows why. This week, Poland’s president – mostly a ceremonial figurehead – averted a full-scale confrontation between Warsaw and Brussels by vetoing two of three laws attacking judicial independence. Poland’s government wants to replace its supreme court judges with political appointees, but, amid EU threats and massive street protests, Andrzej Duda said “no”.
Britain doesn’t usually miss a chance to highlight Brussels’ overweening arrogance and interference in domestic affairs. Yet we’ve been curiously silent over the Polish matter. The reason is that it has seen the EU play a role we don’t associate with it: a defender of democracy.
Poland’s accession into the EU came with a strong British endorsement back in 2004. The UK reasoned that the inclusion of the eastern bloc’s fiercely independent nations would make it harder for Brussels to pursue a federalist agenda. The eastern nations, having only recently gained their freedom from the Soviet Union, are deeply uncomfortable with the idea of a superstate.
Unfortunately, the current Polish government’s Euroscepticism comes with a heavy dose of authoritarianism. The ruling Law and Justice Party is, despite its name, willing to trample all over institutions deemed essential to most democracies, like a free press and independent judiciary.
Its ministers also include a fair share of retrograde, nationalist fantasists. When I visited Poland a few years ago, Krzysztof Jurgiel, now agriculture minister, told me that he wanted to “stop globalisation”. His vision was that Poland would stop trading with the world and grow all of its own food. Rather than letting markets flourish, he told me that each town ought to be assigned nearby farms to provide its sustenance and should build rural factories to provide employment.
Mr Jurgiel’s vision was popular in the staunchly Catholic countryside, where thousands of small-scale farmers are still growing crops on medieval-style strips of land (subsidised by EU grants, of course). But young urbanites were appalled by his party’s top-down illiberalism. To them, the EU was their only guarantor of basic democratic rights. They soon took to the streets in their thousands, waving EU flags.
The idea is bizarre in Britain. Our history can be seen as one long tale of fending off Continental interference while establishing our own, gradually democratising institutions. The nation, for us, is the guarantor of rights. For many young Poles, as for many Spaniards, Italians, French and Germans, whose countries have lived under national fascist rule, it is the EU that stands for rule of law and democracy.
Brussels and Britain were never prepared to recognise and respect one another’s historic differences. But now we are contending with the ultimate insult: the idea that our courts, famed the world over for their integrity, cannot be relied upon to protect the rights of our resident EU citizens and must be superseded by EU courts even after Brexit. This might sound reasonable to a Pole. To a Briton, an inheritor of rights guaranteed by the nation, which stretch back hundreds of years, it simply sounds insane.
Avid admirers of the German “social market” economic model are rather quiet this week. No wonder. It has emerged that most of Germany’s biggest car-makers are under investigation by the EU, suspected of running a technology cartel to fool authorities and consumers about their cars’ emissions.
This isn’t meant to happen. German companies are supposed to be sensible, sober and social. They’re virtuous, we’re told, because workers sit on their boards, and competitive, because they save and invest prudently.
Alas, corruption comes in many forms. If the allegations prove correct, it will be worse than any bank mis-selling scandal. I would say that, of course, as a diesel Audi owner.
At any rate, the British government, currently dealing with the fallout from its botched diesel policy, should surely see an opportunity here. If Germany’s car-makers helped convince governments to design diesel-friendly policies, wouldn’t it be fair for them to contribute to the cost of reversing them?
We might be obsessed with hackers and cyber-security, but let’s not forget that old-fashioned spying is still in mode. Civil servants in the Brexit department have been told to avoid loose talk in Westminster’s bars and restaurants because they are stuffed with loitering foreign spies of all nationalities – European, Russian, Chinese – and might even be bugged by them, too.
They could, of course, decide to have some fun with the situation. A former military man recently told me that he was given a beautiful glowing globe as a gift when visiting China. The gift was quickly examined by British officials and, naturally, found to be riddled with spying equipment. So he sent it off as a present to a heavily accented farming friend of his in Somerset. He likes to think that the diligent Chinese officials listening in are at least getting a good education in British regional accents. FOLLOW Juliet Samuel on Twitter @Citysamuel; READ MORE at telegraph. co.uk/opinion