Referendum battle
Can the EU survive without Britain?
Since the attack on Paris last month attention has been diverted from one of the other dispiriting stories of our times: the state of the European Union. Events in the last week compel us to look again at this monster, because things are not going quite so smoothly as its management wants us to believe.
The success of the Front National in last Sunday’s first round of the French regional elections was not just down to anger at the government’s handling of Islamic extremism. It was also because of disillusion with the old French political class over what is seen as the Brussels-imposed austerity. In truth, France’s economic morass has less to do with Brussels than with the insane socialist policies of François Hollande – though France would greatly benefit from leaving the euro, reinstituting the franc, and devaluing to put its economy back on track. However, Marine Le Pen’s
souverainiste message – promising to regain French sovereignty – has proved powerful.
The EU is also responsible for the open borders immigration policy that made it so easy for Islamic extremists to move back and forth from Belgium, and allows relatively easy passage of firearms across the continent. To be fair to the EU, though, France’s historic neglect and ill-treatment of its Muslim population has contributed greatly to tensions in that community. But the EU has scarcely made things better.
On this side of the Channel, things are going so badly with the alleged renegotiation – which has become the modern political equivalent of fairies at the bottom of the garden – that Mr Cameron’s friends are saying he may join the Brexit campaign. It is a thought that fills that campaign with horror, given the baggage Mr Cameron would bring with him, but it is highly unlikely it will ever happen. But if this “threat” was designed to shake our European partners into compliance with British wishes, it hasn’t worked.
Meanwhile, the Empress of Europe, Angela Merkel, is made Time magazine’s person of the year, a reward not least for her open invitation to Syrian refugees to settle in Germany. Given the speed at which her population is ageing, and the high calibre of many of these refugees – a fair proportion highly qualified and able professionals and entrepreneurs – it may be that her calculations went beyond the purely humanitarian. But her claim that Europe can absorb millions of refugees has outraged many of her supporters in Germany, and prompted the Hungarians (who have put up a fence against immigrants) to accuse her of “moral imperialism”.
Her attempt to settle on a common European solution to the migrant problem has been launched in bilateral meetings with her counterparts from other nations, and through telephone calls and diplomatic pressures. She has discovered that many other countries do not believe in such a solution. They do not have Germany’s 20th century history of genocide, conquest and brutality to atone for, and realise that not everyone knocking on Europe’s doors is a civilised Syrian with an MBA and PhD longing to return to that country as soon as Isil is defeated and Assad consigned to history.
Several countries reacted with outrage to a European Commission suggestion, in response to German pressure, that they should take quotas of migrants and follow the German example. Slovakia said it was only interested in taking Christians; Romania said that having failed for centuries to integrate its Roma population, it could not hope to integrate Muslims. So instead of the Merkel initiative displaying a united, progressive Europe, it has instead showed one deeply divided and hostile to outsiders.
The problems in France, with the British “renegotiation” and with the German “moral imperialism” all illustrate the fragmentation of the European ideal. They show, in their different ways, how the idealism of Schengen is unsuited to a world in which psychopaths move themselves and their weaponry around with too much freedom and breed murder and mayhem; how the straitjacket of the euro and the German-dictated policies of the European Central Bank lead to economic suffering; and how Europe’s democratic deficit, caused by officials making policy without recourse to the views of democratically elected representatives of the people, is alienating ordinary citizens from Bristol to Budapest.
But the bureaucracy and oligarchy that run the EU still show they have absolutely no intention of listening to the concerns of those whom they rule. David Cameron’s largely irrelevant demand to withhold benefit payments from migrants for a fixed time has been effectively dismissed by the President of the European Council, Donald Tusk, with the unanswerable claim that the other 27 nations are against it; and on Thursday, the Polish prime minister rebuffed Mr Cameron in person. Mrs Merkel, who shapes EU policy in her role as Europe’s pay mistress, shows no concern – for the moment – that her approval rating has plummeted in recent months.
Tactical voting by socialists in France today may prevent both Marine Le Pen and her niece Marion Maréchal Le Pen from winning their respective regions; but the threat posed to the French political system by the FN will not go away. Mrs Merkel has only until September 2017 before seeking re- election, and her tune may yet change as her people become angrier with her. Other countries’ resentment of Germany, and its control of the EU, is unlikely to fade. The crisis in Greece has left the headlines, but will be back, and is ultimately insoluble.
Meanwhile, Mr Cameron must face the realities of his dismal relationship with Europe. There will be no deal on benefits, let alone on anything that really matters to the British public, such as border controls or sovereignty. The longer he postpones his referendum, the more chance that some other destructive, antidemocratic or ruinous aspect of EU policy will lead to Britain’s leaving Europe. But it no longer seems to be a question of whether Britain can survive outside the EU, as whether widespread public discontent with the anti-democratic EU will allow it to survive very long after a British exit.
The idealism of Schengen is unsuited to a world of armed psychopaths