Macron’s ‘inspirational’ EU dream is actually an authoritarian nightmare

The French leader and Jean Claude-juncker will end up shattering hardwon enlightenment values

One of the great pathologies of British politics, at least since the Fifties, has been our strange refusal to understand European integration. We keep telling ourselves that the EU is a transactional relationship, a “trade block”, a means of boosting our mutual GDP, of making it easier for British banks and German carmakers to do business. The entire post-brexit referendum debate in Britain has continued to be conducted along such absurd lines.

Whenever bemused Europeans tell us that we are missing the point, that EU integration is a historic project to build a new civilisation, we cannot compute. We laugh nervously, stick our fingers in our ears, and go back to arguing about how the EU should focus on trying to semi-liberalise the market for purple widgets.

French énarques, who pride themselves on Cartesian rigour, have a theory for why Britain is unable to face facts. They believe that, as befits a conservative nation obsessed with evolutionary change, that hasn’t undergone a proper revolution since 1688, we are overly practical. We are accountants and shopkeepers who cannot comprehend grand theories or abstract concepts: in effect, Brexit was a rejection of a philosophy we never understood. The French specialise in the general; we focus on the particular, and neither side understands the other.

That is why anybody who cares about politics should read Emmanuel Macron’s speech on the future of Europe. His agenda is striking: he wants more new bureaucracies, a centralisation of the setting of taxes, an Eu-wide minimum wage, European military integration and much else.

If you follow European politics, you will know that its aims are mainstream among the continental establishment. But if you still believe the EU to be little more than a clever vehicle to facilitate tourism or cut the price of phone calls, you may be jolted out of your complacency. This is about politics and nation-building, not commerce; economics only matters when it is weaponised to promote political integration, as with the euro. You may even come to understand that Theresa May was right to say in Florence that “the United Kingdom has never totally felt at home being in the European Union”.

On top of the European military intervention force, Macron wants a substantially greater European budget, and a drive towards tax harmonisation, starting with corporation tax, the treatment of tech firms, carbon levies and national insurance. Macron has been forced temporarily to tone down his support for a Eurozone finance minister and debt mutualisation as a result of Angela Merkel’s humiliation in Germany; but these ideas lurk in the background. Macron also wants a European public prosecutor, an asylum office, a border police and a more integrated immigration policy.

The purpose is to build a new country called Europe, with a common history and cultural references. For this to work, old identities need to be downplayed and eventually turned into historical curiosities. Hence the creation of new European universities, the promotion of apprenticeships in other countries and the adoption of pan-european lists and parties at European elections.

It is usual to contrast Macron’s vision with that of Jean-claude Juncker, also outlined this month. But the distinction is merely one of practicality: Macron realises that an increasingly centralised European state will have to be multi-speed. The hard core will integrate fastest; the more reluctant Europeans will move more slowly. He even thinks the UK may rejoin this slow lane.

Juncker, by contrast, is more one size fits all. Everybody is “dutybound” to join the euro and European banking union; he wants a “fully fledged European Defence Union by 2025”; a new economic nationalism which screens “foreigners” (ie noneuropeans) from buying certain companies, and a crackdown on Eastern Europeans who oppose a centralisation of immigration policy. It’s all or nothing, with dissidents crushed.

Both men are euro-nationalists, inspired by the 20th-century ideology of Jean Monnet and Robert Schuman; both share the same assumptions; both are latter-day empire builders who want to “reunite” Europe and pit it against other countries. It’s a “choice” between two shades of grey that will end in catastrophe by unleashing populist demons across the continent.

To legitimise this power grab, European ideologues like to draw upon the work of the sociologist Benedict Anderson. He claimed that contemporary national identities are “imagined communities” forged out of disparate, pre-industrial groups by national education systems and other forms of top-down cultural moulding. If “Frenchness” and “Germanness” are mere political creations, then why not replace them with “Europeanness”? Yet the logic is faulty: past acts of extreme social engineering do not justify a project to remould society.

That is not a “liberal” vision but a sinister, authoritarian one. Seeking to replace supposedly “fake” identities with new, carefully constructed ones designed to lead to a particular political outcome is merely replacing one kind of nationalism with another. The British metropolitan Left is kidding itself if it does not see this.

PRO-EU ideologues may argue that by forging a new coherent Euro-demos and holding elections to determine who governs it, a genuine form of democracy will be able to take root in the EU. But that will be a 100-year project, at best. In the meantime, existing checks and balances will be eroded as power is handed to nameless politicians and officials, and technocracy will reign supreme. Far from saving the enlightenment values that almost perished in the World Wars, European integration will have destroyed them.

Britain never wanted any of this. We joined the European Economic Community for practical reasons: we thought it would modernise our economy and help the West to defeat communism. We were wrong, and we won’t make that mistake again. It will become increasingly impossible, as the years pass and Macron and his allies get their way, for anybody to pretend that the EU is merely a “free market” rather than an embryonic state.

Once we leave, that will be it: we will never rejoin.