Alphen, Netherlands. 18
December. A South African satirist
Jonathan Shapiro tells a tale about Nelson Mandela that typifies the great man. In the mid-1990s he had been lampooning then
President Mandela savagely in a Cape Town newspaper. One morning Shapiro receives a telephone call
from the President. In that wonderfully
resonant voice Mandela says, “I am very disappointed in you, Mr Shapiro”. Shapiro fears the worst. “What have I done,
Mr President?” “Your cartoons are no
longer in the newspaper and I cannot start my day without them,” Mandela
replies. “That’s a relief. I thought I had offended you, sir”, Shapiro
says. “No not at all.” Mandela
replies. “That is your job”. Mandela understood that in a democracy power
is held in trust and that the first duty of a leader is to preserve the
integrity of leadership.
Contrast that with EU leaders
today. This week will see biggest
transfer of national sovereignty to counter-democratic EU institutions since
the creation of the Euro. What had been
billed as an EU summit devoted to European defence has been hijacked to create
a Restoration Fund for failing Eurozone banks and to pave the way for European
Banking Union. This may sound on the
face of it the stuff of Euro-geeks but it is in fact a massive step towards
both political and monetary union…and Europe's citizens were not meant to realise it.
The retreat by European
leaders from the integrity of leadership is typified by Dutch Prime Minister
Mark Rutte. Knowing Dutch resistance to
these plans Rutte reported to the Dutch Parliament this week that the
communique from the last EU summit in October had been “mistranslated” from
English into Dutch. When he said that there
would be no more transfer of sovereign Dutch powers to create a European
Banking Union he had meant to say there will be a transfer of more sovereign
Dutch powers to Brussels in the form of “politically-binding contracts”.
Beware geeks bearing
gifts. Although Britain is not in the
Eurozone the implications for the City of London and British banks are
profound. At a stroke Frankfurt rather
than London will become the banking centre of Europe, which is what Berlin is,
er, ‘banking’ on. For the European
Central Bank and European Commission to have such powers is a treaty-change in all
but name. Deputy Prime Minister and
Commission Odysseus Nick Clegg is always telling the British people that any
significant shift of more powers to Britain will trigger a “treaty lock”, i.e.
a referendum. Not a murmur from Clegg or London. The “treaty
lock” is yet another con.
Half union, half empire what is taking place is
the dangerous concentration of power in a few elite hands in Europe with unelected
bodies given ever more power in the name of the ‘Europe’ and with Germany
providing what is left of national oversight.
English philosopher John Stuart Mill established a fundamental principle
of libertarianism that informed Nelson Mandela’s leadership and which for
democracies establishes the fundamental contract between elected leaders and led. The Harm Principle says that “no-one should
be forcibly prevented from acting in any way he chooses provided his acts are
not invasive of the free acts of others”.
When one replaces democracy with bureaucracy and/or empire one replaces rights with
obligations.
With polls suggesting that 30% of the new Parliament could be comprised of Euro-sceptics Brussels is of course warning
about ‘populists’ emerging at next May’s elections for the European Parliament. Bring it
on! To the Euro-elite anyone who challenges their 'vision' is a populist. Europe desperately needs more checks
and balances at the European level because elected national leaders are failing
in their first duty to their peoples.
As Rutte demonstrated all
too clearly with the marked exception of Germany most European nation-states
are fast being stripped of all meaningful sovereignty. Rather, the European Union looks ever more
like the failing Roman Republic of the first century in which aristocratic
Senators would routinely suggest that whilst they were for the people they were
not of the people.
Seen through the light
of Mandela’s example the cavalier attitude of Rutte and his fellow EU leaders
to democracy, sovereignty and the will of the people is appalling. Madiba’s genius was to be both of the people
and demonstrably for the people precisely because he had seen the abuse of
power at first hand and understood the vital importance of integrity in
leadership.
As the great man once said,
“What counts in life is not the mere fact we have lived. It is what difference we have made to the
lives of others that will determine the significance of the life we lead”. To paraphrase Lincoln’s Gettysberg Address;
government for the people, of the people, by the people should not perish from
Europe…but with European democracy an empty husk it could soon do so.
Julian Lindley-French
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