Vienna, Austria. 26 September.
Gazing across the vertiginous topography of my Viennese cappuccino as I
sit on the terrace of the Palmengarten palaces stretch before me in this most
beautiful of cities which adorns the very heart of Europe. With a loose heritage that dates back to
Charlemagne and the Holy Roman Empire Vienna is the quintessential
post-imperial European city. Now the
capital of a small but rich and modern European state it was once the epicentre
of a vast multicultural, multi-ethnic empire that collapsed in 1918 under the
weight of its own political hollowness.
As a metaphor for modern Europe there can be no better.
Sad though this may be
much of my weekend was spent reading and contemplating the Future of Euro-Aristocracy
(sorry Future of Europe) Group report compiled by the foreign ministers of
Austria, Belgium, Denmark (traitors), France, Italy, Germany, the Netherlands,
Poland, Portugal and Spain. If this was
a football/soccer tournament this would be known as the Group of Death because
it would be almost impossible to get out of.
The report establishes
the battle-lines between a Europe built around its nation-states and national
parliaments, for all its inevitable inefficiencies, and a Europe that replaces
rump nation-states with a putative European super-state, for all its inevitable
inequities. The Group choose decisively
for the latter.
A not inconsiderable
bit of the report I sort of agree with.
That, “the European Union has reached a decisive juncture” cannot be
contested. Their central contention that
a Europe of “28 or more” member-states renders the EU less than the sum of its
parts, is equally compelling, but only because they are moving the goalposts
between structure, power and ambition. However,
thereafter I part company with the ministers because for all their talk of
democracy and accountability for them more Europe, means less democracy. This report is in effect the founding
document of the coming Eurosphere and they see themselves as its founding fathers, like Schumann,
De Spaak et al before them.
They call for “treaty
changes” if needs be to deepen Economic and Monetary Union, ever deeper policy
co-ordination between member-states, an effective single ECB supervisory
mechanism to oversee the banks and more power for the European Commission with
a directly-elected European Commission President (what German Foreign Minister
Guido Westerwelle last week called a European Government). All this together with a
strengthened European (Pretend) Parliament to “ensure full democratic
legitimacy and accountability”. They
also call on the EU “to strengthen its act on the world stage” by creating in
effect a real EU foreign and security policy, taking the veto (i.e. Britain)
out of EU foreign and security policy decision-making and for a new European
defence policy, which “could eventually involve a European Army”.
In short, the Euro-Aristocracy are
creating is a political Frankenstein, something Polish Foreign Minister Radek Sikorski rather forgot in an anti-British speech he made in Oxford last week. We,
the citizens? Last week I was told by a
fully paid-up member of the Euro-Aristocracy to shut up. What he painted for me
was a picture of my European future. I was warned for standing in the way of
the powerful. “Yes”, I replied, “because
what is happening is so important that we citizens must be heard whether you
like it or not”. He snorted dismissively. Across Europe the
same pattern is being repeated. Civil
society is slowly being strangled by the elite as critics are either co-opted,
intimidated or both.
Over coffee I fell into
conversation with a Viennese gentleman.
He did not like the idea of a big Europe because he said it reminded
Austrians of a very painful past but like millions of his fellow Austrians he
felt utterly powerless. He told me he detested
politicians acting in his name when he had no say. He said he also felt
grateful to Britain for again standing up to the grand illusion of a European
super-state. Sadly, I did not have the
heart to tell him that PR-Meister Cameron and his Lilliputian London Government
lack both the vision and the political backbone to stand up for British
interests, let alone those of small countries far way about which they know
little.
This report should not
be under-estimated. It is the beginning
of a determined campaign by the Euro-core Euro-Aristocracy to drive through the
most profound change in political Europe since World War Two. They will use hook and crook, demanding formal
treaty change here bypassing the recalcitrant there, be they concerned citizens
such as me, or the soon to be EU-exiting British (or both).
Given all that Vienna seems an
appropriate place to remember the parable of the naked emperor. Conned into believing he had been given a
magic cloak of the finest cloth, the emperor was in fact naked and only he was
blind to the fact. This time it is the
emperors who are conning the people.
Julian Lindley-French
