Podella Pisanella. 29 April.
Niccolo Machiavelli once said, “Men are so simple and so inclined to obey
immediate needs that a deceiver will never lack victims for his
deceptions”. The Tuscan landscape flows
smoothly across the eye like a good bottle of Brunello di Montalcino flows
smoothly across the palette. In the
grand distance Cypressi stand erect across the hills and ridges like Roman
legionnaires celebrating the status – real or imagined - of the masters who
planted them. This is a refined,
man-made landscape born of ages with just the merest glimpse of the ancient
Etruscan wildness and medieval mayhem which once did so much to shape this land
and its people. Tuscany in some ways is
a metaphor for Europe. Right through its ancient heart run the highways and
bye-ways of an empire that still effectively shapes Europe – the Roman Empire. What does Tuscany’s history say of Europe
today?
Rome grappled
continually with the battle between elite power, the rights of citizenship,
discrimination, immigration, insecurity and supranational identity. Even today the shadow of Rome does so much in
the mind to separate the European from the non-European, the ‘them’ from the
‘us’. It is a tussle that still marks Europe’s
many dividing lines and which is daily played out as the EU and its leaders try
to turn distinct nations into European empire…again.
For many years now the
battle for a European ‘us’ has been fought between politicised Eurocrats and
their political fellow-travellers and national democrats dismayed at the
assault on their states by the very institution they thought served them. The EU has become one of those giant
computers beloved of Hollywood which is built to serve but learns to dominate. Sadly, what started out as a wonderful,
war-ending idea has become a nightmare as the ‘Europe’ the elite built simply
created a new ‘them’ and ‘us’ between the anonymously powerful and secret and
the anonymously and yet massed impotent – the people.
In May almost-elections
will take place to the almost European Parliament to elect the mainly unknown
at great expense to ‘represent’ the all-too-wittingly unknowing. Thereafter, the power-justifying, mandate
illegitimate European Parliament will be cited by the powerful as a false
mandate to build their false ‘Europe’ on false democracy. Sadly, the EU today is just about as far one
can get in democracy from government by the people, for the people and of the
people.
Machiavelli knew that If
politics outstrips identity then power becomes autocracy. And yet so many in the Brussels elite seem to
think that by chipping away at the power of the state function can somehow build
identity. The saddest thing of all for
the people is that so many European states are willing to go along with this. Many eastern Europeans after years of
subjugation by the Soviet Russians see EU membership as a badge of honour and a
source of protection (of sorts) even if it is not quite democratic. Southern
European states mired in debt see a loss of democracy and possibly liberty as a
price worth paying for access to the money of the few European taxpayers
actually paying hard cash to keep the Eurozone afloat. The French and other members of the original ‘Six’
still somehow think the EU of today is the European Economic Community of old and
that somehow they still have the beast under control. The Germans think that because they control
the European Central Bank in Frankfurt they control the EU and that somehow the
Union is the answer to the century-plus old German Question; European
integration on German terms.
Only the British perhaps
with their distinct traditions of law and freedom hewn out over centuries of
revolution-free history see the EU for what it is – power for a few at the
expense of the many. And yet the British elite have become so entangled in
their own spin that they have abandoned the fundamental principles of power and
influence. No-one listens to them
anymore – either within or without.
Just up the road from
here in Florence Machiavelli understood power and the arts of its dangerous
practice. He would have recognised today’s European nation-states as not
dissimilar to the Fifteenth century Italic League that he helped craft and
which was eventually crushed by the 1494 French invasion. The League was too late for Italy’s warring
city states had already been stripped of real power. Today’s EU state has been
similarly hollowed out by transferring so much of the essence of state power to
Brussels that no-one knows where the EU starts and the state ends. It is a recipe for strategic disaster.
And in steps Vlad.
Moscow is re-drawing Europe’s margins in that direct and brutal way in which
Russia has so often told its own story. Ironically,
given the case made by those for deeper European integration Russia’s aggression
has revealed just how weak Europe has become because of it. In any case, Comrade Vlad thinks the EU is
hypocritical. The EU’s exercise of power
is little different to that of the Kremlin - utterly secretive and lacking in
transparency with few if any real checks and balances.
Machiavelli was at his
Florentine peak during the 1494 French invasion. The Master would have understood all too well
the Europe of today. For him there would
likely be only two winners – the false democrats of Brussels spinning their
paralysing webs of ‘harmonisation’ and ‘efficiency’ and the non-democrats of
Moscow driving their tanks of autocracy through sovereignty.
The only question Machiavelli
would have asked is to which of the two to serve. After all, both Brussels and Moscow are brim full
of plotting little princes with whom the Master would have felt entirely
comfortable. My bet is on Brussels for Machiavelli
would have understood that with power moving inexorably away from the state it
is the little princes of Eurocracy that will soon rule whatever the people say,
think or vote. Power is an end in and of
itself for princes.
The new struggle for Europe concerns where democracy happens. The EU elite unlike Comrade Vlad are not averse to democracy they simply want it to happen at the European level. The rest of us believe that 'democracy' at the European level will simply confirm power that is too far distant from the people. They very thing that in the end killed Rome.
Julian Lindley-French
