Why European Union Is Anti-Liberty
by Alberto Mingardi
There are some reasons for libertarians to be very skeptical about the new National State being formed today on the Ancient Continent under the friendly name of "European Union". Going back a little bit in history, around the Fifties, the idea of a common European market seemed to be a first step in the direction all libertarians highly encourage: free trade, less barriers, more freedom. The European single market was defined as "an area without frontiers in which the free movement of goods, persons, services and capital is ensured in accordance with the provisions of this Treaty" (Article 7 of both the Treaties of Rome and Maastricht).
But we must remember that the economics of trade is heavily conditioned by a legal framework: treaties and internationally important free trade and association agreements have all created complex legal structures and rules. This is particularly true in the case of the European Union, which possesses its own legal order — a point that distinguishes the EU from GATT and other international trade arrangements which operate at the level of relations between states. That legal order is embodied in a number of rules made under various Treaties which empower European institutions to make an aggressive use of the technique of "harmonization" of detailed standards of goods, services, and service providers. Generating many thousands of pages of detailed legislation, this system creates as well strong pressure to impose unnecessarily high and cumbersome standards and regulations.
So, the step from a general "liberal" legal order (that tried to have everywhere in Europe general rules against unjustified discrimination against nationals of other member states, and general rights of establishment and movement in order to provide services) to an authoritarian one was brief—maybe because the EU has always been simultaneously the "Europe of Adam Smith and Colbert", as Anthony De Jasay has recently defined it. There were different tendencies from the beginning of the Community—one going towards a free common market and a minimal European government (the goals of Luigi Einaudi and Ludwig Erhard, for example), and the other one pursuing an integrated big goverment (that has been, very properly, called "European federalism", referring to Alexander Hamilton's federalist views).
In this sense, Wilhelm Roepke deserves an appreciation for his works on Europe. Now, it wasn't the case that he was an ardent critic of the Community when it was still just a common market (Adam Smith's Europe); rather, one of his most famous books was International Economic Disintegration, in which he detailed the disastrous consequences that collectivist economics produced by destroying the international division of labor through trade restrictions, exchange controls, and government planning (Wilhelm Roepke, International Economic Disintregration, Philadelphia: Porcupine Press, 1978 [1942]). For Roepke, the idea of an European Community was exactly the result of this general cultural inclination: a result of the "fatal conceit" of bureaucrats and the State's tendency not just to plan and tax, but also to "harmonize" and amalgamate different people and different cultures.
Roepke saw ahead of time what now must be clear to all freedom-lovers, that although the single market is an important aspect of the activites of the European Union, it is only one of those activities. And it's not the central activity. Apart from the common market itself, the goals of the EU include a common foreign and security policy, justice and home affairs cooperation, an extensive European "social" legislation, environmental policies, and of course the creation of a common currency (the Euro). The whole is intended to form part of "the process of creating an ever closer union amongst the people of Europe" (Maastricht Treaty, Article A).
The Ventotene Manifesto
"Even closer union" seems to be a euphemistic label meaning a federalized and centralized State. This was the dream of the Italian Leninist and former Stalinist Altiero Spinelli, a character many libertarianians have never heard of, but who was an architect of the European common institutions. During fascism, Spinelli was an enemy of the government. Since fascism has been more tolerant with the opposition than many other (even democratic) regimes, he and many other opposers weren't killed but just confined in Ventotene, an island in the Gulf of Gaeta, off the Italian coast between Rome and Naples.
In Ventotene, Spinelli wasn't alone but rather had as companions other political criminals, including all "European federalists", led by Ernesto Rossi. Rossi, formerly a head of the anti-fascist group "Giustizia e libertà", would after the Second World War become one of the most prominent Italian advocates of a "third way" between socialism and laissez-faire capitalism
Rossi was a friend of Luigi Einaudi, previously mentioned as a free market economist supporting the European Community. Einaudi, well-known in international academic circles as one of the most important Italian free-market advocates, and as well a founding member of the Mont Pelerin Society, sent Rossi the writings of Hamilton, Jay, and Madison. The latter had the strongest influence on his thought. Among contemporary writers, it was no surprise that Lord Beveridge (a Keynesian, and one of the opponents of Lionel Robbins at the London School of Economics) had a strong influence on both Rossi and Spinelli.
This then was the political background leading Rossi and Spinelli to write the so-called Ventotene Manifesto, a central landmark in the history of European federalism. The Ventotene Manifesto has had an extraordinary impact, inspiring those who drafted the policies of re-emerging Italian parties. After the war, it became the basic document of the European Federalist Movement.
In the Ventotene Manifesto, Spinelli and Rossi argued that a Federal Union of Europe had to be the top priority for post-war Italy because the workers of both capitalist and communist countries have to be "liberated." Not surprisingly, given Spinelli's background, it reads like a communist tract. "A free and united Europe ... will immediately revive in full the historical process of the struggle against social inequalities and privileges. All the old conservative structures which hindered this process will have collapsed or will be in a state of collapse... In order to respond to our needs, the European revolution must be socialist..." (Ventotene Manifesto).
Spinelli thought that ending the nation-states of Europe would have other benefits as well. "The multiple problems which poison international life on the continent have proved to be insoluble: tracing boundaries through areas inhabited by mixed populations, defense of minorities, seaports for landlocked countries, the Balkan question, the Irish problem, and so on. All matters which should find easy solutions in the European federation."
This is still the vision of European Federation endorsed by the supporters of a federal Europe (especially the governments of France, Germany and — of course — Italy). It leads us to examine the last EU meeting in Nice, where the participants had put on the agenda some points Spinelli and his friends would have strongly supported. One was the "harmonization" or integration of defense, leading ultimately to a European military force. The second was the process of harmonizing judicial process and policing, and the creation of some sort of European criminal code. The third was to have that final and definitive attribute of statehood, a written constitution for the EU.
The Nice Meeting
All of these things to a greater or lesser extent are in the draft treaty. It was brought out by the Commission in a paper excitingly titled "Commission Opinion in Accordance with Article 48 of the Treaty on European Union on the Calling of the Conference of Representatives of the Governments of the Member States to amend the Treaties". We must fill in what exactly the agenda of the Commission was.
First of all, the army. What was proposed wasn¹t the creation of some additional military resource available to the European Union, but rather what is being tackled is the command structures of existing troops. None of the member governments in the EU has the appetite at a time like this to expand defense expenditure, so the focus is on the creation of politico-military structures in Brussels. Rather than having either an intergovernmental or a NATO-based approach to defense matters, there would be a direct input by the Commission and Council of Ministers who have at the Cologne summit assigned a specific national force called the Eurocorps. This had its first deployment a few months ago in Kosovo and is seen as the nucleus of an European army.
The second pillar: policing and the judiciary. It is quite important to be clear about what is being done here. What is being proposed is not mutual recognition of judgments or co-ordination of judicial practice. That already happens both within the EU and around the world. There are remarkably sophisticated accords and treaties dealing with the fact that time spent in one prison can be counted as time off a sentence in another jurisdiction, guaranteeing translation in courts and so on — all of that is already there.
What is being proposed is something far more far-reaching and ambitious, which is the creation of a new criminal code for the EU. For the first time it would be possible to be arraigned in front of a court not because you have committed a crime under English or Scottish or French or Portuguese 1aw, but under a new criminal code. This is almost unprecedented — and has got a clear goal: when you have a European legal system you of course need a European police force to enforce it. So, the idea is to open the door to turning Europe into a police-state.
The third pillar: The justification for all these measures can be found in the new "European Constitution", despite it being called at the moment merely a "Charter of Fundamental Rights and Freedoms". It is not a Bill of Rights: as the American people (libertarians, first of all) know well; to have a Bill of Rights as well as a constitution, there must be a kind of struggle before. In US there were federalists and anti-federalists, and the fight between these two groups led to the establishment of a balanced constitution. Instead, this phenomena has not happened in the unified Europe, where the State has decided by itself what a right is, and what it is not, and has put this into a constitution. No fight. No struggle. Just the power "limiting" itself.
Crushing Tax Competition
Nice has been just the last step of we can call "the Europe of Colbert": a movement towards a progressive centralization of policy-making in Brussels, and a total harmonization of differences between legal orders—what economists can synthetically call "tax competition". Avoiding tax competition, Brussels is going to stop any residual chance for its citizen to "vote with their feet", moving capital from more socialist countries to low-tax ones. The triumph of Colbert's Europe is exactly the death of the dream of a free-market Europe: since, as anyone can see, advancing "harmonization" means exactly to destroy the benefits you can obtain from the free movement of capital and labor. If you can move your capital, but only in a totally politically integrated system where every country, province, and city has the same regulations and the same taxation level, it's like you are not moving at all.
Wilhelm Roepke deserves to be praised since he was able to show ahead of time not just the existence of "the Europe of Colbert", but that this movement towards a progressive centralization was definitively anti-Europe itself. Europe was the birthplace of capitalism, as (among others) Ralph Raico in America and Jean Baechler in Europe have extensively remarked. And, at the time, Europe was a pluralistic contest until 1861, the year of the unification both of Italy and Germany. Before that time, Italy and Germany were formed by a plurality of small states, competing with each other in the positive, market sense of the word. And the Austrian empire, destroyed at the end of the First World War (with the contemporary emerging of social-democratic model of goverment) was itself really a pluralistic, decentralized entity, where people had had the freedom to differ in many ways.
Making this point, Roepke correctly stated that "decentrism is of the essence of the spirit of Europe: to try to organise Europe centrally, to submit the Continent to a bureaucracy of economic planning, and to weld it into a block would be nothing less than a betrayal of Europe and the European patrimony. The betrayal would be the more perfidious for being perpetrated in the name of Europe and by an outrageous misuse of that name. We would be destroying what we ought to defend, what endears Europe to us and makes her indispensable to the whole free world.
"It is an ominous sign that there should be any need even to argue about the fact that a certain method of European integration should be excluded because it is un-European, centrist, and illiberal in the broadest sense of European libertarian thought. Economic nationalism and planning on the continental scale is no progress whatever in relation to economic nationalism and planning on the national scale. Indeed, it is much worse because these tendencies would have much freer scope on the larger territory of a whole continent...
"Respect for distinctions and particularities, for diversity and for the small units of life and civilization ... these are the general principles whose observance alone identifies us as true Europeans who take the meaning of Europe seriously".
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Alberto Mingardi is a regular columnist of the Italian daily Libero (Milan), and a visiting fellow of the Atlas Economic Research Foundation (Fairfax, VA). Email: amingard@tin.it.
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