Magnifying old mistakes: the situation in France
by David Pryce-Jones
google.com
Excerpt:
The European Union structure of administration happens to be in Brussels, concentrated in a tight core of some twenty-five thousand permanent officials. Other countries in the European Union are perforce handing more and more policy-making over to Brussels, but the French do so with a tenacity all their own. In a number of respects, Brussels is Paris writ large. The system operating there, that is to say, is monarchical, displaying a central control which Louis XIV would envy. The elementary features of democracy are missing. There is no separation of powers, no accountability, no appeal. The legislative body meets in secret and does not publish its proceedings.
An accelerating juggernaut has been constructed by harnessing the fact of central control to the old revolutionary ideal that for their own good men are to be made over in the image that their master has for them. Brussels operates a continental-scale welfare state through a complex network of subsidies, transfer payments, grants, and aid. Regulations by the tens of thousands bind everywhere all aspects of industrial, commercial, and social intercourse, down to trivia in what had hitherto been considered spheres with which the state had no business. So much for the free market. So much for freedom itself. Billions more dollars vanish into the pockets of the power- brokers and invisible officials who in practice now dispose of Europe. This is a command-bureaucracy, absurdly like Brezhnev's Russia, the second time round, as tragical farce.
Every country in this enterprise is obliged to bear immense costs of adaptation, in real terms, and no less expensively in the national psyche, in its view of itself. The French have their special dilemma. Whether through the hazard of events or by conscious design, they find themselves caught in the contradictions and flaws of the past, replicated and magnified yet again. Universalism as practiced in Brussels is in conflict with the particularity embodied in France and the nation-state so absolutely that in the end one of these concepts must kill the other off outright.
Almost unanimously, the contributors to this symposium are ready to accept Brussels-driven universalism at face value. Not a single one of them makes a principled objection to the command-bureaucracy and its anti-democratic nature. They seem to believe that the emerging federation will resolve the social, political, cultural, and economic ills they have dissected as specific. So at the center of this general discussion about the current situation of France is a huge gap in logic: since final decision-making lies with every passing week more and more in the hands of others, whatever is the point of the French bothering their own heads about how to reform themselves? In essentials, and in accumulating details, too, they have already committed their future to Brussels, and can now recover it only through an upheaval whose fallout cannot be predicted.
Two writers alone defend French particularity. In the view of Pierre Manent, France has to expect only "humiliation, dispossession, and mutilation" from the construction of Europe. In the light of history, Max Gallo questions German intentions: is this European Union really the lion lying down with the lamb? Or will the command-bureaucracy be powered by the Germans, a kind of latterday Wehrmacht occupying Europe again, in civilian disguise? In any case, Gallo would rather not owe anyone anything, even if he were to be poor and deprived. For him, it is a matter of pride and self-respect.
The speed and ease with which so many thoughtful men, unquestionably democrats and patriots, have abandoned French particularity is as baffling as the collapse of France in 1940. What is the origin of their pervasive and almost fatalistic acceptance that France must transform into something else? As then, one possible reason seems to carry further than others. In the manner of pro-Nazi precursors in the Thirties, the National Front has compromised the ideal of the nation-state to the point where those who would normally defend it are afraid that patriotism and democracy will be mistaken for nationalism and impotence respectively. Sabotaged, they are unsure where to turn, how to regroup. In Germany, too, neo-Nazis are eroding the right-wing vote. In the absence of articulate expression of mainstream opinion, the deceptive universalism of the European Union goes unchallenged. This makes for a political vacuum, and in the event of extremists in France or Germany actually filling it, of course, a national and a European catastrophe will be at hand.
Another slogan forms: "Rather Brussels than Le Pen." That is almost certain to translate in practice as "First Brussels, then the general backlash against it." The thugs sign up for nationalism and racism; voters retreat into apathy; intelligence has been betrayed again; and the country hangs in the balance between self-renunciation and violence. |
