Anti-fasciste? Tres bien, j'en suis heureux. L'Europe a bien besoin de gens comme toi.
Par contre, il y a quelque chose que les Europeens ne comprendrons jamais.
In America, power is vested in 'We, the People' and leased upwards, through town, county, state and federal government, in ever more limited doses. By the time you get to the organs of embryo world government like the International Criminal Court, Americans are inclined to feel that's leasing it a little too far. America is the only Western power in which a significant proportion of voters disdain the UN and all its works, and where for many years Congress declined to pay the country's membership dues. Europeans assume this is some sort of primitive, redneck fear of 'multilateralism', but in fact it's an entirely reasonable wariness of diluting the sovereignty of the American people in what is, in large part, a front for anti-democratic forces.
Conversely, in Britain, power is vested in the Crown and leased downwards in ever more limited doses. Even the language of alleged decentralists - 'devolution', 'subsidiarity' - assumes that the natural place for power to concentrate is at the centre. It seems to me the reason that there's no real mass movement against loss of sovereignty to Europe is that, unlike small-town Yankees, most Britons don't feel they have any sovereignty to begin with.
Britain and Europe have 'free governments' but they don't have 'the spirit of liberty', and they suffer as a consequence. If you were to apply Tom Ridge's system of colour-coded security alerts - from blue to red via green, yellow and orange - to the entire planet, you'd wind up with something along these lines: the United States, code green; the Britannic world, code yellow; Europe, code orange; the Middle East, code red. The Arab world has no democracy, and little prospect of any, and so its much-vaunted 'Arab street' is, in fact, a symbol of weakness. Folks jump up and down in the street when they've nowhere else to go. The Arabs are world leaders at yelling excitedly and shouting 'Death to the Great Satan!' and are world losers at everything else.
Western Europe, though, isn't much healthier. In America, Canada and Britain, we're the heirs to so many centuries of peaceful constitutional evolution that we find it hard to comprehend the thin ice on which European democracy skates. When we look back on the Seventies, it's Jimmy Carter, Pierre Trudeau and Harold Wilson, all of whom I could have done without. But they look pretty good compared with a stroll down memory lane in Portugal, Spain and Greece, where Seventies nostalgia means Salazar, Franco and the Colonels. In most of Europe, there simply is no tradition of sustained peaceful democratic evolution. After 215 years, the US Constitution is not only older than the French, German, Italian, Belgian, Spanish and Greek constitutions, it's older than all of them put together. Whether the forthcoming European constitution will be the one that sticks remains to be seen, but I wouldn't bet on it. The curse of the Continent is big ideas: Communism, Fascism, European Union. Generally speaking, each of these wacky notions is a response to the last dud: the pre-war German middle classes put their faith in Hitler as a bulwark against the Bolsheviks; likewise, the postwar German middle classes put their faith in European integration as a bulwark against a resurgence of Nazism.
The ideal Euro-scenario was postwar Austria, a two-party one-party state where, whether you voted centre-left or centre-right, you ended up with the same centre-left-right coalition government. Then Jorg Haider came along. The EU sees itself as the answer to the problem of Le Pen, Haider, Fortuyn, et al. Le Pen, Haider and co. see themselves as the answer to the problem of the EU. The correct answer is probably 'Neither of the above', but the stampede of politicians and press to demonise Pim Fortuyn suggests it's the Europhiles who are in the advanced state of derangement: when you're that eager to tag as a fascist the guy who's standing up to the fascists (the Islamofascists, that is), you're in pretty bad shape. France is even more diseased: if an election with only one viable candidate, no debate, a cheerleading media, a blind eye to corruption, and public demonstrations with bussed-in schoolchildren 'strengthens' your democracy, then I'm moving to Zimbabwe.
Britain, Canada, Australia and the rest are in better shape. But it's weird to see the suffocating ubiquity of Tony Blair described as 'presidential', when in truth he wields more power as the Queen's First Minister than a US president could ever dream of. A humble prime minister can effectively abolish one house of the national legislature, install toytown parliaments with variable powers in three-quarters of the realm and chop what's left into bogus invented regions. If you live in, say, Banbury, you might wind up in South Midlands (North), North Midlands (South), West Midlands (East), Greater Thames Valley or Lower Mercia, but, wherever it is, the decision is entirely out of your hands. No US president can carve off the western bit of New Hampshire and the eastern bit of Vermont and rename it Central Region or Humberside.
Yet, for all its imperfections, Westminster democracy has delivered an unglamorous stability: unlike America with 'life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness', Canada's constitutional preamble commits it to 'peace, order and good government', which sounds less primal and more bureaucratic but is still more than the Continent has managed. The great mystery is why Britain, having successfully exported its democratic structures around the world, is abandoning them at home to subordinate itself to a political and legal culture with which it has nothing in common.
You would think, would you not, that, if Europe were really serious about avoiding the horrors of the last century, it might try and learn from the two most successful and enduring forms of democracy in the world: the Westminster parliamentary system and American federalism. Instead, these are precisely the forms the EU is most determined to avoid. The French spend so much time demonising America as a 'hegemon' and 'hyperpower' that they miss the point: the US made it big by keeping things small, by recognising that the most important part of democracy is the first rung on the ladder. Thomas Jefferson considered New England town government 'the wisest invention ever devised by the wit of man for the perfect exercise of self-government and for its preservation'. The last word is the important part: anyone can start a democracy, but keeping it going depends on an engaged, participating citizenry, not just folks who shuffle along to the polls once every four years to vote for some guy from a centrally approved list of party hacks. The 'spirit of liberty' is at least as important as a 'free government', and, in its reflexive distaste for the former, the European Union is unlikely to end up with the latter.
English text by Mark Steyn |
