Pandora’s Box and the Trojan ‘orses: The EU and its critics by Reverend Doctor Peter Mullen

On the principle of  Know Your Enemy, I’d like to sketch the misty beginnings of the European Union. Sketch is the operative word, for too much detail will only make me as boring as the EU itself

The German-French politician Robert Schuman (1886-1963) is sometimes called The Father of Europe for what became known as the Schuman Declaration in which he called for the formation of a supranational community and reorganisation of post-war Europe through treaties. And it was Schuman who began the post-war French-German co-operation that created the European Coal and Steel Community, later joined by Italy and the Benelux countries. The date of the drafting of the Schuman Declaration, 9 May 1950 has ever since been celebrated, bemoaned or largely ignored as Europe Day.

Then there was Konrad Adenauer (1876-1967). The first post-war Chancellor of West Germany whose main ambition was the reconciliation of Germany and its European neighbours after the Second World War. And Adenauer played a big part in the formation of the European Economic Community (EEC) and the European Atomic Energy Community (Euratom) Crucial was the Elysee Treaty, signed by Adenauer and Charles de Gaulle in 1963 which papered over the rivalry between France and Germany – or, if you prefer, continued Hitler’s subjugation of France, once again with France’s concurrence. This is what made the EU possible.

Paul-Henry Spaak (1899-1972), three times Belgian Prime Minister, was one of the strongest supporters of European integration after the war. He led the committee named after him that produced a plan for what was then called a common market and a European Community. The Spaak Report was basic to the Intergovernmental Conference on the Common Market and Euratom in 1956 and the founding Treaty of Rome the following year.

Jean Monnet (1888-1979) a devious French diplomat, political economist and general apparatchik, never held public office but he was one of the main architects of the EU. Monnet plotted political union by gradualism and stealth. He was the master of the conspicuous art of saying one thing and doing the opposite. This is what made him so admired by such as Edward Heath, Roy Jenkins and Kenneth Clarke who, along with many others we can all name, are all pale copies of their idol.

We shouldn’t forget Alcide De Gasperi (1881-1954), the Prime Minister of Italy from 1945 to 1953. De Gasperi was, I believe, the first man to argue for a common European defence policy.

If, with me, you think that what Bismarck failed to achieve by force of arms in 1870, the Kaiser failed to achieve in 1914 and Hitler, using the same methods, failed to achieve in 1939, Angela Merkel has achieved without a shot being fired – up till now anyway – you should seek out a speech made to the House of Commons on 26^th February 2008. This speech was not made by Rowan Atkinson but by his more sensible elder brother Rodney. He reminded the House that the Germans have striven for the domination of Europe for a century and a half – and perhaps for even longer than that.

R.G. Collingwood in The New Leviathan – the book he described in 1942 as his “contribution to our war effort” said:

“An Englishman is liable to a certain time-lag between barbarism’s arriving at a certain stage of maturity in Germany and that fact becoming known to him in England, perhaps a longer time than we might expect. And German barbarism has rediscovered the great rule of barbarist warfare originally laid down by the Turks: that among barbarists there are no allies; all fight against all.”

We find testimony to the persistence of this trait among Germans in what might be seen as an unlikely place – in John Eliot Gardiner’s excellent new book on Johann Sebastian Bach in which he speaks of the chthonic forces which lurked for centuries in the vast and terrifying central European forests and their potential to emerge. We should not be surprised when we notice that Freud and Jung wrote in German – and so did the brothers Grimm and Richard Wagner.

Rodney Atkinson also said:

“The EU was founded by Nazis and Fascists, as was the Charlemagne Prize awarded to Tony Blair, Edward Heath, Roy Jenkins and others for their role in removing democratic sovereignty from the nation states of Europe. No wonder that the EU has today reproduced the policies and structures of 1940s Europe and shows all the characteristics of a totalitarian anti-democratic corporatist Empire — for that is what its fascist founders intended.”

Prominent among them was Walter Hallstein, a former Nazi Leadership Officer who promoted Nazism in Universities and in the Law before becoming the First President of the European Commission in 1957. Paul Henri Spaak – whom we met earlier – in the 1940s rejected the democracies in favour of the fascist powers and warned the Allies not to attack Germany through Belgium..

Walter Funk was a Minister under Goebbels at the Nazi Propaganda Ministry and, as the Reich’s Economics Minister, was responsible for dispossessing Jews of their property. Funk wrote the economic blueprint for a united Europe adopted by the European Union.

Hans Josef Globke drafted the Nuremburg Race Laws but this didn’t prevent his ascent to the post of Director of the German Chancellor’s Office from 1953 to 1963

Since Oswald Mosley, leader of the British Union of Fascists was notable for his desire to see European union, it should come as no surprise to learn that his widow Lady Diana – a Hitler aficionado – expressed her admiration for the European Union in a BBC interview shortly before her death.

“No wonder”, said Atkinson, “that the EU promoted the ethnic cleansing of a million people in the Balkans, mainly Serbs, Jews and gypsies, from Croatia, Bosnia and Kosovo all of which provided Waffen SS divisions for the Nazis in the 1940s.

“Either,” he said, what those political elements wanted in the 1940s was reasonable, in which case we should not have fought the Second World War to prevent their integrated Europe, or they were extremely dangerous people and we must reject the European Union which they helped to create and which bears their ideological stamp today.”

Atkinson describes what he calls “…a coup against the people of Britain and those nation-states of Europe which were liberated from Fascism in 1945 and from Communism in 1989. This has been a coup against the sovereignty of the voters, the very definition of democracy. Those who sought to destroy democratic sovereignty knew they could not succeed if they were open about their intentions. And they could not succeed if they attempted their coup within one democratic system. They therefore acted behind the democratic system and across national borders. They established in the European Union a bureaucratic corporatist state so monolithic that most can be intimidated into silence by the very size of the project, and emasculated by the necessary remoteness of the powers involved.”

Today’s leaders in the EU ignore the voters and so the much-vaunted European democracy is a fiction and the corporatist state the reality. We are governed by unelected commissioners – oligarchs and bureaucrats – and the European parliament is only a rubber stamp. The European Constitution was thrown out with gusto by the people of France and the Netherlands, but it was smuggled back in again as the Lisbon Treaty. This Treaty effectually established a new legal country called the EU. It also provides for further constitutional changes without the people’s consultation. It abolishes free trade, licenses the erosion of individual liberty in the supervening interests of the new super-state, and permits the entry of EU forces into any member state.

There is much talk about human rights and freedom, but the truth is that under EU jurisdiction European nationals can be arrested and transferred to other member states in the absence of evidence against them, with no prospect of jury trial and the suspension of habeas corpus.

Apologists for the EU say that, whatever its faults, it has preserved the peace in Europe for eighty years. In what way? This is merely non sequitur. The fact that there has been peace in Europe –more or less – since 1945 is true, but it is not demonstrably true that this happy circumstance has anything to do with the existence of the EU. We haven’t been at war with Japan since 1945 either. Was it the EU which prevented that? And a man as intelligent as Norman Tebbit has predicted that the deepening crisis in the EU could lead to a new war among the European nations. Lord Tebbit said also:  “Let’s not forget that the EU let the oligarchs wreck Russia and helped Putin to power.”

I have just sprayed around a few facts about the tyranny that is the EU. There is no doubt that we now live in a totalitarian edifice which has obliterated our national sovereignty and the centuries old political liberties that went with that sovereignty. So why are the many critics of this regime dismissed as Little Englanders and fruitcakes pickled in a nostalgia to which reality never bore any resemblance? We are not Little Englanders. We are an historic maritime nation with a former global empire now a community of nations in the Commonwealth. And our political liberties – now stolen – were once our genuine possessions. Eurosceptics are scorned and vilified by all three of our puppet political parties. We are castigated as belonging to the far right. Loonies. The Monday Club and UKIP and Major’s Bastards and sundry other denizens of the ideological leper colony. But critics never used to be confined to the right, let alone to the so-called far right. They included many prominent socialists.

I’ve called this talk Pandora’s Box and I draw the phrase from Ernest Bevin who once said of the burgeoning EU: “If you open that Pandora’s box you never know what Trojan ‘orses will jump out.” Which just goes to show that socialists can be amusing, if only unintentionally. Or how about that socialist saint Michael Foot – he of the Cenotaph donkey jacket and the longest suicide note in history –  said, “We can disagree about whether the EU has been a socialist or capitalist influence, but it is undeniable that it wields that influence without ever asking the people.”

And Tony Benn wasn’t consistently bonkers. He once said, “The EU is absolutely undemocratic and now we live in a continent where power has gone to a group of people who are not elected, cannot be removed and don’t have to listen to us.”

Benn wrote in his diaries:

“This huge Commission building in Brussels, in the shape of a cross, is absolutely un-British. I felt as if I were going as a slave to Rome; the whole relationship was wrong. Here was I, an elected man who could be removed, doing a job, and here were these people with more power than I had and no accountability to anybody. My visit confirmed in a practical way all my suspicions that this would be the decapitation of British democracy without any countervailing advantage, and the British people, quite rightly, wouldn’t accept it. There is no real benefit for Britain.”

And in a letter to his Constituents in 1974 Benn wrote: “Britain’s continuing membership of the European Economic Community would mean the end of Britain as a completely self-governing nation and the end of our democratically elected Parliament as the supreme law- making body in the United Kingdom.”

Let’s come nearly up to date. The lately late Mr Robert Crow, over whom many tears were shed, wrote:

“Polls in Britain show that voters want a referendum on EU membership. So why not give them a referendum? Working people across Europe are sick and tired of the EU business model.  The only rational course is to leave the EU.”

Mr Crow could wax eloquent when he wished. He elaborated his criticisms as follows:

“Social EU legislation, which supposedly leads to better working conditions, has not saved one job and is riddled with opt-outs for employers to largely ignore any perceived benefits they may bring to workers. But it is making zero-hour contracts and agency-working the norm while undermining collective bargaining and full-time, secure employment. Meanwhile, 10,000 manufacturing jobs in the East Midlands still hang in the balance because EU law demanded that the crucial Thameslink contract go to Siemens in Germany rather than Bombardier in Derby.”

And concluded, “The only rational course to take is to leave the EU so that elected governments regain the democratic power to decide matters on behalf of the people they serve.”

Many years ago, Euroscepticism was common on the left.  There were giants in those days. The former Leader of the Labour Party, Hugh Gaitskell, famously said to a party conference that participation in the European project would mean: “The end of Britain as an independent European state, the end of a thousand years of history!”

With the passing of Mr Crow and Mr Benn, the only notable eurosceptic remaining on the left is Kate Hoey who said in an interview:

“You haven’t had a vote since 1975. Labour supporters in the country want to see a referendum. I would love to see lots of powers come back from the EU, but I don’t think we are going to get those powers back and on that basis of that I would vote to come out because I feel confident about our country. in future I believe we should be more Internationalist. I think Europe is a sick organisation now that is going to get worse.”

Do you remember Peter Shore? In 1992, he declared firmly:

“We must look at Europe today and at what is proposed in the Treaty of Maastricht, and measure against it as follows: We surrendered a trade and common commercial policy ages ago. The single currency and single bank are the great issues in the Treaty. Yes, common citizenship is in the Treaty, but nobody has discussed it. Apparently, all of us are to be jammed together in a single citizenship. Has anyone asked one person in this land whether he or she wishes to have that additional citizenship, what obligations that involves, not necessarily now but in the future, and what rights it would bestow? What is all this about a Europe without frontiers, except to demolish the whole idea of a nation state having sovereignty and control over its own frontiers?”

At its special conference in 1975 the Labour Party voted against our membership of the EU, overwhelmingly by 3,724,000 to 1,986,000. So where have all the lefties gone? Why have socialists abandoned their opposition? Because originally they regarded the Common Market, as it was then, as a bastion of international capitalism, as they said, “a rich man’s club.” Of course it was never anything of the kind. Festooned with regulations, restrictions and control-freakery, the European project has always been socialism red in tooth and claw and very congenial to the corporatism and collectivism which socialists hold sacred. What are the self-appointed Commissioners but commissars? What is the European parliament except the mouthpiece for the EU’s politburo?

In the face of such gargantuan tyranny, such overwhelming unaccountable power, why do I still believe the EU can be overthrown? Because it is a mass of internal contradictions and rotten to the core. As such it will implode, as its sister organization the USSR imploded in 1989 – the bicentenary of the Revolution in France. All the arguments which Burke deployed against that tyranny should be taken out dusted off and redeployed against the EU. The economic crisis in the Eurozone is the first-fruits of its demise. Patience, persistence and diligence in opposition should be our watchwords. For the truth will out, even if we have to wait a thousand years. I do not believe we shall have to wait that long but, with Norman Tebbit, I do fear that the EU hell-hole will not just end in tears but end in blood. Already tensions between Germany and the southern states are heightened because the agricultural countries of the south are tied to the euro which is crippling them to the benefit of the imperialistic Germans’ balance of payments.

Still we must persist because it is the truth which we are fighting for against the empire of lies. What is there to fight for except the truth? We must persevere and if in so doing we have to suffer, then so be it. Here we stand and we cannot do otherwise. Words of T.S. Eliot spoken in 1934 ought to encourage us: “Do you need to be told that what has been can be again?” And his other reminder that we have duties as well as rights. Our principal duty is to try – and to try consistently. As he said, “Ours is only the trying; the rest is not our business.”

We do not need to invent a counter-ideology. We do not need ideology with which to combat a tyranny which is holed in inconsistencies and incoherence. We are not required to stand on the left or on the right. We require only practical philosophy, reason, logical thinking – and belief in our cause. Let me fire a few opening shots….

The EU is inconsistent in its advocacy of centralized control but with devolution. It is weak because unlike the nation state it is not rooted in reality – the soil, you might say. It is an abstraction and thus bound to be ephemeral. Individual countries and peoples have their distinctive character which too is real and indelible. This character is not the mechanical fabrication of a centralized despotism but a thing which is worked at and suffered for over centuries and even millennia. The nations of Europe, now labouring under this captivity, have their own different characters: the Germans are as different from the Greeks as the English from the French. Because these characters are real and indelible, they will re-emerge and thrive even if for the time being they appear smudged and subdued.

Economically, the Union is strangling itself in the net of its own regulations. while the political-correctness which insists on the primacy of non-carbon based energy – and which prompted Merkel to close down all the nuclear power plants – is causing an acute and chronic energy shortage. Bizarre EU regulations insist on the subsidy of wind farms despite their cost – not including the back up costs for when they don’t work – far exceeding that of nuclear. And to be dependent on Russian gas while waving the big stick at Russia over Syria and the Ukraine is not the most farsighted Ostpolitik.

The EU is fundamentally unstable because its understanding of human nature is deficient, and this is a direct consequence of its having abandoned Christianity. Whatever your views on the miraculous and metaphysical aspects of the Christian faith, Christian psychology has human nature bang to rights. I refer to the doctrine of Original Sin. This is not some strange taint inherited from our mythical father Adam, via his wife and the malign ministrations of the serpent. Original Sin is simply the technical term for the faulty and flawed state of human beings. This is described perfectly in twelve words of one syllable by St Paul: “What I would not, that I do; and what I would I do not.” It was mischievously described by David Jenkins, former Bishop of Durham, as “the buggeration factor.” We are morally imperfect. We let ourselves down. I do, and so do you. And we know it.

Despite the sheer obviousness of this fact, the ethics and politics of the EU is derived from the belief in inexorable Progress which dates from the Enlightenment. Despite the fact that the 20^th century saw more deaths in wars and genocides than in all the previous centuries put together, enlightened secular politics in Europe insists that we are getting better all the time. We do not need to point to the disastrous wars of the 20^th century and the numerous lesser betrayals, slaughters, rapes and pillages. Each of us needs look no further than his own conscience. We all disappoint ourselves by repeatedly falling short of our own best image of ourselves.

But all the EU’s insistence on equality, diversity and universal rights depends upon our being consistently able to act in accordance with our own best motives, to keep our promises, to behave justly and so on. These things we conspicuously fail to do. Thus the only sort of paradise the EU can ever be is a fools’ paradise. The bureaucracy even seems to have some dim and intermittent awareness of our shortcomings which it seeks to remedy by providing a plethora of rules and regulations. A favourite wheeze following any catastrophe is, as they say, “to put in place a system so it will never happen again.” Every time I hear that phrase, I break into the little song which begins, “Here’s to the next time!” As Eliot said, the idea is “to dream of systems so perfect that no one will need to be good.” Unfortunately, every system is only as good or as reliable as those who invented it and who operate it. So, you might say, the EU is based on a mistake – and it is a philosophical mistake. It is impossible to legislate for virtue or to preserve peace and ensure prosperity by fiat and diktat. Other qualities – which themselves originate in the Judeao-Christian tradition – must first find their place: kindness, generosity, charity, courtesy, humility, give and take, magnanimity, sorrow for one’s own wrongdoing, forgiveness and the grace which makes reparation and reconstruction possible – of nations as well as of individual lives.

The other deadly consequence of the secular Enlightenment philosophy is utilitarian ethics. Nothing is ever done for some absolute good but only with the aim of relative benefits – which do not always come to pass in any case. In utilitarianism, good is always something which is forever postponed. But society needs moral absolutes. Something has to be basic. But, as T.E. Hulme said,

“In the secular humanist view, everything is justified by results and the results are justified by their results and so on. But there are absolute goods which are not justified by anything that they may lead to but are good in themselves.”

And even John Locke in his Letter affirmed: “Promises, covenants and oaths, which are the bonds of human society, can have no hold on an atheist. The taking away of God, though but even in thought, dissolves all.”

Locke – something of an Enlightenment man himself – concedes that it is not even necessary actually to believe in God; only that there is no social morality without the acceptance of at least some moral absolutes – those things which are good in themselves.

Criticism of the EU has been launched from the political left as well as the right, from economists and I have indicated the criticisms which might be made by a philosopher. But there is something which goes deeper and for this I come back to the real, flesh and blood people who live in the European nations. The people are not abstractions, mere counters in a game of political-utilitarian consequences. And the nations to which they belong are not abstractions either. The nation – my country – is a basic, natural, organic thing, like the family. It is natural for a man to love his country, as he loves his mother. We even speak of the mother-country – though there are those who prefer a different connotation and say fatherland.

This is all bound up with landscape and borders, with language and dialect, with customs and even with the different crops which grow in the various countries, the differing shapes and colours of the ordinary houses, the characteristics of a country’s music and painting. These things are not peripheral and they are not accidental either. They are historic and they have developed over thousands of years. And usually change is gradual. Usual but not always. But when change is sudden it is always shocking and frequently accompanied by violence. This is especially true when changes are imposed from authorities which are, or are regarded as, alien. The imposition of change by the EU is alien to us. And that is why so many of us instinctively dislike it. If you say this is the attitude of the peasant, then I am proud to accept the nomination.

And I would warn that peasants have been known to revolt.

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