A delightful silence reigns. No one is talking about the European elections. For the first time since the 1970s (direct elections to the European Parliament having begun in 1979) the United Kingdom will not be taking part.
“When are the European elections?” a friend who is immersed in politics wondered. The answer is in three weeks’ time, from Thursday 6th to Sunday 9th June.
When one turns to the European Union website to check this, one is urged to “Watch the video”, for “Democracy is a precious gift passed on to us from previous generations”.
The video is extremely moving. It begins with an aged and dignified Frenchwoman telling her granddaughter about the horror of the invasion in 1940. She and other witnesses to tyranny urge the younger generation never to “take democracy for granted” and to “use your vote or others will decide for you”.
The problem with this high-minded message is that the European Union is not a democracy. Europeans will not go to the polls in three weeks’ time in order to elect a European government.
The chance will instead be taken, in most of the member states, to register a protest against the national government. Populists will be returned in large numbers in the European elections, but their purpose will be to dominate the national debate.
For there is no European demos, “European” here being used to mean owing one’s first loyalty to Europe rather than to France, Germany, Poland and the rest.
Nor, as a consequence of this void, are we able to have a European political class, working through European political parties competing between each other to reflect European public opinion expressed by European media.
Without these things, it is impossible to conceive of a democratic European Government, which wins or loses the elections held every five years since 1979.
What we have instead is European bureaucracy, a Napoleonic apparatus invented by the French but no longer controlled from Paris. When at Westminster we talk about Eurocrats, we mean officials in Brussels who we fear will trample down our freedoms, which were already old in 1215.
The greatest and most durable attempt to build and maintain a free government on a continental scale is found in the United States.
The Americans studied the Roman Republic, and embraced their inheritance from Magna Carta and the Common Law, as they set about framing their constitution, in which federalism became the means of establishing central power without destroying the liberties of the 13 states and their inhabitants.
Alexis de Tocqueville examined, in Democracy in America, this brilliant achievement, and noted as early as the 1830s a marked decline in the calibre of presidential candidates.
Larry Siedentop ended his Democracy in Europe, published in 2000, with the words:
“Federalism is the right goal for Europe. But Europe is not yet ready for federalism.”
He had earlier wondered:
“Why has Europe failed to generate a debate which approaches, in range and depth, the debate which developed around the drafting of a Federal Constitution for the United States? Where are our Madisons?”
A quarter of a century later, Europe remains unprovided with figures such as Madison, Jefferson, Adams, Franklin, Jay, Hamilton and Washington, Founding Fathers capable of drafting and working a European Constitution which shows which powers are reserved to the member states, and which belong to Brussels.
Europe possesses instead such figures as Olaf Scholz and Emmanuel Macron, leaders of national political parties who are forced to worry mainly about their national competitors, some of whom pile up votes by striking a brazenly nationalistic note.
But this is not the whole truth. The United States was formed as a way of declaring and preserving independence. The EU was formed as a way of getting on with one’s neighbours, and in particular of ending the wars between Germany and France.
Germany has about 17 neighbours and must get on with them, or else those neighbouring countries, each of which is less rich and populous than Germany, will grow fearful and end by making an alliance with each other.
History lends force to this German calculation and geography renders it irresistible. Berlin can only feel secure within a European system, which means a great and even sincere show of submission to the EU is a cardinal principle of German foreign policy.
If one lives in the British Isles, on the west coast of Europe, history and geography suggest a more detached relationship with the EU is possible.
But if one lives on the border with Russia, as Ukraine and Georgia do, and if one is determined in the name of national and individual freedom to defy Vladimir Putin, membership of the EU becomes highly desirable, even, one might say, indispensable..
A Latvian witness is included in the EU video cited at the start of this article. If Latvia, why not Ukraine and Georgia?
But can the legitimising principle of the EU be the elections which are to be held in three weeks’ time?
Anyone can see those elections are bogus. If anything they delegitimise Brussels, by inviting us to go along with a pious but palpable fraud.
The essential point is that each member of the EU should be committed to democracy and the rule of law.
That is the condition which lends legitimacy to the EU as an alliance of sovereign states.
A Napoleonic bureaucracy will never command general consent. Nor is there the slightest possibility of creating a federal structure on the American or German model.
The will to subordinate the nation state to a federation run from Brussels does not exist. On this central reality Nigel Farage and his fellow populists are right to insist.
But just as the Greek city states could not resist Persia without forming an alliance between themselves, so Europe’s democracies cannot resist Putin without standing together.
Clubs are unfashionable. They are criticised for being unduly exclusive. But a European club which admits democrats and excludes autocrats is the only proper and practical way to defend freedom.
