We are developing the social individualist meta-context for the future. From the very serious to the extremely frivolous... lets see what is on the mind of the Samizdata people.
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Belmont Club has a couple of fascinating entries that mesh well with my last post on the tranzi menace. Collect the set!
I was particularly struck by the Club’s take on the immediate post-9/11 tranzi reaction:
The curious antipathy of the Germany and France towards unilateral American action following September 11 was driven not by a sudden revulsion for American culture, but by the loss of something they deeply coveted: the means to exercise supranational police power under the aegis of international treaties. In the days following Osama Bin Laden’s attack on New York, hopes ran high in Paris, Berlin and Moscow, that America in her grief would deposit her strength in the hands of the “international community” who, thus armed, promised to put a stop to terrorism and uproot its causes. To provide the violins, the capitals of Europe expressed the utmost sympathy for the American loss and deluged embassies with flowers and letters of support. “We are all Americans now”. For a moment, matters hung on edge, the most critical instant in modern history. Then the haze passed, and America shook the expectant, extended hand and said “I’ll take care of it myself”. The response was immediate and incandescent. The internationalists rounded on America with as much hatred as the sympathy they had professed mere moments before.
As always, Belmont Club’s full analysis of the prospects for the future shape of international order are worth pondering. The Club posits a bottom-up New World Order founded on common law that contrasts sharply with the top-down command-and-control vision of the transnational progressives.
The transnational progressives have a new power grab underway – their attempt to seize control of the trial of Saddam Hussein and move it to the ICC or some other “international court.” I think it would be a very serious mistake to indulge the tranzis on this issue, as it would serve to validate and legitimize the most noxious pillar of their ideology.
The transnational progressive movement has a consistent theme: that governments should be answerable primarily to some overarching international authority, rather than to their own citizens. The pernicious (and unstated) part of this theme is that last phrase – the tranzis never state, and may not even recognize, that as governments become more accountable to outside authorities, they become less accountable to their own citizens.
The EU project is certainly an attempt to implement this ideal, as was last year’s attempt by the UN to control US foreign policy and military apparatus in the Iraqi, campaign. Readers will, I’m sure, be able to multiply examples, as the tranzis are nothing if not consistent in their top-down approach to accountability and control.
For the tranzis, the problem of rogue or abusive governments is not that such governments are too powerful and/or insufficiently accountable to their own citizen/subjects. After all, the source of legitimacy for this lot is not the consent of the governed; rather legitimacy can apparently only be conferred from above. Thus, the creation, from whole cloth, of international institutions such as the UN or International Criminal Court, so that there is a higher, transnational, authority to judge and confer legitimacy on the doings of national governments.
Of course, being made answerable to the “international community” (read: other governments) comes at the cost of being accountable to your own citizenry. This is the reason that the whole tranzi project is fundamentally corrupt, and corrupting. In my book, consent of the governed is the only source of legitimacy. Period. Discussion over. Turn out the lights as you leave. The tranzi project is corrosive of the consent of the governed, because it substitutes the consent of other governments for the consent of the governed.
The whole meme/dynamic is on full display in Iraq right now. The tranzis and their project are the long-term enemies of liberty, my friends, as much as or more so than your penny-ante domestic politician.
Many thanks to Tacitus for his rather more brutal assessment of the tranzi attempt to shove the Iraqis out of the way and seize control Saddam’s fate, which got the juices flowing this morning.
The French Government has reacted with fury to the news that Saddam Hussein has been captured by US forces.
Speaking to reporters in Paris this evening, the Foreign Minister Dominique de Villepin, denounced the arrest of the former Iraqi leader as ‘an act of international piracy’:
“Saddam Hussein has been kidnapped by America. You cannot simply seize and detain people without proper negotiations. The Americans should have given more thought beforehand. This situation requires the careful application of justice not cowboy tactics”
His words were echoed at a meeting of EU Ministers in Brussels this evening. Speaking on behalf of the assembled ministers, Dutch Commissioner Willy Van Der Pimp issued a warning to the Americans not to ‘go it alone’:
“If the Americans think that they alone can administer justice, then they are very mistaken. The international community will not tolerate being ignored in this fashion. Europe has a vital role to play in deciding the future of Saddam Hussein”
The Council of Ministers will meet again tomorrow in emergency session to draw up an action plan.
But still under sentence of death.
That is why I have such mixed feelings about the apparent breakdown of talks to finalise an EU Constitution:
European leaders are playing down the scale of divisions at their Brussels summit that made it impossible for them to agree on a constitution for the EU.
The can play it up, down or any way they damn well please. This is not the end, merely a brief setback. There is far too much vested interest in this wretched process for it to be simply left at that.
Nor has this impasse been brought about by anything as welcome as reflection or second thoughts. Assuming any of the participants have ever read this monstrous charter, it is probably a stretch to assume that they have even given it a first thought. No, the bandwagon has been brought to a grinding halt by an intractable bunfight over their respective looting voting rights:
Negotiations broke down over how voting will work when the EU expands from 15 to 25 members in May.
Poland and Spain insisted on keeping voting rights already secured, while France and Germany want a system to reflect their bigger populations.
Glueing an entire continent into a permanent state of indenture will have them feverish to sign the dotted lines but fail to stroke their egos sufficiently in the process and they will make a brave stand. I have long since passed the point of expecting reason or common sense to prevail; there is not enough of either of those qualities among Europe’s political classes to fill a thimble. But at least their over-arching need to all get their snouts in the trough has worked in our favour (albeit for now).
But, lest we forget, Mr Velveteen (and his huddle of Vichyites in the Foreign Office) is no better. He simply cannot wait to get this whole train back onto the tracks:
Tony Blair insisted, however, that the humiliating inability of heads of government to get beyond the first items on the summit agenda did not spell doom for the constitution. “We have got to find a way through. We have got the time to do it,” he said.
If Mr Blair gets his way this country will cease to exist in any meaningful or material sense. We will have been delivered up as a mere component of a big, despotic, inescapable dirigiste asset-stripping operation. This is what he wants and he wants it more than anything else.
But why? Why does he want to assassinate this country? What is impelling him and this cadre of political fixers to want to drive a dagger through our hearts? If we can find the answers to those questions then maybe we have a means of turning this stay of execution into a true and lasting victory.
I am reminded of an old, inscrutible Oriental saying: time is a slow but fair judge:
Less than half the population in the European Union’s member states now support the EU project, according to polling results yesterday.
The latest Eurobarometer to be released this week found that just 48 per cent of EU citizens viewed membership as a “good thing”, down from 54 per cent last spring.
Britain was by far the most negative state, with positive feelings tumbling to 28 per cent, but even the French were below half for the first time after months of battles with Brussels over tax cuts and illegal aid to ailing firms.
How long until George Bush scores a higher approval rating among Europeans than Brussels does?
Just how long will the European Union last? Unarguably it is well dug in. Will it hang in there just long enough to condemn an entire continent to a painful and lingering death?
Few people are prepared to confront such a possibility or even entertain any such notion. Fortunately, one of those few is Ruth Lea:
The tectonic plates of the global economy are shifting. After a gap of several centuries, India and China are re-establishing themselves as major economic heavyweights. China, in particular, is becoming the “workshop of the world” and its economic rise will be as significant as the USA’s arrival on the global scene in the 19th century.
We may complain as jobs are “exported” to these emerging colossi but, whether we complain or not, this seismic shift is occurring and we cannot ignore it. The need to remain internationally competitive is becoming ever more critical for all the “western” economies.
I have little doubt that the US, with its “can-do” entrepreneurial attitudes and enormous economic power will continue to make the grade. But I am increasingly unsure that this can be said about the major euro-zone economies or even, in my darkest moments, Britain. After all, over the past five to six years, Britain has been slipping down the competitiveness league tables compiled by the World Economic Forum and the International Institute for Management Development reflecting higher taxes, heavier regulations and poor public services.
Government policymakers, while singing the praises of enterprise, competitiveness and high productivity, have undermined them all. The EU’s regulatory zeal has undoubtedly played a significant role in damaging British competitiveness. Over the past six years, one of British business’s greatest complaints about Government policy has been the rapid increase in the number and complexity of employment regulations.
And, as if right on cue, yet another set of Brussels-mandated employment regulations comes into effect in the UK today. → Continue reading: Laughable
The past is not another country, it is another world.
Remember all that strutting triumphalism of the EU enthusiasts? Remember their blustering certitude and stainless steel non-stick bravura? The European Union was unstoppable, invincible and the wave of the future. It was an historically-inevitable behemoth gearing up to straddle the globe and lock all of mankind into its eternal Bonapartist embrace.
Soon there would not be so much as a single molecule on the face of the earth that would not be regulated by Brussels. Resistance was futile and dissent was pointless. It was written in stone. The European union will conquer the known universe!
That was then.
This is now:
There is no doubt that 2004 ought to have been a great year, the year East Europeans became full members of a revived, streamlined and more democratised European Union. Instead, Europe is in its worst shape for years.
There is only so much battering, criticism and friendlessness any institution can take before it breaks. Europe is no different.
Victory is within sight. Just one, big, final push and we can send the whole rotten edifice crashing down.
[My thanks to Peter Briffa for the link.]
Exactly a week ago, last Friday evening, I attended a discussion at the home of CNE boss Tim Evans, one of his Putney Debates. Alex Singleton spoke eloquently about what a fine thing free markets are and how difficult it is for the government to do as well.
Also present at the discussion was a long-time friend of London libertarianism by the name of Bruce. Bruce has been living in Spain for the last decade or so, but is now back in London, and during the discussion he said something very interesting which stuck in my mind, and which I now realise deserves the attention of this blog.
For as along as I can remember, whenever we’ve met up, Bruce has been telling me that the Spaniards have had a much more sensible attitude towards the EU than the British, which is that if they don’t like any particular EUro-regulation or EUro-imposition, they just ignore it. Why, he would ask, can’t the British just learn to do the same? That’s a sentiment I think we’ve heard here quite a lot also, whenever we’ve been arguing about the nuances of the EU.
This time, however, he said something different. Apparently, in Spain, a class of pestilential busybodies who take EUro-stupidity seriously is starting to form and to make its pestilential presence felt, and the Spaniards are starting to notice this, and to get rather fidgety. To put it another way, instead of the sensible Spanish practice – of ignoring all this EUro-nonsense and just carrying on baking bread, fishing for fish, being a bit rude to the occasional ethnic minority, driving as they please, dodging VAT, and so on and so on, the way they always have – spreading to Britain, the British practice, of taking all such drivel seriously, on account of it being the law and all that, is now spreading to Spain. And my guess would be, this tendency isn’t confined to Spain.
This official bEUrocratic infestation process, if it is indeed happening, strikes me as a lot more significant than the grumbling that is now occurring throughout the Euro area about inflation, because this ‘inflation’ could just be a one-off effect from the switch from the local currencies to the Euro. Yes, prices have gone up a gut-wrenching amount, and a lot more than is being officially admitted, but presumably that effect will calm down, and in due course be forgotten. But this hideous tribe of meddling EUro-despots look like being a permanent and ever-growing presence, and the hatred of them seems likely only to grow and grow.
I don’t have any links to stories which might back up any of this, but of course commenters may well be able to correct that omission.
Low cost airline RyanAir is a subject that gets mixed feelings from this blog’s different contributors. Their latest problem is an EU ruling that affects their French and Belgian operations from the British Isles because the preferential rates offered to RyanAir amount to a state subsidy (funny how state subsidies to farmers do not seem to get the same response, eh?) because the airports in question are all state owned:
The airport is owned by the Walloon regional government, which approved grants worth an estimated £5 million a year to subsidise landing and handling charges and marketing costs. Ryanair pays a landing fee 85 per cent lower than the list price. However, since the airline’s arrival, the annual passenger “throughput” at Charleroi has risen eight-fold to nearly two million, sharply boosting the local economy.
[…]
Managers say they would adopt the same approach for other publicly-owned airports. Negotiations are already under way with a dozen private alternatives. Some European countries, such as Italy, Germany and Sweden, have a significant number of non-state airports, but not France.
The solution is screamingly obvious. Privatise all the frigging airports in Belgium and France and the problem goes away! Duh.
And quite eminent men to boot:
A powerful cross-party group of peers will seek today to begin a national debate on whether Britain should stay in the European Union by demanding a parliamentary investigation into the economic benefits of membership.
Their action reflects a growing feeling in the House of Lords that withdrawal from the EU might be preferable to signing up to a new European constitution that would erode British sovereignty.
They may not get the debate they want as it is highly likely to be scuppered. Even if they get the debate they want it may not produce the result they want. And even if it does produce the result they want said result will have no legal or political effect whatsoever.
But it will have an effect, albeit a marginal one.
To date, the idea of British withdrawal from the EU has been unthinkable in any respectable circles. It is the Great British Political Taboo. Discuss our relations with Europe by all means and criticise the EU if you must but suggest we pull out?!! Are you mad?
But the problem with taboos of this nature is that they will not bend so they can only break and it only takes a few people to start thinking the unthinkable before they begin to look fragile. If people start saying the unthinkable (and keep saying it) then it is only a matter of time before the cracks begin to appear.
We are not there yet. Not even close. But if more people just keep talking publicly about withdrawal then that emboldens others to do the same and eventually the drip, drip effect begins to eat away at the consensus. What starts as a few whispered heresies can grow into a chorus of raucous disapproval.
So, more and faster please.
De Great White Colonial Adminstrator, Tony Blair, him be most worried about stirring up de
It is hard to know what to make of this:
Gordon Brown celebrated his return to politics yesterday by firing a shot across the bows both of Brussels and Tony Blair. Perhaps the Chancellor has found the time while on paternity leave to read the 250 pages of the draft European constitution. Mr Brown evidently does not agree with his neighbour in Number 10 that the constitution is a mere “tidying-up exercise”. On the contrary, he is obviously alarmed by the text agreed by the constitutional convention, which extends EU competence into areas of economic policy hitherto jealously guarded by the Treasury.
The only thing I am sure of is that it does not mean exactly what it says. My tentative take on it is not that Brown dislikes a regulated economy/society per se, but rather than he insists on being the one doing the regulating. The guy is hardly a free market capitalist after all and neither is he much of a nationalist. Maybe he feels that as Kinnock already has his snout highly placed in the EU’s trough, there will not be room enough for another ‘big beast’ such as himself and thus he is stuck with maintaining his looting rights via obsolescent old Westminster.
Alternatively, could it is just a ploy to demonstrate that there is a ‘vibrant Euro-sceptic wing in the Labour Party’ and thus forestall natural Labour supporters from feeling they have to vote a revitalised (ha!) Tory Party under Count Drac… Michael Howard, given that Brown is making it clear that “Labour is not entirely in the pocket of Brussels”. Are Labour’s strategists really that clever though? Not sure.
Cynical? Moi?
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