Samizdata

Unless you have been living on an isolated desert island for the past three years – not an entirely bad thought – you would have read of how the collapse of scandal-ridden firms like Enron and WorldCom contributed to the bloodbath in the world’s stock markets.

As the tales of corporate accounting hijinks and outright fraud surfaced, the Cassandras took to print and the airwaves to inform us of how these tales proved that the equity-crazed Anglo-Saxon form of capitalism was vulnerable to such behaviour. Of course, what these tales proved was that the world’s modern capital markets can and will punish malefactors harshly. They certainly did.

Well, corruption is hardly the sole preserve of corporations. And surely there are few more corrupt institutions that the European Commission, as shown by this story in today’s Financial Times newspaper. But whereas businessmen at Enron and elsehwere were swiftly brought before the courts, it seems that corruption in the bureacracy of the EU is proving much tougher to clean up.

To which I would add, why is anyone surprised?

I was able to avoid the so-called peace rally on Saturday by spending the weekend in the altogether more agreeable company of my girlfriend and the wonderful people of Malta. Malta is currently going through a referendum on whether to join the EU, having won the dubious right to apply for entry to that body recently. Naturally, my temptation is to tell any proud Maltese (and they are proud) to say no.

Malta has a mixed and varied history, as rich as that of any much bigger European nation. English is widely spoken there and there are many signs of Britain’s influence on the island when it was a vast Royal Navy base – red telephone kiosks, old English cars, road signs, old-fashioned bakery stores out of an Arnold Bennett novel. The country has a relaxed feel about it and a fairly liberal business regime. I cannot vouch for this with 100 percent certainty, but I would imagine doing business in Malta is going to get a lot more of a bureaucratic ordeal if it does join the EU.

I think French President Chirac’s recent arrogance towards the European nations who have sided with the Bush administration over Iraq will not have gone missed among the Maltese. It may even have a direct impact on the referendum vote, if the antis can use this intelligently. The Maltese will see, in its rudest form, what being a member of the EU means. Obey moi.

The evidence is slowly mounting up and it’s pointing in one direction. The finger of suspicion is all but ready to twitch into the rigid instrument of damnable accusation. When even the most ardent and passionate supporters are starting to sniff the foul wind of failure, then you just know that the European Union is heading for the rocks.

Two articles today in the Wanker, the first by a Czech journalist Jana Ciglerova:

“We may still see the economic opportunities that we are told that Europe could bring to us. But we also now sense a fear of the unknown and even that, after barely a decade of freedom, we could be swapping one tyranny for another.”

The fruits of the lumbering Euro-cracy that has left the former Eastern Bloc countries on the periphery kicking their heels for far too long, thus giving them ample time to read through all the small print. For Brussels, the clock is ticking close to midnight now.

Also this rather more arid, technocratic item from somebody called Kirsty Hughes who is described as a writer and consultant on European Affairs’ so it is safe to assume that she knows a little of what she speaks. Evidently a passionate Europhile, even she cannot hide the cracks that are starting to appear in her head:

“The enlargement to be launched at Copenhagen is a historic achievement. But it is only the first step in meeting the European and global political challenges that the new Europe must address. If it fails, then this moment will be seen as a turning point that marked the start of the EU’s decline and not its new beginning.”

How different it all was even a year ago when everyone who was anyone was busy trumpeting the EU as the bright, shiny, exciting project for a better tomorrow with a future written in the stars and those who proffered even the mildest of criticisms were pilloried as xenophobic, reactionary losers.

Well, now the smug grins of satisfaction are on the other faces and the Wankers of the world are united in their creeping realisation that they bought a pup. It’s very nearly pitiful. Like fairy-tale children, the Europhiles are wandering in the deep, dark Graveyard of Grand Schemes, enveloped in the thick miasma of impending doom. Unable to deny its power to grip them or find a way out, they all hold hands and sully forth into the unknown, calling out plaintively for someone to come and rescue them and lead them home.

I almost feel sorry for them. Almost.

In one of the most utterly wrong headed articles I have ever seen in the Daily Telegraph, called Watch out America, the 7st EU weakling may kick sand in your face by Ambrose Evans-Pritchard posting from Brussels (naturally), he would have us believe that, in response to criticisms from the USA that the EU is “a status quo power that resists and resents being hurried into a turbulent new post-Cold War era”:

…Europe is arguably the world’s most dynamic political bloc today. While the US borders have changed little since 1848, the EU is about to swallow eastern Europe up to the edge of Russia and Ukraine.

The EU is about to swallow the poison pill of the basket case post-communist agricultural economies of Eastern Europe, eager to feed at the massively subsidized trough of protectionist Europe and Evans-Pritchard holds this up as evidence of dynamism?

But EU officials are quietly confident that the strategic balance will shift as a decade of debt, over-consumption, and ballooning trade deficits catch up with America.

[…]

“Nobody wants to see America in difficulty, but there’s a high risk that the Clinton boom is going to end badly. Then we’ll find out if Europe’s slow vessel might not prove to be steadier in the long run.” One day soon, America may wake to find itself facing a wealthy superpower of 470 million people.

The European Union… filled with heavily taxed, highly regulated and subsidy ‘protected’ economies… is going to overtake lower taxed, less regulated and slightly less subsidised USA? Oh give me a break. The whole reason that the ruling classes of Eastern Europe want to join the European Union, is that the EU seeks to lock in the position of the all its political classes, to insulate them from the reality of de-politicised markets and the consequences of that anti-market politics brings.

Eastern European businesses, at least some of them, see subsidy and protection from global competition from the USA and Far East beckoning, voters likewise see membership of the EU as meaning the end of restrictions on their ability to travel, work and reside in the more developed West… a ‘brain drain’ heading west of the best and brightest that the middle European former ‘eastern Bloc’ has to offer will soon ensue (good news if you live in the ‘west’), followed closely by an army of welfare parasites looking to help themselves to taxpayer money in Britain, France, Germany, Denmark, The Low Countries and Italy (extremely bad news of you live in the ‘west’).

The very essence of the EU is stasis and yet paradoxically, it is spreading, like some Nordic legend of winter eternal sends its deadening cold fingers into everything. The only people who really benefit are those who are sucking at the teat of the state and even them only until the curves of the EU’s spectacularly aging demographics and that of its increasing tax burden cross, like some cruxiform tombstone.

The First World used to be ‘The West’ and Japan, the Second World used to be the Socialist Eastern Bloc… soon ‘First World’ will come to mean the USA, Switzerland, Japan (maybe), Canada (maybe), Australia and new Zealand and, if it finally breaks clear of the European suicide pact, Britain and possibly even Ireland. ‘Second World’ will just come to mean sclerotic Europe, forever sidelined by more dynamic economies eleswhere and more assertive polities everywhere.

EU as future ‘superpower’? Don’t make me laugh.