Quotulatiousness

June 6, 2012

Europhiles and Euroskeptics have much in common

Filed under: Europe, Government, Media, Politics — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 08:57

Under all the noise and confusion, the fans of the EU and the foes of the EU are rather similar says Brendan O’Neill:

Over the past year, as the Euro crisis has intensified, there has been a really interesting revelation — which is that Europhiles and Eurosceptics are not that different from each other. In fact, Europhiles and Eurosceptics are driven by very similar impulses, by similar anti-democratic instincts.

Both of these groups seem keen to absolve national governments of responsibility, to absolve nation states of responsibility for political and economic chaos.

The Europhile does it by kowtowing to Brussels, calling upon EU institutions to do more to save Europe. And the Eurosceptic does it by blaming the EU for almost everything that goes wrong, treating Brussels as a kind of Death Star that has sucked decency from every inch of Europe.

The Europhile tends to have blind faith in the EU, seeing it as the solution to every problem, while the Eurosceptic has a blinkered dislike of the EU, seeing it as the cause of every problem. What they share in common is a belief that responsibility lies with the EU. Both the depiction of the EU as the saviour of Europe and the depiction of it as the destroyer of Europe are underpinned by an instinct to say: ‘National governments are not to blame for what has gone wrong.’

In answer to the question ‘Did the EU kill democracy?’, I would say ‘No, it didn’t’. The EU is better understood as the end product of the death of democracy in Europe, a creation of national governments that had given up on the ideas of sovereignty and democracy. The EU follows the demise of European democracy, rather than instigating it.

The real driving force behind the EU over the past 40 years was the cowardice and opportunism of national governments, not the sinister ambitions of Brussels or Berlin. National political leaders who felt increasingly estranged from their own populations fashioned a post-sovereign institution that they could effectively hide in.

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