Nice to have the Mises Institute on side

Louis Rouanet writing on the Mises Institute website produces an adequate but far from earth-shattering analysis of why the European Union is, in fact, the very antithesis of Europe and European history. It's a short piece but worth reading.

Contrary to what is often said, the European Union has nothing to do with peace, freedom, free trade, free capital and migration movement, cooperation, or stability. All this can very well be provided in a decentralized system. The European Union is nothing more than a cartel of governments that tries to gain power by harmonizing the fiscal and regulatory legislation in every member State. Article 99 of the Treaty of Rome (1957) clearly states that indirect taxation “can be harmonized in the interest of the Common Market” by the European Commission. As for Article 101 of the same Treaty, it explicitly restrains regulatory competition “where the Commission finds that a disparity existing between the legislative or administrative provisions of the Member States distorts the conditions of competition in the Common Market.”

Can't disagree with that and the more people say it the better it is for all of us.

To some extent he is right

Professor Herfried Münkler gives his view on how to salvage the situation. What situation? Why Europe, of course. To be honest, the good professor is playing verbal games. He must be aware of the fact that Europe has existed for a very long time before the creation of what eventually led to the European Union and it is just possible that some of us would prefer to salvage that Europe.

Not so the good professor, who is writing in Der Spiegel:

Europe's political elites are a pathetic sight at the moment, from their contradictory reactions to the rebellions in the Arab world to their timid handling of the euro crisis. Either they persist in doing nothing or they flee from one falsehood to the next, all in the expectation that this will enable them to gain control over the markets. Now that the European elites have had to produce proof of their long-held claim that Europe is a capable player on the global political and economic stage, they have done nothing but flounder. And because they refuse to believe that this is the case, they celebrate every stumbling move as the salvation of Europe and the euro. The poor image Europe is currently projecting is largely the result of the impotence of its elites .

In light of this failure of the elites, it is hardly surprising that we are hearing renewed calls for the democratization of Europe. Suddenly, the people are expected to fix what the elites have botched. Since they are already being asked to pay for the problems caused by the elites, many believe that the people should have more say in how and by whom Europe is controlled.

As reasonable as this might sound, by no means does it make as much sense as it seems at first glance. Even after the democratization of Europe, the elites in Brussels and Strasbourg will still be in charge. The only option available to the European people, to the extent that they can be referred to as such, would be to react to obvious failure by voting their leaders out of office -- and to vote an opposing elite to take their place. Whether this would fundamentally change anything is open to question.

Brussels, also the capital of Belgium, is particularly well suited to show that democracy does not automatically lead to the installation of capable elites. Since last summer's elections, Belgium's political parties have been unable to form a functioning new government. Belgium's democracy suffers from ethnic quotas and political parceling. It has long been incapable of reaching the most basic decisions. And, now, not even compromises are feasible.

I certainly agree with his description of Europe's political elite: it is a pathetic sight but their failure to solve the problem may have something to do with it being insoluble; their failure to project Europe's power may have something to do with there being no power to project; and their failure to come to an agreement may have something to do with the fact that there is no common ground. Giving them more power in the circumstances may sound like a good idea but, among other problems, it would go directly against the thought and spirit of the real Europe.

What is to be Done?

I make no apology for using that hackneyed title again. Like so many political ideas it emanates from Russian radical circles, first used by Nikolay Chernyshevsky as title to his highly influential and immensely boring novel Что Делать?, which means just that: What is to be Done?. Written in the early 1860s, it outlines in many many badly written pages ideas about revolutionaries and the formation of the revolutionary elite. It says something about those radicals that they took to this novel (or pretended to do so) in a country that boasted at the time some of the world's greatest writers.

Other writers responded as did Dostoyevsky, viciously, in Notes from the Underground (Записки из подполья), published in 1864. This was a protest against the soulless materialism of what he perceived to be the modern age but, in particular, it was a sarcastic attack on Vera Pavlovna, Chernyshevsky's heroine and her interminable dreams, particularly the last one in which people appear to live in some sort of a crystal palace.

The great novelist Tolstoy wrote a pamphlet with that title in 1886, which is a description of Russian social conditions, presumably as seen from Yasnaya Polyana, Tolstoy's mansion and estate. What was required, he thought, was change within people themselves.

The best known work is, inevitably, V. I. Lenin's. It is as boring and badly written as Chernyshevsky's but it is shorter and there are no dreams in it. The book is the most important one Lenin wrote as it gives a precise, if badly phrased, idea of the "need" for a revolutionary elite that would impose its own views on the people. There are also reasonably clear instructions on how that elite is to be formed into a coherent and disciplined party.

The reason for these musings is an internet conversation I have been having with no less a person than Gawain Towler (name published with his permission and encouragement), Head of Media at UKIP who linked to this story in the Telegraph.

If you were a Brussels bureaucrat and David Cameron dumped a cheque for a few billion onto your desk to spend on foreign aid, what would you do with it? Would you spend it (a) on poor people or (b) on cocktails and dancing for white European socialists, and on some vanity projects to promote the power of the EU?

Well, if you were a genuine Eurocrat, you’d probably have gone with (b). Thanks to the EU – which takes a fifth of our international development budget – a chunk of our aid isn’t spent on fighting global poverty at all, but on promoting the EU’s own political goals – which is why so much of it ends up in states that don’t need it, such as Russia, Singapore, India and China.

Last week, however, the Eurocrats decided to spend our money a little closer to home by hosting a major conference in Brussels. Along with providing lots of European Leftists with cocktails and a dance floor, this promoted “the key role of the European Union” in international development and helped to “improve European cohesion”.

To top it all, as Martin Banks and Gawain Towler report, the conference spent aid money to host a fashion show, showcasing seven European designers and one Moroccan. Apparently, this helped the delegates understand the Millennium Development Goals, but it strikes me that it was just an excuse for a jolly at the taxpayer’s expense.

Foreign aid or international aid, as we are supposed to call it now, money spent on parties and fashion shows is not precisely news. My response was that at least money spent on a party and fashion show in Brussels would not go into the coffers of evil, bloodthirsty kleptocrats who use it to fight nasty wars and oppress their people. I was accused of being ultra-cynical.

(In parenthesis let me add that I have been accused of cynicism many times, though not by Mr Towler, but I have never until a recent exchange on a particularly ridiculous forum, been accused of being a do-gooder and, by implication, a bleedin' heart liberal. This was not a person who knows me; nor had he bothered to read anything I write. There is a first time for everything.)

Anyway, moving right along, the discussion between Mr Towler and me then developed into the usual one of "well, what should we do to get people interested". As many times before I maintained that producing silly stories and yet more examples of corruption gets us nowhere. They produced two reactions: people either 1. shrugged their shoulders and said well what do you expect, yawn, what's on the tele, or 2. started getting worked up about the need for reform, control, supervision and transparency. When 2. did not produce the necessary results because they could not, people would revert to 1.

Well, what would you do, asked Mr Towler quite reasonably. Should we start swinging from the Cenotaph? No, I pointed out, as, apart from anything else, it achieved nothing beyond annoying very many people.

It is time, I continued, to start assuming that most people are adults and capable of assimilating serious ideas, such as international aid does not help poor people but keeps bloodthirsty kleptocrats in power and the EU is a state in the making that has already destroyed Britain's sovereignty and constitutional democracy as well as being economically, politically and environmentally regressive and destructive.

Ah yes, said he, but the media does not want that - the media wants silly stories. How well do I know that and how well do I recall being press officer for the Campaign for Independent Britain (CIB) and getting calls from journalists who wanted really stupid European stories. All right, I'd say, how about the really stupid common fisheries policy. Nothing doing. We want something our readers can easily understand. Square strawberries, for instance. Those stories kept appearing as did stories of corruption and wasted money and where has all that got us? We are ever more integrated in the Project and have a non-Labour government that is fully as bad as John Major's Conservative one was (which is when I became involved in all this).

When I say that we should accept that most people are adults who are capable of assimilating serious ideas I do not mean journalists or politicians. Sadly, I probably do not mean people who are involved in party politics either but those are ever fewer in number as we keep being told. But I do mean others - the electorate of all ages and social positions.

There is no question in my view: while it is quite a good idea to produce those stories of wastage and corruption, what we really need to do is go for the central problems, whether it be the EU, international aid or, for that matter, education in this country. Nothing else will get us anywhere. We do miss the likes of the old IEA that changed economic thinking in this country and there seems to be no money around for a eurosceptic think-tank as money tends to go to useless campaigns for referendums or to perestroika organizations like Open Europe or the Taxpayers' Alliance. We do have the internet, of course, and the American example of a blogosphere that became enormously powerful.

So here is my first response to the question of what is to be done - concentrate on the main issues and assume your audience is capable of understanding them and fight through the new media, whether it be the blogosphere (as Mr Towler does as well), other websites or, let's accept it, social media. That might get there somewhere. Anyone has any better ideas?

Plus ça change ….

How often does one use that title about all sorts of political developments? It's not that there is never any change. There have been many times in history, even recent history, when great changes were enacted. However, one of the things that never seems to change is the behaviour of transnational organizations who continue to spend huge amounts of taxpayers' money to set up more organizations, meetings, conferences and committees to try to control the world's economy. By and large they fail though in the process they manage to undermine real economic development through all those taxes and regulations.

A fascinating article in the Wall Street Journal reminds us of a failed predecessor to the recent Copenhagen Circus Conference, a similar event that took place in Lima in 1975. "Both conferences were failed, taxpayer-funded attempts to institute global economic governance."

I must admit that until reading that article I had not been able to recall the Lima Conference. Even now my memory is experiencing severe difficulties. In other words, the author is correct: these events do disappear from one's horizon.

However, I do recall the political and ideological (I hesitate to use the word intellectual) background:

Lima '75: Those were the good old days of "Third Worldism." The developing countries, spurred by the demonstration of force by oil exporting countries during the oil shock of 1973, called for the institution of a "new international economic order" (NIEO), aimed at securing a better place for these countries in the world economy. Once the call was made, international organizations started aligning their work programs toward that grandiose objective.

It should be recalled that in those days the dominant view in the corridors of international organizations favored strong state intervention in economic affairs. The prevailing view had its dissidents: Bela Balassa, an economist at the World Bank, as well as Little, Scitovsky and Scott, authors of a report commissioned by the Organization of Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD), to mention a few. These economists argued that developing countries would do better to place their hopes in the interplay of market forces rather than in state interventionism and, accordingly, should adopt policies aimed at encouraging foreign investment and improving the international competitiveness of their goods.

The governments of many developing countries that adhered to the dominant view arrived at Lima with the firm intention of obtaining the international community's endorsement of a "plan of action," stipulating that 25% of the world's industrial production should be generated in the Third World by the year 2000.

Nothing much came out of Lima but since then there have been adjustments in the economic balance of the world. An ever larger percentage of the world's industrial proeuction is generated in developing countries, a number of which no longer count as such, having developed quite well in the last thirty years. The thing is that all this happened to countries that abandoned the consensus of the seventies and accepted the views of those dissidents.

What of Copenhagen? What did that produce apart from a great deal of hot air and the coldest winter spell that city has seen for a long time?

Like third-worldism in the 1970s, today's environmentalism has its dissidents. There are many. They do not deny the existence of global warming, but question the role of human activity in this phenomenon. In addition, they tend to advocate technological innovation, rather than restrictions on the emissions of carbon dioxide, to deal with the impacts.

Like Lima, the conference in Copenhagen did not go beyond the declaration of intentions. Agreement was not reached on concrete measures to drastically reducing carbon emissions. And just as Lima relegated the hardest discussions to a series of consultations, so Copenhagen sent negotiations to another conference next year—without explaining why agreement would be easier in 2010, the year of mid-term elections in the United States, which will make the American Congress even more reluctant to alienate voters by approving costly measures to deal with global warming.

Beyond their differences, Lima and Copenhagen suffer from a common handicap: Both conferences were a failed attempt, at the expense of taxpayers around the world, to institute global economic governance by imposing quantifiable targets on the 192 member nations.

Fabio Rafael Fiallo, the author of the article, is reasonably optimistic. Lima, he thinks was the high point of "third-worldism" and Copenhagen will prove to be the high point of "environmentalism". The result will not be dissimilar: environmental and economic advances will happen if the consensus is abandoned and the dissidents who are far more vociferous now than they were in the seventies, by the way, will be listened to.

Taking the analogy between the two conferences a step further, it is possible to conclude with a note of optimism. In the same manner that developing countries succeeded in increasing their share in world industrial output through international competition, irrespective of the Lima planning, so one can expect that the issue of global warming will be dealt with, not through the Copenhagen Accord, but by technological innovations, notably those falling within the category of geoengineering. These techniques aim at capturing carbon emissions or, more directly, at cooling the climate.

I am not qualified to express an opinion on the warming/cooling/not going anwywhere special debate but I do understand the politics and, on the whole, I agree with those sentiments. However, I have to add a somewhat pessimistic rider.

These people do not give up. If they cannot get a plan for the world economy one way they will try another way. There will be more taxpayer-funded conferences and attempts to interfere with markets and economic developments. This time round we must grasp what the new ideology is before it takes serious root.

Still true after all these years

Quite a large proportion of my reading matter recently has been concerned with political and cultural developments in the thirties, forties and fifties. Very little new has entered into our lives since that period.

One of the books on the go is Michael Kimmage’s “The Conservative Turn”, a parallel biography of Lionel Trilling and Whittaker Chambers, both men I admire immensely (though in Trilling’s case there is the odd reservation to do with his worship of the phony Kennedy “Camelot”), and an analysis of the way these two men have changed American political thinking through their anti-Communism.

Whittaker Chambers was crucial to the creation of the new conservatism that is still powerful in the United States, despite the recent electoral results. Let’s face it, politicians come and go but it is the underlying trends that matter. His insistence that there needs to be a conservative movement for the second half of the twentieth century grew out of his understanding of Communism and fight against it.

Lionel Trillling took another path. He moved back to his original classical liberalism and worked hard to detach the liberal left from its support of Communism. Up to a point he succeeded but looking at the position of the left over the Pond I remain doubtful. The support from the left and what is known in American terms as “liberals” for all tyrannical and totalitarian regimes as long as they are supposedly left-wing and anti-American is staggering.

In Britain the situation is even more difficult because the serious fight to install genuine anti-Communism was not fought to the end for a number of reasons, not least a refusal by the political and cultural establishments to take ideology seriously and the consequent inability to understand its influence.

The two men had known each other from their student years at Columbia but drifted apart subsequently. For Chambers Communism became his life while Trilling played at the edges; in the same way the anti-Communist struggle overwhelmed Chambers’s work while remaining only part of Trilling’s. The liberal academic found the conservative journalist a little hard to take. Despite all that, it is astonishing how close their thinking was.

Even more interesting is the relevance of their thoughts to the situation today. Both of them wrote critically about John Steinbeck’s “The Grapes of Wrath”, the book and the highly praised film based on it.

This is what Professor Kimmage says about Whittaker Chambers on the subject (on pages 137 and 138).

Brilliance however, was about all liberals had, in Chambers’s view. They had no ethical sense whatsoever, only a myopia so extreme that evidence of Soviet crimes remained forever invisible. (This was Sidney Hook’s frustration with Henry Wallace.) In a stinging review of the film made from Steinbeck’s The Grapes of Wrath, Chambers attacked fellow travellers: “pinkos who did not bat an eye when the Soviet Government exterminated 3,000,000 peasants by famine, will go for a good cry over the hardship of the Okies.” It was not the impotence of the liberals that bothered Chambers but their power and their ubiquity.

Chambers wrote mostly for Time magazine and his language was, at times, crude and hurtful. He also felt that the time for niceties had gone. One may add that his estimate of peasants deliberately starved to death by the Soviet Government is probably on the very low side. To the comment that cinema audiences are more likely to care about their own, American people than about Russian or Ukrainian peasants, one can answer that Okies were an alien specie to many other Americans, especially to liberal writers and, in any case, they had expressed a great deal of interest in the supposedly high levels of welfare of those foreign peasants, wishing the same on their own people.

Chambers took his criticism of the Left to radical extremes. Liberals and leftists were ignorant of the basic truths that Soviet history had to teach. “How should they [fellow travellers] know that Lenin was the first fascist,” Chambers wrote with unforgiving sarcasm, “and that they were co-operating with the party from which the Nazis borrowed all their important methods and ideas.”
The sickness of the Left was nothing other than the sickness of intellectuals, whose heyday was not the Roaring Twenties but the low, dishonest 1930s. Intellectuals’ alienation from religion and tradition led them to love alienation as such and to mistake sickness for health. “Fundamentally sceptical, maladjusted, defeatist,” chambers wrote, “the intellectuals felt thoroughly at home in the chaos and misery of the ‘30s.” Hence, the outpourings of enthusiasm for The Grapes of Wrath. The tragedy was the twisted decency of intellectuals: “fundamentally benevolent and humane, they loved their countrymen in distress far more than they ever loved them in prosperity”.

If we can discard the unfortunate tendency to use every cliché possible (let us not forget that Auden “loathed” the poem from which that phrase “low, dishonest decade” came from and tried to prevent its republication until the mid-sixties) and the author’s obvious distaste for Chambers’s fury and vulgarity, we find a great deal of very interesting stuff there, repeated oddly enough when Professor Kimmage writes about Trilling’s much more palatable criticism of John Steinbeck and the novel The Grapes of Wrath.

On pages 134 and 135 of the book we read this:

Trilling’s psychological insights drew on a pessimism he attributed to Sigmund Freud. As a radical, Trilling had identified Freud immediately as a threat to radicalism, fearing Freud’s doubts about pity and idealism; as an anti-communist, Trilling used Freud to analyze the relationship between pity and the Left, to debunk pity, and to banish it from mature political thinking. To this end, Trilling attacked John Steinbeck, already a venerated statue in the pantheon of left-wing fiction, arguing that Steinbeck’s problem is literary in part because Steinbeck “thinks like a social function, not like a novelist”.

Steinbeck’s literary failure is less significant, however, than the popular success of The Grapes of Wrath, which Trilling ascribed to a distinct group of people – a class, even. “A book like The Grapes of Wrath cockers-up the self-righteousness of the liberal middle class,” Trilling declared; it is easy to feel virtuous in our love of such good poor people”.

Again, this was an analysis that could explain the pro-Soviet sympathies of the Left in the 1930s. The actual goings-on in Stalin’s Soviet Union was immaterial. The Moscow trials, the various Five Year Plans, and the purges had failed to complicate support for the good poor people of the Soviet Union. A personal sense of virtue and righteousness was at stake for the fellow traveller more than the actual condition of the Soviet people. The reception of Steinbeck’s novel was symptomatic of a political condition in which the Left celebrated, more than anything, the heroic tribulations of its own conscience.”

Well, yes, much more agreeable that Chambers’s “rants”. But, as a matter of fact, the two writers were saying the same thing: the intellectual Left did not want to deal with sordid details if the alternative was to parade its own conscience.

How much has really changed? Communism may not be an issue though, as the Van Jones story shows, the MSM still finds it embarrassing to call the truth on that.

But on other, closely related matters, Chambers and Trilling could write all that now. Our political and cultural elites are still in the grip of “compassion” as if that were a particularly virtuous state of mind. As I have pointed out before, being compassionate is not virtuous but merely a display of superiority towards other people whose lives one wants to manage. I was not altogether surprised at the number of comments I had on the blog and in other places that clearly misunderstood the whole issue. I was told that everything would be fine if people actually acted on compassion. Errm, no. That just makes matters worse.

It underlies the reluctance to criticize with any kind of seriousness anti-Western tyrannies even when they practice everything that “liberals” are supposed to abhor. Ah, but they are the weak. We must support them. The details do not matter.

It underlies our cackhanded way of dealing with developing countries, whose economic development we try to prevent while showering aid that keeps bloodthirsty kleptocrats in power on them.

It underlies the insistence that the state in whatever form is the only entity that can run people’s lives and all those who oppose that merely lack compassion. (Whether that means the state in Brussels, Whitehall or the local council is irrelevant.)

And, naturally enough, it means that the preference is for people to be miserable and downtrodden rather than successful achievers. Our collective conscience does not like success – we cannot feel compassionate towards it.

Odd that we should still be fighting the same battles our parents and grandparents fought.