Why has the EU become a Popperian tyranny?

   Moody's negative outlook announced today for the credit ratings for the supposed most prosperous EU northern national economies, even including Germany, MUST mark an EU crisis turning point.

   Many years ago this blogger proposed that the Swiss Constitution provided an ideal blue print for a democratic grouping of Europe's nations wishing to form a closer trading union. That was ignored. The years in between have been wasted.

    My recording of a question to Debating Europe for some EU Presidents and perhaps EU Commissioners, at a planned public debate for next October, reflects that shameful reality and is pasted at the foot of this posting.

    The Swiss Confederation recognises four languages, the strong autonomy of its Cantons - co-incidentally numbering roughly the same number as EU member states, its strong direct democracy with protections for specific linguistic and cantonal sensibilities, a guiding star chamber of seven ministers at confederate level, a federal parliament, provisions for regular constitutional changes, plus the longest history of democracy within Europe all combine to make it the perfect blue-print for an EU Constitution!

   Temporary modifications could be established for an interim emergency EU arrangement, prior to establishing a full EU Constitution subject to individual national referendums contemplating exclusion in the event of a NO vote.

   The only alternative this blogger can foresee is widespread fragmentation during and after years of economic decline across the EU, not necessarily within former national boundaries, with all the well known risks of such an occurence as Europe's troubled history has demonstrated over and over again.

 

Moody's approaches reality in Spain

Anybody looking at Spain, its housing bust, its unemployment, its membership of a potentially tyrannical and certainly dis-functional trading block called the EU, would immediately realize that unless all those basic facts are reversed there is no hope for the country nor the economic welfare of its people.

Yet last night's multiple downgrade of its banks by Moody's, rated only the bonds of Bankia as junk. Read here. 


Mr. de Guindos, however , yesterday accepted the suicidal interdependence of the Spanish banks and Spanish state, read an earlier comment on that aspect from last April from here, aptly titled Hazardous Tango.


Here lie the real political risks that makes all such banks unsuitable for investment. Banks domiciled in Spain, even those having strong overseas assets, are subject to the demands of the Spanish State and soon perhaps an authoritarian, anonymously EU controlled, non-democratically accountable Regulator, who could sequestrate assets at will, or upon a mere whim or unsubstantiated market rumour.


If Britain stays within the EU and goes along with such activities and practices within the Euro Zone, then the suspicion will grow that such financial tyranny could eventually extend to London, that then would be the greatest danger for the Corporation of the City, putting the risks of giving the people a say in their country's future by means of an EU referendum (see my tweet of last evening, on this,) into utter insignificance! 


If Cameron goes along with whatever occurs in Brussels from this Thursday and on into next weekend, that is when a capital flight could begin from London, then Britain truly will be tied to Europe forever and Europe will be a tyranny as defined by Karl Popper, where the rulers may only be replaced by bloodshed.

G20 leaders abandon Europe's peoples to a Popperian Tyranny

President Obama of the USA, of course, led the way in pushing for further integration, consolidation and it must inevitably follow - oppression, in Europe, with the probable tool being the yet to be ratified appalling ESM Treaty.

If the structures of Europe were considered worth continuing the people of the Euro Group would be prepared to lend their Sovereigns their savings, cash and investments confident they would provide secure and real returns.

They will not because it is impossible for any sane or prudent or sensible and responsible individual, with the interests of self, his family or other loved ones in mind, to invest in a thoroughly rotten and corrupt pan-European institution whose leaders lie at every opportunity and which was established by trickery and deceit with its real objectives always kept concealed.

EU Commission President Barroso claiming it as "democratic" in his widely televised temper tantrum to a Canadian journalist early in this G20 typified for the world the dangers Europe now faces. The fact that the leaders of the largest countries in the world left Europe to that fate without demure and the words used by President Obama to justify and describe "progress" in that approach will likewise be long remembered:

"None of them are going to be a silver bullet that solves this thing entirely ...... in the next week or two weeks or two months, but each step points to the fact that Europe is moving towards further integration rather than break-up," Mr Obama told reporters 

(Emphasis added by this blogger).

Jörg Asmussen, the German ECB member driving the case for an EU Fatherland

The Irish Times today has coverage on the plans for pretty wide-sweeping changes to the concept of the EU as now being put forward by the German Board Member of the drowning ECB, Jörg Asmussen.

EU break-up as strongly favoured by this blog based on the anti-democratic and unworkable institutions and procedures of the existing EU, is never going to be achieved without a struggle. Naturally therefore those who have been driving this model forwards would inevitably end by propounding even worse extremes. That is a refreshing development, so far things have reached their present desperate straits by the deceits, lies, evasions and secretive corruption of the EU which we all can witness today.

To correct the inefficiencies, incompetence and criminal waste of the existing EU will require some brutal measures and very distasteful medecine on a pan-european basis. Naturally increased authoritarianism will thus be required. It will be sold only as the cure, to treat the symptoms which naturally are becoming increasingly plain and dire.

We in Europe can seek our own national solutions by democratic means, which means abandoning the EU as presently constructed, and thereafter find a better way of working alongside one another towards some common prosperity, or we can submit ourselves to pan-european rule by the likes of Jörg Asmussen.

The latter would be a Popperian Tyranny, on which I commented at the start of my blogspot blogging over nine years ago!

More reports on Jörg Asmussen from Irish Independent, here and his ECB profile here.

Are Greece's tanks purchases for the oppression of the population?

At the moment when it has been widely expected Greece would announce it had run out of money, we learn instead that it has just committed to spend maybe over a billion euros for 4OO renovated tanks from the USA, read here.

I reported this strange matter just before making my way to bed last evening and pondered during the early hours whether or not the country could be expecting some kind of immediate invasion. Reading the online IHT, now irritatingly arriving as the global edition of the NYT, this morning my conclusion that such an invasion seemed unlikely (other perhaps than from Turkey,) was borne out by this article, linked here, titled "How Greece could escape the Euro" from which I quote this paragraph:

But, of course, there is a way out. It would be messy, and perhaps disastrous. But no one is going to send an army to Athens to force it to keep the Euro.

Precisely, so what will the 400 tanks be used for? Is the EU about to make the final transition from putative Popperian tyranny, to the full-blown real thing?

Orphans of Liberty

I will shortly be adding the above web page to the small list of links from this blog.

Following my problems with Blogger, last week, which has left posts here with some strange decorations in my Edit Posts page, I decided, after more than eight years of lone blogging, across a wide rage of differing titles, to contribute to a group blog and am delighted to inform my few faithful readers that Ironies Too, will in future be regularly contributing to "Orphans of Liberty" , linked again here.

After a lengthy struggle with the Word Press Post Editor, I have now submitted my first post, which hopefully will appear later today.

In anticipating some new readers to this page, this is probably a good moment to repost the blog which explained my taking up blogging on the original Ironies blog, on 23rd February 2003, when Samizdata had already published my post following my removal as a contributor from the EU Forum pages. The removal of the FT Forum pages from the Financial Times, where I had been a regular contributor under the name NM, also played a part in the decision to extend my own blogging activities. The version on Samizdata is here.

Sunday, February 23, 2003
 
I have been attempting (without success) to post on the EU Futurum Future of Europe debate pages, the following contribution to their debate on the proposed new constitution.

I quote it in full as presented to the EU before its rejection:-

DEMOCRACY OR PAN-EUROPEAN TOTALITARIANISM

Pericles in his famous funeral oration for the slain warriors of democratic Athens, among many other ringing statements in favour of democracy, pertinently said the following:

Quote

Although only a few may originate a policy, we are all able to judge it. We do not look upon discussion as a stumbling block in the way of political action, but as an indispensable preliminary to acting wisely.

Unquote

The above is quoted directly from Karl Popper's book The Open Society and its Enemies published in paperback by Routledge Classics (ISBN 0-415-23731-9). It should be required reading for all members of the convention chaired by Vallery Giscard d'Estaing on the future structures of the European State.

Others following these debates are also recommended to the book, but for those unable to obtain a copy, or spare the time to read it, I give below a brief summary of what I consider to be the most salient points as concerns the dangers Europe now faces if the convention proceeds as seems likely. In my opinion, never will the outcome of such a debate be likely to affect so many millions of people, and rarely can there have been such reluctance to openly discuss the frightening implications of the decisions being taken.

Plato is the early villain in Popper's analysis for the ever present drive against democracy and equalitarianism. The author describes, with detailed logic, the elitism, racialism and totalitarianism that can eventually result in a Society that follows the 'chosen people' concept, intrinsic to much of Plato's writings.

Popper makes an excellent case that the critical divide in governance of a geographic entity, whether city, nation (and it follows, super-state) is between collectivism and individualism.

The argument made by Plato that the state be placed higher than the individual and the suggestion that justice is synonymous "for that which is in the best interest of the state" now apparent in the structures of the EU, must be refuted at, virtually, any cost.

Anti-democratic forces malign the case for individualism by falsely asserting that collectivism is synonymous with altruism, while individualism is blackened by being equated to egoism.

"Who should rule?" Plato asks and gives his own reply, "the wise shall lead and rule, and the ignorant shall follow?" Popper proposes that the very question "Who shall rule?" itself, becomes the problem and proposes an alternative question.

Quote

How can we so organize political institutions that bad or incompetent rulers can be prevented from doing too much damage?

Unquote

I would suggest that the above question is the one that the present convention on the future Europe should be considering.

As Popper argues "all theories of sovereignty are paradoxical". For instance we may have selected 'the wisest' or 'the best' as a ruler. But 'the wisest' in his wisdom may find that not he but 'the best' should rule, and the best in his goodness may decide that 'the majority' should rule.

By emphasising who should rule, or indeed on what basis our ruler should be appointed or by what limited constituency he should be elected, we are driven up a blind alley. We should be debating the checks and balances which should be imposed on those who rule us, bearing in mind that only by the best of good luck will any of our future leaders be anything other than reasonably competent. The majority will be incompetent and we will for sure, be subject to the occasional tyrant reaching the pinnacle of pan-European power. How could such a despot be removed? Popper asserts:

Quote

A theory of democratic control can be developed that is free from the paradox of sovereignty. The theory I have in mind is one which does not proceed, as it were, from a doctrine of the intrinsic good or righteousness of a majority rule, but rather from the baseness of tyranny: or more precisely it rests upon the decision, or adoption of the proposal, to avoid and resist tyranny.

Unquote

Continuing with this theme Popper argues that there are two forms of government, those that can be got rid of without bloodshed (such as in general elections) and those that require a successful revolution to replace, or not at all. He labels the first sort 'democracies' and the second 'tyrannies'.

What facilities will the new European super-state supply for the replacement of its rulers… none that I have yet seen proposed, we would thus appear to be heading towards tyrannical, non-democratic rule as labelled by Popper!

Debating who should rule avoids the subject of democratic checks and balances, and leads to further problems clearly evident in the French system of government, such as, that the qualities of leadership may be believed to be identifiable at a young age and an elite education provided, tailored along the lines of those attributes considered important by the existent ruling clique. Self-perpetuating incompetent rule, or worse appears to me the inevitable result.

France nevertheless clearly remains a democracy within Popper’s definition, is this likely to remain the case for the Union of Europe if a French model is imposed on the already un-democratic institutions of the existing EU? The first draft constitution clearly places the State above the individual, inter alia, by granting rights beyond its gift to give, or power to protect.

It would be a major mistake for the new Europe to follow a Platonic pattern of government, but a mistake that daily appears more likely. The existing EU is already the kind of elitist, non-accountable, non-removable nightmare against which Popper warned when he wrote his book in the early nineteen forties. It is incredible how little Europe seems to have learned from those wartime years and the events leading to them.

I have frequently heard it boasted, the EU would not have advanced this far, (or?) to 'ever closer union', had democratic authority been sought at every step!

The present difficulties of the common currency and acceptance of the latest expansion amongst the general public, should amply demonstrate to the extreme federalists who make such remarks, that the limits of such non-democratic coercion have now been reached. Proceeding with further imposed integration, and consequent diminution of national democratic protections, could threaten the whole project of future European unity. Rumblings of discontent abound in all three of the major EU States I have recently visited!

I appeal directly to the Chairman of the convention, who, probably co-incidentally, incorporated my earlier minimum requirement in his initial constitutional draft, to read Popper’s excellent book and consider its implications. To achieve lasting renown, requires a bold step in favour of democratic fundamentals which will be strongly resisted by the various Brussels and National elites! Courage mon brave!

Should Europe’s new institutions be directly controlled by 'the majority' using the new tools available from the revolution in information technology?

Why is the major topic of discussion in the Convention, not about how the people of Europe may periodically remove their leaders and avoid the new organisations such as the ERRF and Europol becoming the instruments of a despot?

Are, perhaps, the tyrants already in control?

These are the questions that need to be addressed. Using Popper's labels of societies, they can be democracies or tyrannies, if the EU is to take on the full characteristics of a State, as the majority in Europe seem to believe is desirable, test whether this statement is true with a pan-European referendum. If the answer is Yes!, then build a Democracy for which all should wish, and of which they can be proud.

If No!, then at least the convention and its Chairman will not have lent their name, to the creation of perhaps the largest tyranny the world has yet to see!

Against whom will the name of Vallery Giscard d'Estaing be set in history… Pericles or Plato?... and for the creation of what kind of European Union, one of democracy and freedom or Popper's only alternative…?

posted by Martin at 2/23/2003 05:01:00 PM

The West's triple tragedies of 7th December 2010

First - The US President and Congress, having been presented with a demand by their own Deficit Commission for an urgent and vast cut in the US Governmant's cash shortfall, instead agreed on vast new tax reductions and spending increases.

Second - The finance ministers of the 27 former nations who instead now form the European Union, faced with the collapse of the block's joint currency and sovereign default amongst several of its number, met in the Ecofin Council and knowing that to do nothing was not an option - decided to do just that - absolutely nothing.

Third - The tool of oppression and facilitator for the growing tyranny across Europe, the European Union's  European Arrest Warrant, was used to jail a man in London (home of Habeus Corpus) who had been accused of no crime, refused any bail, and supposedly co-incidentally had, in the immediately preceding few days, caused discomfit to practically every government across the so-called free world.