The New Road to Serfdom (6 page)

O
n my desk before me as I write are two constitutions: that of the United States and that of the EU. To demonstrate what makes the United States exceptional, I can do no better than to compare the two texts.

The U.S. Constitution, with all its amendments, is 7,200 words long. The EU Constitution, now formally known as the Lisbon Treaty, is 76,000.

The U.S. Constitution concerns itself with broad principles, such as the balance between state and federal authorities. The EU Constitution busies itself with
such details as space exploration, the rights of disabled people, and the status of asylum seekers.

The U.S. Constitution, in particular the Bill of Rights, is mainly about the liberty of the individual. The EU Constitution is mainly about the power of the state.

The U.S. Declaration of Independence, which foreshadowed the constitutional settlement, promises “life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness.” The EU’s equivalent, the Charter of Fundamental Rights and Freedoms, guarantees its citizens the right to strike action, free health care, and affordable housing.

If you think I’m being unreasonable in comparing the two constitutions, incidentally, let me refer you to the chief author of the European Constitution, the former French president Valéry Giscard d’Estaing. At the opening session of the drafting convention in 2002, he told delegates: “This is Europe’s Philadelphia moment,” and went on to compare himself to Thomas Jefferson—inaccurately as well as immodestly, since Jefferson wasn’t present when the U.S. Constitution was drafted; he was, as Giscard d’Estaing might have been expected to be aware, the U.S. ambassador to Paris.

To see quite how preposterous Giscard’s comparison was, consider the way in which the two constitutions were adopted. The U.S. Constitution came into effect only following ratification by specially convened assemblies in eleven of the member states, with the remaining
two, North Carolina and Rhode Island, falling into line soon afterward. Initially, the authors of the EU Constitution had intended to use the modern equivalent: referendums. It soon became clear, however, that the referendums might produce unwelcome results. In 2005, the document was put to the vote in two of the EU’s founding states, France and the Netherlands. Both rejected it: by 54 percent and 62 percent respectively.

At this stage, one might have expected the leaders of the EU to take the old text off the table and try to come up with one more acceptable to public opinion. But that’s not how things work in Brussels. Public opinion is treated as an obstacle to overcome, not a reason to change direction. Realizing that their proposals for deeper integration were likely to be rejected at the ballot box, the heads of government resolved not to allow any more votes. The text of the European Constitution was scrambled. A team of lawyers, as Giscard cheerfully admitted, went through the document line by line, keeping the effects identical, but rendering the articles “unreadable.” The new version was rebaptized as the Lisbon Treaty, and the national governments solemnly announced that their previous promise of a referendum no longer applied.

There was one exception. The national constitution of Ireland requires referendums to be held on any proposal that would substantially alter the location of power. Although the Irish government dearly would
have liked to avoid a popular vote, it couldn’t, since the European Constitution, or Lisbon Treaty, plainly amounted to a substantial shift of power from Dublin to Brussels. Accordingly, on June 12, 2008, Ireland voted on the text. Once again, it was rejected. And, once again, the EU brushed aside the rejection and pushed ahead regardless.

In the run-up to polling day, the President of the European Commission, José Manuel Durrão Barroso, had declared: “There is no Plan B.” Many Irish voters innocently took this to mean that, if they voted no, the text would be withdrawn. But what Barroso actually meant was that Plan A would be resubmitted over and over again. Extraordinary pressure was put on Ireland, and the country was threatened with isolation and bankruptcy. At the same time, a massive EU-funded propaganda campaign was launched. On October 2, 2009, demoralized by the effects of the financial crisis, which had been more serious in Ireland than anywhere else in the EU, Irish voters caved in and, in a second referendum, reversed their verdict.

Bertolt Brecht’s words apply eerily to the ratification of the European Constitution and, indeed, to the story of European integration more broadly: “Wouldn’t it therefore be easier to dissolve the people, and elect another in their place?”

Giscard’s Jeffersonian pretensions are rendered risible by the Eurocrats’ contempt for the masses. Where
the U.S. Constitution represented a popular impulse toward a new form of government, the EU Constitution was imposed on visibly unenthusiastic electorates. Where the one was based on empowering the people and controlling the state, the other was based on empowering the state and controlling the people.

Indeed, the difference between the American and European unions can be inferred from the opening words of their foundational texts. The U.S. Constitution begins, “We, the People…” The EU Constitution, in the form of the amended European Treaties, begins, “His Majesty the King of the Belgians…”

As we saw in the preceding chapter, states tend to develop according to the DNA encoded at their conception. The United States was fortunate in the timing and circumstances of its birth. The late eighteenth century was perhaps the moment in the development of Western philosophy, or at least British political thought, when there was maximum emphasis on the freedom of the citizen. Because the new republic was born out of a popular revolt against a remote and autocratic government, its founders were determined to prevent a recurrence of the abuses against which they had taken up arms.

Their preoccupations are plainly visible, both in the debates that accompanied the drafting of the U.S. Constitution, and in the resulting text. They wanted to be certain that laws could not be passed without consent,
nor taxes levied except by the will of elected representatives. They wanted the president to be controlled by Congress, and knew what they were doing when they placed the legislature in Article One and the executive in Article Two. They wanted the individual to be protected against arbitrary government or punitive levies. They wanted jurisdiction to be dispersed, with the federal authorities exercising limited and contingent functions while residual authority was vested in the states.

By and large, they succeeded. There have been alterations to the system they planned. The twentieth century saw the White House grow at the expense of Congress, and the federal government at the expense of the states—both, as we shall see, with unhappy consequences. But, relative to other countries, the United States has retained a remarkably devolved and democratic form of government. The Constitution did precisely what it was designed to do, limiting the growth of central power and encouraging the development of a pluralist polity. All the peculiar features of American democracy that we discussed in the preceding chapter—referendums, recall votes, term limits, open primaries, dispersed jurisdiction, direct elections—are the result of the exalted doctrines that were committed to paper at the old courthouse in Philadelphia in 1787.

Unfortunately, the EU is also a child of its time. Its Founding Fathers, no less than Washington or Madison, designed institutions to prevent a recurrence of the
troubles through which they had recently passed. They had come through the terrible experience of World War II, and were determined to prevent future conflicts at any price. This they hoped to achieve by pooling, first the economic resources, and then the administrative structures, of Europe’s nations, so that wars between them should become logistically impossible. The objective of political integration was seen as overriding: more important than either personal freedom or democratic accountability.

Most of the framers of the U.S. Constitution had been involved in a rising against an undemocratic regime, and consequently saw representative government as a defense against tyranny. But the experience of the Euro-patriarchs, above all Jean Monnet and Robert Schuman, had been very different. They recoiled with horror from the memory of the plebiscitary democracy that had preceded World War II. They fretted that, left to themselves, voters might fall prey to unscrupulous demagogues. Accordingly, they were determined to constrain the ballot box and moderate the will of the people.

The system they designed vested supreme power in the hands of an appointed European Commission. Not only is the Commission the EU’s executive, equivalent to the White House; it also has a monopoly of the right to initiate legislation. This extraordinary and outrageous concentration of power is rarely remarked upon,
possibly because it has become familiar through time. But it is worth contemplating the paradox that the twenty-seven members of the EU, all of them democratic in themselves, have submitted themselves collectively to a system of government in which supreme power is wielded by appointed officials who have been deliberately made invulnerable to the ballot box.

When the EU swats aside inconvenient referendum results, it isn’t behaving perversely. It is faithfully obeying the creed of its founders, who believed that public opinion often needed to be tempered by a class of sober functionaries. After all, had the EU been democratic, and had each successive transfer of power from the nations to Brussels been referred to the voters for permission, the project never would have taken off.

Which brings us to another critical difference between the two federations. In America, there was a sense of common nationhood prior to the formal federation of the old colonies. Most of the characteristics that define nationality—a similar culture, compatible religious practices, comparable historical experience and, above all, a common language—already existed in America, and it is striking that, when the Constitution was being negotiated, the word “nation” was generally applied to America as a whole (although the word “country” was more often used for a particular state). Although there was a strong and laudable tradition of localism, there was also a tangible American
demos:
a
community with which Americans identified when they used the word “we.”

Almost no one in Europe feels a comparable sense of pan-Continental affinity. There is no European public opinion; there are no European media. Although the EU provides lavish funds to incentivize the creation of cross-border political parties, politics are played out entirely on a national basis. There is, in short, no European
demos.
If you take the
demos
out of democracy, you are left only with the
kratos:
the power of a system that must compel by force of law what it cannot ask in the name of civic patriotism.

__________

The paradox is that, in pursuing political integration without the consent of their peoples, the leaders of the EU are turning their backs on Europe’s heritage. The richness of European civilization has always resided in its diversity, its pluralism, its variety. Yet, comparing the political structures of the United States and the EU, we see that those values, exported across the Atlantic centuries ago, are thriving better in their new home than on their native soil. Rather as several varieties of European grape survived in California when the nineteenth-century phylloxera blight wiped out the ancestral vines in Europe, so the political structures that brought Europe to global hegemony are better preserved in North America than in the Old World.

What was it, after all, that made Western civilization the dominant force of the past five hundred years? Europe started with few advantages. Compared to the great Oriental civilizations—the Ming, Mogul, and Ottoman monarchies—the squabbling nations at the western tip of the Eurasian landmass seemed to have little going for them. Technologically, they were nowhere near as advanced as the great Asian empires, which far surpassed Europe in their knowledge of astronomy and mathematics, of cartography and medicine, of canals and gunpowder, of paper money.

Why, then, did Europe become the hegemonic power of the modern age? Why didn’t the Chinese, as one might have expected, sail round the Cape to discover Portugal? The most convincing answer was offered by the Australian historian E. L. Jones in his 1981 book
The European Miracle
—although Jones’s hypothesis was later carried to a much wider audience in Paul Kennedy’s
The Rise and Fall of the Great Powers.

To condense an elaborate and subtle dissertation, Jones argued that Europe’s success resided in the fact that it never became a unified state, but rather remained a states system. Where the Oriental empires became centralized, bureaucratized, and heavily taxed, Europe’s princedoms were constantly competing one with another. New ideas were trialed in one country and, if successful, copied by others. The lack of a strong central authority encouraged a culture of
enterprise and adventure, of exploration and mercantilism.

It tended also to encourage political freedom. Many European advances were driven by the phenomenon of the refugee. As long as there was somewhere to flee to, the power of the autocrat was checked. As long as there were competing states, no dictatorship would be secure. As Edward Gibbon put it in his masterpiece,
The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire: