The EU was a product of its time – Telegraph Blogs

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Daniel Hannan


The EU was a product of its time

"I know you like to knock the EU, Hannan, but getting to 50 is no small achievement," says a Euro-enthusiast friend. He has a point. Those of us who criticise the Brussels racket need to acknowledge that, whatever its faults, countries keep joining it.

Founding fathers: Jean Monnet and Robert Schuman

The more I think about it, though, the more it strikes me that most of the EU's flaws are a direct consequence of when it was founded.

All organisations develop according to the DNA that was encoded at their conception. The US, born out of a popular revolt against a remote government, was built on the Jeffersonian principle that decisions should be taken as closely as possible to the people. The EU, by contrast, was founded on precisely the opposite principle: "ever closer union".

Why? It all comes down to bad timing. The US had the good fortune to draw up its constitution at the moment when Western thought was most obsessed with limited government and the Rights of Man. Sadly, the EU, too, was a child of its time, founded at the height of the post-war consensus, when big was beautiful, and everyone expected the state to keep growing.

Thus, where the US Declaration of Independence promises life liberty and the pursuit of happiness, the EU Charter of Fundamental Rights guarantees our entitlement to strike action, social housing and affordable healthcare. To this day, the EU toddles happily along with Five Year Plans, price controls, quotas and the social chapter. How very cutting edge it must all have seemed in 1957.

The EU's founding fathers were not just suspicious of free markets; they also distrusted untrammelled democracy. They had seen the electorates of Europe fall for demagogues and fascists, and were determined to find ways to temper the ballot box with the wisdom of experts. So they designed a system where supreme power was in the hands of unelected European Commissioners.

People often talk about the EU's "democratic deficit" as though it were an accident. In fact, it was central to the Euro-patriarchs' scheme. Jean Monnet and Robert Schuman understood from the beginning that their audacious plan to merge the ancient nations of Europe into a single policy would never come off if each successive transfer of authority to Brussels had to be approved by the voters.

That is why they made sure that the people in charge wouldn't have to worry about public opinion. And that is why, to this day, the EU sees democracy as secondary, cheerfully tossing aside referendum results when they are inconvenient.

Complaining because the EU is undemocratic is like complaining because a cow is bovine, or a butterfly flighty. It is fulfilling its prime directive.

How very different the EU would look if we were setting it up today, in the age of cheap air travel, consumer power and the Internet. The founding fathers of 2007 would never presume to send their regulatory tendrils into every little crevasse of national life. Instead, they would concentrate on cross-border issues, notably the facilitation of commerce. I wonder what they would call their creation. European Free Trade Association, perhaps?

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