The Death Of Democracy

The clip below shows Jose Manuel Barroso - President of the European Commission, making his acceptance speech in Strasbourg in 2009. As president of the European Commission, Barroso is responsible for all legislation passed. He is the Prime Minister of Europe.

                                    

Here is the President of the European Council - Herman Van Rompuy, responding to a young student's question.

In the clips above, they both use the word 'democracy,' Barroso with reference to his appointment as the leader of the government of Europe, and Van Rompuy with a palpable distaste for the word. These men share a vision for Europe, and indeed the whole world, wherein power is centralised within a supranational authority, and nation states no longer have full control of their country's laws. They are extremely close to achieving their goal.

This post focuses on the goals of the European Union's current leadership and examines them in the context of democracy and freedom.

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The end goal of the politicians in Brussels is to create a new country, in the form of a single state called Europe.

The country already has most of the components needed for it to be considered a country – A European Constitution (The Lisbon Treaty), A cabinet of ministers (the European Commission, the main executive body in Europe), a Prime Minister (Jose Manuel Barroso), a President (Herman Van Rompuy), a capital city (Brussels), a European Parliament, a European flag, a European anthem, European courts of justice, a European army, a common European trade policy, a common currency and common monetary policy.

No taxation without representation

The only phase that remains to fully consolidate the power in Europe is to establish a European Treasury, wherein the power is vested with the government in Brussels to directly tax citizens of the member nations and spend the money of UK citizens, French citizens and Italian citizens etc. without the input of their national governments. The leaders of the EU are using the current debt crisis to realise this final phase. The European Stability Mechanism (ESM) is in the process of ratification, which enshrines into law the power for the EU to extract funds from national treasuries, and the forthcoming treaty on Stability, Coordination and Governance will establish a fiscal “pact”, giving the EU vast control over members states’ budgets, taxation and spending, which is a crucial stepping stone to establishing a common fiscal policy. 

The European Commission: We have created a new
top tier of politicians - powerful, expensive and untouchable.

The first proposal for direct taxation has been tabled as a financial transactions tax, for which it is believed that the current anti-banker sentiment will ease its implementation. George Osborne completely crushed the idea in the European finance ministers meeting last November on the basis that a financial transactions tax purely within the EU would be suicidally uncompetitive on the world scale, and rightly pointing out that all taxes are borne by the general population, and not by ‘bankers’ as the name of the tax would suggest. However, the political will to impose direct taxation is still strong and it quite likely that this is not the last we will hear on the subject. 

This is exactly how all dictatorships begin. First, a state of crisis is declared; then ordinary democratic processes are put aside so that the crisis can be resolved; then a strong leader, normally of a military background, takes power ‘for the good of the country.’ In this case it is not a war general, but a group of suited internationals in Brussels, directing the path of the continent from their citadel in the highlands.

We all want a Europe of friendship, trade, and cooperation, and one could even make the case for a international body which oversees environmental and climate issues, and the management of our natural resources. However, above all, we want a Europe of freedom, whereby people can live as independent nations, enjoying the best possible relationships with their neighbouring countries, but free to govern their own people in the way in which they choose. To give unlimited power to a cohort of unelected aristocrats to legislate over almost every aspect of our lives is to turn our backs on democracy and wilfully give up the freedom that our ancestors fought and died to protect.

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Freedom is fragile

All of Europe’s current social and economic problems can be solved with more democracy. The real question for this country is, do we still believe in freedom? All the generations of Europeans before us have fought and died for their freedoms and we are the first generation of Europeans that have not had to do so. Now it seems we take freedom for granted.

What is freedom? Some people ask “freedom from what?” To put it simply, freedom from other people. The government is a group of people; and freedom is our ability to live our own lives in the way we please, without them interfering. When the government makes laws to restrict what we can and cannot do, our freedom is diminished. Now obviously we will always need a government to uphold the law, but in order to ensure that we remain free, and that the laws passed are best suited for our society, the law makers must be people from the society for which they make laws - the weaker the connection between the law maker and the law abider, the less likely that the laws will reflect the wishes of the people. In other words, the people best suited to make the laws for the people of Bratislava, are the people of Bratislava, and not a group of French and German bureaucrats who have never been to Bratislava and know nothing of the way of life in Bratislava.

Bratislava Castle, Slovakia

The range of the government’s reach is of utmost importance. Some laws are made on a local council level, and others on a national level. By passing these laws upward from local to national level, or from national to supra-national level, would leave groups of people with laws inadequate for their way of life.

To give some simple examples, first take the drinking age. Within the UK, the drinking age is 18 and applies to the whole country, but there are no doubt some people in some families or some communities or some regions or some cities etc. that would rather the age was 17, or 19, or perhaps 21. If Wales were to split from the UK, they would have more power to live their lives in the way they choose – they would have more freedom, and they might desire to make the age 19, as it suits their society so. If this power were to move to the EU level, and a ‘one-size-fits-all’ drinking age was applied across the continent, then many people would lose an element of their freedom, as some countries would undoubtedly prefer something different.

Speed limits and road signs for individual streets are best made by local councils. The people best equipped to decide at what level to set individual speed limits, safety regulations, road markings, cameras etc are those that live locally and those that use the roads frequently. If this power were to pass upward to the national level or the supra-national EU level, then many laws would be passed with a larger population in mind and local and individual differences would be overlooked. People would be less able to live a certain aspect of their life the way they feel best – they would be less free. In other words, the more powers that pass to the EU, the more harmonised the European nations become, and the less free we become as citizens.

Democracy preserves freedom

Freedom includes not only the freedom to run your own life and business and make your own choices, but also the ability to influence the legislation of the country you live in. In order to ensure preservation of our freedom, we must ensure that the government fears the people, and that its legitimacy is dependent upon our satisfaction. This means that there must be some form of democratic accountability, to ensure that the law makers are representative of the people for whom they make the laws. In other words, the best person to make any given law for the people of Bratislava, is a person from Bratislava, whose career depends on the satisfaction of the people of Bratislava, and not an English or French bureaucrat that doesn’t speak Slovakian, whom the people of Bratislava have no way of removing if they dislike this person's policies.

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Regime change begins at home

The internet will be the most important tool in this process of reinstalling the public belief in freedom and the importance of democracy for its preservation. Many of the largest broadcasters, corporations and influential lobbyists are already compromised, but we are all still free to express our views on the internet. The image and media representation of the EU is not some kind of underground conspiracy to control information, but more like an ongoing exercise of buying loyalty through the offerings of job security, subsidies and powerful positions.

The EU uses a combination of state and media expansion - to extend the EU’s reach into the public sectors of member states, private sector subsidies – to create a wide network of corporate vested interests in the EU’s success, and propaganda – to reach out to the public and portray the EU in a good light.

There is a large and growing section of Europe with a vested interest in the success of the EU. Everybody working for the EU, or working for a company receiving funding from the EU, and their immediate families, are unlikely to vote against the EU. Once the number of people invested in the EU exceeds the rest of us, the game is over (articulated extremely well in this video – which is about the US federal government but applies perfectly to the situation in Europe too).

Unfortunately there is no easy way of bringing down the European government. Many people still feel puzzled about how such a large international organisation can be so detrimental to the concepts of freedom and democracy, and find it hard to oppose an organisation that claims so adamantly to be working in our interests. However, the pressure is building for a large dose of democracy across Europe. The current ‘crisis’ has brought the Europe debate to the forefront of politics and everyone is discussing it. Strong influences on the politicians’ way of thinking will come about as a result of millions of small conversations, in individual households all across the continent, slowly solidifying public opinion towards a commitment to freedom and an understanding of what the EU really means for the peoples of Europe.

One day historians will look back on the post World War II European Union era as a time when many politicians from many different nations lost their faith in freedom and democracy and traded in their country’s sovereignty in exchange for power, wealth and a grand vision of a new world order. The end of the story is still being written.

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Václav Klaus, the President of the Czech Republic (the only nation other than the UK to opt out of the latest EU treaty), explains the concepts of freedom and democracy to the European Parliament back in 2009.