The New Road to Serfdom (14 page)

Which, of course, is what the current U.S. administration is now doing. Climate change science is a complex and difficult field, but we can say with some confidence that the proposed cap-and-trade legislation will have a negligible impact. We can say this because even the strongest supporters of emissions cuts insist that the planet will continue to heat almost to the same extent with the legislation. They support it, in other words, not because they think it will make a significant difference, but as a statement of good intention, a sign that the United States is trying to do the right thing.

The cap-and-trade legislation is a further example of the Europeanization of the United States, but not just in the way that critics usually mean. Its European nature resides not only in the fact that it will lead to more regulation and slower growth but also in the fact that American legislators, like their European counterparts, are now engaging in declamatory lawmaking.

The Atlantic splits over foreign policy partly reflect the extent to which policymakers are prepared honestly to declare their objectives. Every state, one supposes, operates on the basis of both
Realpolitik
and morality. Both the EU and the United States seek to export their values, including human rights and the rule of law, and do so from a combination of selfish and altruistic motives. The difference is that Americans are less likely to euphemize what they do.

There was shock in Europe when Donald Rumsfeld, asked why the United States was using cluster bombs against militants in Afghanistan, replied, “To try to kill them.” Most Europeans, certainly in those early days, backed military action against the Taliban. And, of course, they understood that military action involves fatalities. But they didn’t like to hear it spelled out.

This difference isn’t merely the stuff of diplomatic awkwardness. It goes to the heart of what is wrong with the European project—and of why Americans should be wary about the Europeanization of their own polity. There is an old chestnut about a British civil servant telling a politician, “It might work very well in practice, minister, but it doesn’t work in theory.” That sentiment has been lifted to become the ruling principle of the EU. Never mind how many unpleasant dictators we cuddle up to. Never mind how casually we disregard democracy within our own borders. We’re still the good guys: Just read our latest resolution on human rights.

Words matter more than actions, motives than outcomes. Indeed, the very effectiveness of unilateral U.S. action can offend European sensibilities. When the 2004 tsunami devastated several countries around the Indian Ocean, the United States, along with India, Japan, and Australia, began a massive relief operation, while the EU held press conferences about surveying the damage. Clare Short, then the International Aid Minister in Britain’s Labour Government, didn’t much care to see American humanitarian assistance: “I think this initiative from America to set up four countries claiming to coordinate sounds like yet another attempt to undermine the UN,” she told the BBC. “Only really the UN can do that job. It is the only body that has the moral authority.” Never mind that the UN had not, at that stage, done anything: The moral authority was what mattered.

Of course, moral authority is best purchased with someone else’s money. I shall never forget the debate in the European Parliament that followed the 2004 catastrophe. MEPs began an aggressive auction to demonstrate their compassion.

“Let’s pledge a million euros for immediate disaster relief,” one would say. “A million?” the next would declaim. “Pah! We must give at least five million!” “With great respect to my two colleagues who have just spoken,” a third would say, “I am not sure they grasp the extent of the devastation. Five million might do as
emergency aid, but the cleanup will cost
a minimum of fifty million.”

And so it went on, each speaker attracting warm applause from Euro-MPs who felt warm about the fact that they were applauding. Then an Italian Christian Democrat, a gently mannered Catholic, rose with a suggestion. Why didn’t we make a personal gesture? Why didn’t each colleague contribute a single day’s attendance allowance to the relief fund?

Immediately the warmth drained from the room. Those who had been hoarsely cheering the allocation of gazillions of their constituents’ money were stony at the thought of chipping in €290 of their own (on top of their salaries and various other perks, MEPs get paid for turning up and signing the attendance register). The poor Italian sat down to one of the most hostile silences I can remember, and the idea was immediately dropped.

Contemplate that scene, and you will descry an elemental truth of politics—indeed, of humanity. People treat their own resources differently from other people’s. There are, as Milton Friedman observed, two kinds of money in the world: your money and my money. And, in Brussels, it’s all your money.

I can perhaps best summarize what’s wrong with European gesture politics by adapting a famous observation by P. J. O’Rourke, who wrote that the only political observation he could confidently make was that
God was a Republican and Santa Claus a Democrat. By the same token, then I suspect that God is a Euro-skeptic, and Santa Claus a Euro-enthusiast.

God comes across a pretty stiff sort, a stickler for rules. He disapproves of waste and extravagance. He dislikes idleness. He has little time for the Utopian schemes and overblown ambitions of His creatures. In fact, when a previous generation of men united behind a presumptuous plan for supra-national integration, He took a very dim view indeed:

Now Santa Claus is a very different proposition. He’s jolly and generous and likeable. He might know who’s been good and who naughty, but he never does anything about it. Everyone gets the goodies, regardless of desert.

Santa Claus, in short, is preferable to God in every way. Except one.
There’s no such thing as Santa Claus.

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Let’s take a closer look at the areas where I identified that the EU was failing to actualize its frequently stated commitment to human rights: Iran, Cuba, China, Gaza. In all these cases, there is a sharp divergence between American and European policy. To simplify, American policy is to cold-shoulder the dictators and encourage their democratic opponents, while European policy is to engage with the dictators in the hope of encouraging reform. The United States is chiefly concerned with the ballot box, the EU with regional stability.

Once again, what we see is a consequence of the DNA encoded at Philadelphia; what Richard Dawkins would perhaps call “an extended phenotype.” The United States was founded in a democratic revolt against a distant government. Like all nations, it treasures and re-tells its founding story. Unsurprisingly, then, its natural prejudice is toward self-determination and democratic accountability.

Of course, democratic prejudice sometimes gives way to national interest, and the United States has propped up its fair share of unpleasant regimes in Africa, Asia, and Latin America. The best we can say is that there was no self-deception involved: policymakers weighed the competing claims of democracy and self-interest, and consciously chose the latter. As Roosevelt
is supposed to have said about the Nicaraguan
caudillo
Anastasio Somoza, “He may be a son-of-a-bitch, but he’s our son-of-a-bitch.” A similar (and similarly misguided) calculation leads the State Department to support the monstrous dictatorship of Islam Karimov in Uzbekistan, simply because he had the wit, in 2001, to proclaim himself an ally in the war on terror.

These exceptions, however, don’t disprove the general rule. From Belarus to Zimbabwe, the overarching ambition of U.S. policy is to foster the emergence of democratic alternatives to tyrannical regimes.

Euro-diplomats, other things being equal, are more nuanced; in Solana’s phrase, more “pragmatic.” They are readier to engage with autocrats, politically and economically. This is partly because they genuinely believe in the power of dialogue and persuasion. But it is also because they don’t have the visceral attachment to democracy that has traditionally characterized the American republic.

We have already seen the way the EU dismisses inconvenient referendum results within its own borders. We have seen the way in which the structures of the EU are intrinsically anti-democratic. Supreme power is vested in the hands of twenty-seven unelected European Commissioners. The servants of such a system, when dealing with, say, Chinese officials, are bound to feel more kinship than the emissaries of a state built on Jeffersonian principles.

If you think I’m exaggerating, consider the career of the EU’s first ever foreign minister—or, to give her correct title, the High Representative of the Union for Foreign Affairs and Security Policy—a position created under the European Constitution in December 2009.

Baroness Ashton is a typical product both of the British quangocracy and the Brussels mandarinate. A Labour placewoman, she has never in her whole life taken the trouble to get herself elected to anything. Simply to read her CV is to get a sense of the extent to which Britain is run, as explained in chapter 2, by quangos.

First, Lady Ashton worked for the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament, going on to become its treasurer. Then she went to the Central Council for Education and Training in Social Work. Then she chaired the Health Authority in Hertfordshire, became a vice president of the National Council for One Parent Families, and was eventually appointed a life peer by Tony Blair—all without facing the voters.

Perhaps understandably, given this background, she displayed little enthusiasm for representative government when she got to the House of Lords. Her main achievement as leader of the House was to steer the Lisbon Treaty through the chamber without conceding the referendum that all three parties had promised in their manifestos.

Nor does the contempt for the ballot box stop there. Baroness Ashton became a European Commissioner in 2008, not because of any special aptitude, but because Gordon Brown was determined to avoid a by-election, and so couldn’t send an elected MP. She was then promoted to the foreign affairs position in 2009, again, not because of particular expertise in foreign affairs but because it was generally felt that Labour ought to be compensated over Tony Blair not getting Europe’s presidency.

Every chapter of that story negates the democratic principle. Every page would have had Sam Adams and Patrick Henry howling about arbitrary government. To summarize: a lifelong quangocrat was appointed in secret to a position created by a treaty on which the public had been denied a vote.

How can such a foreign minister lecture the Cubans about democratic reform? How can she chide Iran for its rigged ballots? Is it any wonder that Euro-diplomats—who have now, under the same treaty, been formed into a recognized diplomatic corps called the European External Action Service—are less willing that their American counterparts to criticize regimes that are insufficiently democratic?

Once again, both unions are being true to the creeds of their founders. Of course there are exceptions, complications, subtleties. But, in general, the sympathy of the American is with the masses, while the sympathy
of the Eurocrat is with the ruling officials, who might not have a perfect electoral mandate, but who do at least have some experience of power—the people, in short, who most resemble his fellow Eurocrats.

__________

Sympathy—in the literal sense of fellow-feeling—is an important factor in diplomacy. Consider the Israel-Palestine dispute. An American politician looking at the Middle East is likely to feel sympathy with Israel as the country that looks most like his own: a parliamentary democracy based on property rights and the rule of law, a state founded in adversity that elected its generals as its first leaders. But to the Euro-sophist, who dislikes “coca-colonialism” and feels that the French farmers who stone McDonald’s have a point, things look very different. To him, Israel represents an incursion of precisely the same globalized culture that he resents in America. Just as his sympathy is with the settled European smallholder threatened by Wal-Mart, so it is with the Bedouin in his flowing robes.

In my eleven years in the European Parliament, I have often wondered why Israel seems to provoke anger out of all proportion to its population or strategic importance. It is the subject of endless emergency debates and condemnatory resolutions. The EU takes very seriously its role as the chief financial sponsor and international patron of the Palestinian regime. Americans
often put the phenomenon down to anti-Semitism, but this won’t quite do. There
are
anti-Semites in Europe, of course, but many of those who are angriest in their denunciations of the Jewish state have honorable records of opposing discrimination at home.

So why does Israel find it so much harder to get a fair hearing in Brussels than in Washington? Partly because the EU sees its role as being to counterbalance the United States. Partly, too, because of demographics: We are forever hearing about the “Jewish lobby” on Capitol Hill, but it is rarely mentioned that there are more than four times as many Muslims in the EU as there are Jews in the United States.

The single biggest disadvantage that Israelis have in Brussels, however, is one that they can’t do anything about. The story of Israel represents the supreme vindication of the national principle: that is, of the desire of every people to have their own state. For two thousand years, Jews were stateless and scattered, but they never lost their aspiration for nationhood: “Next year in Jerusalem.” Then, one day, astonishingly—providentially, we might almost say—they achieved it.