Before the altar of Europe

Charlemagne

Before the altar of Europe

Some parting reflections from this columnist on the faith and folly of the Brussels elite

NIGEL FARAGE, a British politician with a knack for synthetic outrage, was appalled to learn recently that over 1,000 European Union officials earn more than Britain’s prime minister. The EU is a “racket”, thundered Mr Farage, who sits in the European Parliament for the United Kingdom Independence Party (UKIP). No wonder Brussels bureaucrats demand “more Europe”, he declared. What they really want is “more money” for themselves.

The truth is even worse, at least for UKIP voters. Brussels officials call for “more Europe” because they really want more Europe. Yes, some are overpaid, notably old-timers hired before a staff reform in 2004. Highly educated and often a bit bored, Eurocrats can also sound spoiled: moaning about their conditions while enjoying some of the safest jobs in the world. Yet the average Eurocrat is not primarily in it for the money.

The European quarter of Brussels is an odd place. It is less Sodom and Gomorrah than the Vatican. Europe is a faith-based project for its bureaucrats, or at least it was when they took the EU entrance exams. Even as Eurocrats become more cynical with age, learning that promotion has less to do with merit than with politics, most retain a spark of faith. Put simply, they believe that nationalism is the greatest of evils. As articles of faith go, this is not a terrible one. Nationalism has indeed been a European curse. Today, the existence of the EU is a bulwark against fresh horrors. Take the recent tensions between Slovaks and Hungarians, whipped up by cynical populists in both countries. Such ugliness can only go so far: local politicians cannot close the border to traders from the wrong nationality, for example, or sack workers with the wrong background: it would be against EU law.

Brussels officials are often thoughtful, clever and good company. They speak lots of languages. Many are married to partners from another country (and divorced from a spouse from still another country, come to that). They have multilingual, multicultural children who think of Europe as their nationality. Strikingly often, they come from regions with strongly independent identities, such as Catalonia or Wales. Unwilling to seek a career in a hated national capital like Madrid or London, they instead latched onto the dream of a united Europe.

Like priest-confessors, Eurocrats are well-placed to see the grubby deals done in the name of national interests. At the annual fish council, they watch ministers seeking over-large quotas for “their” fishermen, driving prized species into extinction. They see supposedly pro-European governments lobbying so that new laws will favour “their” farmers or car workers. All of this buttresses their faith in Europe as a higher ideal.

Yet their credo of anti-nationalism carries risks too. At best, EU bureaucrats can be naive about how much integration ordinary voters will bear. At worst, they sound hostile to democracy. Like any priestly caste, Eurocrats display a streak of authoritarianism and obscurantism. When the French and Dutch voted against the EU constitution in 2005, Brussels officials muttered that it was nonsense to put the complex legalese of an EU treaty to ordinary people. The bolder among them argued that the EU had always been an elitist project, with good reason. Why, they said, if German voters had been asked, they would never have given up the Deutschmark for the euro. Nor would French voters have approved EU enlargement.

Hardline Eurosceptics accuse European officials of plotting a dictatorship. That is cheap demagoguery. The EU is a club of democracies, albeit one with unelected referees. The Brussels bubble—a cosy world of officials, EU-funded think-tankers and a good chunk of the press corps—is not full of people who hate democracy. The problem is that it is full of people who equate national democracy with selfishness and populism.

An irresponsible parliament

One solution to this problem is proposed endlessly: pan-European democracy, built around cross-border parties and the huge new powers handed by the Lisbon Treaty to the European Parliament. Such enthusiasm requires another act of faith. The European Parliament is the great disappointment of the European project. It is the revenge of the B-team: an assembly led by posturing second-raters dedicated, in their every waking moment, to grabbing new powers at the expense of national governments.

The parliament is elected but not truly accountable. Members can vote down any law without risking the fall of a government and snap elections: that is power without consequences. Ordinary voters have no idea who represents them in the parliament, or even whether the left or right dominates there. In fact, Europe’s diversity means that the left-right labels used by the parliament’s big blocks mean very little: on free trade, for example, Swedish left-wingers are more enlightened than French conservatives. Business is advanced by stitch-ups between party barons, not the open clash of ideas. As a result, the parliament has utterly failed to capture the public’s imagination.

Brussels insiders are convinced that critics of the EU are nationalists. They are wrong. As he ends his Brussels posting, this critic accepts that many of Europe’s worst follies can be blamed on the selfishness and cynicism of governments, not Brussels bureaucrats. The EU holds nationalism in check, and that is a high calling. Charlemagne believes in the EU. On balance it has swept away barriers to internal trade and the free movement of people. It has modernised poor regions. It has anchored southern and eastern Europe in the free world: an historic achievement.

But Charlemagne’s is a low-church sort of Euro-faith. And it does not run to believing in miracles like pan-European democracy. In the real world when democracy gets much beyond the nation-state, it stumbles.