The bEUROcratic Leviathan rising

Article published in French on Un Monde Libre.org and in the University of Portsmouth student newspaper, Pugwash News, anniversary issue No 50.
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During the recent Bielarussian presidential elections, the EU flag was flown as a symbol of freedom and democracy. In Europe, it is being burnt by angry demonstrators. With the sovereign debt crisis gathering pace on the bloc's periphery, austerity measures of payfreeze and other cuts starting to bite, EU civil servants and politicians enjoyed a very festive season indeed. Our supranational ruling class fêted on a bonanza of payrises and bonuses. What austerity at the centre of the “empire” as Commission president, Jose Manuel Barroso referred to the EU... In the “promised Euroland” some have truly become “more equal than others”.
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The EU often complains that it is “unjustly” accused of being out of touch. Recent decisions can only reinforce the perception that the euro-elite is now in orbit. The Supreme Parliament of our post-democratic polity awarded itself a nice little Xmas present. In 2011, MEPs will pocket around €100,000 of tax free expenses (pay hike and perks). While promising more accountability and transparency to the Euro-toiling masses, they will not be required to provide any proof of expenditure! "Doublespeak" à la EU....
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More disconcerting news from the “fairy kingdom of Luxembourg where the European Court of Justice rules supreme without a ‘supremacy’ clause’” as American scholar E. Stein famously remarked. The judiciary annulled the Council decision curtailing the 3.7% pay-rise of EU civil servants. From a legal standpoint, the Court merely applied EU law. Struggling taxpayers across Europe will have to pay. 46,000 civil servants (including ECJ judges) are poised to receive their frozen pay-rise plus interests pending new rules. A Happy New year to them!
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We, citizens of Europe, are all equal but some are more equal than others. In the subsidized farm that the EU has become, one cannot help but think that the “pigs” are living in Brussels. Shocked by the Orwellian metaphor? Think again.
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At the centre of the EU empire, the neo-gosplanners are planning for more 10-year-plans (the 2020 Agenda) unable to review their failing integrationist momentum course. To save the Euro, the bloc nudges towards the establishment of a centralized economic government and to carry out this impossible mission, an economic governance Czar, Council president Herman Van Rompuy, is to be anointed. In the meantime, anger is pouring onto the streets and the governments of the PIGS are fighting for their political survival.
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In the late 1980s, the political vision of the single currency driven by Jacques Delors, a socialist now acting as a “wise man” of integration, prevailed. It is worth recalling that the final endorsement of the Delors Report by the member states took place against a background of extraordinary events: the fall of Communism. The quantum leap of integration (1991 Maastricht Treaty establishing the union) is therefore linked to the desintegration of the Soviet Empire. The old French fears of a powerful neighbour provided additional diplomatic momentum for the Monetary Union.
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Realists would argue that the Euro was the political price Germany had to pay for reunification. In 2010, its taxpayers are bearing the financial cost of the debt mess. The question is: for how long?
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Whatever form the rescue or control mechanism eventually takes, it will imply more bureaucracy to enforce convergence on 27 divergent economies. The parallel with the centrally planned economies of the former Soviet bloc and their eventual failure to deliver prosperity is pertinent. Grand centralizing bureaucratic schemes eventually fail and in the process dwarf individual freedoms. Have we not learnt the lesson? Evidently not.
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The quasi-authoritarian technocratic measures imposed by the troika (IMF-EC-ECB) are undermining popular sovereignty, i.e. who rules. As a recent survey revealed, 56% of Irish people believe that by accepting the bailouts, their country has surrendered political independence. Eurosceptics have long argued that the Brussels elite are actively seeking to replace sovereignty by bureaucracy, voters by experts. As the rejection and eventual adoption of the European Constitution in all but name amply demonstrated, popular sovereignty is deeply unpopular with the European leadership. To illustrate the arrogance of our new “vanguard”, suffice it to recall the comment made by former Labour Commissioner Neil Kinnock in the aftermaths the referendum in 2005. The French “non” said he, was “the triumph of ignorance"....
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How ironic that the European Union now fighting for its survival would owe so much to the demise of another supranational utopia; the Soviet Union with its own kind of highly centralized supranational state apparatus and privileged elite. In a thought-provoking essay, "The Soviet Roots of European integration” (2004), former Soviet dissident Vladimir Bukovsky explains how socialist ideas have gradually transformed a successful economic area (EEC) into a new bureaucratic hegemon. Food for thought.
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Of course, the “post-democratic” Union is constituted by democratic states enjoying high standards of political freedom. To Bielarussian democrats, the EU represents a beacon of freedom. But everything is relative. In fortress Europe, it is no longer possible to ignore the obvious. The on-going surrender of sovereign rights to a self-serving nomenklatura is a step towards the establishment of a supranational economic government, and a bEUROcratic Leviathan. In 1944, Austrian economist F.A. Hayek called it the “Road to Serfdom”.