In this week's Economist, the departing Charlemagne columnist reflects on "the faith and folly of the Brussels elite". He explains that Brussels officials really do want more Europe because they believe nationalism is the greatest of evils. They have faith that the European project is eliminating nationalism and that "the existence of the EU is a bulwark against fresh horrors".
In particular:
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.
Of course the EU has delivered free trade within its borders - it is a customs union after all - but anyone who thinks the EU genuinely promotes global free trade should look at the TARIC database. TARIC (Integrated Tariff of the European Communities) includes not just tariffs, but also tariff suspensions, tariff quotas and tariff preferences. You might enjoy searching the database for wheat for example. Do click through and survey the subdivisions of each tariff, noting provision for variations according to country of origin or destination.
Richard Cobden might well wonder why he bothered with the Anti-Corn Law League.
Current debate on immigration demonstrates that EU member states have not fully surrendered border controls, but this is, of course, in the pipeline.
If the outgoing Charlemagne defines nationalism, and it appears he does, as comprising trade and migration barriers, then the EU has merely elevated nationalism to the level of the European continent, has it not?
Serendipitously, I just finished a book which surveys the issue of European nationalism. Omnipotent Government - the Rise of the Total State and Total War (1944) is perhaps a little strident but then the author, Ludwig von Mises, was an economist of Jewish descent, born into the Austro-Hungarian empire, who predicted the collapse of the Mark, the Great Depression and the rise of German political radicalism before being forced to flee his homeland via Switzerland to the USA.
Mises' thesis, in a nutshell, is that aggressive economic nationalism is the inevitable consequence of increasing government intervention in the economy. For reasons he explains, he calls this ultimate cause "etatism":
The most important event in the history of the last hundred years is the displacement of liberalism by etatism.
Etatism appears in two forms: socialism and interventionism. Both have in common the goal of subordinating the individual unconditionally to the state, the social apparatus of compulsion and coercion.
...
Etatism assigns to the state the task of guiding the citizens and of holding them in tutelage. It aims at restricting the individual's freedom to act...
This might be a good moment to turn to the database of European Union law: EUR-Lex. It is gigantic of course, but allow me to point you to, for example:
- "Council Implementing Regulation (EU) No 580/2010 of 29 June 2010 amending Regulation (EC) No 452/2007 imposing a definitive anti-dumping duty on imports of ironing boards originating, inter alia, in Ukraine": PDF.
- "Commission Regulation (EU) No 547/2010 of 22 June 2010 establishing the standard import values for determining the entry price of certain fruit and vegetables": PDF.
- "JOINT DECLARATION BY THE COUNCIL AND THE REPRESENTATIVES OF THE GOVERNMENTS OF THE MEMBER STATES MEETING WITHIN THE COUNCIL of 5 May 2003 on ‘the social value of sport for young people’": PDF.
- "COMMISSION RECOMMENDATION of 28 April 2010 on the research joint programming initiative ‘A healthy diet for a healthy life’": PDF.
These are simply examples which come immediately to hand: by all means search for yourself.
In his section on "Peace Schemes", Mises writes presciently of our situation:
The main obstacle to the establishment of a supernational customs union with internal free trade among the member nations is the fact that such a customs union requires unlimited supremacy of the supernational authorities and an almost complete annihilation of the national governments if etatism is to be retained. Under present conditions it makes little difference whether the constitution of the suggested union of the Western democracies is shaped according to the legal pattern of unitary or of federal government. There are only two alternatives open: trade barriers among the member states, with all their sinister consequences, economic nationalism, rivalries and discord; or free trade among the member states and (whatever the constitutional term adopted for it) strictly centralized government. In the first case there would be not union but disunion. In the second case the President of the United States and the Prime Minister of Great Britain would be virtually reduced to the status of provincial governors, and Congress and Parliament to provincial assemblies. It is unlikely that the Americans or the British will easily agree to such a solution of the problem.
The policies of government interference with business and of national planning beget economic nationalism. The abandonment of economic nationalism, an indispensable condition for the establishment of lasting peace, can only be achieved through a unification of government, if people do not want to return to the system of unhampered market economy. This is the crux of the matter.
Now, I can't help noticing that we live in a time of considerable government interference with business, that is, etatism. People are losing faith in capitalism, despite general acceptance of the argument that interest rates were too low for too long, a phenomenon manufactured by institutions of government. Business failure in banking has been comprehensively socialised, the banks still aren't lending as the authorities wish and yet bonuses were paid within taxpayer-subsidised institutions. Google returns pages of mainstream results for "euro collapse". There is a democratic deficit in the EU and its member states. Union leaders talk of strikes.
And amongst all this, the Brussels elite desire more power and central control, with Jean-Claude Trichet calling for a "quantum leap" in EU economic governance.
At least he is consistent with Mises.
The Brussels elite certainly have some historic achievements behind them, but I can't help wondering whether they put their faith in the wrong god. Perhaps their folly has been to choose etatism plus the unification of European government when a better choice would have been a post-war return to unhampered social cooperation, that is, classical liberalism.
Let's hope their greatest achievements do not turn out to be merely raising economic nationalism to the continental level and an historic faux pas.
Further reading
- Mises, Omnipotent Government - the Rise of the Total State and Total War (1944) (Amazon, read online, download)
- Mises, The Causes of the Economic Crisis, and Other Essays Before and After the Great Depression (1923-1946) (buy, download)
- Hayek, The Road to Serfdom (1944) (buy, Wikipedia, read online)
- Popper, The Open Society and Its Enemies (1945) (Amazon: Volume 1 - The Spell of Plato, Volume 2 - Hegel and Marx, Google books: Volume 1, Volume 2)
- Burnham, The Managerial Revolution - What is Happening in the World (1941) (buy, Wikipedia, marxists.org)
- Alexis De Tocqueville, Democracy in America (1835-1840) (Amazon, Google Books - the relevant passage starts on page 389)
- Postrel, The Future and Its Enemies: The Growing Conflict over Creativity, Enterprise and Progress (1999) (Amazon)
