Trumpeter 4 Europe

   “For the greatest enemy of the truth is very often not the lie -
  deliberate, contrived and dishonest - but the myth -
  persistent, persuasive, and unrealistic.”
  President J. F. Kennedy

Volcanic eruptions under oceans’ floors slowly push continents apart, according to the theory
of plate tectonics. The tectonic plates of European politics are moving rapidly. A seething hot
mass of Euro-sceptic resentments erupting into British political life and foreign policy is driving
the UK away from the EU at noticeable speed. The UK is splitting off from the EU along a Euro-
sceptic fault line, as was made absolutely clear at the EU conference of 9th December 2011.

Like physical volcanic eruptions and continental shifts this political one has been a long time
in the making. I have already written about the influence of the UK newspapers in pushing
the UK out of the EU (see UK Pressed Out of EU at Trumpeter 4 Europe), but there are more
profound long-term reasons for the deep split between the UK and the EU. In this short essay I
shall provide the explanation for the profound cleavage between British political thinking and the
purposes of the EU. To do so it necessary to dive deep into the history of ideas to discover how
the dominant political ideologies of the 20th century were formed and their effects. One must
look at the forms of types of political thinking. Such is the purpose of this short essay.

In the late 18th century and early 19th century there took place the most radical shift in the axis
of European philosophy in over 2000 years. It moved from being primarily interested in eternal
truths to being interested in dynamic truths. The divide came between Kant, in effect the last
of the ancient philosophers, and Hegel, the first powerfully influential philosopher of history.
During the same decades the sciences of chemistry, geology and economics began; and
theories of evolution of species were developed.

Subsequently in the course of the 19th century philosophers, scientists, historians and
polemicists created theories about dynamic processes which in the 20th century were turned
into political ideologies. The three most important types of processes they theorised about
were:- 1) the biological, 2) the historical, 3) the economic. The theories were in the literatures
of Social-Darwinism; Marxism; and Adam Smith and writers about laisser-faire economics,
respectively. In every theory competition produces the best of all possible results. In biology
the struggle for life produces the survival of the fittest. In history the struggles of class warfare
eventually lead to a communist revolution that sweeps away old contradictions and produces
a new ideal society. In economic life competition between businesses yields the most efficient
use of resources, the best possible goods for buyers, at the cheapest price. I have caricatured
these three types of theories for the sake of brevity and to show that although they cover
different types of human activities, and engendered different types of political ideologies, right,
left and liberal, their underlying assumptions about human behaviour and outcomes were
almost identical.

In the 20th and early 21st centuries, several political and social experiments have been carried
out using political ideologies derived from the above 19th century social metaphysics. All
those ideologies have had a common feature: they are idolatries of impersonal dynamic
processes. In each case political life was and is reduced to being solely a servitor for the
maximum or ultimate success of a specific type if impersonal process. Very briefly, the history
of the experiments conducted with politics in the service of impersonal processes biological,
historical and economic was as follows.

The German experiment in the politics of Social-Darwinism and racial warfare carried out by

the Nazi regime of Adolf Hitler was the shortest, most vicious, an least successful of the three.
It was crushed in WWII. Almost as vicious, but less self-destructive and therefore more long-
lasting, was the Russian experiment to implement Marx’s theory of historical progress through
class warfare to an ultimate Communist utopia. That disintegrated in the late 1980s, bringing
to an end the Cold War, which had been in effect WWIII. The most long-lasting and successful
experiment has been the Anglo-Saxon one of politics as servitor to economic activity. It is this
last one which concerns us now.

In its pure form that experiment came to an end during the early 1930s in the Wall Street Crash
and the Great Depression. Since then liberal economics and its attendant political servitors
have lived within the framework of mixed economies. In mixed economies governments
supplement the free market in economic activities, provide regulatory frameworks, and are
providers of social services that compensate for the failure of pure laisser-faire capitalism to
distribute social goods as well as it distributes private goods. Governments thereby serve the
publicly expressed purposes and ideals of their citizenries as well as the free market. In the
USA the New Deal policies of President Roosevelt rescued US laisser-faire capitalism. In the
UK and Europe after WWII social democratic governments created welfare states that were
mixed economies.

Thus things went along for about half a century until in the late 1970s early 1980s when
conservative thinkers and politicians launched campaigns to return to a purer version of laisser-
faire economic, with the freest of free markets. And so since the time of President Reagan and
Prime Minister Thatcher there has been a strong revival, all around the world, of the Anglo-
Saxon experiment. Hence reduced banking regulation (including repeal of the Glass-Stegall Act
in the USA), privatisation of governments’ assets, and privatisations of welfare provisions. This
revival has brought many efficiencies and benefits but it also brought a credit boom.

With credit boom has come a bust, as usual. Within barely a quarter of a century the revived
Anglo-Saxon experiment, purified out of the supposed dross of mixed economies, has produced
yet another global financial crisis and huge economic downturn. In 2007 the collapse of
Lehman Brothers bank caused a near paralysis of the US banking system. The world came
close to a global financial melt-down. Yet again a US government, along with the Federal
Reserve Bank, had to intervene to save its banking and credit industries from near suicide
inflicted by greed and incompetence. Within a year a British government, along with the Bank
of England, was having to do likewise for several of its banks. Now Euro-zone governments,
and the ECB, are having to organise a rescue for their banks caught in credit crisis because
of possible defaults on sovereign debts. In the US and UK the incompetence of banks was in
underestimating risks on property loans, in the EU in sovereign debt risk assessment. Different
types of loans but the same results: banking and credit systems on life support machines
provided by governments. Many governments are now forced by a market system that they
saved from its own follies into cutting social provisions to the citizens they were elected to
serve. They are forced into these and other desperate measures in order to avoid another great
banking crash and another great depression.

Thus ends a second experiment in the Anglo-Saxon politics of the idolatry of economic forces.
“Knowledge without conscience is nothing short of the ruin of mankind” wrote Rabelais.

At the 9th December 2011 EU conference all but one EU government made clear they do not
serve that experiment. The UK can continue in it on its own. Unlike a virulently Euro-sceptic
Tory party they do not believe they exist just to serve high finance and banks.

The EU owes nothing to 19th century social metaphysics, nor does it exist to serve any ideology.
The EU, and EEC within it, belong to the 20th century and beyond. They have been invented so
that together the nations of Europe may deal effectively with the practical problems of our times.

A central reality about the EU that has not been recognised in the UK is its utter novelty. The
EU is an entirely new political experiment in shared sovereignty. It is a poly-democracy, a sort
of multi-cellular polity. As such it is a new type of polity for a new era in human civilisations.

The EU, and EEC before it, have been constructed out of coping with necessities rather than
from ideologies. They have been built slowly, treaty by treaty, not by revolution, coup, or
sudden changes of government as great changes have come about in the old politics. They
were built to escape from the destructiveness of nationalism and the ravages of ideologies.
They were built after WWII and a disastrous political experiment in politicised biology; during
the long stagnation, decay and disintegration of the Soviet experiment in politicised history; and
when mixed economies had tamed the virulent, destructive oscillations of speculative capitalism
to protect constructive capitalism and citizenries. A great deal of the success of the EU comes
from what it avoids as much as from what it does. Presently it is trying to avoid a financial
implosion, and getting no help from the UK in doing so.

The EU is a collective invention for progress in the international life of reason. It has been
built piecemeal peacefully, in response to realities and crises, and with a deep belief in the
efficiency of freedom; expressed both in free market economics as well as in democratic public
life. Furthermore, its slow deliberations in the present economic crisis reveal that au fond it
belongs more to the latter efficiency than the former. And that is because the ultimate purpose
of the EU is not simply to serve an ideology of economics, such is only a means not an end.
Its purpose is to serve the well being of the citizens of many countries through conduits of
internationalised democracy in institutions for economic action, social action, cultural action,
diplomatic action and political action. The present Euro-zone crisis demands that the EU
must expand in a democratic way its repertoire of actions and institutions to include fiscal co-
ordination between its constituent national governments. So be it.

As in earlier crises, as has been done for about 60 years, the EU/EEC will develop empirically,
and organically, in response to practical necessities, using negotiation and compromise, reason
and intelligence, to invent and slowly build whatever new institutions or laws it needs. Like an
elaborate Gothic cathedral built over centuries by craftsmen rather than to the plan of one all
powerful architect. The EU is a an invention of genius that does not need geniuses to build it.

Strange and ironic that the English, renowned for their pragmatism and empiricism, do not
recognise or accept such non-ideological politics. Instead English Euro-sceptics insist that the
EU should exist only to serve a revived Anglo-Saxon experiment in 19th century metaphysics,
with no social provisions and no efforts in the direction of a mixed economy. Theirs remains a
politics of a war of all against all, with the ultimate supremacy of independent nation states, as
though we still live in the time of Prime Ministers Palmerston or Disraeli.

The present financial-cum-economic crisis marks a definite watershed in world politics. An
epoch is petering out. Not simply because of a relative decline in the economic power of
the USA and Europe, and the rise of Far Eastern economies. More importantly the epoch of
experiments in politicised 19th century social metaphysics is ending. The financial crisis has
destroyed the credibility of a revived Anglo-Saxon idolatry of pure economics, and in China
Marxist/historicist politics has given way to a Chinese version of the mixed economy. Political
Islam struggles with how to create a new fusion of old moralities with democracy and with
modern technological/scientific civilisation. Another epoch is dawning.

The life of reason expressed through internationally organised democracies is an essential
feature of this new epoch. This feature is expressed by the very existence of the EU; by the
Green Movement and attempts at climate change control; by the co-ordinated action of central
banks to revive what is now a global economy; by the existence of the UN; the existence of the
IMF; the Red Cross; the Internet; Face-book; and so on and so forth. Thereby politics is being
forced into serving effectively and sanely the realities of the modern epoch in which we now live.

Thus politics rises slowly, clumsily, painfully to the levels of international co-operation
and peer review that have been normal and successful in the sciences for centuries.

Such modernity is what English Euro-sceptics resist. They don’t want the 19th century to
end. Prime Minister Cameron made clear at the 9th December EU conference that he speaks
for them, and so the gulf between the UK and EU widens and widens. In the EU a modern
political experiment of the 20th century continues on its way. In England a 19th century ideology
splutters out in rage, impotence and resentments. Volcanoes can become extinct by blowing
up.

I leave the last words of this essay to Paul Valery, a distinguished French poet and
essayist. “Our greatest danger comes from dead ideas.”

Kevin Hannon, Chairman West Midlands European Movement (9.12.2011)