I remain a committed internationalist. For me, nation states are potentially extremely dangerous entities. They have the power to co-erce, brutalise and even lawfully to kill their own citizens. They regulate economic, commercial and societal transactions. They wield such power that contest among internal political leaders for control of that power can erupt into violent civil war. And they control such physical resources that nation states can launch war on each other in order to annex those resources or access their benefits.
Western democracy has, in my view, in general been the happiest form of government in modern society, in controlling the internal use of power through democratic mechanisms and in spreading welfare benefits among its citizens, while allowing the economy to function relatively efficiently.
But there have been three developments to jolt us from the notion that the emergence of western democracy represents a development in an inexorable trend of human progress. The notion of historical “progress” is one in which my generation was brought up implicitly to believe. I for one believed in it consciously and explicitly.
The first and most obvious development is the realisation that, while western democracies have more or less eliminated open violence in their internal political arrangements for control of resources, they are increasingly liable to resort to open warfare to gain control over the benefit of the resources of other nations, particularly as those resources become more scarce and valuable. Anybody who truly believes that it is coincidence that Iraq, Libya and Central Asia are hydrocarbon rich, and the major areas of Western military activity, is wilfully blind. There was nothing new about neo-imperialism and its recent manifestation as liberal interventionism is no more than a rehash of standard imperial propaganda on the spreading of civilised values.
What is new is the destruction of the notion that we Western democracies had got morally better and had moved on from the crude war as resource grab. What is also new is the extraordinary use of modern mass media to propagandise the inhabitants of western democracies into such fear of an alien threat, that the government can withdraw numerous liberties and extend vastly its power for everyday physical coercion – which at the most mundane level dawned on Andrew Mitchell last week. The fact that the public accepted 17,000 members of the armed forces guarding the Olympics from nobody at all, and that the armed forces were mentioned in every single public speech by a British politician or official in the Olympic ceremonies, to wild applause, gives but one example of the extraordinary militarisation of Western societies.
The second development is the galloping increase in the gap between rich and poor, in virtually every developed economy. In the UK the normalisation of the extreme concentration of wealth, and the neutering of the political forces for redistribution, constituted the real achievement of Blairism. The wealth gap between directorial and non-directorial incomes in British society has been growing at approximately ten per cent a year for two decades.
This development has been worsened by an abandonment of regulatory mechanisms that modified capitalism, and particularly the tendency of the financial services sector through oligopoly to take vast rent out of simple commercial transactions for which they should be the mere facilitator, at the same time inventing gambling transactions and other artificial processes of cash multiplication with which to tempt the wealthy and the fundholders within their own industry. The epitome of this transfer of wealth was, after the inevitable bubble disintegration, the payment by the state of huge sums to the financial services industry, using the power of the state to coerce the population through taxes to hand over sums amounting in total to several years income each.
Which leads me to the third adverse development – the concentration of media ownership in the hands of the extremely wealthy, the control by the same interests of the mainstream political parties, and therefore the lack of effective choice before the electorate on issues like the bank bailout, where the media and politicians combine to limit the sphere of public debate that will be carried to present only tiny variations on a single alternative. The same is true, for example, of the war in Afghanistan. Without an effective choice being offered to the electorate between real policy options, the notion of democracy is meaningless. That is where the western democracies now are.
Nation states, therefore, even the best of them, are dangerous entities which employ force against their own and other citizens and can be an active danger to international peace. The regulation of relations between states by international law to reduce conflict is therefore an urgent necessity. Some countries are much more danger than others: Ghana, to take one example, has never invaded anybody while the United Kingdom has at various times invaded or bombed the territory currently occupied by three quarters of the states in the World, while the United States projects deadly physical force overseas by a variety of means on a daily basis. Reining in these rogue states is a major priority.
There exists a body of international law which ad been gaining in respect and conformity in the decades since the Second World War, but both the United States and United Kingdom, and others following the neocon lead, have in recent decades driven a coach and horses right through the fabric of international law, through invasion, extraordinary rendition, torture, detention without trial, indiscriminate bombing of civilian populations, targeted extra-judicial killings by shootings or by drones, murder of journalists in war zones, and so on in a depressing litany.
Fundamental platforms of international law violated by the UK, US and their neo-con allies from the BushBlair period on include: The Universal Declaration of Human Rights, The Nuremberg Principles, The Charter of the United Nations, the Geneva Conventions, and the Hague Convention. Recently the UK was proposing in effect to tear up the Vienna Convention too.
My conclusion is twofold. Firstly that international law needs to be radically strengthened in order to come back into repute. Secondly that the idea of the nation state as the basic unit of political organisation should be radically attacked; that the period of history is past in which the development of the nation state was a force for the good of its citizens and the world community.
I believe that the nation state should be attacked from top and bottom. From the bottom, as societies internationalise the idea of an ethnic basis to state boundaries becomes anachronistic. Advantage should be taken of this trend to deconstruct states from within, breaking them down into a combination of smaller states and/or of powerful autonomous regional polities. We need to see many more states split up, especially among the westen democracies but also very definitely Russia, China, India and states in their orbit.
From the top, and with particular reference to the UK, I view the European Union as an excellenct prototype of the sort of organisation that can attack the sovereignty of national states from above. Nobody dares to say this should happen – when those few Europhiles brave enough to state their beliefs talk of greater integration, they talk of “pooling sovereignty” to disguise from themselves and their listeners the fact that what they really mean is appropriating and destroying national sovereignty – and a damn good thing too.
In the UK, national schadenfruede at the problems of the Euro is almost universal across the political spectrum, which is why I trailed this as my most unpopular post ever. How foolish, British media and politicians gloat, of those silly Europeans to undertake the biggest single economic step in the history of mankind! How wise we were to stay on the sidelines sneering!
The problem of the Euro, as I observed a decade ago and everyone now agrees, is that a currency union is not really feasible without a fiscal union. The answer to that is a fiscal union. Where the European Union has gone wrong is not that it has gone too far in integration, but that it has not gone nearly far enough.
After a period of disastrous free-for-all, what we now have is a de facto fiscal union in the Eurozone in which the German government in effect dictates policy – in this case austerity policy – to everyone else. Democracy is now even more meaningless to the Greeks and Spaniards than it is to the rest of us.
The cause of this is the fundamental weakness of the European Union – its deference to the nation states it should be eliminating. Executive power within the European Union needs to be removed completely from the nation states in the Council of Ministers, or Council of German Orders as it should be better known now.
The executive body of the European Union should rather be dependent on, and largely drawn from, a majority of the European Parliament. That parliament divides along ideological, not nationalistic lines and does provide a much broader range of representation of opinion than most national parliaments.
The existing European Commission would become simply the Civil Service to this new, democratically elected, European Government. The European Commissioners themselves, devoid of administrative responsibilities which would pass to the new parliamentary ministers, might form some kind a second chamber, of a deliberative and revising nature, to the European Parliament. Rather like the US Senate, this would give a balance of due consideration to the interests of smaller nations; it might also encourage the break-up further of over-large “national” units to ensure more second chamber representation.
The question of subsidiarity and the balance of powers between the new democratic European government and national and regional governing bodies, should be the subject for a book not an article. But I would move virtually every power of a nation state either up or down. Fiscal policy, foreign policy and defence should all be exclusively at the European level.
The problems of the European Union multiplied when it adopted the philosophy of variable geometry, of inner and outer cores, of fast track and slow track members. For the single currency and single market to succeed, unity must be much tighter. If the European Union is serious about maintaining Europe’s position in the World against the mergence of China, India and South America it must conform to the logical force behind its existence. In economic terms that means not just the free movement of goods, but the free movement of capital and labour as well. So to be in the European Union should mean being in the Euro and being in Schengen too. The alternative should be to leave; and be treated as an outsider. The EFTA free ride must finish.
I view the European Union as a wonderful thing. It is a cliche to note that in my parents’ lifetime Europeans were fighting against each other in the grimmest war imaginable, and yet now are embarked together on a great political and economic project. The peace of Europe, and the freedom I have to move around Europe, to work study or settle there, is simply wonderful.
Let us make it even better. Let us get rid of those pesky internal borders and immigration countrols and those huge foreign exchange costs that benefit nobody but the bankers. And let is get rid of our God-awful national governments.
Well named. Liberal Conspiracy.
“I’m off to campaign for Obomber.” Sunny Hundal. Says it all.
Bastard.
The terrifying thing is I don’t think this article from Craig is tongue-in-cheek.
Of course the elite should just be waved through, none of this passports, customs and inconveniences but instead met with bows and scrapes, lets structure things at the macro level so the minority jet-setting few have things just the way they like them, VIPs recognised everywhere as special; a gain for all, but in practice something most have no opportunity to avail themselves due to personal economic circumstances, but they’ll call for it all the same, sold on its hypothetical application to them to, if they could just aspire and breach the exclusiveness. Just over a hundred years ago, anyone could go anywhere without any indentifying scraps of paper at all, money alone as now being all that was necessary to own the world.
Errant composite states, like the UK containing many nation states, are actually the problem, when they go bad, they go BAD. International organisations like the League of Nations and UN which really had no purpose beyond the joint task of the destruction of the Palestine, now drift aimlessly, causing more harm than doing good. Large parts of the United States seceding from Washington would be a very good thing indeed. De-centralisation.
I bet this thread reaches 3,000 comments before 3rd October.
Europen debt – is it the “Firsters or the Friends” ? So who owns this debt, how much interest do they get annually, does it fall under the inheritance tax net, etc, etc
http://www.economist.com/comment/1658034#comment-1658034
Craig, I would ask you to consider the issue of perspective – the possibility that what may make sense to you because of where you are writing from, a largely eurosceptic member state, can be interpreted very differently from a more culturally, ideologically, and economically integrated member state.
The Barroso EEC/EU/EC is a non-, perhaps even anti- democratic vector for neocon ideology. The highly evolved principals and the statutory basis of social cohesion from Bismark(!) to Keynes are being picked apart by successive treaties (with little popular mandate) and are being accelerated by recent supra-national fiscal control measures.
Add to this the strategem of qualified majority member state voting with weighting by populations, who ironically have no real franchise, and there is a recipe for a return to the most virulent and violent forms of nationalism.
What you are arguing for, in effect, is a form of regression – a grand paternalistic coalition between the pre-1914 imperial powers of Europe, or a repressive 21st Century Yugoslavia that forcibly melds into one political economy the cultural, religious and ethnic diversity of Serbs, Croats, Slovenes, Bosnians, Montenegrans, Kossovars and others.
Perhaps your biggest oversight is human nature. Smaller units of governance facilitate greater representation of human diversity.
@ Mary.
We might also realise that the whole western financial system is clasping the proverbial straw.
1928’s financial crash will be a tea party in comparison to what the global systems are facing this time.
O/t but a problem that is pan European, its called right wing fascism
This is English multicultural reality today, two speculative articles with pictures showing the EDL rabble marching, wasting police time and causing them extra work, because they do not want to live side by side with other thinking people.
Whilst all other stories are taking comments this one is designed as an advertisement only, not that it stops anybody commenting on other threads there. The EDP is rabble rousing, getting people to join the march, imho.
http://www.edp24.co.uk/news/politics/english_defence_league_sets_date_for_first_march_in_norwich_1_1530716
I remember the European Union was divided over the Iraq war which suggested that a unified EU foreign policy did not exist then and does not exist now.
Recently we witnessed NATO, an organisation setup to provide western Europe with security guarantees in the face of Eastern bloc threats, was used to strike a peaceful non-aggressive Libya and now a strike on Syria is technically feasible yet again exasperating the violence and promoting civil war.
This is just one example of US influence over EU foreign policy. There exista many others in the pages of history such as the arms embargo against China retained in place with US influence.
The US has used ‘black sites’ to torture the innocent in Eastern European countries and also used western european countries, including Britain, for secret rendition.
America has not I believe ratified the Rome Statute and thus is not a member of The International criminal court. Because of this we note the recent US military courts abuses and of course Israeli war-crimes go unnoticed. The US has also threatened to use its Security Council veto to block renewal of the mandates of several United Nations peacekeeping operations, unless the Security Council agreed to permanently exempt U.S. nationals from the Court’s jurisdiction.
I cannot see that Craig in his comment has recognised clearly that the EU is in America’s pocket, used and constrained at will and to that effect is NOT an excellent prototype (excepting trade) that can “attack the sovereignty of national states from above.”.
Craig
You want Globalisation? The United states of Africa, Europe, South/North America, Asia etc because thats is what would happen and that is the “Master plan” that the worlds Elite want. It will bring an end to democracy as all the power would be in the hands of the ever decreasing number of mega banks oil companies and media empires etc. Look to China as the model of what the world would look like.
Hang on, if we form a United States of Europe, what happens to Scottish independence? Well, I don’t believe in Scottish independence, so that wouldn’t be my problem. 🙂
interesting, what will happen if muslim nations start forming a united state?
Lwtc247 Let’s get one thing straight. I am actually a globophile in that I like people from all over the planet. But I like people (most of them) from Birmingham, where I live, as I do from England, and the UK, and Europe and the world. I never coined the phrase. But I would like to see an integrated Europe. However this might be impossible as my short cartoon explains.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1bS1608Afr4
Close to 1,000,000 views in a few weeks – Thank-you
http://video.cpt12.org/video/2270078138
Abba Mubba, interesting suggestions, what would the pill have to contain to create unity amongst Arab nations and how would this be received by secular nations such as Turkey?
How would one even start to heal the rift bewtween Shia’s and Sunni’s? any ideas….
Thanks John. My point is, why use the limiting term Europhile? The term automatically carries separatism. For whom is the term reserved? Glad you’re a global citizen. We all should be.
Europeans who are not British do not have quite the same suspicions and misgivings as some expressed here. While there are negative views about the Euro currency, or dominance of one nation over the rest, neo-con agendas and the danger of centralised power, there is not much acknowledgement of the huge practical change that many people in Europe now embrace and take for granted – the huge increase in the free flow of people from one EU nation to another, for reasons of employment, commerce, culture and leisure.
I know people in France, Germany, Holland, Italy and Spain who travel freely and relaxedly between some or all of these countries, and have done so for years. It is as natural to them as it is for us to catch a bus or train from one part of the UK to another to do a days work or visit a friend.
The UK is singular in still seeing the rest of Europe as entirely “foreign”. We are still uneasy about Europe in a way that other Europeans are not, in a practical and personal sense, and perhaps the Channel is not helping in shaking off our entrenched isolationism.
I have European friends who are baffled by this. They have all the same suspicions about the motives of power hungry Eurocrats and they are just as cynical, but they have an attitude that is separate from all of that, which is based solely on the benefits they see in being able to cross borders with virtually no hassle, no stress and no restraints, and to engage with other Europeans with whom they have much in common.
The US and British governments have long pretended that we share a “special relationship”. No intelligent person really believes that. Culturally and socially our natural empathy, despite the trivialised and inane comical cliches about the “stubborn French”, the “humourless Germans” and the “Boring Belgians”, lies with Europe.
Just as recent wars are not considered waged in our name, but by those who act without our consent, many in Europe are capable of building bridges to other Europeans and in doing so rise above the shennanigans of Eurobanksters and assorted power-hungry Eurocrat ambitions they hate as much as we do.
Most Europhiles are not so because they desire a centralised dictatorship, but because they wish to bypass the petty squabbles and maneouvrings of Brussels and widen their personal contact with a loose federation of fellow humans on their doorstep. They also wish to convene a European system of jurisprudence which upholds justice for those whose own nation’s justice system has failed them. The European regulations on Consumer Protection and Court of Human Rights are just a start. It is a risk to enlarge the scope of any pan-European organisation but it might be a risk worth taking for the sake of the relative peace and certainly better understanding we now enjoy, despite the flaws, the corruption and the misgivings expressed in many posts here.
@Craig
I wonder how all those brown-skinned people who don’t speak a European language will feel about having their dreams of true independence snuffed out by a council of uber-powerful rich men.
International community of the disgruntled, disenfranchised and dispossessed, comprising a huge majority everywhere desire a new rebel leader, to further a growing peaceful revolution.
Previous putative leader-elect has proven an admirer or tool of the very forces the movement seeks to overthrow. Previous applicants and aspirants need not apply.
Now that even Craig Murray has succumbed to the dark side – for which he may all along have been one of many irons in the fire, denouncement of torture just a stunt to buff up his alternative, outsider credentials, got cold on the fringes wants back in the convivial warm – where can anyone go but underground. Limited hang-out, honeypot here.
How dare you not have all the answers and please everyone all the time, but this?
City States are also dangerous. The City of London for example ! We can’t change them, but they change us.
I’m pro Europe and SNP. The EU has begun to worry me tho’.
It is not democratic either ! Then there is it’s miltant tendencies re:Libya but not Tunisia !
They accept Israeli treatment of Palestinians in Gaza and the WB without sanctions and give them all the benefits of being a member without any responsibility.
Yes, you can vote for a party but not a person.No transparency.
Then we have the 3 unelected Caballeros , Barroso, Van Rompuy and Ashton salivating at the mouth at taxing EU citizens directly.
The corruption in Brussels and Strasbourg was built in. You have no idea where half the money goes, but watching any live parliament session and you can see the kind of interest that the Euro MP’s have in their decisions.
The Euro hasn’t done the smaller economies any good. It looked good for as long as they were all high on EU investment.
Similar to the way that drug dealers work, they pump their money into weak economies until they’re dependent.Now Greece cannot function with a bail out nor without it !
It has taken Nanny State to a new level ! Greece is boiling and will boil over !
So , rewind the EU to Maastricht, which was the last time there was serious debate.
And if they are serious about being democratic then we should also have the possibility of voting in the executive.
I think your Utopia is possible Craig, but the EU lost its way 10 years ago.
For the same reasons Scotland want out of the Union, I believe we should keep Barroso’s dreams in check.
… And without international borders, how will jurisdictions be defined? How will laws be unified to take account of different customs, cultures and religions without introducing special forms of discrimination? How will migration be controlled to prevent massive swelling of some economic centres and desertion of others?
I’m all for Europe trying this experiment on itself, so we can all see how it cannot possibly work for the rest of the world.
@ Mary,
You say:-
“We heard most of the above in the Seventies. No borders, no passports, a common currency, no more wars, lands of milk and honey…..and look what happened. I am proud to say that my father went round with a loudspeaker on his car roof speaking against joining the Common Market, as it was called then, when Wilson’se referendum was being held. He had the vision to see what was coming.”
But – is there really any easy solution.
1. Can Britain go it alone? ( if so – how so – in terms of markets, currency and relations with an international community that gravitates towards unifications based on blocs of interests?)
2. Alternatively, if one narrowed to just jurisprudence, then one could say that the UK is able to adjudicate on its own with its own mature jurisprudence, and does not need the EU to accomplish justice.
3. However, it is the finances, economic and money considerations that drive the process, while the political, jurisprudential, social and cultural dimensions of the EU are the facilitative mechanisms to deal primarily with facilitating long-term economic/financial goals.
Just one man’s thoughts – but happy to hear what the viable alternatives are.
O/T Is it usual for a Lord Chief Justice to arrange a press conference to hold forth on lengthy cases, for example the length of time it has taken to extradite Abu Hamza ie when one sovereign state succumbs to the over weening power of a larger state.
??
Abu Hamza-style delays source of ‘fury’ – Chief Justice
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-19744724
I have European friends who are baffled by this.
Here’s an example of the effect of the intentional political conflation of ‘Europe’ with the ‘EU’. British friends are actually just as ‘European’ as French, Italian and German friends!
The implication is that terra incognita starts on the far side of the Channel, where one finds ‘foreign’ people, languages and customs.
It’s never flattering when you buy ‘one-size-fits-all’.
I don’t know if it’s still in print, but if you can get it I’d recommend at least a skim read of “The Secret Constitution” by Brian Sedgemore, sometime PPS to Tony Benn. It describes the highly centralised nature of British government – in Sedgemore’s time it was the Cabinet, nowadays it’s even smaller than that – just Tony’s old sofa, apparently. The EU has the problem in spades. Its parliament (our representatives) are even more utterly powerless than those in Westminster, although I expect they are comforted by their soccer-star salaries.
“The European regulations on Consumer Protection and Court of Human Rights are just a start.”
I hope you’re not making the common mistake of linking the ECHR with the EU. The ECHR is operated by the Council of Europe (CoE) which is a totally different organisation. The CoE pre-dates the EU and already counts Turkey and the Russian Federation amongst it’s 47 members.
The Euro is to blame at least in part for the economic crisis currently facing the PIIGS nations. The one-size-fits-all interest rate significantly reduced the cost of personal and state borrowing, OK so it was human greed/weakness that led to people taking advantage but if you leave money lying around on a pub table you can’t expect it to be there when you get back. Now monetery union is hindering recovery by preventing national governments from adjusting interest rates and/or devaluing. The bureaucratic nature of the EU is a further hindrence, no rescue plan can be launched until there is consensus and consensus is proving impossible to achieve.
@Cryptonym 27 Sep, 2012 – 2:57 pm
Are you suggesting what i think you’re suggesting? It could be possible of course but i’m hoping that this irresponsible article is purely down to an element of naivety, misplaced honesty or a certain element of devils advocacy. Or a mixture of all.That’s what i hope at least. Otherwise,like you say: “where can anyone go but underground. Limited hang-out, honeypot here”
Further procrastination:-
http://www.guardian.co.uk/business/nils-pratley-on-finance/2012/sep/26/eurozone-crisis-spain-european-stability-mechanism
Meanwhile Athens and Madrid go up in flames and now France and Germany are feeling the pain.
A little OT is this gem from Matt Taibbi, closely allied with Hunter S. Thompson, and not surprisingly affiliated with Rolling Stone, the latter’s headquarters. On our own version of EuroTrash.
“All of these points of view have merit, I guess, but to me they’re mostly irrelevant. The mere fact that Mitt Romney is even within striking distance of winning this election is an incredible testament to two things: a) the rank incompetence of the Democratic Party, which would have this and every other election for the next half century sewn up if they were a little less money-hungry and tried just a little harder to represent their ostensible constituents, and b) the power of our propaganda machine, which has conditioned all of us to accept the idea that the American population, ideologically speaking, is naturally split down the middle, whereas the real fault lines are a lot closer to the 99-1 ratio the Occupy movement has been talking about since last year.
Think about it. Four years ago, we had an economic crash that wiped out somewhere between a quarter to 40% of the world’s wealth, depending on whom you believe. The crash was caused by an utterly disgusting and irresponsible class of Wall Street paper-pushers who loaded the world up with deadly leverage in pursuit of their own bonuses, then ran screaming to the government for a handout (and got it) the instant it all went south.
These people represent everything that ordinarily repels the American voter. They mostly come from privileged backgrounds. Few of them have ever worked with their hands, or done anything like hard work. They not only don’t oppose the offshoring of American manufacturing jobs, they enthusiastically support it, financing the construction of new factories in places like China and India.
They’ve relentlessly lobbied the government to give themselves tax holidays and shelters, and have succeeded at turning the graduated income tax idea on its head by getting the IRS to accept a sprawling buffet of absurd semantic precepts, like the notions that “capital gains” and “carried interest” are somehow not the same as “income.”
Read more: http://www.rollingstone.com/politics/blogs/taibblog/this-presidential-race-should-never-have-been-this-close-20120925#ixzz27gUjTZb5
In connection with my last comment, the US has declared Assange “An enemy of the State”.
http://www.smh.com.au/opinion/political-news/us-calls-assange-enemy-of-state-20120927-26m7s.html