|
[A
LESSON OF HISTORY]]
Throughout
its
benighted
history,
megalomaniacs
have
tried
and
failed
to
subjugate
Europe's
sovereign
nations.
Here,
with
Brussels
making
the same
mistake,
says
SIMON
JENKINS
asks
will
they
ever
learn
from...
2,000
YEARS OF
HUBRIS
AND
FOLLY
|
SATURDAY
ESSAY
BY
SIMON JENKINS: Dictators failed to unite
Europe's ... - Daily Mail
OCTOBER 20,2019
ON AUGUST 6,
1806, a herald in full regalia rode across
Vienna to the city's Jesuit church. He
climbed the tower blew his silver trumpet
and summoned the crowd to silence. he then
announced that the Holy Roman Empire was
dead.
After a thousand years of existence,
Europe's oldest union was being wound
up-courtesy of Napoleon. The crowd wept.
Might it happen again? History tells us that
whenever Europe tries to act in unison, it
screws up. The Holy Roman Emperor
Charlemagne left an empire that collapsed in
ruins. Ferdinand of Bohemia tried to create
a single Roman Catholic empire, and
unleashed the Thirty Years War in the 17th
century. Napoleon brought most of Europe
under his rod, an millions died until
Wellington did for him at Waterloo.
The
Allies punished Germany after the First
World War, and so brought Hitler to power.
Today's European Union mishandled Russia
after 1989 and paved the way for the
reign of Vladimir Putin.
Anyone who
believes the EU is so modern, united and
peace-loving that it will deftly handle
Britain's departure should read history and
shudder.
Ever
since somewhere called Europe came into
being under the Ancient Greeks, two forces
have driven this continent forward.
One is the
inability of the descendents of its original
migrant tribes to live in peace with their
neighbours. The other is the attempt of one
power
[GERMANY TODAY]
after another to seek to dominate and unite
those disparate tribes.
Rome
tried. So did successive popes, Holy Roman
emperors, Louis XIV, Napoleon, Hitler and
now, dare I add, the leaders of the European
Union. Some of these attempts were
well-intentioned; most were not so'
There is no
question they together forged a continent
that is globally outstanding.
Today, Europe is
wealthy, stable, mostly
liberal and a magnet to
the world's migrants,
rich and poor alike.
Whether this was
because of or in spite
of a history of
ceaseless conflict is an
open question, But so,
too, is whether half a
century of stability can
survive any new
breakdown in unity.
WHEN I first
studied Europe's history, I searched for
themes that have glued together its various
forces. First was the potency of ancient
Mediterranean culture. Greece under Pericles
was a kingdom of reason, fascinated by the
human condition as expressed in art,
literature and civic politics.
Rome was a sort of opposite,
a realm of law and order, the wielding of
power over the entire Mediterranean basin.
'These be your arts, O Rome, 'said Virgil,
to impose the ways of peace,' The operative
word was impose.
As Roman rule disintegrated,
it mutated into that of the Christian
Church.
Christianity was ostensibly a
doctrine of universal love and peace, but it
soon became a cauldron of rivalry and
disunity. It split Rome from Constantinople,
and proved so quarrelsome that a third of
Christendom-in the Levant and Africa-became
Muslim and has remained so ever since.
In 1216, the bid of
Pope Innocent III to declare himself
sovereign lord of Europe bred endless
conflict with the Holy Roman Empire, based
in Germany. So we can conclude that as a
glue of union, religion was a failure. By
the 16th century the Reformation had split
Innocent's Roman church in two, between
Protestant north and Catholic south.
This in turn led to the
Thirty Years War-the cruellest devastation
of Europe before the 20th century. From the
wreckage of that first great European War
ever more potent nation states -notably
France, Spain and Austria.
The new cause of disruption
was not religion but dynasty. Louis XIV
sought perpetual war with his neighbours.
Russia flexed its territorial muscles.
Frederick the Great of Prussia declared that
'national enlargement is a fundamental law
of life'. To him, Europe was synonymous with
struggle.
Nothing seemed able to bring peace to the
continent: not the vitality of the
Renaissance or wisdom of the Enlightenment,
not great thinkers and writers like
Petrarch, Shakespeare.
Locke, Voltaire or Goethe.
Napoleon's attempt to unite
Europe under French rule led to
5,000,000
DEATHS
The
victorious nations at the Congress of Vienna
in 1815, a few months after Waterloo
valiantly attempted a
'Concert
of Europe'.
In future,
they ordained, difference would be settled
around a conference table not the
battlefield.
Peace lasted
for a century, while Europe plunged into a
different form of aggrandisement-that of
overseas imperialism
By
the end of the 19th century, the British,
French, Dutch, Portuguese, Spanish and
Germans ruled an astonishing half the
world's population and 85 per cent of its
trade
Some might have hoped that
such expansion might leave Europe itself in
peace. Yet no sooner had it strutted the
globe as a champion of progress then it fell
victim to two of the world's most horrendous
conflagrations.
The idea that the 'Kaiser's
war' and then 'Hitler's war were random
Prussian monstrosities was absurd. They
resulted from a failure of political
imagination and leadership across all of
Europe, whose turbulent nations seemed
incurably belligerent.
By
1945, Europe was in self-inflicted ruins.
Its peoples were starving, its cities
destroyed and a centuries-old edifice of
cultural achievement was crippled. Though
Fascism had been defeated, the price was
half a continent enslaved to Communism, and
the other half dependent on American
protection.
There is no
doubt that the subsequent half-century saw
Europe at its best. It rebuilt itself,
displaying a sincere desire for there never
to be a war ever again
A
Common Market was formed in 1956 under the
Treaty of Rome. This treaty grew and
flourished, until a free trade area covered
virtually all non-communist Europe. The
continent seemed genuinely at peace, under
the embrace of 'ever closer union'.
But as
this half of Europe prospered and cohered,
it also slid into the morass of bureaucratic
centralism. And here is where the lassons of
history were ignored
The
ambition of the Brussels elite was
curiously reminiscent of the medieval
church. It became a quest for ever-tighter
control of its adherents, and a disregard
for the political mood of member states
The first
moment of truth came with the fall of the
Berlin Wall in 1989. This ended the wartime
division of Europe, to which the EU reacted
like a conquering power. It enticed Russia's
old Warsaw Pact allies into the EU and NATO,
and left Moscow dangerously isolated.
When Boris
Yeltsin warned that advancing NATO deep into
Eastern Europe meant 'the flames of
war could break out again across Europe, the
EU laughed.
The
result was Vladimir Putin, vowing to 'make
Russia great again' under his
kleptomaniac rule. In the U.S., the
balance of power between a central
superstate and its various subordinate
states was embedded in a constitution,
written in blood. I Europe, that balance was
left to evolve.
The
EU ignored the risks it was running, not
just in mishandling Russia, but in readily
opening its borders to the immature
democracies of Eastern Europe.
[And
not forgetting the arrival in Germany of the
once East German official Frau Merkel.]
After Maastricht in 1992, which effectively
pledged the continent to become one giant
federal entity, majority voting in the EU
council eroded the authority of
NATIONAL
PARLIAMENTS.
Europe seemed the plaything of French
bureaucrats and German bankers.
[HITLER WOULD BE PROUD]
Once
more, the hard-learned lessons of the past
were disregarded in the zealous pursuit of a
new Nirvana. For example, the continent's
longest confederation was the Holy Roman
Empire. Voltaire may have called it not
holy, nor Roman nor an empire-but its
respect for the treasured autonomy of dozens
of German princelings contrived to keep the
German people's at peace with their
neighbours for a millennium. Europe gained
in the process, the wealth of the Rhine and
the Baltic, the radicalism of Luther and the
genius of Bach and Beethoven. That union
collapsed only when Napoleon in France and
then Bismarck in Germany could not tolerate
what they saw as affront to their imperial
ambitions.
The
collapse of a united Europe did neither
tyrant any good, but it did turn Germany
from a peaceful confederacy - a kind of
giant Switzerland - into a belligerent power
under the supremacy of warlike Prussia.
The
lessons must be obvious. Attempts at
European union fail when they lose respect
for the
IDENTITY
AND
AUTONOMY
of
the continent's ancestral communities
You cannot ram union, let
alone
GLOBALISATION
down people's throats.
Diversity lies at the core of Europe's
collective experience, but it is jealously
guarded diversity.
Europe can
never be subsumed under a single power
structure. Union can only be a light-touch
and consensual.
The EU's greatest mistake was
to move beyond ever-closer trade to an
ill-defined' ever closer union'. Above all,
it lay in demanding that member states
accept open borders.
That may have seemed a small
matter to the globe-trotting cosmopolites of
Brussels. But control over immigration meant
control over the
CHARACTER and RATE of CHANGE
of LOCAL COMMUNITIES.
To
the member states of Europe this was a
critical area-of sovereignty
[sacrosanct]
The character of one's
society is not to be bartered merely for
tariff-free trade.
Unlike previous unions in
Europe, the EU is a collection of self
-determining democracies.
Already by 2010,
anti-European sentiment was growing and
consent crumbling. Turnouts in EU elections
plummeted from
60 % to 40
per cent.
Populist politicians-anti
immigration and often anti EU-emerged in the
UK. France, Italy, Germany and former
communist states. The 2008 financial crisis
saw the Eurozone's GERMAN MASTERS
inflict terrible damage on GREECE and SPAIN.
Then in 2016,
the UK shattered the equilibrium. Its people
voted -narrowly- to withdraw. Europe's union
face d a fissure, and a deep one.
There was nothing new in Britain detaching
itself from the rest of Europe. It had
'left' after the Hundred Years War that
finally ended in the mid-15th century and
after Henry V111's defection from Rome
nearly a century later. It refused to join
the Common Market in 1957, and only combined
under NATO to benefit from America's nuclear
shield.
Now,
once again, Britain has said
ENOUGH IS ENOUGH
We
should have no doubt of the reason.
Political Europe has not found an answer to
the question that defied all earlier
attempts at union. How can this fragmentary
continent be united without lurching either
towards debilitating central authority or
towards disintegration
Since the
Lisbon Treaty of 2009, the EU has lurched
towards the former. Now, with the rise of a
reactionary populism, it is lurching towards
the latter
There is hardly a member state that would
dare imitate Britain and hold a Referendum
on EU membership. But that is insufficient
consent for union.
With
or without Britain the EU must find a way of
returning substantive sovereignty to its
MEMBER STATES
not
least over their borders. If it does that,
who knows, Britain might rejoin.
If
it fails, Britain will not be the only
defector. The EU will go the way of its many
forerunners - to
DISINTEGRATION and DANGER.
* *
*
OCTOBER 20,2018
A
SHORT History of Europe:
From Pericles to Putin by
Simon Jenkins. Viking, £25 (20pc discount),
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