Spivocrats and federasts are fiddling their expenses as Athens burns. The two are closely related, for most economic and social woes are at heart moral.
The problem with the European Union, its economies collapsing and its cities aflame, isn’t a deficit of democracy. It’s a dearth of morality, both public and private. As proof of that, compare the strategy pursued by the EU with that followed by our own democratic government.
Every serious political philosopher, from Plato and Aristotle onwards, has been aware that unfettered democracy is problematic. They have all known that democracy has to be limited and checked by other parallel forms of government, for otherwise it runs the risk of becoming mob rule.
If getting into power requires only the purely arithmetical exercise of counting heads, then those seeking power have to develop, to the exclusion of all others, the skills known to produce favourable counts. A few generations of that, and a new type of politician emerges: the unprincipled, self-serving, power-seeking spiv able to talk to electorates only in the language of shameless demagoguery. Part of the process is buying allegiance, or rather votes, with public funds, bribing the electorate as effectively, and as immorally, as stuffing £100 bills into their pockets.
This creates the vicious circle of corruption: corrupt politicians have to corrupt voters to vote the right way. This — and only this — is the reason for the welfare state, and any parallels between that and charity are mendacious. Erstwhile recipients of alms were grateful for what they got, and it would have never crossed their minds to demand more. Today’s welfare recipients do demand more as of right because they know they can: politicians depend on their votes to remain in power. It’s as if residents of an almshouse could oust the board of their charitable foundation and appoint one that would be more generous.
Yesterday’s giveaways become today’s entitlements, and even those few politicians who are aware of the immorality of this arrangement will claim nothing can be done about it. It’s a non-negotiable fait accompli. They also know that, should they demur, social unrest will follow — nothing like a few riots for the corrupt underclass to augment the power it already wields at the voting booth.
What works with individuals can also work with states, as proven by Prussia in the 19th century, when it set out to bribe (or force) other German states into unification. The Prussians created the Zollverein, a customs union ostensibly aimed at easing trade among various German areas. In parallel, they showered other principalities with free loans and subsidies, only demanding that all currencies be pegged to the Prussian thaler (or vereinsthaler, as it eventually became). Finally, the populations of the weaker principalities thoroughly corrupted, Germany became a single state with a single currency, called the mark since 1873.
Sound familiar? Of course it does. This is exactly the strategy Germany, assisted by her poodle France, used in the second half of the 20th century, after the failure of her rather more direct attempt to unify Europe. However, what could be regarded as a qualified success in the 19th century is proving an unqualified disaster in the 21st. For, unlike the German principalities of yesteryear, the European countries of today are heterodox. They vary immensely in their economic philosophies, work ethic, labour relations, expectations — you name it. German business practices, commendable as they may be, depend heavily on what Max Weber called the Protestant work ethic. In the absence of that, what’s Germany’s meat will become other countries’ poison.
However, one thing all European countries have in common is a corrupt political class self-perpetuating by creating a corrupt underclass. Whatever variations are observable are those of degree, not kind.
Sizeable and growing sections of European populations now expect to survive nicely without having to work much, if at all. Such expectations, already created by their national governments, have been boosted no end by the cheap bribery money pushed their way by German and French banks.
Then suddenly they are told it has to come to an end. The bribery funds are running dry, chaps. You may have to work for a living. But work is hard. Setting fire to a few hundred buildings is so much easier.
No doubt this isn’t the whole story. Considering their recent history, many Greeks must also resent being told what to do by the Germans — especially when what the Germans tell them to do is tighten their belts, go to work and wait for the Wirtschaftswunder to arrive. That’s ‘economic miracle’ in English. I doubt the term translates into Greek.
But such resentments ought not to be confused with a quest for democracy, which the Greeks experienced for only about 40 years of their history. (Any invocation of Athenian democracy in this context is frivolous: it bore no resemblance to our free-for-all. Only about 30,000 of Attica’s 250,000 citizens were entitled to vote, and the voting was direct, with no system of representation.) It more closely resembles nationalism.
Both our modern democracies and the non-democratic EU have similar problems of fundamental design, not mechanics. As they both ineluctably breed corruption, the problems are above all moral. They wouldn’t go away if the EU suddenly became more democratic — at best, nothing would change. Britain should get out of the EU not to get more democracy but to get more sovereignty, a much more important political and moral consideration.
Twenty-five European countries have succumbed to Germany’s and France’s blackmail to trade a lot of sovereignty for a little money. Many of them are finding out that they end up with neither. Before too long they all, most emphatically including Britain, will realise this.
And then real conflicts will begin, those between the classes that work and those that receive, the nations perceived as rich and those regarding themselves as poor, the North and the South, the West and the East. The Greek arsons are just the first spark of a massive conflagration. Is your fire extinguisher in working order?