Please don’t tell anybody, but — is anyone listening? — for once I found myself in agreement with Mr Delors. Moreover, he said something that made me jump up, punch air and scream, ‘Yes!’ What caused this uncharacteristically effusive reaction was his admission that the euro was a non-starter from the word ‘allez’, or something to that effect. Moreover, the ‘Anglo-Saxons’ were right all along when arguing that, without a fiscal union (that means a single European state, in English), a monetary union couldn’t possibly succeed. At that point, my enthusiasm began to dampen. You see, over 11 years of part-time living in France I’ve learned that, when a continental and especially a Frenchman refers to the British as ‘Anglo-Saxons’, he’s no friend of ours (the implication is that les rosbifs and les yanquees are cut from the same unsophisticated cloth).
That got my antennae twitching, so I couldn’t possibly miss the rest of the message. The conclusion, continued Delors, is that we all should have listened to him and joined together in one glorious Germany-dominated EUSSR from the start. In other words, the thinking behind the project, his own thinking to be exact, was flawless. Shame about the execution.
Now where have I heard this before? Let me see… oh, yes, a couple of weeks ago when a young journalist writing for a London paper told me that Marxism was a great idea, but it was perverted by the Soviets. Now, in the hope that the youngster will learn something (Delors never will), allow me to share a few home truths.
The problems with any giant socialist project, be that the USSR, the EUSSR, our sainted NHS and comprehensive education, or Sweden’s welfare state, are always systemic, not symptomatic. All such projects fail not because they are badly executed, but because they are erected on the subsidence-prone, termite-eaten foundations of a wrong moral, philosophical (and therefore metaphysical) idea. It’s not a good thing done badly, but an awful thing done badly.
In this instance, the monstrous idea of a giant, supranational European state runs against the very nature of Western statehood. Our states historically derive their legitimacy either from divine right or from public consent or, ideally, both. Now, unless Messrs Delors, Clarke and the whole LibDem party believe that the EUSSR is divinely ordained, they have to presume that their abortion of a state would enjoy pan-European consent of the governed. It wouldn’t. Such a state might, for a while, be more sound economically than the EUSSR is now, but in any case it wouldn’t be economics that would bring it down. It would be the pride of each of the 27 members (or however many the federasts would be able to coerce or bribe in), their sense of national identity, their all-too-human resentment at being told what to do by foreigners, especially those they don’t like very much. It would be their love of home, as they and their ancestors have known it from time immemorial. The EUSSR of Jacques Delors’s dream wouldn’t be suffocated by tight money supply. It would be drowned in blood.
The fault lies not with the mechanics but with the designers. It’s yours, Delors.