Europe: A continent becoming united on being free from the clutches of the European Union
 To understand England's antipathy to the European Union, it is important to see its role from the 1684 Treaty of Westphalia, which ended the Thirty Years War when all agreed that one nation's law should run no further than its own borders.
This has been greatly undermined since, not only by the EU, but by jurisdictions more powerful than their neighbours. One recalls the Montreal Police ticketing a motorist for going through a red light in a neighbouring municipality, but not ordering him to pay the fine to the local traffic courts, but to the larger City of Montreal which would spend the proceeds of the fine. From the micro to the macro one can see the 1989 case of General Manuel Noriega, a head of state, who was arrested by US forces in Panama to answer US domestic drug charges in Florida. Such extra-territoriality of courts has since become common place.
But such concerns are a mere fraction of the complaint of the 52 per cent in the UK who voted to leave the EU common market in 2016, which by stealth has been morphing into a federal state, a united states of Europe. The disappointed 48 per cent who voted remain, rather like the children in George Orwell's Nineteen Eighty-Four, knew of no time before the EU and are terrified without it, believing all the hell-bound scarifying predictions Eurocrats make to keep Britain in.
The justification for the 1952 European Union was the prevention of war, hence the steel and coal treaty between France and Germany. Some said that broke the Westphalian deal, but then no one was too fussed because Germany was a de facto vassal state in 1952 under military occupation. Even West Germany's constitution, like Hong Kong's flimsy post Hand Over "mini-constitution", was called the Basic Law.
Which brings us back to England's place in Europe, with its long-standing resolution not to be considered part of Europe until the EU came along and even then, with the greatest reluctance. Traditionally, Britain sought to maintain the balance of power on the Continent when France and Germany threatened to dominate Europe and make life difficult for the British Empire. So in the 19th century Britain backed Germany (Prussia) against Napoleonic France, and in the 20th century, backed France against Germany.
More recently, when former British Prime Minister David Cameron told the EU that had no choice but to hold a referendum on leaving. The EU had had several such votes before. A vote in Ireland on the Treaty of Lisbon, which if approved, would have meant closer ties, but was rejected by 53 per
cent in 2008. In 2005, in France rejected the EU by 55 per cent and Netherlands voters rejected it by 61 per cent in 2005. Had these votes turned out positively, as they did in Spain and Luxembourg in 2005, they were considered binding, but if an electorate "gets it wrong" they are treated as non-binding plebiscites. When negative outcomes seem likely to occur ahead of such votes, they are cancelled or unscheduled such as in the Czech Republic, Denmark, Poland and Portugal.
How European bureaucracies came to be so at odds with the people's will has a history, and some root it to Frankfurt School of the 1920s. These were western Marxist academics, who moved to New York in the 1930s with Hitler's rise, and lodged themselves at universities, with their accolytes infusing themselves into universities in the western world in the years since.
In social sciences, now called the humanities which included teacher training, political science and journalism, this left-wing ideology began to dominate university life, outside the STEM (science, technology, engineering and mathematics) fields. From the 1980s, such cadres began to produce entry level personnel for the media and the civil service, and increasingly, the major corporations and banks.
Human resources became major departments in major institutions, insisting on university degrees - even when supervisors made no such demands, thus ensuring that greater and greater number had been ideologically pre-filtered by leftist professors of the academy.
All went well until Marxist moral authority collapsed. It started with Soviet leader Nikita Kruschev's 1956 "secret speech" denouncing the Stalin purges, which make Hitler's crimes seem comparitively petty, and serious thinkers could no longer see Marxism was a force for good given the scale of atrocities. Rearguard Marxists deflected criticism for a decade or two, saying it was all Stalin's fault and had Lenin lived etc… but since glasnost and perestroika opening up of Russia's files, it became clear that Lenin was guilty of horendous crimes too.
But such tidings, while they did not remain secret for long, were not helpful to the Frankfurt School, and its alumni now reaching the middle ranks of the what was becoming a mutually re-enforcing media, academic, bureaucratic complex, whose denizens were in no hurry to air the Marxist dirty laundry that they had concealed for so long. Instead, they focused on the lesser evils Nazi evils. (University of Toronto psychology professor Jordan Peterson in his podcasts expresses amazement that advanced university students who attend his classes find such information entirely new to them.)
But then the seemingly impossible task of defending indefensible Marxism morally when its entire claim was based on social morality, was unexpectedly rescued by another intellectual movement called "post modernism", and its principal tool "deconstructionism".
What is post modernism. The modern age dates from 17th and 18th Enlightenment, also called the Age or Reason, which opposed church dogma. Postmodern thinkers, who emerged in the 1960s and '70s in Paris, say no truth that can be established definitely, so nothing can be said to be better than anything else. There were no facts - only opinion. This essay for instance, is no better or worse than the most highly valued piece of writing in their eyes. To establish this, postmodernists employ the technique called "deconstruction", conducts a social critique on a piece of highly regarded literature in order to devalue it for its content of sexism, racism, toxic masculinity etc.
Of course, now that icons of literature and philosophy, are only worth what a deconstructing readers make of them, one would have thought that opinions would vary widely, but not so. All students know that good marks from the professor mean good Marx from the student. Thus students are asked to find sexism, racism, toxic masculinity, and if they hope to graduate and pay their student loans, this is what they find.
While this process deeply affects what in the last 20 years has emerged as an increasingly feminine and feminised university-educated ruling class, such values have been rejected by the largely male working class, who voted to reject as much of they can of this enveloping world of rules and regulations, each of spawn squadrons of inspectors all requiring university degrees no doubt.
As this process matures, the division between Main Street, the world of mechanics, opticians, plumbers, and Wall Street the world of futures traders, stock analysts, diversity consultants and social scientists will become more pronounced and heated.
This is the conflict that is only beginning to convulse Europe and the West as a whole. How it will turn out is anybody's guess. |
