Europe's March of Folly

__"European Union—A Disaster in the Making" by David Pryce-Jones, in Commentary (June 1997), 165 E. 56th St., New York, N.Y. 10022.__

Scheduled to adopt a common currency (the Euro) by 1999, the nation-states of Europe continue to march toward some sort of political federation—and also to disaster, warns Pryce-Jones, a British political analyst and novelist.

"Europe" today, he notes, "still has no sovereignty, in the true meaning of that word, but is rather a stew of German federalism, French dirigisme [state intervention], protectionism, corporatism, and mass welfarism— all enshrined in an Orwellian language naturally known as Eurospeak and intelligible, if at all, only to the presiding Eurocrats."

But every European country, including Britain, he points out, now has two heads of state—its own and the president of the European Union (EU), Jacques Santer— "two capitals, two parliaments, two flags, and, above all, two systems of law: national law, and the law decreed by the European Court of Justice." Conflicting statutes are breeding a disrespect for law itself. "European elites increasingly treat public life as a vast patronage system, there for the plundering," he says. Almost $10 billion of the EU’s $89 billion budget for 1995 "disappeared through corruption and fraud," according to auditors, but unofficial estimates are much higher.

The rise of a supranational Europe is producing unintended consequences, Pryce-Jones writes. "As the nation-state surrenders to something larger than itself, it is leaving behind a vacuum, and ethnicity is filling that vacuum fast.... Basques in Spain, Flemings in Belgium, the IRA in Britain, Corsicans in France, all threaten the social and political cohesion of their respective nation-states." Nationalist xenophobia is increasing. Europe’s roughly 20 million immigrants, legal and illegal, are often blamed by popular opinion for weakening the nation-states’ old identities.

"Historically," Pryce-Jones argues, "the nation-state has satisfied but also controlled nationalism, which otherwise builds up like underground gas, to explode when it can." But the new Europe’s weakened states aren’t as effective. "Strange new groupings" have flourished, such as the Northern League in Italy, Jean-Marie Le Pen’s National Front in France, and Jorg Haidar’s Austrian Freedom Party.

The creation of a supranational Europe is "a utopian experiment which is mustering the very same destructive forces it claims to be eliminating," Pryce-Jones concludes. Though the nation-states are surrendering their sovereignty, national interests remain. "On the day these interests collide," he fears, "there will be nothing except the Euro and a half-formulated anti-American ideology to hold together the artifical scaffolding that is Brussels, and ward off a general collapse in anger, disillusionment, and violence."