The Euro-fundamentalist

National Review, February 21, 2019

The caustic reaction of EU Commission president Jean-Claude Juncker to a series of Brexit votes in the British parliament provoked a tweet from one Conservative Brexiteer describing Juncker in anatomical language un­printable in this magazine and — oh dear — of continental origin. Her fury was proof of sorts that Juncker is in the right job.

Jean Monnet, the most important founding father of what evolved into the EU, believed that only a united Europe could assure the continent’s peace and prosperity. In the absence of popular enthusiasm for such a union, it would have to be built, Monnet once remarked, “by zig and by zag,” obliquely, quietly, and by misdirection. “Of course,” observed Juncker years later, “there will be transfers of sovereignty. But would I be intelligent to draw the attention of public opinion to this fact?”

Sovereignty cannot be transferred to an idea. Monnet’s genius lay in establishing the essence of a government — a civil service (the commission), a court, and the precursor of a parliament — long before there was any state for it to run. The commission’s objective was to use the powers it had been given and then accumulate more, often with the connivance of politicians mistily supportive of “Europe” but unaware of the deeper significance of what they were agreeing to. As Juncker explained in a 1999 interview: “We decide on something, leave it lying around, and wait and see what happens. If no one kicks up a fuss, because most people don’t understand what has been decided, we continue step by step until there is no turning back.”

The three words — “ever closer union” — included in the EU’s defining treaties meant what they said. There is no reverse gear.

Two genuinely great Commission presidents were Walter Hallstein (1958–67), who set Monnet’s machinery in motion, and Jacques Delors (1985–95). Under Delors, the pace of integration picked up noticeably, not least with the establishment of the “single market” and the creation of a clear path to a shared currency. Since then, the principal task of the EU Commission’s president has been to steer rather than set the course, with plenty of direction — when it came to larger initiatives — from national leaders. Thus the Lisbon Treaty, the notorious pact that bypassed voter rejection of a proposed EU constitution, owed more to Angela Merkel than to José Manuel Barroso, then the president, a pattern repeated when the euro-zone crisis erupted in 2010. Merkel counted in a way that Barroso did not.

Juncker, too, counted. At the time, he was not only Luxembourg’s prime minister, a position he had held since 1995, but also its treasury minister. It was in that second capacity that he chaired the Eurogroup, a forum for the euro zone’s finance ministers, until 2013. He thus had a key role in the successful defense of the currency union against the financial pressures that could have fractured or even shattered it, a defense that, in its early stages, included — as his French counterpart admitted — violating “all the rules”: “The Treaty of Lisbon was very straightforward. No bailout.” What mattered more was keeping the euro zone intact, an example of how, throughout his career, Juncker has combined a certain — uh — flexibility with an unyielding dedication to ever closer union.

To be sure, the latter has been good for his career. The EU has handed Juncker a playing field that is far bigger than his native Luxembourg (which has a population of around 600,000). But his country’s geography and history, and, to the extent that we know much about it, the famously secretive Juncker’s background, are all reasons to think that his Euro-fundamentalism is sincere.

Luxembourg has three official languages, French, German, and Luxem­bourgish (a primarily Germanic language). It is lodged between Belgium and, more uncomfortably, France and Germany, both of which have lodged in it in the past — Germany, most recently, in both world wars. Luxembourg was incorporated into the Reich in 1942. Under the circumstances, it is unsurprising that Luxembourg was a founding member of what became the EU. Adding a personal twist, Juncker’s father, no Nazi, was drafted into the Wehrmacht and later taken prisoner by the Soviets. His father-in-law, by contrast, collaborated actively with Luxembourg’s German occupiers. Juncker was born nine years after the war, but his conviction that a federal Europe is a bulwark against a return to the horrors of the past makes at least psychological sense.

Juncker’s appointment to the Commission’s presidency in 2014 was a reminder that, however much Barroso may have been reduced to a secondary role during the euro-zone crisis, integration ground on. Juncker’s predecessors were chosen by the leaders of the EU’s member states, but this procedure was revised by the Lisbon Treaty with the addition of a proviso that they should “take into account” the results of elections to the EU’s parliament. This reliably federalist body, representing a European “demos” that doesn’t exist, used those words to try to snatch control of the nomination from the member states, asserting that the new president should be picked by the party that could summon up the necessary backing in the European parliament. That put Juncker, the nominee of the European People’s party, the parliament’s center-right bloc, in the pole position. Hungary’s Viktor Orban and, fatefully, U.K. prime minister David Cameron (backed by some of the more excitable sections of the British press) came out against Juncker. References in the Sun to Juncker’s family links to the “Nazi regime” were unlikely to turn the Luxembourger into an Anglophile.

Cameron and Orban distrusted Juncker’s Euro-fundamentalism. There were other concerns, too, and they were shared beyond the Anglo-Hungarian awkward squad even if those who felt them were not prepared to step so far out of line as to vote against Juncker. He was tainted by the memory of Jacques Santer, the last Luxembourgish commission president (handy intermediaries between France and Germany, there have been three in all), whose term ended in ignominy when he and his entire commission resigned amid widespread criticism and credible accusations of corruption against one of his team.

Juncker had served in government under Santer and had succeeded him as prime minister: Was he cut from the same cloth? Other worries included Juncker’s involvement in a scandal over the activities of — don’t laugh — Luxembourg’s intelligence service, which eventually led to his resignation from the premiership. Then there was his reputed love of the bottle. Wading through the euro mess might have driven anyone to drink, but it was a destination where Juncker had long since arrived. Allegedly.

None of this can have bothered Angela Merkel overmuch. She threw her support be­hind Juncker, and that, as usual, was that. Juncker took office in November 2014.

In normal times he would have been a suitable enough choice, amenable to accommodating the EU’s dominant Franco-German axis but otherwise devoted to the discipline of “ever closer union,” if, sometimes, rather late in the day. Almost immediately after assuming the presidency, Juncker came under fire when leaked documents showed how Luxem­bourg’s enviably relaxed tax regime had become even more welcoming during his years in office. Evidently shocked, shocked, by what had been going on, Juncker accepted only “political” responsibility for these “problems,” which could, he argued, be eased by the imposition of a “common tax base” across the EU of a type, further leaks a few years later revealed, he had previously opposed. Juncker, a climate warrior with a fondness for private jets, contains multitudes.

But these have not been normal times. Merkel’s decision to fling open Ger­many’s doors in September 2015 (and her subsequent demand that some of the new arrivals be relocated elsewhere in the EU) gave an additional boost to a populist revolt that had already been gathering momentum mainly, but not exclusively, in some of the countries most brutally affected by the procrustean economics of monetary union. Making matters worse still, even if they (for the most part) affected the U.K. only indirectly, the twin currency and migration crises reinforced many Britons’ belief that the EU was not only poorly run but also a menace, toxic sentiments with a Brexit vote in the offing. Even so, had Brussels demonstrated a little more flexibility in its negotiations with David Cameron ahead of the referendum, the Leave campaign, which secured only a 52–48 majority, would have lost.

Not all the blame or credit — far from it, in fact — for the referendum result lies with Junker. Nevertheless, his unbending loyalty to both Angela Merkel and ever closer union played a part in helping the Brexiteers past the winning post. To a lesser degree, the similar approach he is taking to the terms of Britain’s withdrawal is contributing to what is likely to be a damaging relationship with the U.K. after the divorce. Away from Brexit, Juncker’s robotic insistence that the answer to the EU’s wider problems — from its troubled currency to migration — is “more Europe” is stoking populist anger across the bloc, with possibly interesting implications for the EU’s parliamentary elections in May.

Juncker came into office promising a “highly political” commission, but, although he can boast of some technocratic achievements — such as this year’s trade deal with Japan — his political record, scarred by that rising populist challenge and, above all, Brexit, contains little to brag about. Brexit will, of course, remove the British brake on ever closer union, but that silver lining will accrue to a future president. The cloud is all Juncker’s.

A tin ear (fêting Marx’s 200th birthday was not a way to win over restless Eastern Europeans) and embarrassing public displays (his sporadically strikingly un­steady gait has, however, been blamed by loyal officials on sciatica rather than alcohol) have all contributed to an impression of growing disengagement from a job Juncker recently described as “hell.” All this has made all the more credible allegations that he has fallen under the sway of a German puppet master, Martin “The Monster” Selmayr, the authoritarian Euro­fundamentalist who was until recently his chief of staff. These fears were exacerbated when, in a charade rushed through in a few minutes and relying on a legally questionable technicality, Selmayr was appointed the commission’s secretary general (its top bureaucrat) in February 2018. Any opposition at the top of the commission was — it is claimed — muffled by talk of increased retirement benefits. After looking into the matter, the EU’s ombudsman expressed serious reservations last year. These were confirmed in a final decision issued on February 11: “Mr Selmayr’s appointment did not follow EU law, in letter or spirit, and did not follow the Commission’s own rules.” Meanwhile, in December, a vast majority of the normally docile European parliament had passed a resolution calling for Selmayr’s resignation. None of this has made any difference. Juncker will step down when his term ends later this year, but the Monster will continue to preside from his new lair.

This shady, secretive, and successful maneuver, which the EU’s parliament described as “coup-like,” is yet more evidence that the EU is sliding ever further away from democratic control. Despite the current turbulence, it will probably continue to do so, and there will be no shortage of Junckers to help it on its way.

Jean-Claude Juncker’s boast about the euro is an insulting fantasy

CapX, January 4, 2019

History may or may not repeat itself, but hubris certainly does. In April 2008, as the euro approached its tenth birthday, Joaquín Almunia, the EU’s then Commissioner for Economic and Monetary Affairs, recalled how its construction had been accompanied by “dissenting voices”. “One economist” had jeered that it was “at best, an act of uncertain merit”. Another had denounced it as a “great mistake”. Fools! Almunia bragged that “the euro [had] proved an economic success”.  Within 18 months Greece was in crisis.

Earlier this week Jean-Claude Juncker marked the euro’s 20th anniversary of with words seemingly so far removed from reality that not even sciatica could explain them away: “The euro has become a symbol of unity, sovereignty and stability. It has delivered prosperity and protection to our citizens…”

Goebbels once wrote that “the English follow the principle that when one lies, one should lie big, and stick to it. They keep up their lies, even at the risk of looking ridiculous”. However, he would not have expected the English to mock those who they were trying to convince.

Juncker, no Englishman, but known to some as “the master of lies”, has rarely shown much concern about appearing ridiculous. Nevertheless, boasting that that the euro has delivered prosperity insults almost every member state other than Germany, particularly those hit hardest by the bursting of bubbles wholly or partly inflated by the single currency. Most may have crawled out of the A&E (or in Ireland’s case done rather more than that), but memories of what they went through are fresh. And in some instances, they aren’t even memories. Youth unemployment in Greece has only recently fallen below 40 per cent. GDP per capita in Italy (where the euro’s corrosive effect is real, but more difficult to assess) stands roughly where it did in 1999.

On the other hand, Juncker’s claim that a currency which has brought chaos and division in its wake is a symbol of “unity” and “stability” may seem equally absurd, but seen from Brussels, it makes good sense. To appreciate why, note the reference to “sovereignty” as another of the qualities symbolised by the euro. A country that relinquishes its own currency gives up some of its sovereignty, but Juncker was focused on where that sovereignty had been transferred. And that was to “Europe”. Having its own currency represented a major advance in the EU’s step-by-step assumption of sovereignty, and with it, the attributes of a state.

Now adopt that same Brussels perspective to understand what Juncker meant by unity. Despite sharp disagreements, those running the Eurozone stuck together through the crisis, trashing treaty obligations, promises to voters, a referendum result, the integrity of the European Central Bank, economic logic and basic democratic norms to keep the currency union intact. They succeeded in a display of unity that also delivered Juncker’s notion of stability — a Eurozone that weathered the storm — as well as a strong indication that it will continue to overcome the challenges that come its way.

Part of the reason for that, is that once in the euro, there is no easy exit. “Ever closer union” are perhaps the three most important words in the EU’s definition of itself: They imply that there is no reverse gear. Nowhere is this more the case than, as its creators intended, with the single currency, described in 2012 by one top German civil servant as “a machine from hell that we cannot turn off” — words to remember amid current talk of widespread support for the euro.

But back to hubris. Like so much central planning, the euro was born of arrogance, over-confidence, conceit and ideological obsession. Cramming a large number of diverse economies into a necessarily Procrustean currency union made little economic sense—the savings flowing from the removal of foreign exchange risk were somewhere between minimal and illusory. It was also an invitation to disaster, made riskier still by the absence of any degree of fiscal union, something which might have provided a safety net, but would not have been politically acceptable in many of the countries signing up for the new currency.

One example of hubris overlapped with another. Some of those in charge of putting the euro together were aware of its innate flaws but expected that they would eventually lead to—as the phrase in Brussels goes— a “beneficial crisis”. This would be the catalyst for forcing through the fiscal union that had always been the logical counterpoint of monetary union and would also constitute a giant leap forward towards ever closer union. The hubris lay in believing that such a crisis would be manageable in the manner that Brussels hoped.

It wasn’t. Even allowing for its starting point, Juncker’s perception of unity is based on turning a blind eye to some highly inconvenient truths. Made even more destructive by its intertwining with the financial crisis, the storm that tore into the Eurozone essentially divided the currency union’s member states into two antagonistic camps, creditor nations in the north and debtor nations in the south.

The north’s distrust of the south, and the south’s resentment of the north, along with economic distress and the realisation that Brussels and its allies bore much of the blame for this mess (but had no interest in changing direction) also boosted political parties once confined to the fringe or triggered the formation of new parties that would once have found a home there. Those forces were given additional impetus by an unrelated issue— mounting unease over immigration and its longer-term implications. What’s more, many continental eurosceptics have been transformed from naysayers opposed to further integration into a force that actively wants to reverse the direction of ‘ever closer union’. Populist governments (of very different hues) have come to power in Greece and Italy.

Germany and other ‘northern’ states are now even more firmly set against fiscal union, rightly regarded as a device to milk their taxpayers in perpetuity. In the Eurozone’s south, meanwhile, there is increased resistance to Germany’s insistence on enforcing its sometimes counter-productive brand of fiscal discipline on everyone else. It’s significant that, with Emmanuel Macron’s own plans for fiscal union floating face-down in the Spree and gilets jaunes roaming France’s streets, his government will now be breaching (just a one-off, of course) the EU’s budgetary rules.

All that said, betting against the survival of the euro is unwise. The political will to keep this vampire currency going should, as the last ten years have shown, not be underestimated and populist parties are just as conscious as their more orthodox rivals of the general public’s fear of ‘something worse’.

But European growth prospects are deteriorating despite years of the ECB doing “what it takes”. The economies (and balance sheets) of many of the Eurozone’s weaker member-states continue to suffer from the after-effects of the last crisis and remain confined to the straitjacket of a one-size-fits-all currency:  They will not be well placed to cope with a fresh slowdown. It’s hard to avoid the conclusion that another Eurozone drama may well be approaching, with political consequences that are likely to be much trickier than last time around.

One way to head off some of the worse of what might lie ahead would be by splitting the single currency into ‘northern’ and ‘southern’ euros which would better reflect the economic realities of the domestic economies they serve. This would be far from straightforward, but it beats sticking with a status quo that offers much of the Eurozone little more than stagnation at best, and catastrophe at worst.

But such a split runs against the idea of the irreversibility of ever closer union. It’s never going to happen.

The Propagandist and the Censor

National Review, June 21, 2018

In 1936, Oswald Mosley, Britain’s Mussolini-in-waiting, released a question-and-answer book that explained what a Fascist Blighty might look like. Freedom of the press? Fleet Street would “not be free to tell lies.”

Some 80 years on, German chancellor Angela Merkel, infuriated by criticism of her immigration policy (and, rather less so, by Russian disinformation), endorsed a new law, the catchily named Netzwerkdurchsetzungsgesetz, under which social-media companies must take down posts that constitute “manifestly unlawful . . . hate speech” and “fake news” from their sites within 24 hours of a complaint. Failure to do so can result in a fine of up to 50 million euros. Fake news is criminally fake if it amounts, say, to an insult, malicious gossip, or defamation — including defamation of a religion or ideology — sufficiently serious to contravene German law.  

Combine the potential size of the fine with offenses that lend themselves to flexible interpretation (much like that “manifestly”) and it’s easy to see that Berlin intended to scare social-media companies into an approach to censorship that goes far further than the letter of the law, a ploy that appears to be working. The government wanted to shut down talk that was not necessarily illegal but — after Merkel flung open her country’s doors in the summer of 2015 — uncomfortably unorthodox. The mainstream media had enthusiastically echoed the chancellor’s Willkommenskultur narrative of kindly Germans cheerfully greeting the migrants, but establishment unanimity was not enough for the instinctively authoritarian Merkel. Her less “welcoming” compatriots had found an audience on social media. That would not do.

Others have taken note. Singapore, no haven of free speech, is taking aim at “deliberate online falsehoods.” Malaysia has criminalized “news, information, data and reports which is or are wholly or partly false.” (Intent seems to be irrelevant.) Russian lawmakers, immune as usual to irony, have proposed their own laws against fake news.

Brussels is on the case — of course it is — urging social-media companies to sign up for a voluntary code of conduct to combat what the European Commission refers to as “verifiably false or misleading information . . . [that is] created, presented and disseminated for economic gain or to intentionally deceive the public, and [that] may cause public harm.” That word “verifiably” has to do a great deal of heavy lifting, and, as for “misleading,” well . . .

Some of Brussels’s proposals, such as more transparency about sponsored commentary, are sensible. Others could conceivably reflect an even more cynical view of the European public’s credulousness than that displayed by the Kremlin. It takes only an elementary understanding of how politics works to grasp that the call for EU member-states “to scale up their support of quality journalism” will be used to justify lucrative handouts for journalism that toes the party line.

Another recommendation, “enhancing media literacy,” isn’t an invitation to corruption, but if the enhancement is to be anything more than a lesson or two in applied skepticism (no bad thing), instruction on how to “read” media will just as likely — thank you, Michel Foucault — enable fake news as do the opposite. Equally, turning to “an independent European network of fact-checkers” is a less-than-reassuring idea: Fact-checkers have all too frequently shown themselves prone to bias. Quis custodiet ipsos custodes? was a good question 2,000 years ago, and it’s a good question now, but it’s not one that worries many of those leading the charge against fake news.

Meanwhile, France’s president, Emmanuel Macron, is pushing a law to battle fake news that includes allowing politicians to complain to a judge about the spreading of supposedly false information online during or shortly before an election. The judge has 48 hours to respond and can, under certain circumstances, block the offending item, a power that — call me a cynic — could, just possibly, be abused. Fake news, Macron told the U.S. Congress in April, is a “virus,” an attack on the spirit of democracy: “Without reason, without truth, there is no real democracy, because democracy is about true choices and rational decisions.” That prettily complimentary, pretty delusional description (take your pick) leaves open the question as to who is to decide what is true — Quis custodiet? again — and where reason is to be found. The madness of crowds is a perennial risk, but a ruling caste convinced that it has all the answers can be more harmful still.

Macron’s words contained the seed of the suggestion that if the electorate votes on a basis its betters find to be flawed, the result is not “really” democratic. To follow that logic through, should such a result be allowed to stand? Macron, it should be remembered, is one of those now steering the EU, an institution with a tradition of either condemning or ignoring electorates that have voted the “wrong” way, or, for that matter, nudging them back to the polling booth for a do-over.  

There is no reason for any complacency here in America. The First Amendment’s protections have never been absolute. While they have been extended a long way, that process can go into reverse. When intellectual fashions change, judicial precedent can be more elastic than is often assumed. And intellectual fashions have changed. The assault on free speech has long since burst out of the academy and, somewhat paradoxically, has been given extra heft by the ubiquity and indispensability of social media, private terrain where the First Amendment has very little application.

On Facebook, on Twitter, and elsewhere, the apparatchiks of Silicon Valley’s new class rule on the limits of free expression, a power they may well eventually have to share — not necessarily unhappily — with politicians who are no fonder of the wrong sort of talk than they are. Fake news could well give Washington a pretext to join in the effort to tame social-media speech. Always on the lookout for another excuse for 2016, Hillary Clinton has described fake news as a “danger that must be addressed,” and Senator Dianne Feinstein (D., Calif.) told social-media companies last fall that if they didn’t sort out the problem, “we will.”

That’s not a threat to take lightly. Social media are now an essential part of the public square. To the extent that social-media comments are policed, the approach taken — arbitrary, opaque, and (at least to a degree) biased — is, given the market power of the social-media giants, disturbing. But the alternatives are worse. What the market gives, the market can take away. What the state takes, it generally keeps. Giving the government the power directly (or indirectly, via proxies) to determine what social-media content is true — and, in some cases, to suppress that which it has decided is false — would be a menace to free speech too obvious to need explaining.

“Regular” media meanwhile would be untouched, protected, as they should be, by the First Amendment. They would also be left to promote their takes (far from monolithic, but still) on events with fewer challenges than they now face, a windfall that would be as unhealthy as it is undeserved. The First Amendment is not a guarantor of objectivity. In an age when the boundaries between reporting and opinion in newspapers, television, and radio have faded, disinformation is, to put it mildly, not confined to games played within the social-media feeds of the unwary.

When Donald Trump describes this more respectably sourced disinformation — and anything else he considers (or pretends to consider) to be disinformation — as “fake news,” he is sending a message that works on several levels. Hijacking a term that was already resonating with the public is not only a clever way of rebottling an old whine — politicians are forever grumbling about the press — but a way of making it stronger. It is not just an attack on the story, but on its source — and on what’s left of its authority. CNN? No better than Facebook.

Broadening the definition of fake news is also a subtle undermining of the argument that Trump owes his presidency to media manipulation. If anything, it carries with it the hint that he was elected despite fake news, not because of it. It may also, one day, provide a way for either Left or Right to begin the erosion of the First Amendment protections the press now enjoys. According to a Harvard-Harris poll from May of last year, two-thirds of voters believe that the mainstream media publish fake news, and that survey was by no means an outlier.

Treating the partisan dishonesty of the news media and the real (so to speak) “fake news” as, basically, the same also risks overlooking the genuine hazard that the latter may represent. For now (but only for now) its most potentially dangerous manifestation comes from the dezinformatsiya orchestrated by a Kremlin once again appreciative of how destabilizing disinformation can be — and clearly aware of how neatly such disinformation can be slipped into social media. How much influence Russian fake news (a handy scapegoat for disconcerting electoral outcomes) has really had so far can be debated, but there is no doubt that the sophistication of its targeting and the quality of its material is going to improve rapidly. The day that a computer-generated Trump makes a fake but (to the right audience) truly incendiary speech mocking, perhaps, the prophet Mohammed is not far away.

The prospect is terrifying. But so is one element in the likely response: the unleashing of censors to block this, ban that, and, presumably, fight a long Pac-Man struggle with bots as the prey. But this cyberwar would probably do more damage to what’s left of the West’s free speech than to the lies of our opponents. Fake news can be suppressed or, infinitely better, rebutted, but, as it speeds through the Web, it can travel many times around the world before the truth has time to boot up.

The Gutenberg galaxy is expanding exponentially, generating unprecedented amounts of information — true, false, and everything in between. To the extent we can trust it — Quis custodiet? — technology may help identify what is reliable and what is not (I met the other day with the CEO of a start-up using artificial intelligence to rate the reliability of those posting on social media), but technology will have to contend with psychology. Our quest for objectivity is less diligent than we like to think. We are all too ready to collaborate in our own deception. Some stories are too good not to believe, some stories are too satisfying to unpack (how many birthers were there again?), some gossip is too good not to pass on, and confirmation bias remains as seductive and reassuring as it ever was.

Skepticism will help, but too much of it — easy enough in an era when old media are regarded with suspicion and new media are difficult to process, let alone trust — can lead to a perverse gullibility. In a 1974 interview, Hannah Arendt observed that “a people that no longer can believe anything . . . is deprived not only of its capacity to act but also of its capacity to think and to judge. And with such a people you can then do what you please.”

Fake news is a challenge that the West must get right. So far, there’s little reason to expect that it will.

Playing The Verdun Card

The Weekly Standard, May 26, 2014

In the curious pantomime that is the EU parliament, the French politician Joseph Daul is a star. He’s the president of the European People’s party (the principal center-right bloc in the parliament), an apparatchik with impeccable EU establishment credentials. He has euro-federalist beliefs, a funding scandal in his past, and a willingness to warn that Brussels is all that stands between the continent and a reversion to its warring ways. He’s also a little twitchy about the elections to the EU parliament later this month.

“I am convinced,” he announced recently, “that if Europe succumbs to the siren voices of populists and Euroskeptics, there will be a turning back towards chaos and war.”

This is an all too familiar eurocratic refrain, but it is heard even more frequently on those rare occasions when Europe’s voters are given a chance to slow down the march to a superstate. Trying to cajole his compatriots into choosing the euro in a 2003 referendum, Swedish prime minister Göran Persson recalled how Germany’s “weeping” Chancellor Kohl had told him that he did not want his sons to die in a third world war, an understandable sentiment, but an unpersuasive argument. Swedish voters stuck with the krona.

Two years later, another Swede, Margot Wallström, then the EU commissioner charged with selling the proposed EU constitution to a somewhat doubtful continent, took the opportunity presented by a visit to the Nazi concentration camp at Theresienstadt (Terezin) to observe that “there are those today who want to scrap the supranational idea. They want the European Union to go back to the old purely intergovernmental way of doing things. .  .  . Those people should come to Terezin and see where that old road leads.”

With this month’s election falling within a few weeks of the hundredth anniversary of a certain shooting in Sarajevo, the dire warnings now tend to refer to a different dark chapter in Europe’s tumultuous 20th century. Last year, José Manuel Barroso, the EU’s top bureaucrat, implied that those “who want to roll back our integration” were risking a regression to “the war [and] the trenches” of the past, a ludicrous variation on an already ludicrous theme.

If all this scaremongering were a matter of cynical calculation it might be possible to treat it with a degree of admiration. As a political tool, it has, after all, proved very effective: Fear works. And so does the manipulation of historical memory, another integral element in Brussels dezinformatsiya. If Europeans could be persuaded to blame the nation-state for their wars, they could be talked into distrusting their own patriotism and buying into the bogus made-in-Brussels “European” identity.

And, indeed, this is what we have seen over recent decades. As it came to be widely accepted that a united Europe was the key to peace, those who persisted in dissenting from the principle of a broader federalist agenda, except, perhaps, in reliably stubborn Britain, were pushed into uncomfortable and ultimately self-segregating corners far from
the electoral mainstream. Outside the skeptic isle, almost the only political parties prepared, until lately, to reject “ever closer union” were those drawn from the rougher ends of the political spectrum, an uninviting destination for centrist voters. That, in turn, made it easier to claim that Euroskepticism was, by definition, evidence of extremism and, maybe, a screw loose too.

The mantra that the EU was staving off a return to the hecatombs also operated as an unsubtle reminder to the Germans that they had a moral obligation to confine their role in the new Europe to keeping quiet and footing a large chunk of the bill. Meanwhile the rest of the continent—and, such is the power of guilt, much of Germany too—was led to believe that only Brussels could keep the Hun on the leash, a notion that rested on the absurd premise that panzers still prowled through Teutonic dreams. Such is the power of history.

The passing of time and the reemergence of German economic power have eroded some of the Bundesrepublik’s willingness to follow the demeaning postwar script, but by less than might be expected. Introducing the euro over the objections of most Germans made a mockery of their democracy. Preserving the single currency has stretched the country’s much-prized constitutional order and now threatens to become a permanent drain on its coffers, but the conservative, gently Euroskeptic (anti-euro, but pro-EU) Alternative für Deutschland is only likely to score 6-7 percent in the upcoming election, and no small portion of that support will owe more to the AfD’s mildly restrictive immigration policy than to its opposition to the single currency. Most of the rest of Germany’s political class remains in thrall to the tired myth that to retreat from ever closer union would be to advance into danger and, quite possibly, war.

But a myth it is. What kept the peace in Europe was, yes, in part, memories of Auschwitz and Verdun, but it was also, much more so, the product of the savage ethnic cleansing of Eastern Europe’s awkward German minorities, and, above all, the discipline imposed by the Cold War—by Soviet hegemony over half of the continent and American leadership of the other. The evolution of the EU was the consequence of this new, rather chilly peace, not the creator of it. Brussels subsequently performed an invaluable role in shepherding Moscow’s former European colonies back to the West after the Soviet collapse, but on foundations built by the Atlantic alliance.

Those who used and abused this myth to drive the EU forward were in many cases not so much Machiavellis as priests who had faith in a tale they themselves spun. And it proved to be a highly convenient myth. The insistence that nationalism is inherently dangerous is an extrapolation from a totally defeated, especially toxic, and specifically German form of nationalism. But it gave those in charge of the European project an ever-expanding license to remove more and more of anything that marked out the distinctiveness of a nation from the regular democratic process: The voters, poor creatures, so susceptible to “populists,” you see, could not be trusted to do the right thing.

Slice by slice, sovereignty has been transferred from democratic nation-states to a largely unaccountable supranational technocratic elite which in turn has become dangerously disconnected from the reality that encounters with the electorate might have brought, and dangerously emboldened as a result. And so the euro was put together with little regard for its own rule book, common sense, or anything resembling informed popular consent. Once launched, the currency union was run in a way that was, if anything, worse. After hubris, nemesis, and with it, old demons began to stir.

The long economic crisis has shattered the never completely convincing illusion of a continent that was leaving nationality behind. Northern Europeans resent being compelled to bail out nations of a eurozone periphery for which they feel little affinity and less respect. The eurozone’s laggards detest what they see as harsh rule by foreign diktat. Vintage stereotypes are dusted off. Greeks are thieves. Chancellor Merkel is a Nazi. Trapped in the jaws of a dysfunctional currency union, and lacking the democratic legitimacy to fix it and either the imagination or the courage to try something else, the establishment parties have little to offer but more of the same. And so the hard times grind on.

And as hard times tend to do, they are persuading increasing numbers of voters to turn to alternatives they once would never have considered. While the effect may be magnified by low turnout (which fell—the sixth consecutive drop—to 43 percent in 2009), this month’s European election is likely to see something that looks a lot like a Euroskeptic wave. Some 25 percent  of the vote could go to Euroskeptics  of one description or another, up from 15 percent or so (it’s difficult to be precise) in the current parliament. As waves go it will be choppy: This is a ragtag group, drawing from left and right and ranging from the benign (such as Britain’s UKIP) to the sinister (Greece’s neo-Nazi Golden Dawn, given its big break by the failures of an EU that once claimed it had consigned black shirts to history). It will be neither numerous nor cohesive enough to change very much in the short term. But what these parties do have in common is a determination to wrest back control of their countries’ destinies from what is rightly seen as remote, micromanaging, and alien bureaucratic control.

This month’s vote will be followed by noisy, angry, and overwrought polemics, but not by dramatic transformation or the guns of August. That said, as the Barrosos and the Dauls push on—and they will—with the trudge towards ever closer European integration, doubtless claiming that the rise of “dangerous” Euroskepticism makes it even more imperative than before, they will be ignoring a nastily inconvenient truth from Europe’s past: Imposed multinational federations don’t end well.

Sarajevo learned that a century ago. And then it learned it again.