Just Say No

National Review Online, February 14, 2013

Have we just witnessed a cynical attempt to induce an old ally to sacrifice itself for the benefit of the United States? Possibly: Foreign policy is not for the morally squeamish.

Look no further than Philip Gordon, the U.S.’s assistant secretary of state for European and Eurasian affairs. In January, Mr. Gordon hurled himself into Britain’s contentious debate over the EU with the observation that America viewed the U.K.’s continued participation in that wretched union as “essential and critical to the United States.” This did not play well with Blighty’s euroskeptic hordes, a crowd all too willing to suspect that Uncle Sam takes John Bull for granted. An indignant Nigel Farage, leader of the insurgent euroskeptic United Kingdom Independence party (UKIP), snarked that, as the U.K. had rejected the Americans’ suggestion that it might lend a hand in Vietnam, the U.K. would also “say no to them over the EU.”

Undeterred, Barack Obama waded into the controversy a week or so later, releasing some comments shortly before David Cameron was due to deliver a much-anticipated speech on Britain’s role in the EU. The timing was intended to stiffen the back of a prime minister under immense domestic political pressure from his euroskeptic critics. The president began softly enough, politely underscoring “America’s close alliance with the United Kingdom,” but then came to the point: The United States values “a strong U.K. in a strong European Union.” Following Cameron’s speech, that message was echoed by Joe Biden, never a man afraid to repeat the words of others, during the course of a visit to Europe earlier this month: “We believe the United Kingdom is stronger as a result of its membership [in the EU]. And we believe the EU is stronger with the U.K.’s involvement.”

On one level, that was not so far from what Cameron had ended up saying. In his speech, he called for a reformed, “leaner, less bureaucratic union . . . with the single market at its heart,” a union open for business with the rest of the world, a decentralized union that would return powers to its member states but that would have room within it for a smaller group of countries on a pathway to “much closer economic and political integration,” but no sin bin for those who did not. If that is a vision in any way connected with reality, the State Department ought to be able to relax.

Of course, it is not. Fears among the EU’s leadership (alluded to by Cameron in his speech) that a restructuring on the lines he proposed could lead to the union’s unraveling will mean that it will never take place. If Britain is to loosen its ties to Brussels, it will have to do so on its own. That would involve persuading all the other 26 EU countries to go along (since changes to the EU treaty require unanimity). That’s not going to happen either.

No matter, Cameron has guaranteed British voters a referendum once his implausible negotiations for an impossible deal have been concluded. It will, he explained, be “a very simple in or out choice. To stay in the EU on these new terms; or come out altogether.” So would that be something for the White House to worry about? Not really. The Conservative manifesto for the general election, due in 2015, will include a promise to hold a referendum. But here’s the catch. The Conservatives will almost surely not win that election, for any number of reasons that we don’t need to go into now.

Even in the astounding event of a Tory victory, what then? Doubtless there would be an elaborate pantomime of negotiation — there is still a large constituency within the EU (including, most importantly, Germany) that would like the Brits to stay in — and doubtless a few crumbs of concession would be tossed Cameron’s way. Indeed there were sections in his speech where the prime minister already seemed to be signaling his willingness to find a way to accept them. For older Britons, this brings back memories of the 1975 referendum that rubber-stamped a cosmetically “renegotiated” deal with the precursor to the EU. And a rerun of that would probably be what they would get.

Disregard the polls currently showing that a majority in the U.K. would opt for Brexit (yes, that’s the term). That’s just venting. Given their druthers, because of anxiety about what lies outside, reinforced by skillful scaremongering (and there’s been quite a bit of that lately), most Brits would prefer to remain within the EU, albeit one that is less intrusive. The nature of the EU — an “ever closer union” — means that that is not on offer. But presented with a prettily packaged excuse to avoid confronting that unpleasant reality, and battered by warnings from the great and the good of the supposedly hideous implications of quitting, the British electorate would almost certainly stick with the devil it knows.

So Cameron’s gambit is highly unlikely to get anywhere, let alone lead to Britain’s escape from the EU, and yet the Obama administration still seems oddly concerned. In part this may be a feint, aimed not at London but at Brussels, Berlin, and Paris, crafted to demonstrate to a bloc of some consequence that the Brits might be euroskeptic but their cousins across the pond most definitely are not.

And in part it may be caution. Cameron is right: “Democratic consent for the EU [within the U.K.] is now wafer thin.” If the Labour party were to shift in a more euroskeptic direction, the political equation would change dramatically. Despite electoral logic and some tentative maneuvering, that’s not likely for now. The party’s leader is firmly in the Brussels camp. But its supporters are rather less so. All things considered, the White House may have thought that spreading a little of what euroskeptic blogger Richard North has dubbed FUD (fear, uncertainty, and doubt) over the consequences of a Brexit might be a sensible preemptive step.

More than that, the EU is in a tense, febrile state. The underlying structural failings of its monetary union, combined with a nutty determination to dig that hole still deeper, may well force the countries of the euro zone (and perhaps others) into a degree of integration that will, however much they might try to avoid it, necessitate amendments to the EU treaty. Those will be amendments to which the Brits will have to give their assent (unanimity, remember). At that moment, whatever the fate of Cameron and his referendum, the U.K.’s relationship with the EU will be up for discussion. As matters now stand, it is, to put it mildly, unlikely that the country will opt to join any inner core, but, by spreading a little FUD in advance (with more, unquestionably, to come), the U.S. is obviously trying to contribute to the creation of a climate of opinion within Britain that will prevent the U.K. from wandering too far from the heart of Brussels’s realm.

And as to why the administration should try to do this, well, that (if it is thinking straight) is where the cynical sacrifice of an old ally would come in. The EU is fundamentally anti-American. Designed as a counterweight to American power, it is a project that, lacking any genuine positive identity of its own, defines itself by what it is not. What it is not, its grandees like to emphasize, is America. Economically, the ideas of its founders were rooted in central planning at home, and, in dealings with the outside world, mercantilism. But British membership (and the example set by the success of Thatcherite reforms within the U.K.) has helped nudge the EU on a somewhat different (but not irreversible) course, more open to free markets and free trade and thus more to Washington’s liking (for instance, talks on a U.S.-EU free-trade deal are set to start in June). Similarly, Britain has acted as a brake on the construction of a common — and overarching — EU foreign policy that would, almost by definition, make the union an increasingly awkward partner for the U.S.

The problem is that the EU’s original suspicion of free enterprise has never disappeared, and hard times have given it fresh life. There are clear signs that Britain can only block so much for so long (the evolution of EU financial regulation is just one harbinger among many of trouble to come). The trudge toward a common foreign policy continues. Nevertheless, so long as the Brits stay relatively close to the center of the EU’s decision-making, there remains a decent chance that Brussels’s more damaging initiatives can be diluted, delayed, or derailed. Seen from an American viewpoint, there is thus a brutal logic to convincing the U.K. to hang in there, even if, from a British angle, it makes no sense at all.

But what if the White House is not looking at this question in the coldly Machiavellian way that Americans have a right to expect? One alternative interpretation of Obama’s effort to insert himself as a counselor into Britain’s unhappy European marriage is that his administration is still in thrall to the Cold War calculation that regarded (Western) European unity as a strategic good in its own right, an obsolete notion kept alive today by intellectual laziness in Washington and, somewhat more legitimately, by an appreciation of the genuinely useful role played by the EU in the transformation of the post-Communist part of the continent. It’s a mindset that has led successive White Houses — Republican and Democratic — to view the EU’s progress toward that ever closer union with insouciance, or even, sometimes, enthusiasm. A more tightly unified EU, gushed Condoleezza Rice back in 2005, would be a “positive force.” Maybe the Obama administration has simply succumbed to this delusion, and cannot grasp why Britain would not wish to sign up for the ride.

Then again, there could be a yet more troubling explanation. Does Obama look across the Atlantic to Brussels and rather like what he sees, an entity developing in a supranational, “progressive,” environmentally correct, corporatist, and technocratic direction that is not so far removed from his own agenda for this country? If he does — and it’s not so far-fetched an idea — he won’t have much sympathy for a bunch of what he doubtless sees as “bitter” Brits clinging to what’s left of their independence.

But whatever the reasons Messrs. Obama, Biden, and Gordon had for saying what they did, from the British perspective it is clear what David Cameron’s response should be. He should pay absolutely no attention.

Fight For The Finnish

The Weekly Standard, December 24, 2012

He won more votes than any other candidate in Finland’s 2011 parliamentary election, and the maverick party he leads is a profound embarrassment to the current eurozone regime, but there’s something refreshingly down-to-earth about Timo Soini, the leader of the euroskeptic Perussuomalaiset (PS), or, perhaps more easily for you and me, the Finns party. (The former translation of their name​—​the True Finns​—​was felt, a party official told me, to have an “ominous echo” in some corners of Europe of a sort that the PS did not wish to convey.)

Soini, 50, an eloquent, likable, and often amusing former “concrete boy” from Espoo, a city on the edge of Helsinki, was sitting across from me a few weeks ago in a restaurant in Midtown Manhattan. He’s a big man, with big opinions, haphazardly shaven, with rough-hewn features, thick glasses, a shirt with a touch of the lumberjack about it, and an air of genial dismay at my choice of Diet Coke to go with lunch. He has a beer (just one, I note, in case any of the more puritanical members of his party are reading). In his soft-spoken, pleasantly old-fashioned and very Finnish way, he’s outraged by what is now unfolding in Europe.

“A deal is a deal,” he says. The technocrats who once promised that under a shared European currency no country would ever have to bail out another now see things differently. As for the mendicants of the eurozone periphery, let’s just say that Soini is a man with a sharp sense of right, wrong, and history.

Unlike many European countries, Finland, Soini recalls, honored its debts throughout the Depression. And then it paid off the penalties imposed upon it by a vengeful Soviet Union after the Second World War. Later still, it worked its way out from underneath the wreckage of a savage banking crisis in the early 1990s. Left unsaid is the contrast with the Greeks, the Spanish .  .  .

Then it’s not left unsaid. They can be blunt, Finns. The mayhem that the single currency has brought in its wake has upset the European political order in ways that must shock even the utopian gamblers who originally calculated that a “beneficial crisis” was just what was needed to herd the EU’s recalcitrant nation-states into ever closer union. Governments have tumbled across the continent. The far left and neo-Nazis are on the march in Greece. The Catalans are eyeing an exit from Spain. Italy’s democracy has taken a timeout in favor of a technocracy that may soon be replaced by who knows what. Britain could, one way or another, be stumbling towards some sort of end to its unhappy European marriage. And there are plenty more melodramas to choose from.

Where there is Europe, there are euroskeptics. They are a motley crew, ranging from Britain’s neo-Thatcherite UKIP, to the Dutch Koran-bashers of Geert Wilders’s Freedom party, to the postmodern leftists of Beppe Grillo’s 5-Star Movement in Italy, to some groups to the east about whom​—​Soini rolls his eyes​—​the less said the better, and the list doesn’t end there.

Soini’s party, in time-honored populist style, draws on elements of left and right. In a nod to my Englishness, Soini describes his supporters as “working-class Tories.” Yes and no, I’d say. The PS, he explains, is for the workers (“but without socialism”) and for small businesses (“they create the jobs”). Like its counterparts elsewhere in Europe, it draws on the support of older folk and, in return, supports their right to a decent pension. The PS may not, strictly speaking, be socialist, but its 2011 program checked most of the boxes of the traditional Nordic welfare state, including high taxation as a moral good. The Tea Party it is not.

Soini himself is a Roman Catholic convert, exotic for Lutheran Finland. His opposition to abortion is, he admits, a minority view within his own party, but the PS is socially conservative, sometimes abrasively so. Like many euroskeptic parties, it is immigration-skeptic too, occasionally harshly so. When I ask him about this insult or that slur, he replies that a party should not be blamed for everything that one of its members might have said or done. That’s a stock response. What was not was his honest admission that not all his elected representatives are ready for prime time. Some, he sighs, are “stupid” or, he adds more kindly, “semi-stupid.” In a party that has risen so far so fast, that’s not surprising, but, that said, there is undoubtedly a harder edge to Soini’s lot than you’ll find with UKIP’s merry pranksters.

That the success of the PS and its kin elsewhere is due to the overreach of a project​—​an ever more deeply integrated Europe run by a small transnational elite​—​designed to head off such unruly expressions of populism is an irony to appreciate, if not always to savor. That it has happened in Finland only adds to its piquancy. Since joining the EU in 1995, Finland had always been a model pupil, diligent and thoroughly communautaire. Unlike Denmark, and despite initial considerable skepticism on the part of its population (in 1996 fewer than 30 percent of voters supported the idea of a single currency), Finland never negotiated an opt-out from its obligation to sign up for the euro, nor, like Sweden, did it simply grab one. The Swedes and the Danes then rejected the single currency in referenda, an opportunity never offered to the Finns. Eager to please the membership committee of a club they were desperately keen to join, Finland’s politicians were never going to risk allowing their electorate to second-guess the goal of monetary union.

For there was something else at work in Helsinki: the thought of a large and still troubling neighbor. Every step Finland took deeper into its new “European” identity, even the adoption of the EU’s funny money, was a step away from Muscovy. And it is not only the Finns who feel that way. Anxiety over the bully next door does much to explain the increasingly egregious Europhile posturing​—​plus royaliste que le roi​—​by some members of Poland’s political class, and, more poignantly, the reason given by the Estonian prime minister for signing his frugal, well-run country up for the madhouse math of the European Stability Mechanism: “Our objective,” he said, “is to never again be left alone.”

These are sentiments that Soini evidently understands. He shows me a photograph of his daughter standing on the apparently unguarded Finnish side of a stretch of the Russo-Finnish border that runs through the forests to the east. He reminds me​—​with a smile​—​that the U.K. did not exactly rush to Finland’s assistance when the Soviets invaded in 1939. I suspect he is not convinced that, if it ever really came down to it, Brussels’s umbrella would amount to much either. Finland must look after itself.

The still widespread idea that Finland needs Brussels to anchor it in the West is not one that the Finns party shares. It is opposed not only to Finland’s participation in the bailouts, but also to the euro itself (if a tad cagey about what to do about it). Most iconoclastically, the PS would prefer to see today’s EU replaced by a free trade area somewhat akin to the “common market” that gullible Britons believed they were joining in 1973. Within that looser association, Soini mentions there could be room for closer regional cooperation where it made sense, with the other Nordic nations, of course, and the Balts, say, and the Poles and maybe the Brits, too. And the Germans? “No, they would want to bring France with them.”

For now this is just talk. A large majority of Finns want to remain in the EU, and most still prefer to hang on to the euro. The bailouts of the eurozone’s weak sisters are a different matter. They are opposed by well over half of all voters.

It was voter anger over the bailouts that propelled the PS into the big leagues, but the party will struggle to take the championship. In the 2011 general election, it came in third with 19.1 percent of the vote, nearly five times the tally of four years before, but it was a triumph it failed to repeat in the presidential elections in early 2012: Soini (with 9.4 percent) was eliminated in the first round. In October’s municipal elections, the party won 12.3 percent of the vote, a result that may understate its real level of support but was nevertheless a disappointment when measured against the glory days of 2011.

The Finns party may have done its work too well. The two established parties most vulnerable to Soini’s appeal to rural and working-class voters have taken a markedly euroskeptic turn, not least the Social Democrats, from whose ranks the country’s finance minister is drawn. As a result, Finland has become an increasingly awkward member of the eurozone’s glum rescue party. The country insisted that its contribution to the second Greek bailout finalized in early 2012 be backed by collateral. And so (partially) it was, somewhat secretively and somewhat complicatedly, but good enough to allow the Finnish government to offer some reassurance to its restless electorate, a feat it essentially repeated for July’s Spanish bank bailout. Soini clearly remains skeptical about how valuable some of this collateral might eventually prove to be, joking that it really consisted of “stuffed penguins.” But whatever the role that Antarctic wildfowl may play in the efforts to protect the country’s finances, there is no doubt that, where it can, Finland is acting as a brake of sorts on the pace of largesse.

Yet still the ratchet turns. The aggressive actions of the European Central Bank have relieved some of the pressure on the eurozone for now, and Greece has just weathered its latest storm, but the crisis​—​not over by far​—​will continue to fuel demands for the cash and closer integration that the euro’s survival may require. That’ll be bad news for Finland’s finances and a disaster for its democracy, but when it comes down to the wire, the track record of its government​—​which includes just about everybody other than the PS​—​would suggest that it will be unlikely to say no.

The reasons for that might be respectable​—​unwillingness to risk the cost and the chaos that a euro collapse might involve​—​and they might be based on a genuinely idealistic, if misguided, belief in the virtues of deeper European integration, or perhaps even on humility: Is it really for little Finland to put an end to such a grand dream? Then again, less attractive reasoning could come into play. The groupthink of Brussels has a curiously powerful allure, as does the siren whistle of its generous gravy train, and the pleasures, as Soini, puts it, of the (ministerial) Audi.

Soini, who spent time in the belly of the beast as a member of the European parliament and didn’t like what he saw (he tells me a few tales of expense accounts), is not optimistic that Finland will bring this long farce to a close. On the other hand, this is the same Soini who, channeling Churchill, delighted the crowd at UKIP’s 2012 conference with his declaration that “we will never surrender.” Somehow I don’t think that he will.

Happy Warriors

The Weekly Standard, October 15, 2012 

Nigel Farage, UKIP Conference, Birmingham, September 2012   ©  Andrew Stuttaford

For people once described by David Cameron as “fruitcakes and loonies and closet racists, mostly” (I’ve always savored that sly “mostly”), the members of UKIP—the euroskeptic United Kingdom Independence Party—gathered in Birmingham last month for their annual conference were a bright, friendly, and refreshingly normal bunch.

They were also surprisingly upbeat. The euro—that Freddy Krueger of currencies—remains as indestructible as it is destructive, and José Manuel Barroso, the president of the European Commission, is openly using the once-taboo F-word, pressing for transformation of the EU into a “federation of nation-states.” But never mind all that, the cheerfully determined folk at the conference reckoned that events were moving their way. UKIP, said its leader, the indispensable, charismatic, and hugely entertaining Nigel Farage, is “a party in a very good mood.”

Indeed it is, and why not? Nearly two decades after its founding in 1993, UKIP has come a very long way, despite bouts of internecine strife, a series of scandals, serial eccentricity, and a collection of electoral disasters that would have made even Harold Stassen pause. As Farage explained to the conference, things had been a “bit shambolic” in the past, a confession that was no revelation.

Thanks to the EU, and in more ways than one, this dismal state of affairs has been changing. The relentless intrusions of Brussels into everyday British life have sustained a market for UKIP’s ideas in a nation that was never europhile to start with. And one shocking continental innovatio—proportional representation—has given UKIP a position unimaginable under Britain’s first-past-the-post voting system.

The mathematics of first-past-the-post are brutal for upstart political parties, except in areas where they can find concentrated support such as that enjoyed by nationalists in Scotland and Wales. The Liberal Democrats took 23 percent of the vote in the 2010 election, but only 57 seats in the 650-member House of Commons. UKIP fared even worse, winning 3 percent of the popular vote and taking no seats at all.

Such results feed upon themselves. The electorate shies away from casting votes that will be wasted—or worse. Much of UKIP’s support comes from formerly die-hard Tories, and many more of that growing tribe would follow their lead were it not for their (justifiable) fear of splitting the right-wing vote and letting the left slip in through the middle. As it is, defections to UKIP probably cost the Conservatives some 20 seats—and an absolute majority—in the 2010 election. The Tories thus ended up in a coalition government with the euromaniacal Liberal Democrats, an irony lost on few and a strong disincentive for many potential UKIP voters to slip the Tory leash. And UKIP hasn’t done much better in local elections. It has just a handful of councilors and supreme power only in the Cambridgeshire town of Ramsey (population 6,000).

Thanks to proportional representation, worries about wasted or counter-productive votes have not been such an issue in elections to the EU’s Potemkin parliament. The few concerns have been further diluted by the suspicion—not quite as justified as in the past—that the world’s only commuting legislature (as a result of some ancient compromise, it sits in both Brussels and Strasbourg) counts for very little. UKIP celebrated the election of its first three members of the European parliament in 1999. Five years later, UKIP came third with 16.1 percent of the vote and 12 MEPs. In 2009 it overtook the governing Labour party, grabbing 16.5 percent of the poll and a haul of 13 seats out of a British total of 72. UKIP’s leadership is convinced the party has a good chance of coming out on top in the 2014 EU elections.

The very nature of a European election makes it an obvious vehicle for a protest against the Brussels oligarchy. That fact, combined with a typically low turnout (in 2009 an unimpressive 34 percent of the British electorate), means that those percentages overstate UKIP’s real backing. Nevertheless the prospect of UKIP topping the euro-poll in 2014—and the momentum that would come with it—must worry David Cameron, facing a national election the following year.

UKIP already stands at some 7-10 percent in national opinion polls, something that cannot just be put down to midterm disillusion with the Tories. There is a wide and growing disconnect between the pedantically centrist, tiresomely PC prime minister and a good number of his party’s natural supporters. Many of these are euroskeptic, and so this breach is only worsened by Cameron’s refusal to respond with anything other than curiously arrogant disdain to mounting British disgust with an EU that displays an ambition only exceeded—hanks to the flailing euro—by its troubles. One recent poll showed almost half of all Britons wanted out of the EU, while only under a third preferred to stay in. Making matters worse still for Cameron, however unfairly, is the U.K.’s failure to emerge from the economic mess his government inherited. Put all these circumstances together and UKIP’s allure is not hard to understand. Nor is the fact that the party’s appeal is reinforced by its plague-on-all-your-houses outsider status.

And that’s no act: The Birmingham conference was a long way in thinking and in feel from Britain’s political establishment. From the endearingly self-deprecatory remarks that accompanied so many speeches, to the occasional organizational glitches, to the misfiring microphone at the conference’s Friday night “gala dinner” (tickets cost all of $55), this was a gathering that featured little of the bombast and none the slickness of the larger parties’ shindigs. The auction that accompanied the gala included some cheaper items—tea bags in a fancy box, a woven silk portrait of the queen, and a painting that would have been unforgivable even had the artist been blind—that only underlined the distance between UKIP’s grassroots essence and the political establishment some UKIP members refer to as the Lib-Lab-Con.

At a desk near the entrance to the conference, some volunteers—including Mrs. Farage (a German, as it happens)—could be spotted selling Ukitsch: umbrellas, pens, mugs (“The EU is NOT my cup of tea”), tote bags (“The EU is NOT my bag”). Then there was the moment when Mr. Farage—no velvet ropes here—started hawking “Belgian damp rags” to a delighted crowd at five pounds each. (Full disclosure: I bought two.)

Autographed by Farage, these, uh, striking kitchen towels are decorated with the dispiriting features of Herman Van Rompuy, the president of the EU’s European Council. They are an allusion to the one event, more than any other, that made Farage the YouTube star that he is today, a status he cemented with a series of speeches that did much to ensure his recognition by Der Spiegel as the “seventh most dangerous politician” in Europe, no small honor. In 2010 Farage, an MEP since 1999, greeted Van Rompuy—world famous in Belgium, if nowhere else—to the European parliament shortly after the former Belgian prime minister had been appointed the quasi-head of the EU’s quasi-state. After asking who Van Rompuy was, and how he had been picked for this job, Farage compared the new potentate’s charisma to that of a “damp rag” and his appearance to that of “a low-grade bank clerk” (Farage apologized later to bank clerks). It was a virtuoso, deftly theatrical performance, but, as so often with Farage, there was a knife concealed within the knockabout. After the laughs there was this, delivered more quietly:

I sense though that you are competent and capable and dangerous and I have no doubt that it is your intention to be the quiet assassin of European democracy and of the European nation-states.

This display of unruly parliamentary vigor was too much for the EU’s mausoleum of democracy. Farage was fined $4,400 for his lèse-Rompuy, not a bad price for the publicity it brought.

Farage, 48, a smoker (despite a bout of cancer in his 20s) who enjoys a drink or two, is well aware of his naughty, none-of-the-above appeal. The Belgian damp rags were also decorated with a small, impish photograph of UKIP’s leader roaring with bad-boy laughter. UKIP’s anti-establishment message was a familiar refrain from the conference floor. The term “political class” was a frequent punch line, repeated with more resignation than anger, the exasperated lament of passengers who have found themselves on a peculiarly poorly run vessel but are still debating how violent the mutiny should be.

One thing that does seem certain, however, is that the Conservative party is in danger of being shoved over the side. It’s not just the EU, or the economy, or the drift to a witless center, although it is all those things. There’s something else. UKIP’s activists are a smart lot, and they understand but do not appreciate the contempt in which they have for too long been held by Cameron’s metropolitan clique. There’s recently been talk of some sort of UKIP-Conservative nonaggression pact for the 2015 general election. In his keynote speech, Farage appeared to leave a door slightly ajar “to consider it,” but only in exchange for a promise “written in blood” of an in/out referendum on the EU. A later speaker wanted something else: an apology. The applause that followed ought to be a reminder to Cameron to be careful in the future about whom he chooses to demonize.

As always in Britain, resentment comes wrapped in the country’s class sensitivities. The accents at the conference were provincial. Toffs were scarce on the ground. As I listened to the talk, time went into reverse, to Conservative constituency meetings of 30 years ago. These were Thatcher’s people; many of them had come of age under the Iron Lady’s reign. They were no-nonsense, often self-employed, and not the sort invited to the dinner parties that had dreamt up the rainbow coalition of politically correct gestures that, in the end, failed to carry Cameron to clear victory in 2010 against one of the most incompetent governments in British history.

To date the border between UKIP and the Conservative party has been ill-defined and rarely policed. That may be changing. If UKIP is to anchor itself at home as well as in the European parliament—essential if it is to increase its clout—it cannot just be about Brussels (the conference’s slogan was “Beyond the EU”). That will mean staking out a position more clearly distinct from the Tories than hitherto. Farage (who quit the Conservative party in 1992 over the EU’s Maastricht Treaty) has been successful in excluding racists and the jackbooted from his party, and describes himself as libertarian. But it is easy to see that the search for vote—particularly from what Farage terms “patriotic old Labour”—may be easing the party in the direction of the harder-edged, bigger-spending populism of euroskeptic parties on the continent, such as the Finns party (also known as the True Finns) and the Danish People’s party.

That could cause trouble in time, but for now Brussels remains the bogeyman around which UKIP can rally, a piñata for all, bashed in Birmingham by Farage in top form, clever, incisive, and witty. Later, “with greetings from the eurozone,” came Timo Soini (Der Spiegel’s “fifth most dangerous”), the leader of the Finns party and the politician responsible for forcing the previously supine Helsinki establishment to do something to protect its taxpayers from the ravages of a dysfunctional monetary union. Soini was hammer to Farage’s saber, but he was amusing and touching, too—proud of his country but also of de Gaulle’s grand vision of a Europe des Patries. If this conference was a celebration of xenophobia it was taking a very strange form. The single currency itself was, of course, singled out for rough treatment and rougher prophecies, not least from the distinguished City of London economist (and former Treasury adviser), UKIP co-belligerent Roger Bootle: “When did things go wrong with the euro? Right at the beginning.”

That was the fun stuff. It’s when discussing the next stage in this saga that the usually ebullient Farage began to look a little anxious. He has long been skeptical, for good reason, about the terms of any referendum that Cameron might offer the British electorate. His new concern is that Barroso’s attempt to push for federation will provide an extremely convenient escape hatch for Cameron, by providing him the opportunity to offer the British to vote on joining a closer union or remaining “as is.” The problem with that choice is that, unless the position of those EU member states who choose to remain outside the deeper union is fundamentally renegotiated, “as is” is not good enough. It might seem attractive to a country easily bored by the technical complexity of the EU debate, but Britain would remain subject, in practice, to the heavy burden of EU regulation, not to mention the exorbitant costs, direct and indirect, of membership. In short, it would be a very limited victory. The electorate’s fear of the unknown will make an in/out referendum a risky proposition for UKIP and its sympathizers, whatever the current opinion polls may predict, but for now it remains the last best hope.

Making matters worse is the gradual approach of 2015 and the likely election of a europhile Labour government and, with it, the closing of the exit door, quite possibly, forever.

And writing those words makes me think of a scene in the final Lord of the Rings film. As Gimli, the martial dwarf, contemplates the perils ahead, he turns to his companions, and remarks, “Certain death. Small chance of success. What are we waiting for?” Gimli, I feel, would have been a member of UKIP.

Declarer of Independence

National Review, March 1, 2012 (March 19, 2012 Issue)

He’s a tolerant man, Nigel Farage, a devotee of John Stuart Mill, a cricket-loving happy warrior, an “accidental politician.” The leader of the Euroskeptic United Kingdom Independence party (UKIP), and, since 1999, a member of the EU’s Potemkin parliament, he is standing expectantly at the bar of his local, the George & Dragon (of course) in Downe, a friendly low-ceilinged Kentish pub as English as its name. I’m ordering the beers. There’s a traditional, brewed-by-two-yokels county bitter for him (of course) and for me an industrial, vaguely Teutonic lager, bitte. “Euro-piss, I see.” Mock shock: Live and let live. Later on we share a bottle of good red wine. French.

We met up earlier at a railway station in a spot where the countryside emerges from London’s shadow. As we drove past tall hedgerows and stark winter trees, the late-fortysomething Farage proudly played guide: “I’ve always lived around here.” There’s landscape, history, old graveyards to inspect, English Shinto. Up there (he gestures) are the remnants of the oak where William Wilberforce resolved to launch his great anti-slavery campaign, and over here is the splendid pile where Pitt the Younger once lived. I point out Biggin Hill, an RAF redoubt during the Battle of Britain. Replicas of a Hurricane and a Spitfire stand guard. “They had real ones when I was a boy.”

Farage feels the past in this place. He’s a history buff, a battlefield maven, just finishing reading a book on Allenby of Great War fame. We stopped off at the small town of Westerham to inspect a statue of its most famous son, General Wolfe, conqueror of Quebec. Nearby, a restless-looking Churchill seems ready to leap out off the chair on which his sculptor sat him. The last lion’s last den — Chartwell — is nearby. Then on to the George & Dragon, just past the house of another Farage hero, Charles Darwin: The woods where the great scientist wandered are “just as they were . . . almost.”

But to believe, as many critics like to suggest, that Farage and his party are golf-club xenophobes wanting their country back as it was (. . . almost) is to subscribe to a very partial version (in both senses) of the truth. To be sure, there is a trace of the 19th hole about them; oh, what a horror. And is the idea that the country has gone to the dogs imprinted in UKIP’s DNA? Maybe, but the country has gone to the dogs. Claims of xenophobia, however, are difficult to reconcile with reality, in ways both small (Farage’s second wife is German; their two young children are being brought up to speak the language) and large: UKIP is a defender of de Gaulle’s Europe des patries, fighting the bureaucratic drive to remold the continent into a homogenized administrative unit in which history has been sanitized, tradition reduced to decoration, and difference regulated away.

If there is an era for which Farage is nostalgic, it’s more likely to be the 1980s, a time when big government was in retreat and big opportunity was round the corner. Not the most diligent of students, he skipped university and went straight into the City, London’s financial center, just as Mrs. Thatcher’s reforms were transforming it from an entertainingly seedy, mildly run-down club into today’s chilly international hub. It was “like a gold rush,” as we both recall. And there’s still the hint of an Eighties trading desk about Farage, an engaging, quick-witted risk-taker (a survivor of testicular cancer, he still enjoys his Rothmans) with a taste for a good time that has sometimes got him into trouble. Rick Santorum he’s not. Smart, direct, and impressively fluent, he speaks in paragraphs, punctuated with one-liners: He has a way with words, and he knows it.

If you doubt that, just check out the way he welcomed Herman Van Rompuy to the European Parliament shortly after that discreetly sinister Belgian had taken the EU’s top job at the beginning of 2010. Farage’s speech was brutally iconoclastic, rudely funny, and, in its warning of the threat that this official with “the charisma of a damp rag” posed to European democracy, deadly serious. It created uproar across the EU and made UKIP’s leader a YouTube star. Check it out, and you will see why.

“You’re a bit of actor, aren’t you?”

Farage grins his confession. His only regret — a very English regret — is that he may sometimes appear “too shrill.” In fact he doesn’t, but, endearingly, he insists on explaining that the microphones in the EU parliament’s chamber are set up in a way that makes it difficult for viewers to hear the barracking to which he is, not infrequently, reacting. But if it’s not always possible to make out the jeers, you can, I tell him, occasionally see the faces of his critics twisted into something that looks a lot like hatred.

“Oh, it’s hatred.” He names a couple of names. “They have their dream. It’s their religion. These are dangerous people.” They cannot accept dissent, especially when they know they’ve been rumbled: They just don’t want to be told how anti-democratic they really are. Wouldn’t they be happier if bolshie John Bull just quit the EU? “Some of the Euronuts,” maybe, but not the Merkels and Sarkozys: They’d be too nervous about which country would be next.

But is UKIP the right vehicle to extricate Britain from this mess? Since its founding in 1993 as a party set on taking the country out of the EU, it has woven an unsteady path, marked by scandal, factionalism, sporadic incursions by the far right, PR disasters, leadership crises, damaging outbreaks of eccentricity, and, above all, the pervasive, persistent sense that it was not ready for prime time. This was probably inevitable, and not just because small parties tend to be a lot like that. There was also the matter of UKIP’s great cause.

Euroskepticism was hardly unknown in Britain at the time — particularly amongst Conservatives — but it was house-trained. Withdrawal from the EU was widely considered a step too far even amongst those who loved Brussels least. “Banging on” about Europe (to borrow David Cameron’s notorious phrase from a decade or so later) was portrayed by media and political grandees alike as obsessional, retrograde, and profoundly damaging to the governing Tories’ unity, the last a development that, in a paradox understood by just about everyone, could only help sweep the slavishly Europhile Tony Blair into power. And, it turned out, keep him there.

Smears can be self-fulfilling prophecies: The nascent UKIP attracted more than its fair share of cranks, outsiders, and the hopelessly adrift. And it continued to do so, creating the image of the party to which David Cameron played when, in 2006, he referred to UKIP as a bunch of “fruitcakes and loonies and closet racists, mostly.” The feigned reasonability of that “mostly” was a clever touch.

Farage is no fan of Cameron. Is the prime minister a Christian Democrat on Rhineland lines? Not really. “Dave” (“an affable chap,” he adds, kindly) is more of a social democrat, a paternalist, a statist, and he’s not going to do much about Brussels: nothing that counts, anyway. Farage, a staunch Thatcherite back in the day, doesn’t have much time for the way in which the Conservative party has evolved. To read what UKIP would stand for, at least in theory (once Britain was out of the EU), is to be presented with an attractive mix of the hard-nosed and the libertarian, including deregulation, flat taxes, strict immigration controls, proper schools, tough policing, an aversion to multiculturalism, and a reversal of the kamikaze greenery of the Cameron years. Compared with the Tories, what’s not to like?

The problem is that Britain’s “first past the post” electoral system guarantees that, in most elections, a vote for UKIP is wasted — or worse. It’s “difficult,” Farage admits, an understatement. In the 2010 general election, UKIP scored some 3 percent of the vote, but took no seats, and, by nibbling away at Tory support, cost the Conservatives an absolute majority, thus (more or less) forcing them into coalition with the Eurofanatic Liberal Democrats. UKIP hoped that the Lib Dems would use their new position to push for the adoption of a voting system friendlier to small parties. They did, but they failed: A switch to the Alternative Vote was rejected in a referendum in May 2011.

Farage still wants electoral reform (AV+, since you asked). A glance at Britain’s elections for the European parliament (where a type of proportional representation is used) in 2009 explains why. Led by Farage since 2006, UKIP came in second (slightly ahead of Labour) with 16.5 percent of the vote and, like Labour, won 13 seats out of the UK’s total of 72. Even allowing for the low turnout and the fact that European elections are an excellent opportunity for Britons to register a protest against the EU, the result was a triumph.

Stymied at home, however, by the uncooperative electoral system, UKIP continues to struggle domestically, even as it stands at about 6 percent in the polls, not so far behind the Liberal Democrats. But Farage is determined, stubborn, and resilient (he has survived a plane crash as well as cancer). He’s not giving up. And he’s going to do it his way. Deals with the Conservatives, such as (one suggestion) an agreement not to challenge the party’s many genuinely Euroskeptic MPs, seem out of the question for now. Farage clearly wants UKIP to be seen as more than a Tory offshoot (he takes pains to tell me that its membership also includes “patriotic old Labour and classical liberals”). Those Euroskeptic Tory MPs? Useful camouflage for a Conservative party unserious about the only thing that really counts: prising Brussels out of Britain. “Unless we sort this out, we can’t do the rest.” The financial cost of EU membership is enormous (in direct payments alone, a net £10.3 billion in 2010, UKIP estimates). The democratic toll is still higher: About half of all “British” laws are now passed at the EU level. True enough, bad enough, but by splitting the right-of-center vote, Farage risks helping the Europhile left, which is always pressing to make matters even worse.

So there he stands athwart a political conundrum, Captain Sparrow at the head of UKIP’s motley crew, but something of a one-man band too, harrying the Eurocrats, embarrassing Britain’s establishment, deftly playing new media and old, deftly playing politics, new style and old. He crisscrosses the country, addressing meetings (he truly is a terrific speaker), talking to schools, retail stuff, good stuff. He’d like UKIP to take first place in the next European elections (2014), but what Farage, the gambler, wants most is a referendum — in or out — a high-stakes, binary game (a vote, however reluctant, to remain in the EU is every Euroskeptic’s nightmare). It would bypass that domestic impasse. And he believes it is winnable: His much-disdained UKIP has, “like Stalin’s [Red Army] punishment battalions, softened the ground up.”

The polls suggest that Farage might be right, but he understands that fear of what lies outside (possibly exaggerated further, and ironically, by the instability that the battered euro is leaving in its wake) could make voters pause. To calm that, he’s looking for business support to rally behind his idea of a country that sees its future in a world far wider, and freer, than the EU’s inward-looking, closed, and highly regulated customs union. That’s a vision that ought to be made all the more sellable to clearer-headed voters by the damage that the euro-zone crisis has done to the whole notion of Brussels’s “ever closer union.” And that crisis is unlikely to end soon or well. Farage doesn’t know what’s coming next. If he did, he’d be “in the betting shop.” He guesses that Greece will exit sometime in 2012, followed by Portugal, and believes that the “ultimate question” is France. But he’s not waiting to find out. To him, the issue is this: If Britain does not quit now, then when? Remaining in the EU is death “by a thousand cuts.”

I ask Farage whether he’d like Pitt the Younger’s old job. No thanks, he’s not interested in rank. He’d rather be remembered like a Wilberforce, for having changed things for the better.

Put another way, he will damn the torpedoes and steam on ahead.

Right but Repulsive

Peter Oborne and Frances Weaver: Guilty Men

The Weekly Standard, October 31, 2011

A doctor ignored by a smoker won’t celebrate if lung cancer strikes. Britain’s euroskeptics are generally too worried about the consequences of the Eurozone’s thoroughly predictable crisis to submit to the temptations of I told you so.

Well, most of them are. The United Kingdom may be outside the Eurozone, but some British Banquos have managed to crash its beggar’s banquet nonetheless. One, Foreign Secretary William Hague, has compared the currency union to “a burning building with no exits.” He can be forgiven his bluntness. As Tory leader, he had said the same and much more besides when that ill-fated building was still under construction. The reward for his prescience was to have his words used against him as part of a vicious and deceptive campaign that failed in its specific objective, yet succeeded in a wider task: contributing to a political and cultural climate that doomed Hague to vilification and defeat in the 2001 general election, and Britain to years more of Tony Blair.

That campaign—to persuade Britons to adopt the euro—has now been retrieved from the memory hole and made the subject of Guilty Men (Centre for Policy Studies), a brutal, brilliant new pamphlet by Frances Weaver, a freelance writer and researcher, and Peter Oborne, the Daily Telegraph’s chief political commentator. The title is provocation and insult. Published in 1940, the original Guilty Men was a savage, if not always accurate, attack on British politicians of the appeasement era. To revive its name was to hurl down a gauntlet.

Guilty Men should be seen as the third in an Oborne trilogy that began with The Rise of Political Lying (2005). That volume and The Triumph of the Political Class (2007) are two of the finest books on British politics in recent years. Their titles speak for themselves, and their message ought to resonate far beyond Britain. The same is true of Guilty Men. Within its covers you will find the description of an elite unimpressed by its homeland, enthralled by transnationalism, seduced by the main chance, and buttressed by a mistaken conventional wisdom that it chose to defend by any means possible. None of this, of course, could ever happen here.

Like all the best thrillers, Guilty Men begins with a dastardly foreign plot. In its introduction, Peter Jay, a distinguished journalist and a former British ambassador to the United States, describes a lunch in Paris he attended as a 15-year-old in 1952. The guest of honor was the French diplomat Jean Monnet, the man who launched what eventually became the European Union. Dismayed by the spectacle of a France now eclipsed by the United States and Soviet Union, Monnet apparently explained that the only way that la gloire could return to France was within a Greater Europe. But this would have to be a superpower created gradually and by indirection, “by zig and by zag,” until, as Jay puts it, “the walls of old-fashioned national sentiment collapsed in favor of a new focus of national unity, Europe itself.”

In the nearly 60 years that have followed, there has been plenty of zig, and plenty of zag, and rather too much European Union, but the United States of Europe has yet to emerge. And as for “the dimension of empire” that EU Commission president José Manuel Barroso claimed to detect within Brussels’s realm back in 2007, well. . . .

Critically, there is, to borrow the unkind observation of Václav Klaus, the Czech Republic’s splendidly Thatcherite president, “no European demos—and no European nation.” There are, of course, the institutions—the parliament, the Commission, and so on—and the pretensions and the massive regulatory overreach. There’s a pretty flag and, via Beethoven and Rhodesia, a nice enough anthem, but that’s about it. To the extent that there is any European patriotism beyond the expensively furnished lairs of the upscale and, let’s concede the point, some genuine enthusiasm for Europe’s Ryder Cup golf team, it finds its most powerful expression in, significantly, something negative—distaste for the United States. These are too-flimsy foundations on which to build a challenge to the world’s colossi.

Thus it was not some atavistic dream of empire that persuaded so many of Britain’s best and brightest to rally behind the campaign to sign their country up for a shoddily constructed currency that was, whatever Paul Volcker (oh yes) might have said, clearly ill-suited to the U.K. economy. For some, career was the motive, and not only in an obvious way. Brussels can pay well, directly and indirectly, but, more than that, opposition to the euro had been cleverly smeared as a badge of the bizarre, an ornament to no résumé worth having.

The sharply told tale of how the opponents of the Eurozone’s madhouse money came to be regarded as nuts takes up some of the most interesting sections of Guilty Men, but it’s worth pausing to note how the structure of Britain’s politics and media makes it easier to manipulate public opinion there than in the United States. Power is much more centralized. There are fewer movers and shakers who need to be convinced. There are no awkward states to cajole. The press is ideologically diverse, but television and radio matter far more, and in broadcast the loudest voice is that of the officially nonpartisan, taxpayer-funded BBC, a megaphone for the pieties and prejudices of the soft left. There is no meaningful equivalent to Fox News or America’s gung-ho Genghis talk radio to bite back. And at the time when the euro wars were at their most intense, the blogosphere was still being born, and Twitter had yet to hatch.

The BBC had therefore an immense advantage, and it abused it. In the course of one nine-week period in 2000 on BBC Radio 4’s influential Today program, Oborne and Weaver record, “the case for the euro was represented by twice as many [speakers], interviews, and soundbites [as] the case against.” That’s not the end of it. A controversy can be defined by the way that it is framed by the media. When euroskeptics were heard on the BBC, it was often in the context of hugely exaggerated reports of splits within Conservative ranks over the single currency. A divided party is electoral poison, and the splits became the story. The argument against abandoning the pound was shelved for another day.

Word games of a type all too familiar from America’s mainstream media were deployed (it was euroskeptics who were the “hardliners”). Scare stories of the terrible fate that awaited Britain outside the Eurozone made headlines, inconvenient statistics that cast doubt upon them were buried. If you think that sounds a lot like much of the American media’s treatment of the global warming debate, you’re correct.

The BBC was not the only prominent media institution to play these tricks. The Financial Times is widely perceived as authoritative, serious, informed, the voice of British business, the house journal of the City. It is meant to be something more than a mere newspaper. Oborne and Weaver demonstrate how, when it came to the euro, it was very much less. Not all its writers played along, but too often the Financial Times resorted to a camouflaged advocacy journalism that may even, ironically, have contributed to the Eurozone’s present mess. How many bankers will have read the paper’s ecstatic accounts of the euro’s progress and felt just that much better about lending to Greece, Ireland, or Portugal? What could go wrong? On May 26, 2008, the FT ran a leading article with a headline that included these words: “Europe’s currency union has been a remarkable success.” Remarkable indeed. Less than two years later the first Greek bailout was under way.

With such purportedly fair-minded grandees lending weight to the cause of the euro, and the Tories burdened by the irrational popular loathing that had swept them out of office, the vitriol of more openly partisan journalists came to be treated by many as something approaching gospel. In its viciousness their work anticipated the high-minded nastiness seen in the coverage of the Tea Party a decade or so later. Weaver and Oborne have plenty of examples showing just how low reputedly respectable detractors of “euroskeptic pus” could stoop. The euroskeptics were a “menagerie of has-beens, never-have-beens, and loony tunes.” They were “a sect” of “intellectual violence . . . [stoking] the phobic fire.” They were keen on “Hun-bashing,” yet had something to do with the Latvian SS. They were liars, they were hatemongers. They were a “paradigm of menace and defeat,” “extremist,” “dogmatic,” and “hysterical.” Surely someone somewhere must have said that they were “bitter.” They were “maniacs.” Their opponents were “sane,” a loaded adjective frequently abused in American polemics too.

This dark mood music was deftly conducted by Prime Minister Blair and an entourage skilled in the blackest arts of politics. What was there to lose? An economic illiterate, Blair didn’t grasp how destructive dumping the pound could be, but as an iconoclast he appreciated the break with the past. And campaigning for the euro could bring its own rewards. The Conservatives’ opposition to a change supported by some of the country’s smartest could be used to reinforce the image of the know-nothing Tories, out of touch and not even “sane.” The assault was relentless: Addressing the Labour party conference in 1999, Blair launched into an attack upon the “forces of conservatism,” a faintly totalitarian diatribe that implicitly linked the jailers of Nelson Mandela to the euroskeptic threat. The idea was to push the electorate’s perception of the Tories to a point where the Conservatives would be viewed as oddballs who deserved to be driven out of parliament and, indeed, polite society altogether: Under former Conservative prime minister John Major, explained Blair, “it was weak, weak, weak. Under William Hague, it’s weird, weird, weird. Far right, far out. . . . The more useless they get, the more extreme they get.”

Naturally, a place in the respectability room would be found for those “sane” Conservatives who would sign up for the “cross-party” crusade for the euro. Quite a few did just that.

Polite society paid attention. Conventional wisdom builds upon itself, especially when self-interest is greasing the way. It wasn’t just individuals on the make who discovered their faith in currency union; it was companies too, dancing the corporatist waltz. Obama’s GE would understand. Firmly in the pocket of big business interests confident of their ability to play the EU game, the influential Confederation of British Industry (CBI) threw itself behind the campaign, lending it further credibility and then, less helpfully, incredibility. The CBI’s polling data showed that 84 percent of British business supported the euro. Once this distinctly Soviet result was revealed (thanks to the work of yet another determined euroskeptic “crank”) to have been arrived at by distinctly Soviet math, the pushback slowly began. Within a few years the CBI found itself (in the words of one well-known journalist) “tugged towards the new extremism and europhobia.” In other words, it adopted a neutral stance on the euro.

But don’t see this saga as evidence of some giant conspiracy. There were a few plotters to be sure, notably in the Labour party and, doubtless, Brussels, but for the most part the surge of support for the euro among the U.K.’s chattering classes was the result of something more insidious and less planned: This was a scheme they simply felt to be right. For many British intellectuals, the cultured Europe of their vacations and their imaginations has long been a finer place than their grubby, greedy, and in all senses insular homeland. The weather is nicer, the food is better, and the ambience is both pleasingly picturesque and refreshingly sophisticated. Most alluring of all, Continentals treat the intelligentsia with a respect rarely to be found in unruly, ill-read Blighty.

To such folk, confident in the inadequacies of what they prefer to describe as their midsized nation (then perhaps the fifth-largest economy in the world, with nukes to boot, but let that pass), the EU was a safe haven that only the mad or the bad would disdain. The fact that it had evolved, not into the superpower of Peter Jay’s fears but into the vaguely utopian, proudly progressive post-national technocracy that was Monnet’s greater vision, only added to its appeal. If signing up for the euro was the price of admission to the EU’s inner circle, why would any civilized, “sane” individual want to object? And who knew anyone who had?

There was a lady called Pauline Kael who once asked a question much like that.

In the end, the thin red line held, maintained by politicians of integrity (and, yes, sometimes eccentricity), the caution of British voters, and, crucially, the venom of Gordon Brown, the finance minister, too jealous of the upstart Blair to allow him to take the U.K. into the Eurozone. Britannia stayed out, and has weathered the current economic storms far better than she could have done with the euro around her neck. Signing up for the single currency will be off the agenda for quite a while.

A happy ending then? No, it’s more a “to be continued.” As Weaver and Oborne understand, the opprobrium heaped on the Conservative party for being, as it turned out, right about the euro helped derail the careers of three Tory leaders and paved the way for “modernizers” such as Prime Minister David Cameron, determined to avoid “banging on about Europe” at a time when that’s just what he needs to be doing. The increasingly desperate attempts to resolve the Eurozone crisis are likely to include proposals to change the EU’s legal framework in ways that will require the approval of all member-states. That will be a good moment (if Cameron can be persuaded to seize it) for the U.K. to finally play hardball with its European partners over the repatriation of powers that should never have been transferred to Brussels in the first place. Britain’s euro-claque will noisily object. A reminder to the rest of the country of just how hard that still largely unapologetic claque worked to shove Britain into the Eurozone’s abyss is just what such a debate could use. And that’s what Guilty Men is designed to provide.

Oborne and Weaver give plenty of indications of how much it will be needed. One of the guilty, former EU commissioner Lord Patten, chairs the BBC’s governing body. His vice chairwoman, Diane Coyle, is a lady once deeply concerned about the “gut anti-Europeanism and Little Englandism” of the pound’s “elderly” defenders. This dismal duo will find little in the Beeb’s current EU coverage to disturb them. The Financial Times is now edited by its former Brussels chief, another cheerleader for currency union. He is in charge of a newspaper that appears sadder these days, if not much wiser. Waiting, perhaps, for a fresh euro-dawn, former CBI boss Adair Turner is currently using another collective mania to hobble the British economy. He’s chairman of Britain’s Committee on Climate Change, a perch from which he can admire similar efforts by Britain’s destructively green energy minister, Liberal Democrat Chris Huhne, a europhile who has lost none of his vim. And then there’s Tony Blair, continuing to pontificate to anyone who will pay attention or, at least, pay. He’s not the only member of the Labour party who still believes that Britain should sign up for the single currency—when the time is right, of course.

Zig and zag.

Tough Times in EUtopia

The Weekly Standard, March 30, 2009

Sometimes truth just has to speak to powerlessness. Addressing the EU's sham parliament in mid-February, the Czech Republic's refreshingly tactless and refreshingly Thatcherite president, Václav Klaus, raised the awkward topic of what the EU euphemistically refers to as its "democratic deficit" and told MEPs that they were part of this problem, not its solution:

 "Since there is no European demos-and no European nation-this defect cannot be solved by strengthening the role of the European parliament either. This would, on the contrary, make the problem worse and lead to an even greater alienation between the citizens of the European countries and Union institutions."

Klaus's listeners were predictably outraged. They ought to have been terrified. With the EU economies falling apart at an unprecedented pace, there is nothing that these toy-town parliamentarians can do-except get out of the way.

The EU's insultingly undemocratic nature is not news (indeed, it is part of its rationale), but it remains the key to grasping how those who run the EU have, for better and worse, had so much success in ramming their agenda through. Not having to bother too much about national electorates has been a great boon to Brussels. As the continent's economies slide ever deeper into the mire, however, that once handy feature could end up crashing the entire system.

An economic debacle on the current scale is going to shake any political structure, however securely moored, but the EU's persistent recourse to a form of soft authoritarianism has left it peculiarly ill suited to weather the storm to come. After decades of routinely bypassing its voters the union may well no longer have what it takes to secure their approval for the harsh medicine and painful sacrifices necessary to bring the EU through this ordeal in one piece. After all, it can barely even get them to vote: Turnout for the most recent (2004) elections for the EU parliament sank to a record low of 45.5 percent. Admittedly that total was dragged down by massively uninterested Eastern Europeans (only 16.7 percent of Slovaks voted and 20.4 percent of Poles), but it was sparse almost everywhere: Only 39 percent of Brits showed up, about the same percentage as made it to the voting booth in the Netherlands, one of the EU's founding nations.

As the history of the union's occasional, grudgingly granted referenda-a sorry saga of chicanery, rejection and do-overs-reminds us, appeals to the supposed solidarity of that imaginary European demos have never really worked. And that was in the good times. They surely won't do the trick now, nor will arguments based on the logic of a free market ideology widely, if inaccurately, said to have failed. Yet to steer a course through what may become hideously hard times without much in the way of popular consent threatens to push already alienated electorates in the direction of the extremist politics of left or right.

The story of this slump is too familiar to need repeating here, but it is worth pausing to consider how the introduction of the euro has left the EU marooned on a circle of economic hell all of its own making. Imposed on most of the European heartland by a characteristic combination of bullying, bribery, conclave, and legerdemain, the single currency was put in place with as little regard for the real world as for the ballot box. To squeeze a wide range of vastly divergent economies (and to do so with few safety nets) into one monetary system made little sense except when understood as a matter of politics, not economics. But economics has a nasty habit of biting back.

Up until the eruption of the present crisis, the European Central Bank's interest rate policy primarily reflected the needs of France and Germany, Euroland's largest economies. This left rates "too" low for naturally faster growing countries like Ireland and Spain, which in turn inflated unsustainable housing bubbles. These have now burst-in Ireland's case taking much of the banking system down with it. On some forecasts Irish GDP may shrink by 10 percent between 2008 and 2010, a dismal number that could eventually prove too optimistic. Gloomsters joke bleakly that the difference between Ireland and Iceland is six months and one consonant. Spain meanwhile now boasts an official (in other words, understated) unemployment rate of 14 percent. Over 600,000 migrant workers have been laid off. This is not a recipe for social peace.

In other countries, most notably a horribly in-hock Italy (public sector debt over 100 percent of GDP and expanding fast), low interest rates allowed governments to put off long overdue structural reforms. Instead of forcing the introduction of the badly needed discipline that was allegedly one of the principal reasons for its adoption, the euro (a hard currency when compared with shabbier predecessors such as the lira or drachma) was treated as a free pass. It has been anything but. Even before the current mess, Italy's crucial export sector was finding it difficult to cope with the brutal combination of rising cost inflation and a currency far stronger than the accommodating, and periodically devalued, lira. On some estimates, this latest recession is the fourth that Italy has suffered in the last seven years. Back in 2005 Silvio Berlusconi described the euro as a "disaster" for his country. He was not exaggerating.

Devaluations are to GDP what steroids are to sport. In the long-term they may be unhealthy, but in the short-term they frequently work miracles. The problem is that the option is no longer so easily available for the nations that adopted the euro. Italy, Ireland, and a number of other countries are in the grip of a one-sized currency that could never fit all, and the euro is now for them little more than a straitjacket or, more accurately, a noose. They have theoretically retained enough sovereignty to quit the euro, but for one of them to do so, especially if other states stick with the common currency, would be to risk something close to complete economic meltdown.

Money would pour out (so much so that capital controls would probably be required), interest rates would soar, and the reborn national currency would plummet. In the absence of a bailout from the eurozone it had just abandoned, the exiting country itself would probably be driven to renege (either de facto or de jure) on its foreign debt-as would much of its private business. In its consequences, this could be a Lehman-plus trauma with possibly devastating effects on already chaotic international capital markets. No less critically, it could set off a crisis in confidence in the credit of those weaker nations that had kept faith with the single currency, not to speak of feebler economies elsewhere. The cure, therefore, could well be worse than the disease.

In the meantime, in a damned-if-you-do, damned-if-you-don't spasm, the markets are fretting that the disease is turning ever more dangerous-and, in a process that feeds upon itself, ever more infectious. Spreads on sovereign debt yields within the eurozone (between German Bunds, say, and paper issued by Spain, Greece, Portugal, Italy, and Ireland) have widened noticeably. This is a warning that investors are beginning to think a once unthinkable thought: that one or more of the zone's less resilient members might go into default. On this logic these countries can neither afford to keep the euro nor to junk it. Rock, meet hard place.

These worries are made even more pressing by concern over the impact of Eastern Europe's spiraling economic woes on the already shattered finances of the western half of the continent. Contrary to some of the more excitable headlines, not all the countries of formerly Warsaw Pact Europe are, yet, in deep trouble, but the problems of those that are (notably Hungary, Ukraine, Romania, and Latvia) threaten to wreck confidence in those that are not. And those problems will not be confined safely behind the Oder-Neisse line: Two of Sweden's largest banks, for instance, are frighteningly overexposed to the faltering Baltic States, while their counterparts in Austria, seemingly lost in nostalgic Habsburg reverie, have reportedly lent out the equivalent of 70 percent of their country's GDP to once Kaiserlich und Königlich territories and parts nearby.

Eastern Europe's problems are Western Europe's and, given Eastern Europe's dependence on Western capital flows, vice versa, a state of affairs that neither side appreciates. Infuriated by the impression that they were being sidelined by the upcoming "G-20+" summit in London, nine of the EU's former Soviet bloc members held their own breakaway meeting earlier this month to discuss what to do. Meanwhile, led by Germany's indignant Angela Merkel in full prudent-Hausfrau, Thatcher-handbag mode, the Westerners have tried to damp down the East's increasingly aggressive demands for assistance. Good luck with that. Demonstrating a keenly cynical awareness of which buttons to press, the Hungarian prime minister warned that a severe slowdown in the East could lead to "a flood of unemployed immigrants traveling to Western Europe in search of jobs."

If you suspect that all this leaves the EU looking somewhat stuck, you would be right. But then this is no accident. The lack of democratic responsiveness so thoroughly ingrained into the union's architecture was always intended to stop the bloc's politicians from succumbing to the temptations of protectionism, beggar-thy-neighbor devaluations, and other questionable devices often found in the toolbox of an economically desperate national government. That's all very well, and all very praiseworthy, but it doesn't do anything about the desperation, a desperation that will be felt all the more sharply by electorates looking for their leaders to do something, anything, in response to this crunch-only to discover to their chagrin (to use too gentle a word) that there is little that the EU will, legally or politically, allow those leaders to do.

To take just one example, earlier this year Britain saw a series of wildcat strikes protesting the importation of cheap foreign workers from elsewhere in the union as a means of undercutting the locals. The facts that triggered the dispute are murky, but what is certain is that even if the British government had wanted to intervene under EU law it could not. Equally, while the opposition Tories grumbled, nobody was fooled. If the Conservatives had been in charge, they would have done just the same as Labour: nothing. If you want to drive voters to the political extremes, stories like this are a good place to start.

Except that "start" is the wrong word. Parties of the extreme, whether of left or right, already have more than a foothold in Germany and France. "Populists" of every description can be found in the legislatures in countries from Belgium to Denmark to Latvia to Austria to Poland to Hungary. Take your pick: There are plenty to choose from. Even in never-so-sedate-as-it-seems Britain, a country that has made a fetish (if not always convincingly) of its moderation, the much-reviled far rightists of the hitherto tiny British National party are showing some signs of evolving from being useful bogeymen for the left into a party with demonstrable political clout within elements of a white working class that has been neglected for too long.

The backgrounds and the prospects of these movements vary widely from country to country, as do the pasts and the resentments that have shaped them, but in recent years their appeal has begun to grow in sections of the electorate pummeled by the dislocations brought about by mass immigration and globalization-dislocations made all the more painful by the realization that the ruling elites who never really asked them for their opinion on these changes, let alone their agreement to them, couldn't give a damn about their plight. This is a perception that will only be sharpened when the populations of these countries, more and more of whom are losing their jobs, are told by that very same political class that protection is off the agenda and that austerity is on, that saving local industries is unacceptable, and that helping out foreign countries is a must. And, oh yes, none of this was our fault-it was all the bankers' doing-and, oh yes, they and their bonuses have got to be rescued too.

So what's next? The leaders of the EU countries will do their best to muddle through in rickety, unpopular unity. Here and there they will cheat both on each other and on the key EU principle of a single market. The warning signs are already there. In February, President Sarkozy attacked the way that French auto companies were supplying their home market from manufacturing facilities in the Czech Republic. The previous month, Britain's Gordon Brown had criticized the amount of overseas lending by the UK's beleaguered bailed-out banks. Nevertheless, however awkwardly, however reluctantly, the EU's members will attempt to hang together-for as long as (or indeed longer than) their domestic politics comfortably permit, an effort that will inevitably further boost the appeal of the wild men of the fringes.

That said, as the EU's leaders are all too well aware, the slump has so far brought down two European governments (in Latvia and non-EU Iceland). Nobody wants to be next, let alone run the risk of political and economic breakdown. The few remaining traces of the budgetary discipline that supposedly still underpins the euro will therefore probably be scrapped. The euro may hang on to its reach, but only at the cost of its integrity. To ordinary Germans this will be seen as a betrayal, a Dolchstoss even. A people haunted by memories of where a debauched currency can lead, they only agreed to part with their much-cherished deutsche mark on the understanding that the euro would be run with Bundesbank-style discipline. That was then.

So money will be thrown around, the imperiled brethren of both East and West will, after much shoving, screaming, and hesitation, be bailed out. Some protectionist measures (directed against those outside the EU) will be brought in and all fingers will be crossed. It won't be pretty, but with luck, it might be enough to stave off catastrophe. Pushing their luck, some glass-is-half-full Europhiles believe that the fact that no country can easily work its way through these tribulations alone will conclusively make the case for still closer European integration to some of the EU's more reluctant federalists. You can be sure that this is a rationalization that Brussels will look to exploit: Rahm Emanuel is not the only politician unwilling to waste a crisis. The EU's policy response to the slump is likely to have two objectives: the reconstruction of member-states' economies and the destruction of what's left of their autonomy. Going for the latter could well drive even more disaffected voters into the extremist fringe, though Brussels is arrogant enough to persist. There are already indications that the eurocrats may be pushing at an open door. In a startling example of mistaking the Titanic for the lifeboat, Poland has become just one of several nations speeding up plans to sign up for the euro-and the safe haven it is meant to represent.

On the other hand if, as appears disturbingly likely, the economic situation grows far darker, it's easy to draw an alternative picture in which both euro and union come under previously unimaginable stress, stress with unpredictable and potentially ominous consequences, stress that will be echoed and intensified by mounting political and social disorder in a Europe that discovers, too late, that there was something to be said for democracy after all.