Not To Be President Blair After All
Posted on November 1st, 2009
by David Lindsay |
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Twenty-seven nations mourn.
The admittedly illiterate call for the new EU President to be popularly, even directly, elected exposes the fatal flaw in the entire Eurofederalist project. Such an election is impossible without a common language. Everyone in North Wales or the Western Isles can speak English to the necessary level, indeed with absolute fluency. Everyone in Catalonia or the Basque Country can speak Spanish to the necessary level. And so on. The extent to which this no longer applies in, for example, the United Kingdom (where it is widely overstated, but still a real issue) or the United States (where there is no overstatement involved) is a huge and growing problem, a major impending, or in America arguably arrived, crisis both for democracy and for good government. The EU, for this very reason, can never be an example of either.
But if not Blair, then who? John Bruton, Irish Prime Minister turned EU Representative to the US? Why not? A native English-speaker who has been in Washington for a while, but from a country which is in the Eurozone and wasn’t in the Iraq War. The two main Irish parties are notoriously difficult to place on any normal ideological spectrum, but “Christian Democrat” is not a bad description of either, and perhaps especially of Bruton’s Fine Gael. Within that, Bruton has a proven record of being able to work with the Left. These would not necessarily be my criteria. But they are the criteria. People always said that he was dull. Good. Essentially the chairing of a glorified committee, this is not a job for a politician like Bertie Ahern, or Bill Clinton, or Barack Obama, or Margaret Thatcher in her pomp, so scornful of her Cabinet. Not a job, in other words, for a politician like Tony Blair, also no friend of Cabinet government. No, this is a job for a politician like John Major or Gordon Brown. Or John Bruton. He’d do.
Or how about Wolfgang Schüssel, lately Chancellor of Austria? He is, after all, a native speaker of the language with the largest such both in the EU and in Europe as a whole. However, he is not from Germany. Yes, he went into coalition, not with Haider himself, but nevertheless with Haider’s party. But pots and kettles, motes and beams; here, there and everywhere. Schüssel himself stands in the Dollfuss-Schuschnigg tradition that held the Social Catholic line against both Nazism and Communism until Hitler overthrew it by force. Its holding of that line was not without aspects of authoritarianism. But was there none following incorporation into the Third Reich? Would there have been none as a Soviet satellite (which at the start of the War would have entailed entering it as a de facto member of the Axis, just as the Soviet Union was at that point)? I am given to understand that there was quite a bit in the former, and that there would have been quite a bit in the latter. Whisper it not, but possibly even rather more than under Dollfuss and Schuschnigg.
There was a very similar situation in Portugal, where the Social Catholic line had to be held with some force both against the National Syndicalists and against, first the Stalinists, and then the Maoists, who ended up staging a coup one of the leaders of which has gone on, via a period of rabid “free”-marketeering and Bush-loving as Prime Minister, to become the President of the European Commission. Isn’t neoconservatism wonderful? Those who still doubt the neocon character of the EU, perhaps they would finally have gotten the message if Blair had become President? Then again, probably not.
But whether they get the message or not, that is yet another reason to ensure a serious alternative candidate. Schüssel, heir to Dollfuss and Schuschnigg rather than to Trotsky and Shachtman, may be that man. So may John Bruton, heir of Eoin O’Duffy’s resistance both to Soviet influence in Ireland and to a full-scale takeover in Spain (which, again, would have involved Axis membership in all but name in 1939). Christian Democrats have been, and remain, wrong about the EU as some sort of Christendom reborn. But they have been, and are, right about an awful lot more. If the EU must have a President, then it could do a lot worse than have a President like that. For example, Tony Blair.
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It is great that Blair might not become EU President, though I should not celebrate just yet.
However, I would only be marginally more pleased with Schluessel. Let us remember that while the OeVP is perhaps one of the best Christian Democrat parties in Europe (in terms of maintaining some link to Catholic Social Thought and social conservatism), this is only due to the political climate in Austria, with its maintenance of formally corporatist structures. The OeVP leadership is *very neoliberal* for Austria, and proposes typical Eurocrat and Eurobanker solutions pretty much down the line.
In this context, the OeVP is no longer much of an inheritor of the Christian Social tradition, though a minority wing of the party maintains such an ideological continuation. Haider, for his part, came out of the German nationalist tradition, which was national-liberal (this is a fact I am sure you, David, know, but most libertarians around here will be surprised to learn). Most of the old middle-class and elite Nazis were never socialists and both before and after the war were largely connected to this national-liberalism. Haider’s FPOe was therefore the most neoliberal party in Austria until the truth of globalisation was made known by all in the 1990s and he, like the better nationalist leaders in the rest of Europe, slowly changed tune. Before his death he was berating the US and Eurocrats for their lack of banking regulations leading to the worldwide financial crisis, for which both the OeVP and SPOe opposed him. He, and better yet, his former FPOe, are in some ways better inheritors of Christian-Social policies than the OeVP, even if they are less connected to Catholic Church hierarchy.
To summarise, the CSP would simply not be in league with New World Order (or whatever you prefer to call it) elites.