The European Union Was Designed to Stifle Democracy

Review of Ever Closer Union? Europe in the West by Perry Anderson (Verso, 2021).

Today, the structures of European capitalism and the transatlantic alliance should be under scrutiny like never before. After more than a decade of intense economic and political crisis, Western European powers and their US sponsor are now facing off against Russia in a brutal proxy war in Ukraine.

Amid the maelstrom, European powers are rearming at an incredible rate.... 

What emerges from Ever Closer Union? is a devastating criticism of the ruling liberal hegemony in European society: a chauvinistic worldview with an almost cultic belief in the rights of the powerful and a disdain for democracy. Socialists who want to understand the EU would do well to know the backdrop to this rapidly mutating behemoth....

The second and related characteristic that emerges from Van Middelaar’s work is what he calls the “coup.” At every great turn in its development, actions that had no license in European treaties and rules promoted the advance of European integration. This began with judicial rulings by the European Court of Justice in 1963 and 1964 that established the primacy of European over national law — “without any warrant in the Treaty of Rome,” as Anderson observes....

The passivity of the European public encouraged by the very structures of the EU, the mode of consensus decision-making between elites, and the brutality with which those elites put down popular opposition all create the basis for rule by fait accompli. The signs of decay are clear, Anderson observes, in the widespread financial corruption among the EU’s political elites...

The EU is antidemocratic in structure and culture by design. Caricatures of the union as a vast, grey, unyielding bureaucracy do not capture its true character: it is more like a playground for elites who make up the rules as they go along....

Who rules? First of all, the so-called Eurocrats don’t. Apart from anything else, they are too few in number. The EU employs around 33,000 unelected officials for a population of 447 million citizens, compared to over 400,000 employed by the British state for a population of 67 million. So who is doing all of the EU’s (frequently dirty) work? The national elites of its member states....

Who rules? The answer should never be remote elites who make up rules on the hoof, generals and diplomats operating behind closed doors, and the empire across the Atlantic Ocean....