Giulio Meotti
The real reasons for the impending fall of the European Union have nothing to do with the results of the Brexit vote, but everything to do with the reasons for it.
The mistakes of the current European élite will go on until the final collapse.
The European crisis arose for two reasons and they are not Brexit. There was an original plan to create the “United States of Europe,” but this project was designed without a “plan B” for a change of direction. The machine could not make adjustments to reality. Second, the project was entrusted to a bureaucracy with extraordinary legislative and administrative powers.
It is the famous question of the Latin poet Terence: “Quis custodiet ipsos custodes?” Who will guard the guardians? It is the question of political legitimacy and sovereignty.
Then there are the causes of failure. As everyone knows, there is a terrible deficit of legitimacy regarding the European institutions. These institutions have appealed to the people through their representatives, but when the people were given the right to vote, Europe said “no” to their projects. But the projects continued as before, without being scratched at all by this “no”. So the people drew their own conclusions, and gradually withdrew their confidence.
The integration of Europe was conceived in one-dimensional terms with the dictatorship of unelected bureaucrats and judges, cancellation of laws passed by representative parliaments, constitutional treaties signed without any input from the people, a coin system associated with a heavy debt that nobody knows how to point to who is to bear responsibility for it.
This élite has turned its back on Christianity, apparently unaware of the extent to which the people of Europe still depend on its moral and spiritual guidance. And the heritage of the Enlightenment is also at risk, with the spread of laws on the Continent that prevent people from expressing their religious or national affiliation. Freedom of speech is no longer protected from charges of “islamophobia” or “xenophobia”.
Then there are the cultural-ideological causes. It is the total failure of Brussels political élite to consider the culture of Europe, founded on Judeo-Christian revelation. Europe’s laws, educational institutions and traditions are incomprehensible without reference to the lessons contained in the Bible. But the European culture is also a secular one, based on territorial loyalty. Both religious and secular sources of European culture have been repudiated by the élite, which believes that culture has no value, and obeys only economic imperatives.
Take the convoluted European Constitution. For more than a year, a 105-member committee, under the direction of the former French president Valéry Giscard d’Estaing, worked on this historic document. The key sentence of the preamble is the one that defines Europe as a “civilization” whose inhabitants “have gradually developed the values underlying humanism: equality of persons, freedom, respect for reason.”
The only mention of religion at all in the preamble comes in the next sentence, which mentions the “cultural, religious and humanist inheritance of Europe,” a last-minute addition inserted by the drafters after they decided to delete an earlier specific reference to Christianity. In the 75,000 word document there is not a single mention of Christianity.
It is not surprising that the European Court of Human Rights asked to remove crucifixes from classrooms as a threat to democracy and has set an agenda compromising gay marriage, abortion on demand and a dramatic reduction of freedom of conscience.
Some are willing to live with the problem, believing that EU benefits outweigh the costs. Others – particularly the “Eurosceptics” – believe that the costs outweigh the benefits. For them, like in the Brexit, the confiscation of the decision-making power by unelected élite is a fatal flaw of the European project.
It is the story of Brussels repeated again. The Allies avoided bombing the city during the war, because it was to be the site of the victory parade and a symbol of European rebirth. However, the European institutions have colonized the city, destroyed its beauty and dignity, disfiguring it with blocks of concrete and glass, symbols of the moral void inside.
Who will fill the void in the Godless Brussels? We know the answer…