A united Europe – good for bureaucrats

In the wake of Tony Blair’s declaration that Europe needs further integration, with a democratically elected president to lead it, a Daily Telegraph columnist argues that the only people who will benefit is Brussels’ army of Eurocrats.

Published on 15 June 2011 at 13:38

Last week saw some depressingly familiar stories from the EU: officials travelling separately on private jets while lecturing the world on the need to cut CO2 emissions; MEPs demanding to increase the budget and proposing new taxes in order to achieve greater "harmony" between EU states, despite the cuts being made across the continent.

Most EU politicians, just like most EU policies, lack legitimacy and they know it. So when Tony Blair insisted last week that Europe needs an "elected president", he was giving voice to the deep-seated belief of nearly every official involved in the pan-European political bureaucracy that greater unity is better for everyone.

Never mind that "the project" lacks popular support. Even the fact that the voters now voice concerns about (for instance) open borders between members of the EU has no effect whatever on the Eurocrats' conviction that there can only be one direction of travel: towards ever closer union within the EU, and therefore towards the ultimate obliteration of the nation state.

What is the basis of this view that the nation state will and must be superseded by European authorities? It boils down to the seemingly innocuous claim made by Mr Blair last week that it is "sensible for European nations to combine together, and to use their collective weight in order to achieve influence". The question of how the entity formed by "combining together" comes to have any legitimate political authority over and above that of the nation states which make it up is never answered. Read full article in Daily Telegraph...

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