Ten Reasons to Get Rid of the European Union

The noted blogger Fjordman is filing this report via Gates of Vienna.
For a complete Fjordman blogography, see The Fjordman Files. There is also a multi-index listing here.

With this essay, Fjordman announces the completion of his first book. As publication information on it becomes available, it will be posted here.


1. The EU Promotes Crime and Instability

The EU does not protect the peace in Europe. On the contrary, it undermines stability in the continent by dismantling border controls at a time of the greatest population movements in human history, with many migrants coming from politically unstable countries whose instability spills over to European states. Through its senseless immigration policies, the EU could become partly responsible for triggering civil wars in several European countries. Maybe it will be remembered as the “peace project” which brought war.

The European Union has created a borderless region from Greece to France and from Portugal to Finland, yet the citizens of these countries still pay most of their taxes to nation states whose borders are no longer upheld. It is ridiculous to pay up to half of your income to an entity that no longer controls its own territory or legislation. Unless national borders are re-established, the citizens of EU member states no longer have any obligation to pay taxes.

The EU promotes a ridiculous amount of laws and regulations, yet street crime largely goes unpunished and is growing increasingly common. Laws are used to punish the law-abiding while real criminals rule the streets, although this flaw is admittedly shared with many national governments. The EU makes a mockery out of the social contract every single day. As the authorities from Berlin via Amsterdam to London and Rome fail to uphold law and order, citizens have not just the right, but the duty to arm themselves in order to protect their property and the lives of their loved ones.

It is quite possible that we could indeed benefit from some form of European cooperation in defense of a shared civilization, but not in the form of the EU as it is today. The EU is not about cooperation for protecting the best interests of Europeans; it is about turning the entire continent into a Multicultural theme park while the natives get culturally deconstructed and demographically crushed. The EU is a large-scale social experiment conducted on hundreds of millions of people. It is not about economics of scale, it is about stupidity of scale.

The EU does not give Europeans a “voice” on the international arena. It’s a bureaucratic monster at best, a dangerous Utopian project at worst. It makes our enemies take us less seriously, not more. It is not about giving anybody a voice; it is about silencing the voices we already have, by depriving us of any say regarding our future and the destinies of our peoples.

2. The EU Weakens Europe’s Cultural Defenses

The EU is systematically surrendering the continent to our worst enemies. When French, Dutch and Irish voters rejected the EU Constitution, the EU elites moved on as if nothing had happened. When the Islamic world says that the EU should work to eradicate “Islamophobia,” they immediately consent to do this. When an organization ignores the interests of its own people yet implements the interests of that people’s enemies, that organization has become an actively hostile entity run by a corrupt class of abject traitors. This is what the EU is today.

The EU is deliberately destroying the cultural traditions of member states by flooding them with immigrants and eradicating native traditions. This is a gross violation of the rights of the indigenous peoples across an entire continent. Europe has some of the richest cultural traditions on the planet. To replace this with sharia barbarism is a crime against humanity. The European Union is currently the principal (though not the only) motor behind the Islamization of Europe, perhaps the greatest betrayal in this civilization’s history. Appeasement of Islam and Muslims is so deeply immersed into the structural DNA of the EU that the only way to stop the Islamization of the continent is to get rid of the EU. All of it.
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3. The EU Promotes a Bloated Bureaucracy

A study released by the organization Open Europe in August 2008 found that the EU employs an “army” of bureaucrats, and that the actual number of individuals required to run the EU is close to 170,000 — more than 7 times the 23,000 figure sometimes cited by the Commission.

According to them, “The legislative process of the EU is an extremely complex and opaque system, making it very difficult to identify how many people are actually involved in formulating, implementing and overseeing legislation. However, research by Open Europe, using limited available information, shows that just to draft and work out how to implement legislation the EU requires a bureaucratic staff of around 62,026 people. This figure reveals where the EU’s real legislative work is actually done: in committees, behind closed doors and out of the public eye. Most of the work takes place away from the core institutions within Expert Groups, Council Groups, and what are known as Comitology committees.”

Notice how this closed and secretive process of drafting legislation for half a billion people resembles that of a dictatorship. The EU follows a strategy of hide in plain sight and conceals the real power behind layers of bureaucratic complexities. This strategy was also followed with the drafting of the ridiculously long European Constitution.

If somebody presented you with a contract of hundreds of pages of more or less incomprehensible technical language which was to govern all aspects of your life and that of your children and grandchildren, and that person told you to just take his word for it that it is good and could you please sign on the dotted line, would you have accepted it? That is essentially what the EU has done regarding the fate of an entire continent, not just a single family. When some annoying people, such as the Dutch and the Irish, were unkind enough not to consent blindly to their new serfdom, the EU decided that they were bound by the contract they just rejected, anyway. It’s arrogance on a monumental scale, if not plain treason.

The EU is not yet a totalitarian entity, but it holds all the tools it needs to in order to become one. It has managed to corrupt the national elites to sell out the freedom of their peoples by inviting them to take part in the world’s largest racket, paid for by European taxpayers. The growing pan-European nanny state now interferes with every aspect of social and economic life, governed by an unaccountable and often hostile minority of social engineers who wish to impose their way of thinking on the majority.

4. Excessive Regulation and Centralization is bad for Freedom and for Prosperity

Europe once became a dynamic continent thanks to competition at all levels. It is now virtually impossible to find a sector of society that is untouched by the often excessive EU regulations. The EU functions as a huge superstate centrally directed by statists obsessed by regulations. They have learnt little from history, where central planning has been an almost universal failure. Here is what Nathan Rosenberg and L.E. Birdzell Jr. say in How The West Grew Rich: The Economic Transformation Of The Industrial World:

“Initially, the West’s achievement of autonomy stemmed from a relaxation, or a weakening, of political and religious controls, giving other departments of social life the opportunity to experiment with change. Growth is, of course, a form of change, and growth is impossible when change is not permitted. Any successful change requires a large measure of freedom to experiment. A grant of that kind of freedom costs a society’s rulers their feeling of control, as if they were conceding to others the power to determine the society’s future. The great majority of societies, past and present, have not allowed it. Nor have they escaped from poverty.”

Moreover, “Western technology developed in the special context of a high degree of autonomy among the political, religious, scientific, and economic spheres of social life. Is this high degree of autonomy indispensable to the successful application of technology to economic welfare? Few Western scientists would disagree with the proposition that a high degree of autonomy of the scientific sphere from political or religious control is essential to scientific advance. It is almost as clear that a similar autonomy, in much the same degree, is essential to the economic process of translating scientific advances into goods and services. The technological capability of a society is bound to be degraded if control of either scientific inquiry or innovation is located at points of political or religious authority that combine an interest in controlling the outcome of technological development with the power to restrict or direct experiment. In all well-ordered societies, political authority is dedicated to stability, security, and the status quo. It is thus singularly ill-qualified to direct or channel activity intended to produce instability, insecurity, and change.”

The European Union cannot be anything but anti-liberty because it concentrates far too much power in a centralized bureaucratic system that is almost impossible for outsiders to understand. As the Austrian economist Friedrich Hayek warned in The Road to Serfdom:

“To imagine that the economic life of a vast area comprising many different people can be directed or planned by democratic procedure betrays a complete lack of awareness of the problems such planning would raise. Planning on an international scale, even more than is true on a national scale, cannot be anything but a naked rule of force, an imposition by a small group on all the rest of that sort of standard and employment which the planners think suitable for the rest.”

5. The Lack of a Real Separation of Powers in the EU Invites Abuse of Power

We should study the work of the great eighteenth century French thinker Montesquieu, who admired the British political system. He advocated that the executive, legislative and judicial branches of government should be assigned to different bodies, where each of them would not be powerful enough to impose its will on society. This is because “constant experience shows us that every man invested with power is apt to abuse it, and to carry his authority as far as it will go.” This separation of powers is almost totally absent in the European Union, where there is weak to non-existent separation between the legislative, the executive and the judicial branches, and where all of them function without the consent of the public. In short, a small number of people can draft and implement laws without consulting the people, and these take precedence over the laws passed by elected assemblies. This is a blueprint for a dictatorship.

In 2007, former German president Roman Herzog warned that parliamentary democracy was under threat from the EU. Between 1999 and 2004, 84 percent of the legal acts in Germany — and the majority in all EU member states — stemmed from Brussels. According to Herzog, “EU policies suffer to an alarming degree from a lack of democracy and a de facto suspension of the separation of powers.” Despite this, the EU was largely a non-issue during the 2005 German elections. One gets the feeling that the real issues of substance are not subject to public debate. National elections have become an increasingly empty ritual. The important issues have already been settled beforehand behind closed doors.

Free citizens should obey laws that are passed with the best long-term interests of their nation and people in mind. Most of the laws within the EU’s area are no longer passed by elected national representatives, but by unaccountable EU bureaucrats, some of whom could potentially have been bought and paid by our Islamic enemies with Arab oil money. As such, the citizens of these nations no longer have any obligation to obey these laws.

As Montesquieu warned, “When the legislative and executive powers are united in the same person, or in the same body of magistrates, there can be no liberty; because apprehensions may arise, lest the same monarch or senate should enact tyrannical laws, to execute them in a tyrannical manner.” He also stated that “Useless laws weaken the necessary laws.” The current problem with the EU is not just the content of laws and the way they are drafted and passed, but also their sheer volume. Law-abiding citizens are turned into criminals by laws regulating speech and behavior, while real criminals rule the streets in our cities. This situation will either lead to a police state, to a total breakdown in law and order, or both.

6. The Lack of Transparency Leaves the EU Vulnerable to Hostile Infiltration

In order to have a system with government under public control, you need accountability and transparency. The EU fails miserably on both accounts. The reason why European leaders could commit a betrayal as large as the creation of Eurabia is not only because EU authorities are not formally subjected to the popular will, but just as much because they have made the decision-making process incredibly complicated and moved real power out of the public view.

There is every reason to believe that some of those claiming to be our representatives have been bribed and/or blackmailed by Muslim countries and other enemies to implement agendas hostile to our interests. No system is perfect, but a closed and non-transparent system such as the EU is particularly vulnerable to infiltration from outsiders and hostile foreign interests.

The “anti-discrimination laws” we now see in Western Europe are an indication that the democratic system no longer works as intended. These laws come from a small group of self-appointed leaders who respond to pressure from the Islamic world, not from their own people. The European political elites increasingly risk being seen as collaborators and puppets for our enemies because that’s in many cases how they act.

7. The EU Leads to Less Freedom of Speech

The EU does nothing to promote freedom in Europe, but rather spends a great deal of time trying to stamp out what’s left of it. The EU, in cooperation with Islamic countries, is rewriting school textbooks across the European continent to present a more “positive” image of Islam. The EU increasingly views the media and the education system simply as a prolonged arm of the state. This is the hallmark of a totalitarian state, which is what the EUSSR is gradually becoming. One gets the feeling that the EU’s concept of a “united Europe” means one nation, one people — and one allowed opinion. It is tempting to say one allowed religion as well: Islam.

According to British writer Daniel Hannan, “Eurocrats instinctively dislike spontaneous activity. To them, ‘unregulated’ is almost synonymous with ‘illegal’. The bureaucratic mindset demands uniformity, licensing, order. Eurocrats are especially upset because many bloggers, being of an anarchic disposition, are anti-Brussels. In the French, Dutch and Irish referendums, the MSM [mainstream media] were uniformly pro-treaty, whereas internet activity was overwhelmingly sceptical. Bruno Waterfield recently reported on a secret Commission report about the danger posed by online libertarians: ‘Apart from official websites, the internet has largely been a space left to anti-European feeling. Given the ability to reach an audience at a much lower cost, and given the simplicity of the No campaign messages, it has proven to be easily malleable during the campaign and pre-campaign period.’ The EU’s solution? Why, to regulate blogs!”

At the time of writing, it looks like the most radical proposals to regulate the blogosphere and independent websites have been watered down for now, but there is no doubt that the EU will make new attempts to censor the Internet, especially since the organization has successfully bribed much of the traditional media. The EU has encouraged pan-European laws against “racism and hate speech.” Every single action the EU has taken vis-à-vis these subjects have led to more restrictions of free speech, online and offline. There is no reason not to expect that trend to continue, especially since the EU tries consistently to placate Muslims and other immigrant groups in every way possible. The EU’s attempts to crush dissent and silence criticism of its ideas will become increasingly aggressive and hard to ignore.

8. The EU Fails to Consult its Citizens and Insults Them When Doing So

The Irish referendum in 2008 on the proposed EU Constitution/ Lisbon Treaty is a powerful testimony to the evil nature of the European Union. Before the referendum, a number of EU leaders made it perfectly clear that the Lisbon Treaty was virtually identical to the European Constitution which had been rejected by Dutch and French voters in 2005, and which should then presumably have been dead.

Former French President Valéry Giscard d’Estaing (the chief drafter of the Constitution) said: “the proposals in the original constitutional treaty are practically unchanged. They have simply been dispersed through old treaties in the form of amendments. Why this subtle change? Above all, to head off any threat of referenda by avoiding any form of constitutional vocabulary.” D’Estaing also said: “Public opinion will be led to adopt, without knowing it, the proposals that we dare not present to them directly… All the earlier proposals will be in the new text, but will be hidden and disguised in some way.” Spanish PM José Luis Rodríguez Zapatero said: “We have not let a single substantial point of the Constitutional Treaty go…” Italian President Giorgio Napolitano said: “Those who are anti-EU are terrorists. It is psychological terrorism to suggest the specter of a European superstate.”

Irish Prime Minister Brian Cowen admitted that he had not read the Lisbon Treaty in full, but nonetheless assured his people that it was good and that Irishmen should vote “yes” based on this assurance. He said that voters were being asked to give the EU a “more effective and efficient decision-making process.”

If a dictator decides to ignore the opinion of everybody else and implement policies as he sees fit without consulting anybody, this could be seen as a “more efficient” decision-making process from a certain point of view. Is it this kind of “efficiency” the EU is promoting? Mr. Cowen doesn’t say, but it’s tempting to speculate that the answer is “yes.” According to the words and actions of the EU elites, the will of the people is merely an annoying speed bump which slows down the implementation of their supremely enlightened policies.

After the referendum, when it was clear that the Irish would have none of this trick, the Irish EU Commissioner Charlie McCreevy revealed that he had not read the Lisbon Treaty himself: “I would predict that there won’t be 250 people in the whole of the 4.2 million population of Ireland that have read the treaties cover-to-cover. I further predict that there is not 10 percent of that 250 that will understand every section and subsection,” he said. “But is there anything different about that?” said the Commissioner, adding: “Does anyone read the finance act?” referring to the lengthy documents he drew up when he was finance minister in Ireland.

Let us repeat this again. This man stated — probably correctly — that not more than a couple of dozen people among millions of citizens actually understood the document they were supposed to vote over, yet he saw nothing inherently wrong with this. The EU Constitution/ Lisbon Treaty would finalize the transfer of authority to a new pan-European superstate with almost unlimited powers to direct the affairs and lives of half a billion people in dozens of countries, from Finland to France and from Ireland to Poland. The Irish responded in the only sensible manner, but European leaders made it perfectly clear that they would press on with the project of dismantling European nation states regardless of popular resistance.

French President Sarkozy and German Chancellor Merkel issued a joint statement saying they “hope that the other member states will continue the process of ratification.” The German Foreign Minister Frank-Walter Steinmeier said: “The ratification process must continue. I am still convinced that we need this treaty.” The British Foreign Secretary David Miliband said the UK would press on with ratification: “It’s right that we continue with our own process.”

The President of the European Parliament Hans-Gert Pöttering stated: “The ratification process must continue” because “the reform of the European Union is important for citizens, for democracy and for transparency.” In other words: The reason the EU is tossing aside the verdict of the Irish people, as well as the French and Dutch people and numerous others who never got the chance to voice their opinion at all, is for “democracy.”

According to writer Martin Helme, it was always clear that the power elites were not going to accept an Irish “no.” After the first shock they would simply continue carrying out plan A:

“One of the most disgusting and outrageous talking points already being peddled by the Eurocrats and their friends in the liberal mainstream media is that 862,415 Irish voters have no right to block the desired goal of some 450 million Europeans. This distortion of truth should never go unchallenged. First of all, those few million Irish were actually the only citizens in Europe who were asked for their opinion. The rest of the 446 or so millions were never consulted. How can any politician claim that their voters want the ratification of EU constitution/Lisbon Treaty when the entire political class emphatically insisted on not asking the people? In fact, in many countries politicians openly admit that their voters would have done the same as Irish did, i.e. vote against the rotten thing. So it is not the few million Irish voters blocking the will of hundreds of millions of other European voters but very clearly a mass of Irish voters against a few thousand politicians and bureaucrats who make up the European power elite. Secondly, what happened to those 20 million French and Dutch voters who said no to the same document three years ago?”

The European Commission in April 2008 presented a new plan aimed at increasing EU citizens’ involvement in the decision-making process of the 27-nation bloc, as well as making it more popular. “We must consult citizens,” said the Swedish Commissioner Margot Wallström then. She is famous for her remark in 2005 that Europeans needed to approve of the proposed EU constitution or risk a new Holocaust. Three years after the Constitution was first rejected, and still with no Holocaust in sight, the EU no longer pretends to care about the will of the people. When Eurocrats talk about “consulting” citizens, they mean insulting them.

In April 2008, a demonstration comprising people from all walks of life and from most political parties convened in front of the famous and beautiful Staatsoper (State Opera) in the center of Vienna to demonstrate against the ratification of the Lisbon Treaty in the Austrian Parliament, which later occurred without holding a referendum. Opinion polls showed that a majority of Austrians were convinced, as they should be, that policy is determined almost exclusively by Brussels. They see local politicians as largely deprived of any power, and many of them were reluctant to grant even more power to the unaccountable EU.

Opinion polls from mid-2008 showed that a strong majority of the Dutch were still against the Lisbon Treaty, which is virtually identical to the Constitution that Dutch voters rejected by 62 to 38 percent in the 2005 referendum. Nevertheless, the Netherlands is going ahead with the ratification of the Treaty even after the Irish rejected it, said Premier Jan Peter Balkenende. The political elites are determined to continue a process which will essentially dismantle their country and reduce it to just another province in an emerging Eurabian superstate, and openly ignore their own people in order to implement this.

As Helme states, “Governments have willfully and knowingly gone against the will of the people, trashed their own constitutions, corrupted their courts to go along with it (thus trashing the rule of law) and started to govern without the consent of the people or the rule of law….This is the path that leads to revolution. Good! As Thomas Jefferson said ‘The tree of liberty must be refreshed from time to time with the blood of patriots and tyrants.’ I have a feeling that more and more people around Europe are ready for it. How about the politicians?”

9. The EU Undermines Political Legitimacy and Connections between Rulers and the Ruled

Proponents of the European Union claim that it is a “peace project.” But the EU is not about peace, it is about war: A demographic and cultural war waged against an entire continent, from the Black Sea to the North Sea, in order to destroy European nation states and build an empire run by self-appointed bureaucrats. This is supported by national politicians in order to enhance their personal power, by creating a larger political entity than their individual nation states and by ridding themselves of the constraints of a democratic society. The EU corrupts national political elites into betraying the people they are supposed to serve and protect.

Anthony Coughlan, a senior lecturer at Trinity College in Dublin, Ireland, states the following in an essay at the EU Observer:

“At a national level when a minister wants to get something done, he or she must have the backing of the prime minister, must have the agreement of the minister for finance if it means spending money, and above all must have majority support in the national parliament, and implicitly amongst voters in the country. Shift the policy area in question to the supranational level of Brussels however, where laws are made primarily by the 27-member Council of Ministers, and the minister in question becomes a member of an oligarchy, a committee of lawmakers, the most powerful in history, making laws for 500 million Europeans, and irremovable as a group regardless of what it does. National parliaments and citizens lose power with every EU treaty, for they no longer have the final say in the policy areas concerned. Individual ministers on the other hand obtain an intoxicating increase in personal power, as they are transformed from members of the executive arm of government at national level, subordinate to a national legislature, into EU-wide legislators at the supranational.”

EU ministers see themselves as architects of a superpower in the making, and can free themselves from scrutiny of their actions by elected national parliaments. According to Coughlan, EU integration represents “a gradual coup by government executives against legislatures, and by politicians against the citizens who elect them.” This process sucks the reality of power from “traditional government institutions, while leaving these still formally intact. They still keep their old names — parliament, government, supreme court — so that their citizens do not get too alarmed, but their classical functions have been transformed.”

The European Union is basically an attempt by the elites in European nations to cooperate on usurping power, bypassing and abolishing the democratic system, a slow-motion coup d’état. Ideas such as “promoting peace” or “promoting free trade” are used as a pretext for this, a bone thrown to fool the gullible masses and veil what is essentially a naked power grab.

The European Union is deeply flawed in its basic construction and cannot function as anything other than an increasingly totalitarian pan-European dictatorship, run by a self-appointed oligarchy. Indeed, there is reason to fear that it was designed that way. Power is concentrated heavily in institutions that are above the formal restraints of public consent and above the informal restraints of public scrutiny and insight. EU authorities can do more or less whatever they want to, as they do in relations to the Arab and Islamic world.

10. The EU Spreads a Culture of Lies and Corruption

After Irish voters had clearly rejected the Lisbon Treaty (the slightly changed, but otherwise recycled version of the European Constitution which had been rejected by French and Dutch voters earlier), Prime Minister Anders Fogh Rasmussen of Denmark said Ireland should be given less than nine months to work out its problems with the Lisbon Treaty prior to the EU’s parliamentary elections in 2009. Rasmussen said that the Irish “no” vote to the Constitution should not stop further work by the Union toward getting the treaty ratified. European leaders, including Danish ones, have generally preferred ratification of the EU Constitution without popular referendums because they know there is powerful resistance to it in many countries. It is meaningless to have referendums if they only come when the elites want them to, and these elites can ignore them if they dislike the results.

Mr. Rasmussen is a great example of how the European Union slowly destroys the democratic system and is deliberately designed to do so. He is supposed to follow the will of and interests of his people, but his actual loyalty lies with the rest of the EU oligarchy. He’s by no means the worst person among EU leaders; this isn’t about his personal flaws, it’s about the EU and how it eventually corrupts even otherwise decent individuals. A similar thing happened in Portugal, where the PM responded to calls from the leaders of Germany and France, not his own electorate.

The EU is a slow-motion coup d’état conducted against dozens of countries simultaneously. It is designed to empty all organs subjected to the popular will of any real power and transfer it into the hands of an unelected oligarchy. In fact, it’s worse than a coup d’état because this traditionally implied that a group of people seized control over a country. The EU doesn’t just want to seize control over nation states; it wants to abolish them. The EU is organized treason.

The EU elites react as one when faced with challenges to their power base from ordinary people. MEPs in the European Parliament as well as participants at every level of the EU system get very well-paid jobs for taking part in it, which means that their pragmatic interests lie with maintaining it. Their loyalty has been bought — with the tax money of European citizens — and transferred from their people, where it theoretically should be, to the EU. The EU is their pension plan, so to speak. When you challenge the EU, you thus constitute a direct threat to their personal financial interests, and they will respond accordingly.

Just like the Soviet Union, the European Union promotes a culture of lies and corruption which starts at the top and filters down to society as a whole. The EU system corrupts virtually everybody who comes close to it. It cannot be reformed, it can only be dismantled.