Friday 26 September 2014

Is the EU more Holy Roman Empire than nascent super-state?

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I've thought something like this for a while:

These attitudes suggest that the EU could be devolving from a nascent super-state to something that increasingly resembles the Holy Roman Empire, a fragmented landscape of small, unimportant states wrapped in a unitary, but ephemeral crepe.

If this is so - and I fear it is, the need for a sustainable reform of EU institutions become imperative. Without this Europe as we know it could well collapse into the sort of bickering autarky that organisations like UKIP and the Front National increasingly present as their preferred future.

We need to begin presenting an internationalist alternative to both petty nationalism (UKIP, SNP, FN, etc.) and to the fortress Europe policies of the EU elite. Only Britain has the desire right now to have that debate and, in the UK, only the Conservative Party dare challenge both those sclerotic EU institutions and isolationist nationalism. And that referendum is essential as the lever to make Europe change.

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2 comments:

Anonymous said...

While the SNP & FN might be petty nationalistic parties, I do not think that UKIP are. It is more like a party that wants this country to be freed of shackles imposed on us by an unelected elite of people without the same history and principles of this one, isolated in a distant assembly that the people have limited (if any) access to. There could be a very good reason why the EU is more and more often being referred to as the EUSSR, and it is not because it is a beacon of democracy. UKIP is a party that wants to allow the British people to continue to be British; this is no denigration of other countries, but an acceptance of our differences, and does not preclude them from free and fair trade amongst each other, as well as the rest of the world.

Radical Rodent

asquith said...

You could even try comparing it to the pre-1914 Austro-Hungarian Empire :)