Society as a Playmobile diorama - Macron's vision of Europe

Raedwald describes M. Macron's vision of Europe's (sorry the EU's) glorious future:

Here is the barracks with the SimEU army, here the detention prison of the SimEU Office of Internal Security; here is the SimEU Central Bank and the SimEU Ministry of Finance. And the whole thing populated by busy and happy little SimEU citizens on SimEU minimum wage playing safely on social media regulated by the SimEU Prefecture for Internet Safety, after a hard day's work inventing innovative new Euro things at the SimEU Creative Foundation.

This captures the prevalent centrist (I can now use this term as a perjorative) idea that nothing at all happens correctly unless it is overseen, regulated or controlled by a benign government. Macron - and indeed most of the centrist elite he represents - sees government as a sort of Playmobile diorama with people inserted (with due consideration of diversity, naturally) into socially useful functions by a stern but caring emperor.

Macron's vision, uncritically reported by pretty much all of Europe's main news agencies, is for a European Union modelled on France - centralised, managed by an elite through government agencies, mistrusting of democracy and economically protectionist. At the heart of all this is the increasingly common belief that unspecified foreign agents are conspiring to attack the idea of Europe - those little playmobile figures clearly aren't bright enough to decide for themselves they must be tempted into this populism by sinister manipulative forces.

It is not, however, just democracy that Macron and the centrists mistrust - it's business too. I know that all of Europes Macron enthusiasts (do we call them Macaroons?) can summon up cuddly words about a mixed economy and all of them have mates who work for big private concerns but underneath this veneer is a sort of Faustian pact with big business: you go along with us on protectionism, environmentalism and social control, and we'll protect your international interests.

Despite government being very bad at innovation (it always helps to check how regional economic growth is entirely unrelated to government spending on research) our Macaroons want to pile money into government-sponsored research. There'll be an "innovation council" spending taxpayers cash on things like Artificial Intelligence - creating lots of well-paid jobs in universities but little else. And a further splurge of research agencies doing independent scientific research to combat the influence of corporate lobbies (except of course, as we saw with the TPD and with GMOs when those corporate lobbies are helpful to the anti-business, anti-choice ideology).

A lot of the criticism of Macron's vision focuses on how it "involves the EU gaining further powers and greater influence over people’s lives, at the expense of sovereign states" but I've a feeling this misses the point a bit - the vision of applying the French model of government to the EU is about reducing the choices available to communities and of a state that is not subject to the vageries of democracy or the creativity of the market.

The EU's battle lines (regardless of what the UK does in this matter) are drawn - an uncomfortable alliance of socialists, liberals, old-school conservatives and centrist technocrats versus a mish-mash of populists, proto-facists and Trotskyites. Right now it looks like the former will have enough MEPs to at least stem the populist tide. After May, unless there's an upheaval of unprecendented scale, there'll still be pretty much the same set of faces running the EU and speaking for "Europe" as there are now. And any new faces won't be populists or trotskyites, they'll be reliable career-minded technocracts. Which, of course, is why we need to leave.

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