WHENEVER the oppressive crush of everyday reality simply becomes too much, when the escapist urge overwhelms me, I feel the need to go to Brussels.
It’s not everybody’s choice, I know. Some go to the cinema, subscribing to the idea that Hollywood is still the fantasy world capital, the only place whose very livelihood is predicated on the public’s willing suspension of disbelief. They’ve obviously never been to the capital of the European Union.
The mise en scène for a start is quite brilliant. The skies can’t really be that grey; the shop workers can’t really be that malevolent; the buildings can’t really be that monstrous. It all must be some ingenious but slightly implausible parody of a grim post-industrial northern European conurbation in the grip of a humourless bureaucratic elite: George Orwell as realised by Fritz Lang, a cautionary metaphor for all that can go wrong in the human spirit.
Los Angeles —La-La land and its output — may have its uses, but for real fantasy I’ll take Bru-Bru land any day.
It is in especially fine form as this tumultuous year draws to a close, ready to host Tony Blair and the rest of Europe’s “leaders” next week for one last tilt at the political windmills.
In the real world, this was the year in which voters in two of the founder states of the EU added their names to the long list of nations and peoples who have declared a defiant “no” to the inexorable march of ever-closer union, dictated by the Continent’s visionaries. Others would have done the same if they’d had the chance.
But in Bru-Bru land, the rejection of the constitutional treaty by France and the Netherlands was a mere adjustment to the detail, a bit of decorative furnishing that regrettably fell off their beautifully crafted Baroque construct. The constitution is being implemented anyway, as, to be fair, they always promised it would be (“If they vote ‘yes’, we continue on; if they vote ‘no’, on we go,” they said at the time). The European Prosecution Office, the EU diplomatic service, the European Defence Agency, all explicit dispensations of the despised constitution, are already up and running.
In the real world fewer than one in twenty Europeans till the soil for a living. Next week Mr Blair will try again at least to get an EU budget that introduces some measure of modern reality into it, cutting its total size and addressing the absurdly bloated Common Agricultural Policy. But in Bru-Bru land, it’s always the 14th century, a bucolic idyll where the only threats to French farmers are the vicious predations of starving African peasants immorally trying to sell their food at market prices.
In the real world, companies and employees across Europe are learning how to compete with the nimble dynamos of Asia and America, learning that globalisation requires ever more flexible working environments and ever more open and free markets. But in Bru-Bru land, they’re still weaving an ever-tightening web of regulation and control. In September, on the very day the President of the European Commission courageously announced he was going to abolish 69 absurd regulations, the European Parliament was considering new measures on the control of eels and circuses.
And yet even in this Tinseltown, there are occasional glimpses of a defiant reality. This week I got one of them, in a dark and lonely corner of the European Parliament building. The Brussels Congress, the brainchild of a smart Conservative MEP, Daniel Hannan, brought together representatives of 30 countries united in only one ideal: the old-fashioned belief that free peoples, national sovereignty and diversity might still just be the best route for the nations of Europe.
Eurosceptics have been around a while, of course. But marching under the banner of Euroscepticism has always been a little bit of a challenge if you really believe you can judge a man by the company he keeps.
In Britain, though always a popular cause, it has come to be associated with an odd coalition of fuddies and anoraks. Pinstriped buffers with Biggles moustaches harrumphing about Jerry getting through the EU what we stopped him getting through the Luftwaffe. Or suspiciously scrubbed young men who could quote with alarming precision the balance of payments data for every country of the European Free Trade Area. In continental Europe, it was even worse — little Frenchmen with Napoleon complexes; Austrians who hankered after the Habsburgs; Poles with strong views about the Jews.
But that’s changing. We’ve seen the broad-based unpopularity of the EU already in France and the Netherlands. The new Polish Government is sceptical; a similarly inclined Czech government may soon follow. In the Baltics, people are already disillusioned with their EU membership. Dare we say it, perhaps even in Britain the cause of Euroscepticism took another leap towards normality with the election of David Cameron.
The most encouraging sign is how young so many of the leaders of the anti-EU movement are. The Brussels Congress brought together mostly the under-40 crowd. The Dutch referendum — one of whose most articulate “no” campaigners was a 25-year-old think-tank founder — turned in large part on an assertion by Dutch youth of their right to determine what kind of country they inhabit.
Most important, though, is not the company you keep, but the principles you uphold. Euroscepticism has lacked appeal in the past because, inevitably, anything defined by what it is against is inescapably negative and backward-looking.
But now there’s a chance to make the case for something much more positive. The views expressed at the Brussels Congress were marked as much by their support for things — free markets, democratic decision-making, voluntary international co-operation — as they were by opposition. That’s the way to combat the biggest fantasy on which the EU’s path is built — that there is simply no alternative to the march to a European state.
Which reminds us that there is one big difference between Los Angeles and Brussels. In Hollywood the dream-makers only think they run the continent; in Bru-Bru land, if we’re not careful, they really will.
gerard.baker@thetimes.co.uk
Find more Comment articles by Gerard Baker at: www.timesonline.co.uk/gerardbaker
