Airstrip One

Frontpage Symposium

Frontpage Magazine recently ran a symposium entitled "European Union and the Death of NATO?"

In the differing views and the interesting idea of Israel in NATO, most participants agreed that NATO could not survive if the European Union achieved the harmonisation of defence and foreign policy. None had any words of praise for the de facto federation or its leadership and accepted that, in the short-term, such a development was detrimental to the interests of the United States.

However, one of the contributors, Vladimir Bukovsky, viewed the EU as a Menshevik body. The EUSSR. After all, one of the questions that plagues observers of the EU is: how does the EU fit into the European political traditions. Is it socialist, jacobin, a weberian technocracy, a corrupted bureaucracy, a Holy Roman Empire - what is it?

What is the EU today? It is an undemocratic superstate (governed by 25 unelected Commissars as opposed to just 15 in the former Soviet Union); which most nations join involuntarily, under tremendous pressure; which is socialist by nature (just read their Social Charter!); which has the same ideological goal of eliminating national states; which already has its own nomenclatura (about 30,000 unaccountable bureaucrats who don't even pay taxes); which has the same type of in-built corruption as the Soviet Union used to have ( last week, according to the same article in the WT, the European Court of Auditors in Luxembourg released a 400-page report that found "systematic problems, over-estimations, faulty transactions, significant errors and other shortcomings" in the EU budget).


EU auditors could vouch for only 10 percent of the $120 billion the bloc spent in 2002. It was the ninth successive year the auditors were unable to certify the budget as a whole). And so on, and on, and on. I can spend hours pointing out those similarities. Admittedly, it is a much milder version of the Soviet Union (as yet), but a version nonetheless. Simply put, this is a Mensheviks' version, not the Bolsheviks' one. This is why two years ago I called it EUSSR, and this quip is becoming very popular in Europe today.

(17.32, 26th December 2003)