EU Commissioner Chris Patten, who has famously chided George W. Bush for his stance on the war on terror and who stated the September 11th attacked were ‘the result of globalization’, turns his attention to matters closer to home in The Spectator, namely how to forge a common European political identity where none now exists.
Patten is no doubt troubled by the rise of various anti-establishment political forces in EU member states, notably that of the National Front in France and that of murdered libertarian Dutch nationalist Pym Fortuyn. But Patten, in his usual delusional way, misses the essential point that one cannot impose a national or supranational identity where none previously exists. For a man who once was chairman of the Conservative Party, Patten seems curiously ignorant of the insights of such conservative thinkers like Edmund Burke and Michael Oakshott that national feeling is something that grows from below and takes organic form rather than be imposed from above. Patten thinks of national or supranational identity like a technocratic engineer. In this sense, then, he is heir to that strain of thinking which has been a key part of the French political system since the 1789 Revolution.
And there, of course, is the problem. The EU creates undemocratic institutions with considerable power like the European Central Bank and the European Commission, but then once problems present themselves, the likes of Patten scramble to figure out how to generate some kind of popular legitimacy for these bodies. That is surely putting the cart before the horse.
In his final paragraph, Patten writes: “A healthy European democracy will develop only when people begin to feel an emotional commitment to their European identity.”
But Mr Patten, people don’t WANT to be part of a European nation, hence they feel no need to create a common European polity. Until the elite political class of which Patten is a classic specimen grasp this obvious point, European countries will continue to be roiled by characters such as the ghastly Le Pen.
