Political language, wrote the English author George Orwell in 1946, “is designed to make lies sound truthful and murder respectable, and to give an appearance of solidity to pure wind.” And when it comes to making murder sound respectable, few political words have been more abused than ‘democracy.’ The d-word has been deployed as a shield by repressive regimes from apartheid South Africa to communist China. But dictatorships do not have a monopoly on the dishonest claim to democracy.
Almost eighty years after Orwell wrote Politics and the English Language, the moderate, civilised bureaucrats of the European Union are more guilty than most of trying to “make lies sound truthful” and twisting the word democracy to mean its opposite. Exhibit A for the prosecution: “EU Legislative Priorities for 2023 and 2024,” a Joint Declaration signed by President of the European Parliament Robert Metsola, Czech Prime Minister and President of the European Council Petr Fiala, and President of the European Commission Ursula von der Leyen.
This short document is a rich resource for students of political doublespeak, on everything from the European Green Deal to Promoting Our European Way of Life. We are concerned here only with the last of the EU’s six legislative priorities: “To protect our democracy and values from unprecedented threats, we will use all tools at our disposal to strengthen and defend the rule of law … bolster democratic resilience from within and defend our democratic system from external interests, disinformation and foreign interference.”
Taken at face value, who could disagree with such wholesome sentiments? Yet in truth, trusting EU officials to defend democracy makes as much sense as putting the proverbial fox in charge of protecting the henhouse. The institutions of the EU exist to act as a brake on democracy in Europe. Their role is to centralise power and insulate Europe’s elites from popular pressure and accountability.
In the Brussels worldview, ‘democracy’ now means whatever the EU oligarchy wants it to mean. So, when the joint declaration talks of protecting “our democracy and values from unprecedented threats,” we know that it doesn’t only mean dealing with Vladimir Putin’s Russia. They are also desperate to combat the populist revolt that has used democratic elections to shake the pro-EU establishment from Italy and the Netherlands to Sweden, Finland, France and, of course, the UK.
When the declaration commits EU leaders to using all of their tools to “strengthen and defend the rule of law,” we know it is a code for using the power of the European Commission and Courts to impose Brussels’ will on EU member states whose governments dare to presume that national democracy means what it says, and they should pursue policies for which their electorates voted.
What then should democracy really mean? Let’s briefly go back to Ancient Athens, widely viewed as the birthplace of democracy some 2,500 years ago. The Greek portmanteau word ‘Demokratia’ had two constituent parts. First, demos—the people. And second, ‘kratos’—meaning power or control.
Put them together, and demokratia meant the people not just having a say, but having real political power. The Athenian demos exercised its kratos directly, through the citizens’ assembly, and through the people’s juries that made most laws. (The definition of ‘the people’ was always restricted to Athenian male citizens; the many slaves owned by the citizenry were considered non-people, and the voteless women folk of Athens didn’t count either.)
From the first, this idea of democracy terrified the Athenian elite of rich oligarchs. Demokratia was used most often as a dirty word, sometimes alongside the insult ‘demagogas’; we have accepted the oligarchy’s notion of a demagogue as a rabble rouser leading the gullible masses astray, yet in the original Greek it simply meant ‘leader of the people.’
The great philosophers of Ancient Greece railed against democracy, equating the lower class of citizens with donkeys. Plato wanted to replace the power of the demos with the rule of philosophers and experts (sounds familiar). Historian Paul Cartledge writes in Democracy: A Life that Plato held, “in a sort of anticipation of George Orwell’s ‘Some animals are more equal than others,’ that some citizens were more equal than others.” Another modern study, The Crowd and the Mob: From Plato to Canelli by J.S. McClelland, even suggests that in Ancient Greece, “It could almost be said that political theorising was invented to show that democracy, the rule of men by themselves, necessarily turns into rule by the mob.”
After a hiatus of some 2,000 years from the heyday of Ancient Athens, the modern idea of democracy finally emerged in the age of the Enlightenment. Ever since, the instinct of the powerful elites has remained the same as in Plato’s time: to redefine democracy so as to separate the demos from kratos, and keep the people as far away from real power as possible.
In the Europe of old, the anti-democracy backlash was led by kings and princes who insisted that they were chosen by God, not the swinish multitude. In today’s Europe the most powerful anti-democrats are more likely to be liberal officials and technocrats in the upper echelons of the EU. They pay lip service to democratic politics in principle, whilst in practice striving to take the demos out of democracy. Their slogan might be, ‘Of course we support democracy, but you can have too much of a good thing.’
Distrust of national democracy was built into the EU’s structures from the very start. The founding fathers of post-war Europe saw the horrors of Nazism and World War II as a product of popular nationalism. In their one-eyed worldview, mass politics and democracy paved the way to war. They effectively blamed the peoples of Europe for fascism. (Even now, you can often hear historically illiterate anti-democrats claim that Hitler was elected to power; in fact, he was appointed chancellor by German aristocrats desperate to bring the masses to heel.)
The founders of the EU sought to create a new system that would allow them to manage Europe’s affairs while being insulated from the pressure of the European masses. They would defend the overarching idea of democracy in Europe—by protecting it against the inconvenience of actual democratic politics in Europe’s nation states.
Historian James Heartfield, in The European Union and the End of Politics, notes how the post-war state of West Germany, where a new Constitutional Court was empowered to overrule laws passed by parliament, was explicitly conceived as a system of “wehrhafte demokratie” (defensive democracy), designed to “protect Germans from themselves.” The same elitist prejudice informed the origins of the EU. In order to “protect Europeans from themselves,” power would be invested in bureaucratic institutions. Debate and decision-making were to be shifted out of the arenas of national democracy and into the committee rooms and courts of Europe.
The signals were clear back in 1951, when the leaders of the six founding nations—West Germany, France, Italy, the Netherlands, Belgium, and Luxembourg—signed the Europe Declaration which set in train the creation of the European Community and eventually the EU. It stated that the signatories “give proof of their determination to create the first supra-national institution and that thus they are laying the true foundation of an organised Europe.” The prefix ‘supra,’ from the Latin, means above, over, or beyond. The ‘supra-national’ institutions of the embryonic EU would operate over and above national politics, and beyond the reach of the citizens of any nation state. The stated aim was to create a new “organised Europe” managed not in the public realm of democratic politics, but in the closed world of top-level Euro-bureaucracy and diplomacy.
From the 1950s until today, the clear intention of the European political elites has been to create a supranational form of unity above and beyond the reach of national parliaments. This was not always a case of a Brussels empire trampling over unwilling national parliaments. For decades, governments of many European nations have willingly signed up to the process of political unification, to give themselves more protection from public scrutiny and democratic accountability at home.
Despite its claims to be “an ever-closer union among the peoples of Europe,” the EU operates as a private union of Europe’s political elites, from which “the peoples” are excluded. Look at the main institutions where the EU does its business, in an atmosphere of secrecy and public silence where the rooms are as free of the air of democracy as they are of tobacco smoke.
The core of the EU’s business is done through COREPER—the Committee of Permanent Representatives—a gathering of senior national officials which handles 90% of EU legislation. Its proceedings are treated as state secrets, its documents usually classed as ‘non-papers,’ which means they cannot be accessed by the press or the public. COREPER does the spadework in preparation for the regular meetings of the Council of the EU, which brings governments together to agree on Euro-legislation, usually behind closed doors. Much of this has already been decided in the Council’s many committees and working groups, all of which operate in secret. The big showcase for the EU is the regular meeting of the European Council, a ‘summit’ of European leaders. There is no public record of what is said in there, just a set-piece media photo-opportunity and a summit communiqué prepared by COREPER. This document, known as Council Conclusions, binds governments to what has been agreed, regardless of what happens in their domestic politics or elections between meetings.
At the heart of the EU machine is the powerful European Commission (EC), the public face of the EU and the only body that can propose legislation. The EC is an unelected executive, which believes it is practising what one of its former presidents called “benign despotism.” This bureaucratic body proposes and polices thousands of EU rules and regulations, in consultation with an army of technocratic experts and officials who would not recognise a voter if they bumped into one at lunch in a Brussels restaurant.
The powerful trinity of the Council, COREPER, and the Commission, noted one critical historian, Perry Anderson, when such criticisms were still being made, represents not only an absence of democracy, but also “an attenuation of politics of any kind, as ordinarily understood. The effect of this axis is to short-circuit—above all at the critical COREPER level—national legislatures that are continually confronted with a mass of decisions over which they lack any oversight.” Rather than political issues to be debated and decided in national parliaments, major questions that affect domestic politics become treated as technical matters to be sorted and filed away in committees and secret diplomatic summits.
But what about the European Parliament? All those hundreds of MEPs are directly elected by voters in their nations, after all. The MEPs in turn then vote for the President of the Commission, and at least on paper they even have the power to remove the Commissioners if they collectively agreed.
Well, it’s a parliament, Jacques, but not as we know it. The European Parliament is not a legislature—unlike working national parliaments, it has no power to propose and pass laws, but can only discuss and try to amend what comes from the desk of the Commission bureaucrats. It does not elect a government, like the parliaments of European nations. True, the parliament did choose to endorse the Council’s chosen candidate, van der Leyen, as president of the European Commission—a European president ‘elected’ without winning one vote from the peoples of Europe. But then, she was the only candidate MEPs were offered. Debates in the European Parliament can certainly be revealing and instructive. However, some of us might think the Parliament’s main function for the EU leadership is to offer some rather expensive and unconvincing democratic window dressing, for a system where the real power emanates via bureaucratic diktat and secret diplomatic deals.
Not so long ago, the explicitly undemocratic goings-on in Brussels prompted debate about a ‘democratic deficit’ at the EU, and talk of a ‘legitimacy crisis’ afflicting those at the top of European institutions. Even such an ardent EU supporter as Professor Jan-Werner Muller of Princeton University admitted in his 2012 book Contesting Democracy: Political Ideas in 20th Century Europe, that the political institutions of post-war Europe had been built on “a distrust of popular sovereignty—in fact, even a distrust of traditional parliamentary sovereignty.”
However, the good Professor and his ilk soon came up with a solution. By 2015, in an essay entitled “Should the EU Protect Democracy and the Rule of Law Inside Member States?” Muller was arguing that the EU should double-down on its distrust of sovereignty by intervening more forcefully in member states with conservative, populist governments, such as Hungary and Poland. He called for a new policy of “supra-national militant democracy” to be enforced by a powerful “new democracy watchdog” of Eurocrats who would intervene to impose the “rule of law” and bring the upstart nations to Brussels’ heel. Thus, national parliamentary sovereignty could be obliterated—all in the name of democracy and the rule of law, of course.
The EU authorities have since taken on the spirit of “supra-national militant democracy.” They have now sought to bury the issues of legitimacy by elevating the importance of “the rule of law,” as highlighted in the joint declaration on legislative priorities. The assumption is that, if EU rules are written into law by the Commission, rubber-stamped by the parliament and applied by Europe’s judges, then they must by definition be legitimate. And as such, whether they like it or not, the national parliaments of EU member states must submit to the rule of Brussels’ law.
In case this was unclear to anybody, in 2020 the EU commissar “for Values,” Vera Jourova, spelt it out. When the Commission launched its “first ever strategy for LGBTIQ equality,” she declared that “this is what Europe is about and this is what we stand for.” She had earlier warned that the implications for unenthusiastic nation states were clear:
I also want to repeat it here—the EU law has primacy over national law and rulings of the European Court of Justice are binding on all national courts.
In recent years, the centralisation of power has reached the point where the European Commission, alongside the European Central Bank and the International Monetary Fund, could effectively remove elected governments in Italy or Greece and replace them with unelected technocrats and bankers. Yet the same democracy-trampling EC feels free to lecture governments in Hungary and Poland for passing ‘undemocratic’ laws—by which it means, laws contrary to the tastes of the Commission.
When I hear the truth-twisting use of ‘democracy’ by Ursula-Through-the-Looking-Glass and her EU allies, I am often reminded of the exchange between Lewis Carroll’s Alice and Humpty Dumpty:
“When I use a word,” Humpty Dumpty said, in rather a scornful tone, “it means just what I choose it to mean—neither more nor less.”
“The question is,” said Alice, “whether you can make words mean so many different things.”
“The question is,” said Humpty Dumpty, “which is to be master—that’s all.”’
The EU elites have tried to redefine democracy to mean that they are to be the masters over member states. We must insist, however, that democracy and national sovereignty are indivisible.
Ever since my historical hero Thomas Cromwell wrote the 1533 Act in Restraint of Appeals for Henry VIII, arguing that “England is an Empire” in which the Pope had no right to interfere, national sovereignty has been the bedrock of self-determination. The nation state of emancipated citizens has since proved to be the only basis for a real democracy. Anything that goes beyond the nation’s borders, with talk of ‘Europe-wide democracy’ or ‘global democracy’ simply means the unaccountable rule of such bodies as the European Commission or the United Nations.
The priority today is to find ways to put the demos back into democracy. That is why the populist revolts across Europe are so important. When EU leaders denounce the spreading virus of “rampant populism,” they are exposing their fear and loathing of the populace. What they call populism is really an expression of popular democracy, which is why it is most often used as a term of abuse in high places. Ask what the critics mean by populism, and the Cambridge English Dictionary will tell you, for example, that it is a “negative” term for “political ideas that are intended to get the support of ordinary people by giving them what they want.” Giving ordinary Europeans what they want? We can’t have that, can we! No wonder populism strikes such fear into the heart of the Brussels bureaucracy.
The populist revolts against the EU establishment are the best hope for the future of sovereignty and democracy. That was why a Brit like me, originally from a left-wing background, enthusiastically backed the campaign for Brexit, the greatest democratic uprising in my lifetime. It is why we should all celebrate something like the victory of the Dutch farmers’ party in their recent elections.
Anybody who wants political change today needs to embrace the cause of popular democracy as their best chance. For some conservatives, that might mean overcoming a traditional reluctance to trust the wisdom of the masses. But democracy is the only weapon that can win against the embedded EU elites.
In the Great Debate between Edmund Burke and Thomas Paine over the meaning of representative democracy, I would always have sided with the radical Paine. But I recognise that in the long term, Burke’s argument for a limited form of democracy, where representatives act as the ‘guide’ of the electorate rather than as their ‘instrument,’ won out. We live in an increasingly unrepresentative democracy, where power is invested in unelected and unaccountable commissions, courts, and committees of experts. Conservatives for whom Burke is a hero, however, might need to reflect on the fact that his case has now been turned against them, with power concentrated in the hands of expert and technocratic ‘guides’ who insist they know what’s best for the rest of us.
Those who would make a stand in defence of true European democracy and values today, whatever side they might come from, need to appeal to the masses over the heads—or rather, under the raised noses—of the EU elites. Recent elections and referenda show that we might even win.
Some twenty years ago in Britain, as the Brexiteer editor of Spiked, I helped to pioneer the slogan “For Europe—Against the EU” as part of a campaign for democracy. Not everybody might agree on the need to leave the EU. But we should all come together to resist the EU elites’ crusade against the bedrock European values of national sovereignty and democracy. Decoding the meaning behind the joint declaration’s Orwellian Newspeak seems a good place to start.
