CAREER CHICKEN LITTLES

The march of the machines (Camilla Cavendish, Timesonline, September 25th, 2005)

The insidious drip, drip of global governance fatally dissipates the energies of elected national leaders. The European Parliament has spent the past week arguing about a “sunshine directive” that would have made EU employers responsible for the health effects of sunlight on their staff. Beetroot-red builder’s bottom has now been preserved for the nation, apparently, after a battle that should never have been fought — with our money — in the first place. There is a similar air of unreality in New York. One newcomer to summitry says he is amazed by the industry of pre-meetings and pre-pre-meetings. On Sunday a diplomat commented that the atmosphere in the room was as if there were ten days to the end of the negotiation, not two working days before world leaders were due to arrive. But technocrats have all the time in the world: when the summit ends, the machine will lumber on.

When the UN and the EU were set up, the challenge was to create big institutions that could underpin peace and prosperity. Today the challenge is to tame institutions that have acquired an internal momentum far beyond democratic control. Sure, jaw-jaw is better than war-war. But the UN has prevented war on precious few occasions in its 60-year history. The EU relied on America to intervene in Yugoslavia, and its attempts to dissuade Iran from going nuclear have been a miserable failure. Jaw-jaw can drown out reality.

The UN is inevitably a hostage to compromise — which is why it has stood still while 200,000 have been killed in Sudan’s genocide, and why Kosovo was saved by Nato, in violation of the UN Charter. The UN’s failure to agree a definition of terrorism, four years after 9/11, makes it hard to believe that it can do much about collective security, despite the fashionable belief that the new terrorist threat requires global co-operation. And its credibility has been damaged by the Oil-for-Food scandal, perhaps the largest ever fraud. It is strange that expectations of the UN are so wildly overblown when it is so unaccountable and when its scope for action on big issues is deliberately limited by the vetoes that are the price for security council members turning up. [...]

Judicial creep is the inevitable result of federalism. Like the US Supreme Court, the ECJ’s duty is to interpret the spirit of the treaties — which are generally integrationist. The court’s rulings on cross-border tax disputes are slowly eroding national vetoes on tax. It has ruled that public health is covered by single market legislation because health is a service, and services can be traded. The can is open, and lawyers will worm their way into more areas of national life.

Monarchs grandstanding in New York seems so last century. Maybe we should turn down the volume and listen more carefully to the whirring of the machines. If we don’t get wise to where the real power is, we will sacrifice any hope of changing the world.

One of the reasons the left is so addicted to a never-ending global crisis mentality is that, in order to destroy democracy and replace it with an unaccountable bureaucratic oligarchy, the general population must be made to feel so insecure they cease believing they are capable of deciding what is best for them on their own.