The New Criterion

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Jun 19, 2005 08:58 AM

What did they expect? or the dangers of being a moral Don Quixote

by Roger Kimball

The New York Times reports the shocking news: �Failed Summit Talks Expose Union Abyss�.

Something shattered in Europe on Friday night.

The leaders of the 25 European Union nations went home after a failed two-day summit meeting in anger and in shame, as

domestic politics and national interests defeated lofty notions of sacrifice and solidarity for the benefit of all.

Oh dear, oh dear! Those evil things, �domestic politics and national interests� once again trumped �lofty notions of sacrifice and solidarity for the benefit of all.� How could that be? Didn’t the Europeans scrap human nature when they formed the European Union? Didn�t they transcend narrow self-interest, selfishness, and atavistic sentiments like patriotism, envy, ambition, and greed?

The European Unionists don�t mention the writings of Karl Marx much, but isn�t their vision of a super-enlightened populace all pulling together for the common good (defined, nota bene, by those benevolent, tax-exempt bureaucrats in Brussels) very close to Marx�s Romantic vision: "From each according to his abilities, to each according to his needs," comrade!

The Times, natch, is somber about the disintegration of the latest experiment in social engineering.

The battle over money and the shelving of the bloc�s historic constitution, after the crushing no votes in France and the Netherlands, stripped away all pretense of an organization with a common vision and reflected the fears of many leaders in the face of rising popular opposition to the project called Europe. . . .

Most embarrassing for the European Union was a last-minute attempt by its 10 newest members to salvage the budget agreement late on Friday night. They offered to give up some of their own aid from the union so that the older and richer members could keep theirs.

For the new members, that offer was an opportunity to prove their worth. Criticizing the �egoism� of countries driven by national interests, Prime Minister Marek Belka of Poland said, �Nobody will be able to say that for Poland, the European Union is just a pile of money.�

Imagine that! �Egoism,� countries �driven by national interests�: what a scandal. The Prime Minster of Poland got to indulge in some pleasing self-righteousness. Other bureaucrats savored the pleasures of publicly acknowledging their humiliation at being associated with polities governed by such base, such unenlightened passions.

But for the older members, it was a humiliation. �When I heard one after the other, all the new member states--each poorer than the other--say that in the interest of an agreement they would be ready to renounce part of the money they are due, I was ashamed,� Jean-Claude Juncker, Luxembourg�s prime minister and the departing European Union president, told journalists after talks collapsed.

Buck up, Jean-Claude! You�ll doubtless have plenty of opportunity to exhibit your virtue in the future. Why not start by renouncing some of your money? After all, your salary, unlike the slobs you have been presiding over, is tax free. How about a contribution of 2 or 3 hundred thousand euros to some good cause? (Armavirumque, by the way, is accepting contributions.)

I cannot say that I find the disarray in the European Union surprising. A couple years ago, I predicted to friends that the euro, at least in its present disposition, would not last a decade. Perhaps it will survive as a currency of transaction among banks, but already you are finding people in Italy clamoring for the return of the lira, in France for the return of the franc, in Germany for the Deutschmark--now why do you suppose that is? Could it, just possibly, have something to do with �egoism,� with �national interests�? Heaven forfend.

No, the European Union is an example of fantasy politics (some people call it �socialism�). Emotionally, it owes a great deal to that paterfamilias of human reconstruction, Jean-Jacques Rousseau. Rousseau, too, believed that niggling human nature had to be shed, transformed, if a truly progressive society were to be forged: �Those who dare to undertake the institution of a people," Rousseau wrote in the Social Contract, "must feel themselves capable, as it were, of changing human nature, . . . of altering the constitution of man for the purpose of strengthening it.�

Marx prepared a recipe for �changing human nature.� Lenin and Stalin were among the cooks who signed up to prepare the menu. The unelected bureaucrats in Brussels have added some sugar to the recipe, but they are working for the same kitchen. �I think I know man,� Rousseau sadly wrote toward the end of his life, �but as for men, I know them not.�

Rousseau had plenty of reason to be disappointed. But he shouldn�t have been surprised. As the great Victorian judge and man of letters James Fitzjames Stephen put it in his neglected polemic Liberty, Equality, Fraternity (1873), �The real truth is that the human race is so big, so various, so little known, that no one can really love it.�

Stephen�s chief target in Liberty, Equality, Fraternity was the starry-eyed utilitarianism of John Stuart Mill. �As between his own happiness and that of others,� Mill wrote in one characteristic passage, �justice requires [everyone] to be as strictly impartial as a disinterested and benevolent spectator.� What a splendid commissioner of the European Union Mill would have made! Alas, as Stephen points out, the idea that �justice requires [everyone] to be as strictly impartial as a disinterested and benevolent spectator� is preposterous. �If this be so,� he writes,

I can only say that nearly the whole of nearly every human creature is one continued course of injustice, for nearly everyone passes his life in providing the means of happiness for himself and those who are closely connected with him, leaving others all but entirely out of account. . . .

The man who works from himself outwards, whose conduct is governed by ordinary motives, and who acts with a view to his own advantage and the advantage of those who are connected with himself in definite, assignable ways, produces in the ordinary course of things much more happiness to others . . . than a moral Don Quixote who is always liable to sacrifice himself and his neighbors. On the other hand, a man who has a disinterested love of the human race--that is to say, who has got a fixed idea about some way of providing for the management of the concerns of mankind--is an unaccountable person . . . who is capable of making his love for men in general the ground of all sorts of violence against men in particular.

I thought again of Stephen�s words while perusing the Times�s story. �Lost in the turmoil over the budget debacle on Friday night was a joint communiqu� issued by the leaders that their constitution could one day be carried out. It did not explain how, given the French and Dutch rejections and the requirement that all 25 countries ratify it.� In fact, it�s not too hard to imagine how the EU commissars will get their constitution. Perhaps they will alter the requirement that all 25 countries ratify it. Or maybe they will alter what ratification means, opting not for public referenda but a decision from some sort of committee or praesidium (or soviet?). The possibilities are endless.