The New Vichy Syndrome: Why European Intellectuals Surrender to Barbarism by Theodore Dalrymple

Author:Theodore Dalrymple [Dalrymple, Theodore]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Cultural, Europe, General, Social Science, Civilization, Anthropology, France, Political Science, History, Social History, Western, Discrimination & Race Relations, Sociology, History & Theory, Regional Studies
ISBN: 9781594035661
Publisher: Encounter Books
Published: 2011-10-11T00:00:00+00:00

EUROPEAN UNION AS A PENSION FUND

The answer, I think, is obvious: the European Union is like a giant pension fund for defunct politicians, who either cannot get elected in their own countries or are tired of the struggle to do so. It is a way for politicians to remain important and powerful, at the center of a web of patronage, after their defeat or loss of willingness to expose themselves to the rigors of the electoral process. One of the characteristics of modern political life is its professionalization, such that it attracts mainly the kind of people with so great an avidity for power and self-importance that they do not mind very much the humiliations of the public exposure to which they are inevitably subjected.58 They are increasingly like Lloyd George, the British Prime Minister, of whom John Maynard Keynes was once asked what he thought about when he was alone in a room. “When Lloyd George is alone in a room,” replied Keynes, “there’s nobody there.” It seems that there are more and more people like this, who derive their sense of themselves as truly existing only in front of an audience, preferably of millions.

No one bites the hand that feeds it, or even that might feed it at some time in the foreseeable future, especially as handsomely as the European hand feeds those who play ball with it. You can spot a feeder at the European trough (to change the metaphor once again) a mile off: having for a long time viewed the world exclusively through the windows of an official limousine, having lunched and dined heavily for many years (never at his own expense, of course), and having developed a special langue de bois in which streams of grammatically formed verbiage are carefully studded with words of positive connotation that makes it difficult to argue against him, he has developed the gray, immobile, slab-faced countenance of former members of the Soviet Politburo. Alas, it seems that there are a large number of volunteers—mainly mediocrities, of course—for this kind of life. It seems to them eminently preferable to earning a living.

Hence even those who start out with a predilection against the European project soon find, after an expense claim or two, that it is not so bad after all. And what career politician could be altogether against an organization of politicians and bureaucrats whose accounts have never, ever been signed off by the auditors as being correct? For politicians to abolish such a delightful organization would be like a federation of butchers voting for compulsory vegetarianism.

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