In the Wall Street Journal, my good friend Declan Ganley: An Irish businessman, political activist, and one of the few courageous voices of reason trying to save Europe from its imminent financial collapse:
Alone, Ireland Votes on Europe
Solutions to Europe’s woes must be inspired by Burke, not Robespierre.
Today, Ireland holds its referendum on the European Union’s Fiscal Compact treaty. Not for the first time, Ireland is the only EU member state whose people have the privilege of exercising their democratic voice on the question of whether to transfer fiscal sovereignty to Brussels and Frankfurt.
But Europe is mired in groupthink—and in the finest traditions of old Jacobin France, dissent is seen as tantamount to treason. If Ireland votes “No” today, it will simply be told to vote again, and again, and again until it yields the right answer—even though Ireland and all of Europe are being asked the wrong question.
From the moment Europe’s financial crisis became apparent, the response in Brussels has been a consistent and unwavering commitment to hoping it will just all go away. It’s been a tour-de-force of feeble summitry, with each new gathering of EU leaders producing increasingly Walter Mitty-esque talk of some grand strategy to deal with a problem that it’s increasingly clear they refuse to recognize.
Not only do they refuse to recognize it, they have made it worse. By using taxpayer money to try and fill the hole in the balance sheets of Europe’s banks, they’ve committed the people of Europe to plugging a hole that is just getting bigger and bigger. Their latest plan—the European Stability Mechanism—was unveiled with great fanfare last year as a €500 billion bazooka that would give the EU the firepower it needed to deal with the crisis. Today, it would be a very brave person who would bet on that figure being sufficient to solve Europe’s financial and banking woes.
Europe’s economic disaster is inextricably linked to the abject failure of Brussels as a governing entity. Now that real leadership is required, there is no prospect of it being provided through the democratic process. In Brussels, to initiate any new legislation, you have to be unelected. Those who are elected—the member states’ heads of government—fight among each other for their national interest even as the euro binds them together in the certainty of a shared and common fate.
Europe needs very dramatic economic reforms, and it is increasingly clear that these will only happen with a series of equally dramatic political reforms. Europe will not survive in its current form—the choice is between a return to its founding principles of democracy and economic liberty, or a slow slide beneath the ice-cold waves of its ocean of insolvency.
The economic reforms are obvious—embrace risk, competition and free markets and abandon corporatism, that European practice of picking “winners” and bailing out the losers. Renew our faith in the freedom to fail. A bank that knows it will not be bailed out under any circumstances is a bank that will be more circumspect. If we want to save the euro, we must establish accountable federal institutions, have a one-off debt federalization. These solutions aren’t hard to grasp, but Europe’s democratic failure has made them impossible to achieve.
Brussels needs an infusion of new ideas, new blood and new leadership structures that can tackle the crisis. Its leaders are fond of saying that the EU must “unite,” but seem incapable of doing anything more than just repeating that phrase ad nauseam, as if the act of wishing made it true.
Europe needs a parliament than can legislate and a president that can lead. It currently has two presidents—neither elected, neither legitimate, and a parliament of over 700 legislators who are prohibited from creating any legislation whatsoever. The presidencies of the EU Council and EU Commission should be merged into one office, and a date named for an EU-wide election. To the population-based EU Parliament, a nation-based EU senate should be added. By the end of next year, the EU should have elected somebody with the moral and democratic authority to lead it in a clear, consistent direction, and given itself an infusion of democratic legitimacy and political vision.
The very process of an EU-wide election would focus minds on the European interest, and not merely narrow national interests currently tearing the project apart. The sunlight of democracy itself is enough to encourage public discussion of the reforms and competition of big ideas that Europe so desperately needs, yet so cravenly avoids. Europe has a leadership vacuum, and that vacuum must be filled with votes, or else it will suck the very fabric of the union in upon itself.
Two hundred years ago, looking across the Channel to France under Robespierre, Edmund Burke observed that the Jacobins were making a fundamental error by wiping out their political opposition—noting that “He who wrestles with us strengthens our nerves and sharpens our skill. Our antagonist is our helper.” In Europe today, this has again been forgotten. We need a Europe of Burke, not of Robespierre. The time for a United States of Europe is upon us. Let’s make sure it’s a solvent Europe, built from the bottom up, for freedom.
Mr. Ganley is the founder of the Libertas political party.