Empowerment Through Knowledge

Years ago, long before these latest crises developed, I suggested something that must have seemed at the time like doom-laden hyperbole. This was that the structure of the EU, with the unelected Commission at its head, might represent an effective end to the two-centuries-old experiment in European popular democracy. After the Second World War, there had been a conscious decision by the then-wisest minds on the Continent that mass democracy – which had reached a grotesque apotheosis in the elections of Hitler and Mussolini – had been a terrible mistake. It was time for a return to benign oligarchy. Europe must be ruled in future by an enlightened class of professional administrators who would ensure that the Mob, with its ancient hatreds and bloodthirsty prejudices, would never again run amok. The countries most responsible for the design of these structures that would consign popular democracy to obsolescence were Germany and France, which shared a historical sense of responsibility for the nationalist debacles of the first half of the last century.

They also shared, as it happened, fear and resentment of the global power of America – a fear enunciated very clearly by German Europhiles who were adamant that a European currency must be created to counteract the world dominance of the dollar. And so was born the new Europe with its megalithic institutions and a philosophy that was (who could doubt it now?) explicitly devised to prevent the impulses of the masses from seizing control over economic, social or military decisions.