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Die Welt: "Euro-sceptics risk a new holocaust"
An article by the British MEP Daniel Hannan in the German newspaper "Die Welt":
The British, according to your excellent Ambassador to London, Thomas Matussek are obsessed with the Nazi period. Every recent German Ambassador has made the same observation: it seems to be part of their constitutional function. And I am sorry to say that they have a point. Our television schedules over the past week have been crammed with documentaries about the Second World War, while several newspapers have re-published their front pages from 60 years ago. Although most British people, deep down, acknowledge Germany as a staunch ally, a vital trading partner and probably the European country with whom we have most in common, the casual visitor to Britain might not think so.
I am afraid I am now going to disappoint the Ambassador. After only eight weeks of writing this column, I too am going to mention the war. I am driven to do so in response to an outrageous speech by Margot Wallström, in which she claimed that Euro-sceptics risked bringing about another Holocaust. The Swedish Commissioner first tried to claim that she had been misquoted, and then doctored her website to remove the offending passage from her speech. But I have in front of me a copy of her original words at a ceremony to mark the liberation of the Czech ghetto of Terezin: “There are those today who want to scrap the supra-national idea. They want the EU to go back to the old purely intergovernmental way of doing things. I say those people should come to Terezin and see where that old road leads”.
We all make mistakes, of course. Mrs Wallström said something stupid and hurtful, and plainly wishes she could take it back. And, to be fair to her, a visit to Terezin—Theresienstadt in German—would affect almost anyone’s sense of judgment. It was a holding camp for “privileged categories” of Jews: intellectuals and First World War veterans. Because it contained many writers and artists, a substantial corpus of its inmates’ work has survived. To study those poems and paintings today, to see the schoolwork of the children who passed through the camp on their way to Auschwitz, is almost unbearable. In the circumstances, Mrs Wallström might perhaps be forgiven her lapse.
It is important, however, to challenge her main assumption, namely that the EU is the best way to prevent genocide. For this belief forms the basis of the entire European project. It is the last-ditch argument of all my Euro-enthusiast friends. Whenever I complain about corruption in Brussels, or the iniquities of the Common Agricultural Policy, or the undemocratic nature of the EU, I am told: “Even if you are right, these things are a small price to pay for sixty years without war.”
If the EU had indeed prevented war, that would justify a good deal. But how true is this claim? The assertion that the EU is the main cause of peace in Europe is made so often that we rarely stop to question it. Yet it is surely at least as plausible to see the EU as a symptom of a European peace brought about by the defeat of fascism and the spread of democracy, and guaranteed by the NATO alliance.
In her speech at Terezin, Mrs Wallström blamed the Holocaust on “nationalistic pride”. But many of Hitler’s opponents were motivated by “nationalistic pride”. Patriotism need not be selfish or inward looking. Millions fought against totalitarianism in the belief that they were fighting for the freedom of all nations.
The most terrible wars of the modern era have mainly been caused, not by national rivalries, but by trans-national ideologies: Jacobinism, fascism, Communism, Islamic fundamentalism. If anything, the nation-state is the best defence against totalitarianism, precisely because it is the unit within which representative government works best.
Germany, or so I have always been taught, used to have a proud history of supporting the principle of democratic self-determination, abroad as well as at home. Is it right that the memory of 1945 should be allowed to obliterate forever the spirit of 1848?
In rejecting what Mrs Wallström calls “the old intergovernmental way of doing things”, the EU is turning its back on the main guarantor of Europe’s democratic traditions. I leave the last word to the great German liberal economist and anti-Nazi Wilhelm Röpke: “To organise Europe centrally and to weld it into a bloc would be nothing less than a betrayal of Europe and the European patrimony—a betrayal made all the worse by being carried out in Europe’s name”.
Published in the German newspaper "Die Welt", 14.5.2005.
The article in German
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