Amygdala

So the European Union is steamrollering democracy as it tries to fix the mess it’s created? Greek prime minister Papandreou in Greece is handed his notice by Nicolas Sarkozy and Angela Merkel because he dares to suggest the Greek people should decide whether they want to starve for the next 10 years. Unelected Eurocrat and Brussels yes-man Mario Monti takes charge of Italy and appoints a cabinet of technocrats to run the place

(What are technocrats and are they any good? Well, for a complete answer, can I direct you to the recent history of Belgium? Thought not. In that case, ‘Smug theoreticians who’ve never had a proper job’ and ‘Rubbish party a brewery’ are your revision notes.)

Suddenly voices from as diverse a group as the BBC in London and the Sydney Morning Herald in, I guess, Sydney, are protesting that democracy has been thrust aside. Strangely beautiful, dangerous women with odd accents fight the Eurocrats’ corner. “This is the wrong way to look at the situation,” says one on my telly. “If the building is on fire, you don’t ask if the firemen are elected.”

Er, no you don’t you ludicrous airhead. But you might ask if they were qualified firemen and quiz them about their experience and who gave them their job. You might also worry about them if they worked for a larger organization that had built your burning house without a fire-escape and which had lit the fire in the basement in the first place.

But that’s all by the by. When did we in Europe suddenly get it into our heads that the voice of the people was important? The whole European project has been built on the exact opposite idea. Yes, there have been a very small number of referenda on certain treaties over the years, but only over the opposition of every senior European politician who’s ever lived. And if ever the people have had the impertinence to reject Maastricht or Lisbon or any of the other vast wads of drivel that no-one has ever proofed, the politicians ignore them or run them again until they get “the right result.”

Modern Europe, in the sense of the European Union, is not a democratic project. It’s built on the idea that the people are a dangerous and emotional bunch who, left to their own devices, will create another Somme. To stop this happening, thought must triumph over emotion.  People with huge frontal lobes and no empathy must run countries like a sociopathic private equity chief runs businesses - with Excel spreadsheets and data that’s wrong before the ink’s dry. The main function of European bureaucracy has been to take power from the people to stop them screwing everything up. Slow decisions and no decisions are the safest course. So how’s that working for ya?

Also, and sorry for mentioning it, outside the UK, democracy itself is a pretty new idea in Europe. Men in feathered hats who made their own medals out of milk bottle tops ran most of it till quite recently and even where they didn’t it was only democracy in the sense that Russia defines it.

The Italians invented fascism (admittedly a long time ago but the Coliseum isn’t a football stadium) and the post-war rule of the Christian Democrats was a one-party state improved only slightly by the involvement of shady government-backed militias and the mafia. The Greeks were a monarchy until 1967, run by an army junta until 1974 and got to the present day under the thumb of a politico-industrial kleptocracy that ran in families. A bit like the US. The Spanish only got democracy in 1975 or 1982, depending on your definitions. Before that there was a lot of killing. If you think post-war Germany was a sensible democracy then you need to read Wolraff. Belgium…well, I rest my case.

Those of us who believe the best way to go is a fully participatory, open and transparent democracy, backed up by strong institutions capable of maintaining law and order and prosperity regardless of the passing of personalities, have a problem. Our favoured system is hardly found anywhere, and where it is found, it’s very young and it’s somewhat untested.

So, yes, right now, democracy has been cast aside. But not by this crisis. It was cast aside long ago by people who should have had the guts to build a real, democratic United States of Europe, but who decided instead to build their own unaccountable, bureaucrat-run fudge in a place that wasn’t very democratic before that. Fortunately for all of us, it’s falling to pieces. Unfortunately for all of us, the blame is not being correctly apportioned. So we’ll probably make all the same mistakes again.

Perhaps though we are going through our own version of the Arab Spring. The crisis could be just what we need to re-engage populations with politics and politicians with reality. Perhaps this is the beginning of post-post-war Europe.