You could call it the parable of the turkeys voting for Christmas. Surely the central paradox of the European Parliament elections, at least in the UK, was that the people most motivated to vote were the ones who liked the institution they were voting for the least.
The result was not surprising. The majority of the British MEP’s sitting in Brussels and Strasbourg over the next five years will be at best lukewarm to the European Union itself and, at worst, advocates of the UK’s removal from it completely.
If these people were to use their mandate in a logical and consistent sense they would, indeed, be turkeys voting for Christmas.
How has it come to this ? The simple answer, and it has been given by just about anyone, is that no-one cares much about the EU. And there are others who just hate the whole thing.
Why ? At the political level there has been a narrowing of support for the project that works inversely from the snowballing of its ambitions. As an economic club of equal members trading freely with one another it had enough support to survive.
But throw in social and political integration and support amongst previously agreeable groups has, no doubt, been eroded. And there is little doubt also that the main reason for such second thoughts has been pressure from the populace as a whole.
So just why are people so against a union of nation states across the continent ? Maybe it is just a fear of the unknown or perhaps a general feeling of a lack of control over your own destiny.
But it could be part of a deeper process that has been ongoing since the end of the Second World War. In 1945 a whole era of political unrest, economic upheaval and mass politicisation came to an end in heaps of rubble and a list of tens of millions dead.
At an individual level, those who survived must have felt they had been conned. Especially those living in Germany who had given their faith to Adolf Hitler in the hope things would turn out all right. But those who had lost a loved one (and everyone had) in any country touched by the conflict could have been overtaken by the thought that the fighting had not been worth the human cost.
It might not be so surprising if those same people had recoiled from the political sphere as being not for them. They had more pressing matters; finding a house, making sure they had enough to eat and finding a job to provide the money for those necessities.
For those people politics, running the economy and the civil administration was best left to others. There were more important things in life. And so, outside the Soviet bloc, European countries entered a contract with their politicians. Give us jobs, houses and increasing prosperity and we will let you get on with things. And if you let us down we will use free elections to tell you so and vote the other lot in, just as long as we can trust them to fulfil exactly the same bargain.
Leaders and led detached themselves from each other and people became less politicised and even more focused on the familial and the personal, and they could do so because the politicians seemed to be able to deliver much of what they wanted.
But with succeeding generations that social contract morphed and as the original bargain faded into history it became something else.
A point was reached where politicians and people became so detached as to lose touch completely. To an increasing number all that mattered was what happened within their own family or their own personal lives. They could neither see their connectedness with other people in similar positions or how their own situation was linked to a bigger world.
Understanding of political issues dropped, fewer people voted because they could see no relationship between what leaders did and their own lives. People stopped believing in anything, whether ideology, or God, or in a sense of responsibility to others. Political participation dropped, union membership declined.
This idea that our own lives are the only thing that has any importance ended up being reflected in Margaret Thatcher’s portrayal as the individual as king, a philosophy of “I’ll do as I please” without reference to a wider society. As official Government policy it simply gave voice to what many had been feeling for more than forty years.
A European project, though, takes an opposite view. Even the very words that marked the scheme from the outset, “community” and “union” go against this individualistic streak reflected in the monadism of everyday post-war existence.
Robert Schumann and his friends were idealists. They were liberals and they were capitalists but they believed in sharing and co-operation. They were about ‘us’ not ‘me’. There was an element of self-interest in what they envisaged but it was not individualism that was their mantra.
Economic co-operation was something most on the centre-left and centre-right could agree on as it was based on trade and the enrichment of everyone. But was that enough ?
For those who had conceived of European co-operation as a way of making sure the horrors of war never returned to the continent there must have been a belief that there was more to continued peace and prosperity than one big free trade area.
Especially those politicians who saw the post-war world divided between the USA and the USSR and who perhaps hankered for a chance to sit at the top table. Britain and France alone no longer wielded influence. But Europe might. And so off they went. Everything from a European foreign policy to a single currency ensued.
And on their adventure they have incurred the ire of those who want to be left alone. The populations who believe in nothing, who are not idealists, who have no greater desire than to live in a narrow, exclusive world and who definitely do not want a grand vision.
That frightens them. They are so disengaged from politics they fear any loss of control of their small world from Big Brother; the world of regulations and loss of freedom to do as they please.
Is it any wonder that into the gap between the rulers and the ruled jump UKIP and the eurosceptic Tories ? So that’s how they vote and that is what we get. And the ones that don’t vote at all don’t care because their lives are so remote from Brussels and Strasbourg that they fail to make any connection between them.
And, it seems, the European project is broken too. Its idealism and vision stymied by fear of the unknown and a lack of comprehension about its overall purpose. A European Union will, of course, continue to exist piecemeal, but as for an all-embracing totality the composition of much of the new European Parliament would tend to indicate one big, NON !
The result was not surprising. The majority of the British MEP’s sitting in Brussels and Strasbourg over the next five years will be at best lukewarm to the European Union itself and, at worst, advocates of the UK’s removal from it completely.
If these people were to use their mandate in a logical and consistent sense they would, indeed, be turkeys voting for Christmas.
How has it come to this ? The simple answer, and it has been given by just about anyone, is that no-one cares much about the EU. And there are others who just hate the whole thing.
Why ? At the political level there has been a narrowing of support for the project that works inversely from the snowballing of its ambitions. As an economic club of equal members trading freely with one another it had enough support to survive.
But throw in social and political integration and support amongst previously agreeable groups has, no doubt, been eroded. And there is little doubt also that the main reason for such second thoughts has been pressure from the populace as a whole.
So just why are people so against a union of nation states across the continent ? Maybe it is just a fear of the unknown or perhaps a general feeling of a lack of control over your own destiny.
But it could be part of a deeper process that has been ongoing since the end of the Second World War. In 1945 a whole era of political unrest, economic upheaval and mass politicisation came to an end in heaps of rubble and a list of tens of millions dead.
At an individual level, those who survived must have felt they had been conned. Especially those living in Germany who had given their faith to Adolf Hitler in the hope things would turn out all right. But those who had lost a loved one (and everyone had) in any country touched by the conflict could have been overtaken by the thought that the fighting had not been worth the human cost.
It might not be so surprising if those same people had recoiled from the political sphere as being not for them. They had more pressing matters; finding a house, making sure they had enough to eat and finding a job to provide the money for those necessities.
For those people politics, running the economy and the civil administration was best left to others. There were more important things in life. And so, outside the Soviet bloc, European countries entered a contract with their politicians. Give us jobs, houses and increasing prosperity and we will let you get on with things. And if you let us down we will use free elections to tell you so and vote the other lot in, just as long as we can trust them to fulfil exactly the same bargain.
Leaders and led detached themselves from each other and people became less politicised and even more focused on the familial and the personal, and they could do so because the politicians seemed to be able to deliver much of what they wanted.
But with succeeding generations that social contract morphed and as the original bargain faded into history it became something else.
A point was reached where politicians and people became so detached as to lose touch completely. To an increasing number all that mattered was what happened within their own family or their own personal lives. They could neither see their connectedness with other people in similar positions or how their own situation was linked to a bigger world.
Understanding of political issues dropped, fewer people voted because they could see no relationship between what leaders did and their own lives. People stopped believing in anything, whether ideology, or God, or in a sense of responsibility to others. Political participation dropped, union membership declined.
This idea that our own lives are the only thing that has any importance ended up being reflected in Margaret Thatcher’s portrayal as the individual as king, a philosophy of “I’ll do as I please” without reference to a wider society. As official Government policy it simply gave voice to what many had been feeling for more than forty years.
A European project, though, takes an opposite view. Even the very words that marked the scheme from the outset, “community” and “union” go against this individualistic streak reflected in the monadism of everyday post-war existence.
Robert Schumann and his friends were idealists. They were liberals and they were capitalists but they believed in sharing and co-operation. They were about ‘us’ not ‘me’. There was an element of self-interest in what they envisaged but it was not individualism that was their mantra.
Economic co-operation was something most on the centre-left and centre-right could agree on as it was based on trade and the enrichment of everyone. But was that enough ?
For those who had conceived of European co-operation as a way of making sure the horrors of war never returned to the continent there must have been a belief that there was more to continued peace and prosperity than one big free trade area.
Especially those politicians who saw the post-war world divided between the USA and the USSR and who perhaps hankered for a chance to sit at the top table. Britain and France alone no longer wielded influence. But Europe might. And so off they went. Everything from a European foreign policy to a single currency ensued.
And on their adventure they have incurred the ire of those who want to be left alone. The populations who believe in nothing, who are not idealists, who have no greater desire than to live in a narrow, exclusive world and who definitely do not want a grand vision.
That frightens them. They are so disengaged from politics they fear any loss of control of their small world from Big Brother; the world of regulations and loss of freedom to do as they please.
Is it any wonder that into the gap between the rulers and the ruled jump UKIP and the eurosceptic Tories ? So that’s how they vote and that is what we get. And the ones that don’t vote at all don’t care because their lives are so remote from Brussels and Strasbourg that they fail to make any connection between them.
And, it seems, the European project is broken too. Its idealism and vision stymied by fear of the unknown and a lack of comprehension about its overall purpose. A European Union will, of course, continue to exist piecemeal, but as for an all-embracing totality the composition of much of the new European Parliament would tend to indicate one big, NON !
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