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The German Foreign
Minister, Joschka Fischer, could not have been clearer. On Monday,
after the European Union had announced that it would cut diplomatic
ties with Austria if Jörg Haider's Freedom Party entered
the government, he said, "We and our partners cannot accept
that a party whose policies are directed against Europe can get
into a position where it can block the further integration of
Europe."
His
remarks were ostensibly addressed to Haider but they could equally
well apply to William Hague. They confirm that supporters of European
integration, and of the globalisation of which it is a part, have
no qualms about overturning the results of a democratic election
to advance their aims. Just as the negative result of the first
Danish referendum on Maastricht in 1992 was canceled by a second
referendum on the same text in 1993, so throughout the 1990s,
European governments and the United States have interfered in
elections across Eastern Europe and the former Soviet Union to
support politicians who bend the knee to the doctrine of the end
of national sovereignty. Integrated into the European Union, these
controlled governments will provide convenient institutional lobby-fodder
in EU councils to outvote any country like Britain which might
be foolish enough to try standing up for its own interests.
Mr.
Fischer's remarks, and the EU policies which back them up, confirm
that, without exception, all Western leaders are now in hock to
the old Brezhnevite doctrine of "limited sovereignty."
They are determined to establish the kind of supranationalism
to which the Soviet Communist Party referred in October 1952 as
"the entirely new relations between states, not met with
before in history," of which the USSR's relations with the
Warsaw Pact countries were supposed to be the shining example.
The communist tenets of internationalism and bogus anti-fascism
have now migrated from Moscow and East Berlin to make their nests
instead in the chancelleries of Europe and the United States.
For
little credence can be given to the claim that Austria is being
ostracised because of Haider's immigration policies. If this were
so, then Britain would be in the dog house for requiring visitors
from India and Pakistan to deposit £10,000 with the immigration
authorities when they come to visit their relatives, a patently
racist policy, while Jack Straw would be vilified for implying
that gypsies have an innate tendency to criminality. Instead,
Haider's danger – and his popular appeal in Austria – lies precisely
in his quality as an outsider who challenges the cosy corporatist
inter-party political carve-up of Austrian society, epitomised
by the 13 year-old coalition between social democrats and conservatives
which he has just destroyed. He is believed (maybe wrongly) to
represent the same threat to the similar cartel-like arrangements
which have governed Europe for decades, and whose corrupt practises
are now being exposed across the continent. Indeed, it is no coincidence
if politicians from the Continent's most unaccountable political
systems – principally France and Belgium, but also Germany and
Italy – have led the attack against the new Austrian coalition.
The
tactic, of course, is to demonise the enemy as a Nazi. It is a
ruse which can be deployed limitlessly. Everyone is Hitler now.
From Pat Buchanan and Jörg Haider to Saddam Hussein and Slobodan
Milosevic, with regular doses of aged Latvians thrown in for good
measure, this trick is now so massively abused that it ought to
be discounted as irredeemably debased. However, in the decade
since 1989, the Right has lost the most important political battle
of all, the battle for culture. After the so-called fall of communism,
the historical memory of the 20th century should have achieved
some kind of balance of assessment between the crimes of communism
and the crimes of fascism. Instead, and with a ruthlessness of
which only the Left is capable, the memory of the former has been
utterly effaced by a hypnotic and exclusive concentration on the
latter. Historical memory is now trapped in a dangerous tunnel
vision, as if the only event in the 20th century were the rise
of Hitler.
Communism's
80 million victims are thus conveniently consigned to the dustbin
of history and historical memory is shamelessly manipulated for
short-term political advantage. Consequently, a democratically
elected politician in Austria can be attacked as a Nazi sympathiser,
even though he has never broken any law or belonged to any proscribed
organisation. Meanwhile not an eyebrow is raised when communists
come to power in Italy and France, or when former communists like
Peter Mandelson enter the government in Britain. Massimo d'Alema,
the Italian prime minister, who leads a party which for years
was illegally funded by Moscow, declared in 1998, "I am an
inheritor of Italian Communism. I am not sorry for my past,"
and in 1990, "It is practically impossible to find a name
as beautiful as Communist Party."
Therefore,
just as the Berlin Wall was justified as an "anti-fascist
protection barrier," so the international bodies in gestation,
like the EU and the whole alphabetti-spaghetti of acronymous and
anonymous international bodies around the world, are justified
as a bulwark against any eruption of "nationalism" which
might disturb the bureaucrats' authoritative administration of
the planet. We are familiar with this as the raison d'être
of the EU: globalisation is simply an extension of the same anti-democratic
and anti-national principles to world level. As Jean Monnet wrote
in his Memoirs, "The European Community itself is only a
stage towards tomorrow's forms of world organisation."
The West is thus now on the verge of achieving that of which Lenin
and Trotsky dreamed in 1917. For the point is not, as many Eurosceptics
mistakenly believe, to replace nation-states with a European or
world super-state. It is instead to achieve the old Marxist dream
of abolishing statehood altogether. For, in Lenin's words, the
end-goal of communism is for "every form of state to wither
away." If the New Left has enthusiastically embraced "the
market," giving the illusion of a rightward shift in world
politics, this is in fact only because it believes that the withering
away of the state will be more efficiently promoted by big corporate
mercantilism than by state socialism. Similarly, the pretence
that globalisation is an anonymous inevitable historical force
is merely our old friend, dialectical materialism, in new guise.
As Lenin wrote in his essay, On the Slogan for a United States
of Europe, "A United States of the world, not of Europe alone,
is the state form of the union and freedom of nations which we
associate with socialism – until the complete victory of
communism brings about the total disappearance of the state, including
the democratic state." Mr. Fischer could hardly have put
it better.
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