This EU Won't Work

In this blog we have put many detailed arguments for leaving the EU but, shorn of those details, this is an attempt to encapsulate the core thinking.

It is good to have ideals provided they don’t become ideologies. We should respond to experience and not just make excuses when schemes aren’t working. Science succeeds (eventually) by continuous feedback between theory and evidence but all too often the social sciences lack this discipline (of falsifiability). The theories are never wrong, they just haven’t been tried properly so need more time and patience.

The founding vision for the EU, after WW1, was for a peaceful, harmonious, happy, prosperous and united continent – above all, peaceful – and WW2 provided urgency and new impetus to the idea. A single, federalised state was seen as the means to achieve this, a union in which the citizens, their skills and property could flow freely wherever needed or desired. By establishing sameness everywhere there would be no barriers to these flows, so wealth and happiness would spread evenly across the region, eliminating envy and thus the cause of war between competing nations. The visionaries recognised that the unenlightened, general populations of the disunited nations might not welcome a homogenised super-state and so a process would need to be established whereby the goal was achieved through scarcely-noticeable but irreversible steps. Clearly this could not be a democratic process but would have to be discreetly guided by “wise men”, acting in the enlightened interests of the whole over any sectional (e.g. national) preferences.

Upon this vision and this method a seemingly-benign project developed but progress has not been smooth and the conceptual faults are now being brutally exposed. At last we are seeing the reversal of its liberal agenda, where solutions are imposed, in spite of their devastating effects on people and communities, to save the principles underlying its simplistic philosophy of human society (i.e. that the social and cultural differences developed over many generations can be formally dissolved without raising the destructive ire of the people, which recent events and polled opinions confirm is unrealistic).

Experience shows that the wise men look like fools for holding to a disastrous course and wealth has not spread evenly. There are other, plausible explanations for why Europe has not yet triggered WW3.

If the EU does collapse under the weight of its contradictions, then an alternative community of the nations of Europe may be formed, with more emphasis on the economic, social, intellectual and environmental benefits of collaboration and less on the need to interfere with political realities in order to exclude majorities from active participation.