A Citizen’s Guide to the Subversion of Democracy

EU Law Has Been Designed to Undermine National Sovereignty From the Get-Go

Today, I have a piece for you that I was invited to contribute to the new Café Americain webzine, which, according to their ‘about us’ section, is

a political magazine that confronts the New Normal. The New Normal is the post-ideological and post-political condition of our current social order that has eclipsed the possibility for emancipation.

In those pages, you’ll find a lot of interesting and thought-provoking content, including the following essay by yours truly.

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A Citizen’s Guide to the Subversion of Democracy

EU Law Has Been Designed to Undermine National Sovereignty From the Get-Go

By Stephan Sander-Faes, Café Americain, 19 April 2024 [source]

Lots of (virtual) ink has been spilled trying to describe the “true” nature of the European Union. In what follows, I shall present you with an overarching argument that form follows function. Accordingly, it is, I shall argue, irrelevant if the EU is a “super-state”, a “federal union”, or a “confederacy”; the one thing that matters here is the question: how does “Brussels” influence and change politics, policies, and constitutions in the bloc’s member-states? For me as a historian, this issue relates to my own area of expertise, post-medieval and pre-industrial Central Europe. A decade ago, pro-EU arguments came with a warm sense of Europeans having—finally, after two world wars—learned the proverbial lessons of history. Take, for instance, The Economist pointing to the Holy Roman Empire, or former British diplomat Robert Cooper alluding to the positive experiences of Austria-Hungary in Eurozine. More recently, however, these sentiments have seemingly fallen out of fashion within leading Anglo-American and transatlantic circles, if Matthew Karnitschnig’s singularly misleading article in Politico is any guide. Writing in summer 2023, and without consideration of recent historical research (which takes an increasingly positive view of the late Habsburg Empire), Karnitschnig single-handedly declared roughly half a century of scholarship irrelevant and all positive views on the late Austro-Hungarian empire wrong. The lessons of history from a decade ago were apparently wrong, which therefore begs the question: what is the nature of the European Union?

However, what unites these seemingly disparate elements and meandering lines of thought is not that they invariably invoke whatever historical precedent will enable scoring some cheap political points. In fact, these articles are full of nostalgic allusions that evoke the golden era of homeland movies (Heimatfilme) like Sissi, the 1950s hit in which actress Romy Schneider iconically embodied the Austrian Empress Elisabeth. They also contain many questionable conclusions: “What was unique in the Habsburg zone was that it enabled the small nationalities to survive, keep their culture, some level of autonomy, and even to thrive with it”, as Robert Cooper asserts. These nostalgic portrayals of past kingdoms serve but one aim: to sell the elitist and anti-citizen project of “European integration”. This goal, though, comes with a twist, for the target audience of high-brow outlets like The Economist or Eurozine is not the citizenry-at-large, but the much smaller segment of Eurocrats, party members, and associates in the bloc’s various member-states, their fellow travellers in legacy media, business elites, and academia. While the “average Joe” might balk at the mixed messages employed by “The Experts™”, no criticism is to be expected from those white-collar professionals who benefit the most from the European Union. Moreover, none of these sentiments convey much, if any, explanatory power as to how the EU bloc really works.

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If, at this point, you’re intrigued to find out ‘how the EU bloc really works’, please follow this link over to Café Americain to read the rest.

A Brief Concluding Note

Dear readers, I am in the process of updating and revamping these pages as part of the annual spring-time clean-up, and therefore you may expect some (not too many) changes this week.

Thank you for reading, and enjoy the picture postcards I’ll be posting too.