News
Style Guide for Authors
more
Financial Statement of 2019
more
Available Now! Down Fell the Statue of Goliath - Hungarian Poets and Writers on the Revolution of 1956
more
Subscription
Hungarian Review annual subscriptions for six issues, including postage (choose one):
After the European Elections — Europe’s Moral Landscape
21st January 2015
May 30, 2014
After the European Elections—Europe’s Moral Landscape.
Danube Institute, Budapest
Thierry Baudet
A few years ago, a short video called Hidden Treasures of Europe was broadcast in European cinemas. I would just like to show it as a start of my contribution here today.
Produced by the European Commission, it starts with synthesizer chords reminiscent of Bach. We see a mountain lake and hear church bells. The question “Sweden?” appears, followed by the answer “Montenegro”. Two girls watch their mobile phones. The question “France?” appears. And then the answer: “Serbia”. The game goes on for a while, until the sequence finishes with an Hellenic temple. “Greece?” “Albania”. A cute little girl frisks happily over the sunny grass. The screen turns blue, and the text “So similar, so different, so European” appears. A map of Europe including Turkey looms up, and underneath it: “Growing together”.
The European Commission spent about €500,000 (£401,000) on this film. It was an initiative of the European commissioner for enlargement, the Czech Stefan Füle. The clip is meant to show “just how gorgeous and surprising southeast Europe can be. Yes, the region is different and this is what makes it so vibrant, exciting and fascinating. But is it that different?”
An my answer to that is, that quite like the five-star hotels and business lounges that make up the living environment of a European commissioner, parks and office buildings are indeed similar in different countries. But that is not the case with the people populating them.
Deep political, moral, cultural, linguistic, religious, historical and economic differences divide Europe, as the euro crisis has shown. That the EU’s officials are unable to distinguish Germany from Turkey, France from Serbia, and Sweden from Montenegro, is as hilarious as it is tragic.
The EU’s total budget for “communication” is around €140m a year. A second film, produced in the same year, features Kung-Fu fighters who eventually drop their arms and are peacefully surrounded by the twelve yellow stars of the EU flag. The clip was withdrawn because it was allegedly racist.
Let’s have a look at it, too.
A third project was a European diary – distributed to schools in over 3m copies. The aim was to make children comfortable with European unification from an early age, and to make clear that the EU is a multicultural undertaking. The diary mentioned the festive days of all religions – Islam, Buddhism, Hinduism, and so on. Except for one. Christianity. Forgotten.
My work brings me to Brussels every now and then. The old city centre feels like it is under siege, infested by several kilometres of EU offices. Huge banners are draped along the facades of the massive bureaucrats’ offices, proclaiming the official political agenda. For instance: “Improving animal welfare – Jose Manuel Barroso”. Or: “Creating strong economic governance”. These are slogans no one can really object to, but which are then used to regulate our lives in every detail.
Consider European commissioner Viviane Reding who designed a plan to submit enterprises across Europe to a binding minimum quota of women. Should this succeed, then every company must have a certain percentage of female employees. In the name of human rights and non-discrimination, this quota will surely mean a lot of extra work for Brussels – extra rules, extra employees, extra importance, extra everything. And, in time, it will surely require additional regulations and interventions. For once it is established that a certain percentage of women should be employed, a quota for female students at European universities must surely come within reach, inevitably followed by uniform child care provision across the continent.
Meanwhile, the EU works without tiring on uniform standards regarding the number of people graduating from universities (which should be at least 40%); to have school drop-out rates above a certain percentages and – this is my favorite – greenhouse gas emissions at least 20 to 30% lower than the 1990-level.
It is the combination of boundless ambition and complete lack of interest in reality that makes the European class so dangerous. Regardless of the costs, the cultural and political differences, the economic stagnation, the resistance of the people; this elites just go on chasing their goal of European ‘unification’. The most intrusive rules are devised to make the project legitimate. The most ridiculous clips are shown in cinemas to persuade the public.
But it simply doesn’t work. Our national differences are the strength of this continent. And the more they are upset by Brussels’s bureaucratic bullies, the likelier a violent response becomes. The reasonable solution to the EU’s current crisis is orderly dismantlement, like the dissolution of Czechoslovakia in the 1990s. The longer political leaders deny this reality, the likelier a Yugoslavia will be instead.