Friday 11 September 2015

the pan-European agenda misuses Aylan's memory

Richard Howitt, one of the MEPs for the East of England, has lambasted his UKIP and Conservative colleagues for declining to side with him on a "pan-European" resolution to the refugee crisis.

What may help to make his outburst more comprehensible is the information that EU politics proceed on a "teleological" basis. That is, in responding to a crisis or making a judgement, the prime motivation is not the issue at hand, but rather what the unelected heads of the European Union want that Union to become. Thus, as I explain in Escape from Oppression: the Federalist Derivation, an obscure 1971 European Court of Justice judgement concerning crewing of transport vehicles fixed the principle that once the (then) EEC had concluded a common treaty no individual state had the right to negotiate with external countries on that treaty. This was a year before we joined the European project; earlier still, in 1970, the Werner Report set down, under a heading with the chilling title of The Final Objective, "the elements that are indispensable to the existence of a complete economic and monetary union", the latter being "a leaven for the development of political union".

What has all this to do with the refugee crisis? Absolutely nothing. Just as Mr Howitt's pronouncement of a "pan-European" solution to the crisis has nothing to do with refugees themselves. Once a pan-European method of resettling refugees has been identified, that method will become part of the EU's acquis communitaire, a settled pan-European way of doing things which, once a precedent has been set, no single state will be able to negotiate an exemption from.

I don't deny that Howitt may have some feeling of sympathy for the refugees, or at least guilt, since it was his own party under the disastrous leadership of Tony Blair that set the ball for this crisis rolling with the illegal invasion of Iraq. I simply believe he has stronger feelings for European political union, which is an article of faith among Europhiles who are so extremist that one might call them - remembering that the EU was never set up on democratic lines (according to Eric Hobsbawm) - eurofascists. He and his cadre are using the memory of poor Aylan Kurdi just as much as IS, who use his picture to illustrate what happens when Syrians reject their fundamentalist reading of Islam.

May Aylan, now beyond the reach of those who misuse his memory for their own lives, rest in peace.


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