Posted on 5/23/2003, 4:05:34 AM by Forgiven_Sinner
Happy Victoria Day, the day we honour an old queen by giving her not a moment's thought. A year or two back, some professor thought we should change Victoria Day to Heritage Day to "strengthen our heritage." We strengthen our heritage by obliterating it, apparently. True, there exist many confused persons who believe Victoria Day is Stock's gran'ma, but that's no reason not to stand up for the old gal. She was our first wholly constitutional monarch, and thus a critical figure at a critical time: She embodies the principle of peaceful evolution that distinguishes the Britannic world from ... well, pretty much everywhere else, come to think of it.
Remember the USA Today weather-map system of colour-coded security alerts that Tom Ridge introduced south of the border a couple months ago? If you were to apply Ridge's code -- from blue to red via green, yellow and orange -- to the health of global democracy, you'd wind up with something along these lines: the United States, code green; Britain, Canada and the non-insane parts of the Commonwealth, code yellow; Europe, code orange; the Middle East, code red. The Arab world has no democracy, and little prospect of any this side of the invasion of Iraq, and so its much-vaunted "Arab street" is, in fact, a symbol of weakness. Folks jump up and down in the street when they've nowhere else to go. The Arabs are world leaders at yelling excitedly and shouting "Death to the Great Satan!" and world losers at everything else.
I was reminded of this the other day when Yasser Arafat suddenly decided to come out in favour of free elections and an end to corruption, and I found myself musing on why so much of the "civilized" world doesn't care that their stubbly chum is a squalid dictator. The Palestinian Authority's failure is revealing. People say, oh, but they're not a fully sovereign state, it's unfair to judge them. No, but Yasser's regime has roughly the same internal powers as, say, the state of Texas or the province of Quebec, and rather more than Scotland or Wales. And they've abused them, terribly. They can't run education, or the roads, or anything else.
So why would they be able to run a sovereign state? As the last Frenchman to understand the United States, Alexis de Tocqueville, wrote in Democracy in America (1840), "Town meetings are to liberty what primary schools are to science; they bring it within people's reach, they teach men how to use and to enjoy it. A nation may establish a free government, but without municipal institutions it cannot have the spirit of liberty." That's exactly the phrase: "the spirit of liberty." In the hours and days after Sept. 11, European friends kept asking me why it was Mayor Giuliani who was taking charge on the streets of Lower Manhattan rather than President Bush. The implication seemed to be that the mayor is some kind of understudy, that the system isn't working unless the top guy's there. But that's to get it exactly backwards. It's in the mayor, the police chief and municipal institutions that you measure the health of society.
By contrast, Europe has "free governments" but, highly centralized and constrained by an unelected nomenklatura of Eurocrats, it doesn't have "the spirit of liberty", and it suffers as a consequence. Europe's great thinkers -- a self-defining group -- obsess about what they call the "democratic deficit": The European Union is run by an unelected Commission and a secretive Council, and given a fig leaf of respectability by a parliament of EUnuchs with no real power. (Mrs. Thatcher used to insist, correctly, that they were a mere "assembly" rather than a "parliament.") So now the Eutopians are trying to invent Europe-wide democratic structures, which would be not a solution but simply an alternative problem. The issue is not how to make the chaps in Brussels more "accountable," but why all that stuff is being dealt with in Brussels in the first place -- why so much of what Tocqueville regarded as primary-school science can only be entrusted to the men in white coats back at the laboratory. Eurocrats who spent much of the Eighties mocking President Reagan's "trickle-down economics" are happy to put their faith in trickle-down nation-building: If you create the institutions of a European state, a European state will somehow take root underneath.
In Canada, Britain and America, we're the heirs to so many centuries of peaceful constitutional evolution we find it hard to comprehend the thin ice on which European democracy skates. When we look back on the Seventies, it's Pierre Trudeau, Harold Wilson and Jimmy Carter, all of whom I could have done without. But they look pretty good compared to a stroll down memory lane in Portugal, Spain and Greece, where Seventies nostalgia means Salazar, Franco and the Colonels. In most of Europe, there simply is no tradition of sustained peaceful democratic evolution. After 215 years, the U.S. Constitution is not only older than the French, German, Italian, Belgian, Spanish and Greek constitutions, it's older than all of them put together. Whether the forthcoming European constitution will be the one that sticks remains to be seen, but I wouldn't bet on it. It's more likely the latest doomed big idea: Communism, Fascism, European Union, each wacky notion a response to the last dud.
For all its imperfections, Westminster democracy has delivered an unglamorous stability -- in Canada, New Zealand, St. Lucia, Papua New Guinea ... In celebrating the birthday of Queen Victoria, the first sovereign of a self-governing Dominion of Canada, we celebrate the endurance of our democracy, and thus its superiority. The great mystery is why Britain, having successfully exported its democratic structures around the world, is abandoning them at home to subordinate itself to a political and legal culture with which it has nothing in common.
You'd think that, if Europe were really serious about avoiding the horrors of the last century, they might learn from the most successful and enduring forms of democracy in the world -- the Anglo-American systems. Instead, these are precisely the forms the EU is most determined to avoid. The EU sees itself as the answer to the problem of Le Pen, Haider, Fortuyn et al. Le Pen, Haider and Co. see themselves as the answer to the problem of the EU. The correct answer is probably "Neither of the above", but, as usual, there'll be a lot of blood on the floor before they figure that one out.
I've often thought what Europe needs is more Swiss democracy. Divide all the countries into cantons and let each local group decide what to do locally. Give them all right to arms and freedom of speech. That would go a long way to fixing EU's problems.
But just as true today. It's rare to find a column that ages well; most have the shelf life of milk.
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