EU - Responding to Joe Boot, Part Two

In deciding whether the UK should remain in the EU or leave, Joe Boot believes we need to ask the following questions

"What kind of political arrangement for Britain best guards against the proneness of governments and their bureaucracies to overreach themselves and deify (absolutize) some aspect of the socio-political life of humanity? Which arrangements can place the best check on fallen political power? Which structure most reflects God’s intention for the state? Which arrangement best protects our liberty? Which context provides the best opportunity for our Christian faith to flourish and work like leaven through the loaf of British society? And is leaving the EU or staying in the EU likely to provide the greatest degree of accountability of leaders to their people?"

He adds

"In answering these questions adequately we need to briefly examine two important things. First the unique political inheritance of freedom and justice in Britain and the values and virtues upon which it has been historically based. And second, the European project and the values and virtues upon which it was and is being constructed. Whether these are compatible lies at the heart of the question of ‘Brexit.’"

He fails to define at this point in which sense "the political inheritance of freedom and justice in Britain" is unique. Is it that others don't really care for freedom and justice the way Britons do? Or is that freedom and justice have a unique meaning in Britain? Or is it that Britain got its inheritance of freedom and justice via a different route than others? The remainder of his post hints that all of them apply to some extent. What is clear (for Joe Boot) is that Britain's political inheritance is mostly shaped by the Protestant Reformation, "whilst the major European powers remained within the Roman church." But the really decisive factor was the English Revolution (1640-1689).

"During this period, the absolute power of the monarchy was decisively broken, the rule of law affirmed, and a free English Parliament steadily established."

We can probably see where this is going. The EU seeks absolute power (sees itself as omni-competent), does not acknowledge the rule of law, and Europeans just don't have the respect for parliament that Britons do. What's more, 

"the founding fathers of the European project were dominated by concerned Catholic Christian Democrats connected with Pope Pius XII"

So while British political culture is shaped by Protestant freedom, "the social vision" behind European integration "was to be an essentially Roman Catholic one that emphasized soft socialism and top-down hierarchical government."

"The great majority of these early European lights then were socialists, Catholic politicians and Thomistic intellectuals. It is therefore no real surprise that the EU has developed to become elitist, highly bureaucratic, and out of touch with people, with about as much transparency as the Vatican."

His source is Daniel Hannan which probably explain why the Roman Catholic social teaching is presented in such a skewed way. Laws to protect workers are said to have been the result of "presupposing the Marxist ideology of class struggle" and to have led to a welfare-entitlement culture which resents the clawing back of the welfare state. At this point this still reads like a description of the EU which does not apply to the UK. Later on  the author acknowledges that the UK has in fact the same problems, presumably because (in his view) membership in the EU has turned the UK into a welfare state as well.

Joe Boot even manages to rubbish the concept of subsidiarity (well, it's got to be wrong, it's Roman Catholic).He claims that it is unworkable; its implementation necessarily "arbitrary and subjective" because who is to tell at which level decisions should be taken.

He also finds fault with the social morality aspect. While Britain was shaped by clear confessional values, guarded by "the United Kingdom’s monarch and reformed church," the EU is said to have relied on vague appeals to human dignity and responsibility and this is why what Europeans are left with is

"an almost exclusive preoccupation with money, prosperity and welfare. Economics has become the almost lone criterion for shared values."

And it got only worse with the inclusion of Eastern European member states.

"For many of these countries the simple question has been whether they will be ‘better off’ in or out of this massive political Eurozone, not whether the EU provides a moral, principled and accountable structure for European political life."

Unlike the British referendum debate then?

Actually, Joe Boot recognises that again Britons are not so different after all.

"Sadly, this financial criterion seems to be the only question far too many Britons are asking at this critical point of decision, as though being in or out of this political vision of integration were solely a matter of money and trade." 

But he does not ask why Britain's superior political heritage has not offered greater protection to its citizens. His antithetical presentation of Protestant (= British) and Catholic (= European) political ideals not only ignores the effect of the Reformation on continental Europe but also all that has happened since the religious wars of the seventeenth century.

The claim that "the European Union now consists of 28 member states with wildly diverse political and religious traditions and complex histories" is not altogether wrong but erases the Christian heritage that shaped Europe, even though towards the end the author acknowledges that "the cultural space of Europe as a whole could still be characterized as Christian in its inheritance." What is going on? Joe Boot seems to think that the European Christian heritage is irredeemably lost, while the British Protestant heritage can be retrieved once the UK has left the EU (but only then).

Boot is right to be concerned about the existence of a demos with shared values. I would agree that for democracy to function well there need to be a recognizable demos, not just a conglomeration of individuals who are given the same rights.

"At root, the source of any true unity for a people is religious. Lasting political and cultural cohesion depends on a people sharing a common vision of reality, a common cause, a common identity – in short, a common faith. A common faith is the basis of commonwealth."

(His comments on the importance of sharing a common language maybe relate specifically to monolingual societies; in other parts of the world linguistic diversity is less of a threat to social cohesion because people speak more than one language fluently.)

The problem is the vastly overstated claim to British exceptionalism and the implicit claim that just beneath the surface there is still a cultural consensus within the UK shaped by its Reformation heritage. There is much more we have in common across Europe than divides us and this includes the question of how to respond to the disintegration of a broadly shared vision of reality. This loss of a shared political vision may indeed lead to growing coercion but making governments geographically smaller offers no protection against this. Many of the most brutal, oppressive regimes were geographically small. Larger empires cannot always control their territory as fully as small nation states can. The size of the military and of the police force is a more reliable index of the intensity of coercion to be expected than the number of civil servants who dream of greater integration.

Claiming that the EU is an Utopian project allows Joe Boot to describe it as a failure by simply listing how it falls short of the utopia of a secure world of prosperity without war without the need to weigh up the pros and cons of an arrangement such as the EU.

"Notably it has not prevented war in Europe, for we have seen Bosnia, Kosovo and the Ukraine descend into desperate conflicts in the last 25 years, with Russia successfully annexing Crimea."

The question how relationships between the founding members of the EU might have developed without the European project may be impossible to answer but I hazard the claim that Russia would have annexed the Crimea even if there had been no EU. But the question whether without a EU there would still be warfare, and maybe even more of it than with the existence of the EU, is irrelevant to Joe Boot. There has been war. Ergo, the EU is a failed project because it did not fulfill the utopia of a world free of war.

"It has not provided prosperity. Resentments run deep regarding so-called austerity both in terms of the creditor and the borrower as the welfare states of Europe creak under mounting structural pressure and massive debt loads."

Again, Joe Boot sees no need to examine whether prosperity within the EU member states would be greater or lesser without the EU. There is no need to ask why first the UK and later so many ex-Communist countries wanted to join the economic "failure" that is the EU, or the extent to which current economic problems are related to EU membership or policies. There are economic problems which the EU has not solved. Ergo, the EU is a failed project because it does not give us an Utopian world of prosperity for all.

"Neither has it provided security. The free movement of people through open borders is proving a disaster area and a matter of real consternation in the face of a massive migration crisis of mainly Muslim populations from all over the world into the heart of Western Europe. Both the open borders and welfare handouts of Europe have created a huge security threat in the face of Islamic terrorism and economic migration from Afghanistan to Syria and Somalia. Plus the fact that even within Europe the movement of people has been largely that of low-skilled workers into the more prosperous nations, creating resentment."

Finally, Boot need not limit himself to ticking off the EU for failing to provide the total safety of an Utopian world. There is some evidence to suggest that the EU makes the security situation worse and this in two ways. The free movement of EU citizens within the EU makes it harder for the UK to keep French, Dutch and German terrorists out of the country. This is true. Whether it is a serious problem is debatable. So far home-grown terrorists have not travelled very far within Europe and, from what I know, have rarely been crossing borders with passport controls which is to say that terrorists threats within the UK are still much more likely to come from British rather than Belgian terrorists. Still, one can minimise the risk by keeping the Belgians out. Brexiteers by and large claim that this problem could be solved by leaving the EU while remaining in a free-trade relationship with it. But this does not seem likely, see Norway and Switzerland. Those who think that the terrorist threat from fellow EU citizens is a substantial risk should be prepared to get out and stay outside the EEA, not just the EU. It is little surprise that it is hard to find Brexiters who would honestly admit this.

In addition, there are refugees and economic migrants. The EU struggles to keep them out, partly for geographical reasons, partly for humanitarian ones. Being an island gives the UK a better chance to claim that this is someone else's problem. Maybe for now the UK manages doing precisely that (claiming all this is someone else's problem) even while inside the EU but it is true that some of those migrants and refugees at some point in the future might get, say, German or Italian citizenship and then they could come to the UK. And who is to say that the Germans and the Italians might not award citizenship to terrorists? Still, if one of the big fears is Islamization (and it is for Joe Boot), will the UK really be able and willing to minimize this by regulating immigration accordingly, maybe by way of setting a maximum number of Muslim immigrants?

I am not confident that it is true that within the EU the main movement has been of low-skilled workers into more prosperous nations, as Boot claims. Sending countries often make the contrary claim that they loose their best people. What I do know is that EU citizens moving into the UK usually get jobs. It is often claimed that this is because they are prepared to work for less. Maybe so, although the minimum wage seeks to ensure that this is not simply a race to the bottom. Anecdotally it is also frequently claimed that those pesky Roman Catholic Poles have a very Protestant work ethic...

Probably because he does not believe in subsidiarity, Joe Boot does not get the idea that some people might genuinely believe that there are things that are best addressed at the local level, others at regional, still others at national, and still others at European level and that therefore there is a place for European governing authorities alongside national ones. Also, he does seem convinced that this is all a con with the real aim being the abolishing of lower tiers of government in favour one one big Brussles government. So for John Boot supporting the EU can only mean bowing down to the idol of global government and "a technocratic utopian delusion of elitist coercion". It is a typical case of "because I could only support x, if I wanted y, you who support x must want y."

As indicated above, and to his credit, Joe Boot recognises that leaving the EU in and of itself does nothing to address "our welfare-dependent, sexually promiscuous, irreligious, politically indifferent and morally vacuous popular culture". So wherein lies his hope? In the Gospel, yes, even "in the grace of God and the power of the Holy Spirit." Alas, and this does not sit well with Reformed theology, he seems to think that the grace of God needs something with which it can co-operate, something it will find in British Protestant traditions but not in the wider European Christian heritage.