Patriotism and Democracy: Why no one would be cheering for Team Europe

Is patriotism a virtue, asks Alasdair MacIntyre, and he argues that, rightly understood, it is.  Roger Scruton argues that the national idea, again rightly understood and distinguished from Enlightenment and 19th century nationalism, is inseparable from and necessary to the liberal democratic state.  Here the English MEP Daniel Hannan takes up the discussion in relation to the Olympics

No one would be cheering for Team Europe

The patriotic emotions stirred up by the Olympics are the basis of real democracy

Patriotism turns out to be a rather underrated quality. In Euro-correct circles, it is sneered at or feared as a prelude to ethnic hatred.  Photo: Paul Grover

By Daniel Hannan

7:41PM BST 01 Aug 2012

It is by the merest chance that we are cheering Team GB this week rather than Team EU. At the 1992 Barcelona Games, the European Commission demanded the creation of a united team that would compete in a blue-and-gold strip, mount the podium to the strains of Beethoven’s Ninth and tot up a European tally on the medals table. Fortunately, the scheme broke down in arguments between the EU and the IOC over money, though that didn’t stop the French President, François Hollande, from insisting this week that “it’s the European medals total that counts”.

Only a politician or a Eurocrat could say such a thing. Sporting events are a reminder of the many and complex elements that define nationhood. Listen to the way people employ the pronoun “we”: “We’ve got a decent chance in the sailing”, “How many medals are we on now?” With what significance we freight those two letters. Our emotions are bound up, not only with the performance of our athletes, but also with the mood of our fellow countrymen. We form a nexus of identity – the identity that makes us call ourselves British or Portuguese or Swedish, but not European.  READ MORE

Daniel Hannan, MEP on Eurocrats' Attitude to Their Constituents: FU

How Brussels Stifles Democracy in Europe | Standpoint

Daniel Hannan has a persuasive analysis of Europe's euro disaster. An interesting aspect of it is the way sensible critiques have been dismissed, as they still are, out of dislike of those making the critique. It is a similar form of laziness to that of substituting conspiracy theories for analysis. I remember a student in one of my classes at the University of Texas with a concern about a book I had assigned. Her roommate had told her that the author just said what he said because he was a 'liberal' - and she wanted me to assure her that this malicious slander, as she saw it, was unfounded. Since I too considered "liberal' a derogatory term, but from the security of my marxist position, I thought her concern amusing.

But much more common in academic and elite circles is the no less easy or lazy dismissal of serious arguments because they come or come mostly from the right. Busing for racial balance in American schools was to be supported at all costs because of dislike of those who opposed it, working-class parents included. Religious freedom and conscience exemptions in health care are denounced by the 'new intolerance' out of hatred of orthodox Christians who take their faith, and indeed the very idea of conscience, seriously. Moral wrongs are turned into new 'rights,' which then require a soft totalitarianism. If basic shared understandings of a prepolitical institution like marriage are to give way to a definition based entirely on what the state says it is, a tyrant state that brooks no dissent is required to enforce it. Hence Canada's Star Chambers with names like human rights commissions and human rights tribunals that fine pastors for teaching their faith. Hence the drive to push faithful Catholics and Catholic health and social service organizations out of business unless they buckle to the state's definition of morality.

Hannan here points out how intense the hatred is on the part of Brussels bureaucrats and their euro-enthusiast supporters in governments throughout Europe, how much they loathe democratic processes, and as Greece and Italy have just shown, how ready they are to overthrow democratically elected politicians and replace them with unelected eurocrats, how completely the bureaucrats have subordinated the will of the people of every nation under their control to their own 'enlightened' wisdom. Hannan has made these points eloquently for years (check his Youtube clips.) What is sobering is how blindly and persistently both bureaucrats and politicians are pursuing a course that has proved ruinous and is opposed by electorates throughout the EU. And the main argument in favor of their policies is their contempt for their critics.

How Brussels Stifles Democracy in Europe | Standpoint

Good Intentions, Eurocatastrophe

Here the articulate eurosceptic MEP Daniel Hannan argues that good intentions, not any desire to dominate Europe by other means, motivated Germany's role in promoting European integration and giving so generously to other countries.  As with other charitable efforts, however (see my review of Lupton's Toxic Charity below), the result was to impoverish and maintain in a resented state of dependency those who were supposed to benefit from integration and centralization.

The contrary view, that the EU is a German plot, offers a further example of how conspiracy theories and attributions of malign intent get in the way of serious analysis, discussion, and debate.

As Hannan explains on his blog,

The most unattractive strain of Euroscepticism is the kind that sees the EU as some sort of German plot. You hear it all over Europe: from Frenchmen, from Dutchmen, from Danes, Poles, Czechs, Serbs, Greeks – even, occasionally, from Britons.

Quite apart from being terrifically rude, it couldn't be more mistaken. Far from bidding for mastery of the Continent, Germans suffer from a lack of patriotism that borders on self-abnegation. One of this blog's constant themes is that it is in everyone's interest for German national pride to be normalised.

Teuto-sceptics are having a field day with the speech which the CDU's parliamentary leader gave to his party conference. Volker Kauder demanded that Britain pay a share of the cost of bailing out the euro – specifically by accepting the financial transactions tax, 80 per cent of whose revenues would be drawn from the City of London. 'Just looking for… Read More

Retrieved November 18, 2011 from http://blogs.telegraph.co.uk/news/author/danielhannan/

Before attacking autocratic regimes, the EU should glance in the mirror

EUSSR


Daniel Hannan is a writer and journalist, and has been Conservative MEP for South East England since 1999. He speaks French and Spanish and loves Europe, but believes that the European Union is making its constituent nations poorer, less democratic and less free.

See his blog at www.hannan.co.uk