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Can the European Union Be Multilingual and Democratic? by Steve Sailer UPI, September 29, 2000 |
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Raising basic questions about whether the European Union and democracy will ever prove compatible, Danish voters Thursday rejected the European Union's floundering continental currency, the euro, in favor of keeping Denmark's traditional krone. Although eleven European governments have already adopted the euro, this was the first time any nation's citizens had been allowed to vote specifically on whether to switch currencies. The Danish referendum demonstrates that the most serious obstacle to the Euro-elites' plan for unifying Europe is democracy. The euro controversy is not about economics, but about political accountability. Blaming the defeat in Denmark on the euro's 25% plummet in value against the American dollar since its 1999 introduction, Italian Treasury Minister Vincenzo Visco pointed out, "The root of the problem is that the markets do not think [11] countries can act as if they were a single country," By this logic, the only solution would appear to be to continue the process of homogenizing the historic nations of Europe into one superstate that the markets would indeed view as a single country. Can, however, this coming superstate become a true republic? (It's not much of one now. Most power resides with bureaucrats in Brussels.) There are fundamental reasons, however, why multilingual governments such as the European Union have always tended to either break apart into smaller nation-states or harden into authoritarian empires. There is no denying the short-term economic benefits of a single European currency. Americans can imagine the inconvenience if they had to change money every time they drove from Kentucky to Indiana. And before the euro, European companies doing business in neighboring states had to pay an interest rate risk premium when borrowing due to uncertainty over currency fluctuations. For example, a Dutch firm's subsidiary in Italy could be doing wonderfully, but if the Italian lira collapsed even faster than expected, the company would have to explain to investors why profits weren't up to plan. So, why did 53% of Danish electorate decide to stick with the old krone, despite the lavish pro-euro campaign by Denmark's political, corporate, and media establishments? (In fact, in all of Europe, the only major party publicly opposed to the euro is Britain's Tories.) Denmark's left and right found themselves in an interesting alliance against the centrist euro supporters. Echoing one of the themes of Pat Buchanan's Reform Party Presidential bid, Danish rightists campaigned against giving up national sovereignty over economic policy. To them, managing the value of the currency is one of the basic responsibilities and privileges of a democratic nation-state. The upstart anti-immigration Danish People's Party has ridden the sovereignty issue to a new position of strength in Danish politics. Party leader Pia Kjaersgaard exulted, "The victory that we have won is one for democracy and for the Danish people against an elite." Meanwhile, paralleling the attacks of American Green Party candidate Ralph Nader on the harsh winds of international competition, Danish leftists argued that the obvious need for the European Union to introduce soon some hard-nosed policies to restore the sagging worth of the euro would endanger Denmark's cushy welfare state. Tellingly, the gender gap loomed large in Danish voting. Danish men, who work in large numbers for private firms that export to the rest of Europe, tended to back the euro. But Danish women, who mostly work for the government's vast social service bureaucracies, staunchly opposed the euro. Inga Johnson of Women Against the European Union, called it a "rich man's project," driven by the "raw forces of capitalism." She saw the euro as a threat to Denmark's pervasive system of state-funded daycare, which allows 71% of Danish women to work full time, the highest percentage in Europe. Her fears may be justified. The continent's bigger nations are slowly beginning to follow the path toward more competitive economies pioneered by Margaret Thatcher and Ronald Reagan. The Scandinavians, though, remain the truest believers in the old continental ideal of the cradle-to-grave safety net. American free market economists have been predicting the imminent demise of the Scandinavian "social market" economies for decades. Yet, Denmark and its neighbors to the north continue to prosper despite levels of spending and taxation even greater than those that sapped the work ethic and debauched the currencies of Italy and pre-Thatcher Britain. "One can see why the Italians are OK with the euro," observes businessman James C. Bennett, author of the upcoming book, "The Anglosphere Challenge: The Future of the English-Speaking Nations in the Internet Era." "After all, the Italians are no more bothered by letting Germans run their currency than they are by having Swiss guard the Vatican," In contrast, the Danes have managed their own affairs quite successfully. These chilly northerners still possess the self-discipline to be able to afford the welfare state. They are loath to give up the system they invented just because it's no longer working well for the rest of Europe. Still, many Americans might ask why the Danes should be able to throw a wrench into a movement that appears to be in the economic interest of Europe as a whole. After all, unlike Denmark, a Scandinavian-American state like Minnesota must put up with federal laws that aren't always ideal for its own population of blonde liberals. So, what would be so bad about a real United States of Europe? Unity has certainly worked well for America. There's a huge difference, however. The euro-elite wants the Europe Union to evolve into a superstate, ruling over many different ancient nations. The U.S.A. is a true nation-state, though, with a people united by a common language. A single language unifies a country into a shared "information sphere." When citizens can understand each other, they are much more likely to identify with their compatriots - and sacrifice for them. They can also monitor politics across their society and intelligently participate in debates. Bennett comments, "No one person can really follow European politics as a whole, since that would require reading and speaking such a wide variety of languages with subtlety and ability to understand context, that only a few handful might even try. A 'European' politics outside of the corridors of EU headquarters in Brussels does not and cannot exist." Consider the difficulties posed by the need for translations of political discourse. Jamie Hamilton of AnswerLogic, a company that creates automatic translation software for technical manuals, points out, "To do cross-cultural translation right, you need a firm understanding of what the original speaker said, and how the listener is likely to (mis)interpret it." Soviet dictator Nikita Khrushchev notoriously told the U.S., "We will bury you." American citizens took that as an extremely aggressive threat. Yet, according to Hamilton, in Russian the phrase actually "connotes something fairly mild: 'we'll outlive you,' 'we'll be there at your funeral.'" The European establishment laid sanctions on Austria earlier this year because it didn't like it's democratically elected governments. But almost all the charges against rightwing Euroskeptic Joerg Haider consisted of objections to a few phrases he had used in past years. Concerned foreigners who don't speak German found themselves at the mercy of translators, many with axes to grind, with little way to judge between competing translations. And there really aren't many concerned foreigners. These days, most citizens get their political opinions from watching leaders and pundits speak on television. For example, huge numbers of Americans will decide who to vote for in the Presidential race while watching the candidates debate on TV. If the Euro-politicians were speaking different languages and therefore would have to be dubbed like a bad kung fu movie to make them intelligible to the citizens, apathy will reign. An older word for "superstate" is "empire." The rigorous demands of running an empire naturally tend to undermine democracy. The complexity of governing multilingual domains is so great that more and more power flows from the legislature to the executive and the permanent bureaucracies. Fewer and fewer democratic controls are tolerated since the people are deemed to be not well-enough informed to vote on the many esoteric issues that come up. The Roman Republic discovered this when Julius Caesar conquered Gaul. Nor is America immune to this trend. For example, the last nation the U.S. Congress declared war upon was Nazi Germany. After WWII, Washington's new imperial responsibilities made the ruling establishment reluctant to carry out its constitutional mandate to submit questions of war or peace to the elected representatives of the American people ... with, by the way, disastrous results in Vietnam. Europe faces an even worse problem in this regard than the US, since it lacks a shared European language. Thus, power tends to drift into the hands of self-perpetuating elites, such as the Eurocrats of Brussels. These professional Europeans are either multilingual or can afford translators. For all the deplorable aspects of the current American presidential campaign, it's only possible at all because the great majority of voters speak the same language. There will never be election campaigns for the President of Europe until enough Europeans speak the same language. And until the EU has a legitimate elected executive who can control the Eurocrats, it will remain an essentially authoritarian, anti-democratic institution. Multilingualism and democracy make highly unstable partners. There have been plenty of unified multilingual states. Think of Stalin's Soviet Union, Tito's Yugoslavia, and Suharto's Indonesia. But none of these survived democratization intact. Similarly, if less violently, Czechoslovakia split into two separate states in 1993 along linguistic lines. The track record of the few existing multilingual democracies is not reassuring. Canada and Belgium are highly civilized places. But their politics obsessively revolve around the threat of national dissolution. In Belgium, the need to ethnically-balance the allocation of government goodies and jobs has thoroughly corrupted its government. In Canada, bilingualism has institutionalized touchiness, which increasingly impinges upon free speech in general. Switzerland is the most impressive example of a stable multilingual democracy. But the Swiss hang together by devolving much of the state's authority down to the canton level. And 22 of the 26 cantons are officially multilingual. Sociologist Pierre L. van den Berghe points out that the Swiss state avoids the problems besetting Belgium and Canada "because, being so little of a state, there is so little at stake. ... Switzerland is a very pleasant country, but it is not much of a state by modern standards. Perhaps it is such a pleasant country because it is not much of a state." Similarly, the various states of multilingual India are allowed to pursue quite different policies. In southern India, capitalist-dominated Karnataka is home to the software boomtown of Bangalore. Yet, its communist-dominated neighboring state of Kerala has sacrificed economic development in favor of Scandinavian-style social welfare programs. In the long run, translation software might help the European Union become more democratic. It won't happen soon, though. Hamilton of AnswerLogic cautions, "Translating idioms accurately is an extremely difficult task even for people. There's certainly no technology on the immediate horizon that even attempts to solve this problem." Ultimately, Europe would need a common language to become a democratic nation-state.. There's only one feasible candidate, English, which is already a pervasive second language in Scandinavia, Holland, and Greece. Bennett, however, says, " I can't imagine the French adopting English as the language of their domestic politics (or many other nations either.) But even assuming they did, I'm not sure that a French politician would mean the same thing by the word "fair" as an English one." Steve Sailer (www.iSteve.com) is a columnist for VDARE.com and the film critic for The American Conservative.
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