The EU is breaking records for unpopularity. Its leaders have been rebuffed in referendums in the U.K. and Italy. Anti-Brussels candidates are leading the polls in France and the Netherlands. How has it responded? By unveiling a $350 million new palace in Brussels.
The monstrous new structure, called “Europa,” will house the European Council — one of the many bodies that run the EU. I can best describe it as a vast egg inside a glass cube. If I were a literary critic, I’d call it the EU’s “objective correlative” — the thing that symbolises, in physical form, what is wrong with the entire project.
Late, over-budget, wanting any sense of human proportion, labyrinthine, inaccessible, built to overawe: Here is the EU in glass and concrete.
If you ever traveled behind the Iron Curtain, you’ll remember that the Soviets were fond of using space to signify status — possibly because it was one of the few commodities that they had in plentiful supply. In like vein, “Europa” has plenty of unused protocol rooms and antechambers and broad corridors lined with portraits and empty reception areas and echoing salons. The first thing the visitor sees is a gargantuan 11-story atrium that recalls the sort enormities that Ceausescu built. The main meeting room is a patchwork of clashing colors that resembles an artist’s recollection of a bad trip.
You can’t imagine such a building in, say, Switzerland. Comfortable, accountable democracies do things on a human scale. Pyramids and ziggurats and soaring temples tend to be markers of extractive states: States where the masses labor to supply the elites. Which is pretty much what the EU has become. In as neat a sign of oligarchy as you could ask, its employees are exempt from national taxes, instead paying a special EU rate equivalent to around 20 percent flat. We have returned to the pre-modern notion that aristocrats should be excused the levies that fall on the little people.
Recall that “Europa” was erected over the past 10 years — in other words, during a period when the 28 EU states were struggling to find budget cuts. It’s hard not to think of the tithes, tolls and tributes that defined the empires of antiquity. Passing the building last week, I found some lines coming into my head from Bertolt Brecht’s poem, “A Worker Reads History”:
Who built the seven gates of Thebes?
The books are filled with names of kings.
Was it the kings who hauled the craggy blocks of stone?
Was it the Eurocrats who bore the cost of furnishing their imperial capital? Is it they who, through the Common Agricultural Policy, pay large subsidies to some of the world’s wealthiest landowners? Do they cough up to support the armies of consultants and contractors and parastatal actors who swarm around Brussels?
There’s a theory that you should sell your shares in any company whose headquarters become too ostentatious. An investor applying that dictum to the EU would be panicking now. As public approval for deeper integration has plummeted — and, even according to the official Brussels pollster, Eurostat, it is at a record low — Brussels institutions have become more and more lavish. There are uniformed ushers in every corridor, chauffeurs to ferry the functionaries about, thousands of pretty interns. It’s almost as though Eurocrats are trying to convince themselves that they still matter.
I’ve never been one of those Euroskeptics who argue that the EU is on the point of collapse. As Adam Smith said after the American Revolution, there’s a deal of ruin in a nation — or in a union of nations. Plenty of people are doing very well out of the EU, and will move Heaven and Earth to keep it going.
Now, though, I’m starting to wonder. How much longer can Brussels decree policies that cause poverty and stagnation, while exempting its own officials from the consequences? How long can it insist that the euro is such a noble goal that joblessness and emigration are a price others should gladly pay?
Centuries from now, archaeologists will see “Europa” — and the even more colossal Berlaymont building that houses the European Commission, and the Kafkaesque European Parliament — as monuments to a vanished civilization, doomed by vanity and hubris. As my namesake, the Prophet Daniel, put it when discussing another multinational empire: “God hath numbered thy kingdom and finished it.” Or, as we say these days, recalling Daniel’s prophecy, the writing is on the wall.
Dan Hannan is a British Conservative MEP.
