HOW THE LEFT HAS WON THE COLD WAR
John Laughland says the EU's attack
on Jorg Haider is further evidence of its socialist globalism
THE German foreign minister, Joschka Fis- cher, could not have been clearer. On Mon- day, after the European Union had announced that it would cut diplomatic ties with Austria if Jorg Haider's Freedom party entered the government, Herr Fischer said, 'We and our partners cannot accept that a party whose policies are directed against Europe can get into a position where it can block the further integration of Europe.'
His remarks were ostensibly addressed to Haider but they could equally well apply to William Hague. They confirm that support- ers of European integration, and of the globalisation of which it is a part, have no qualms about overturning the results of a democratic election to advance their aims. Just as the negative result of the first Dan- ish referendum on Maastricht in 1992 was cancelled by a second referendum on the same text in 1993, so throughout the 1990s European governments and the United States have interfered in elections across Eastern Europe and the former Soviet Union to support politicians who bend the knee to the doctrine of the end of national sovereignty. Integrated into the European Union, these controlled governments will provide convenient institutional lobby-fod- der in EU councils to outvote any country like Britain which might be foolish enough to try standing up for its own interests.
Herr Fischer's remarks, and the EU policies which back them up, confirm that, without exception, all Western leaders are now in hock to the old Brezhnevite doc- trine of 'limited sovereignty'. They are determined to establish the kind of supra- nationalism to which the Soviet Commu- nist party referred in October 1952 as 'the entirely new relations between states, not met with before in history', of which the USSR's relations with the Warsaw Pact countries were supposed to be the shining example. The communist tenets of interna- tionalism and bogus anti-fascism have now migrated from Moscow and East Berlin to make their nests instead in the chancel- leries of Europe and the United States.
Little credence can be given to the claim that Austria is being ostracised because of Haider's immigration policies. If this were so, then Britain would be in the dog-house for requiring visitors from India and Pak- istan to deposit £10,000 with the immigra- tion authorities when they come to visit their relatives, a patently racist policy, while Jack Straw would be vilified for implying that gypsies have an innate ten- dency to criminality. Instead, Haider's danger — and his popular appeal in Aus- tria — lies precisely in his being an out- sider who challenges the cosy corporatist inter-party political carve-up of Austrian society, epitomised by the 13-year-old coalition between social democrats and conservatives which he has just destroyed. He is believed (maybe wrongly) to repre- sent the same threat to the similar cartel- like arrangements which have governed Europe for decades, and whose corrupt practices are now being exposed across the Continent. Indeed, it is no coincidence if politicians from the Continent's most unaccountable political systems — princi- pally France and Belgium, but also Ger- many and Italy — have led the attack against the new Austrian coalition.
The tactic, of course, is to demonise the enemy as a Nazi. It is a ruse which can be deployed limitlessly. Everyone is Hitler now, from Pat Buchanan and Jorg Haider to Sad- dam Hussein and Slobodan Milosevic, with regular doses of aged Latvians thrown in for good measure. This trick is now so massively abused that it ought to be discounted as irredeemably debased. However, in the decade since 1989, the Right has lost the most important political battle of all, the battle for culture. After the so-called fall of communism, the historical memory of the 20th century should have achieved some kind of balance of assessment between the crimes of communism and the crimes of fas- cism. Instead, and with a ruthlessness of which only the Left is capable, the memory of communism has been utterly effaced by a hypnotic and exclusive concentration on fas- cism. Historical memory is now trapped in a dangerous tunnel vision, as if the only event in the 20th century was the rise of Hitler.
Communism's 80 million victims are thus conveniently consigned to the dustbin of history, and historical memory is shamelessly manipulated for short-term political advan- tage. Consequently, a democratically elect- ed politician in Austria can be attacked as a Nazi sympathiser, even though he has never broken any law or belonged to any pro- scribed organisation, while not an eyebrow is raised when communists come to power in Italy and France, or when former com- munists like Peter Mandelson enter the government in Britain. Massimo d'Alema, the Italian Prime Minister, who leads a party which for years was illegally funded by Moscow, declared in 1998, 'I am an inheri- tor of Italian communism. I am not sorry for my past'; and, in 1990, 'It is practically impossible to find a name as beautiful as Communist party.'
Therefore, just as the Berlin Wall was justified as an 'anti-fascist protection barri- er', so the international bodies in gestation, like the EU and the whole alphabetti- spaghetti of acronymous and anonymous international bodies around the world, are justified as a bulwark against any eruption of 'nationalism' which might disturb the bureaucrats' authoritative administration of the planet. We are familiar with this as the raison d'être of the EU: globalisation is sim- ply an extension of the same anti-demo- cratic and anti-national principles to world level. As Jean Monnet wrote in his mem- oirs, 'The European Community itself is only a stage towards tomorrow's forms of world organisation.'
The West is thus now on the verge of achieving that of which Lenin and Trotsky dreamed in 1917. For the point is not, as many Eurosceptics mistakenly believe, to replace nation states with a European or world superstate. It is instead to achieve the old Marxist dream of abolishing statehood altogether. For, in Lenin's words, the end- goal of communism is for 'every form of state to wither away'. If the New Left has enthusiastically embraced 'the market', giv- ing the illusion of a rightward shift in world politics, this is in fact only because it believes that the withering away of the state will be more efficiently promoted by big corporate mercantilism than by state social- ism. Similarly, the pretence that globalisa- tion is an anonymous, inevitable historical force is merely our old friend, dialectical materialism, in new guise. As Lenin wrote in his essay, 'On the Slogan for a United States of Europe': 'A United States of the world (not of Europe alone) is the state form of the union and freedom of nations which we associate with socialism — until the complete victory of communism brings about the total disappearance of the state, including the democratic state.' Herr Fisch- er could hardly have put it better.
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