Meet the President of Europe
From the desk of Paul Belien on Fri, 2009-11-20 09:32
Herman Van Rompuy. Get used to the name. He is the first President of the
European Union, which with the ratification of the Treaty of Lisbon by all
the 27 EU member states in early November was transformed into a genuine
United States of Europe.
The President of Europe has not been elected; he was appointed in a secret
meeting of the heads of government of the 27 EU member states. They chose
one of their own. Herman Van Rompuy was the Prime Minister of Belgium. I
knew him when he was just setting out, reluctantly, on his political
career.
To understand Herman, one must know something about Belgium, a tiny
country in Western Europe, and the prototype of the EU. Belgians do not
exist as a nation. Belgium is an artificial state, constructed by the
international powers in 1830 as a political compromise and experiment. The
country consists of 6 million Dutch, living in Flanders, the northern half
of the country, and 4 million French, living in Wallonia, the southern
half. The Belgian Dutch, called Flemings, would have preferred to stay
part of the Netherlands, as they were until 1830, while the Belgian
French, called Walloons, would have preferred to join France. Instead,
they were forced to live together in one state.
Belgians do not like their state. They despise it. They say it represents
nothing. There are no Belgian patriots, because no-one is willing to die
for a flag which does not represent anything. Because Belgium represents
nothing, multicultural ideologues love Belgium. They say that without
patriotism, there would be no wars and the world would be a better place.
As John Lennon sang "Imagine there's no countries, it isn't hard to do,
nothing to kill or die for, and no religion too."
In 1957, Belgian politicians stood at the cradle of the European Union.
Their aim was to turn the whole of Europe into a Greater Belgium, so that
wars between the nations of Europe would no longer be possible as there
would no longer be nations, the latter all having been incorporated into
an artificial superstate.
A closer look at Belgium, the laboratory of Europe, shows, however, that
the country lacks more than patriotism. It also lacks democracy, respect
for the rule of law, and political morality. In 1985, in his book De
Afwezige Meerderheid (The Absent Majority) the late Flemish philosopher
Lode Claes (1913-1997) argued that without identity and a sense of genuine
nationhood, there can also be no democracy and no morality.
One of the people who were deeply influenced by Dr. Claes's thesis was a
young politician named Herman Van Rompuy. In the mid-1980s, Van Rompuy, a
conservative Catholic, born in 1947, was active in the youth section of
the Flemish Christian-Democrat Party. He wrote books and articles about
the importance of traditional values, the role of religion, the protection
of the unborn life, the Christian roots of Europe and the need to preserve
them. The undemocratic and immoral nature of Belgian politics repulsed him
and led to a sort of crisis of conscience. Lode Claes, who was near to
retiring, offered Herman the opportunity of succeeding him as the director
of Trends, a Belgian financial-economic weekly magazine. It is in this
context that I made Herman's acquaintance. He invited me for lunch one day
to ask whether, if he accepted the offer to enter journalism, I would be
willing to join him. It was then that he told me that he was considering
leaving politics and was weighing the options for the professional life he
would pursue.
I am not sure what happened next, however. Maybe word had reached the
leadership of the Christian Democrat Party that Herman, a brilliant
economist and intellectual, was considering leaving politics; perhaps they
made him an offer he could not refuse. Herman remained in politics. He was
made a Senator and entered government as a junior minister. In 1988, he
became the party leader of the governing Christian-Democrats
Our paths crossed at intervals until 1990, when the Belgian Parliament
voted a very liberal abortion bill. The Belgian King Baudouin (1930-1993),
a devout Catholic who suffered from the fact that he and his wife could
not have any children, had told friends that he would "rather abdicate
than sign the bill." The Belgian politicians, convinced that the King was
bluffing, did not want the Belgian people to know about the King's
objections to the bill. I wrote about this on the op-ed pages of The Wall
Street Journal and was subsequently reprimanded by the Belgian newspaper I
worked for, following an angry telephone call from the then Belgian Prime
Minister, a Christian-Democrat, to my editor, who was this Prime
Minister's former spokesman. I was no longer allowed to write about
Belgian affairs for foreign newspapers.
In April 1990, the King did in fact abdicate over the abortion issue, and
the Christian-Democrat Party, led by Herman Van Rompuy, who had always
prided himself on being a good Catholic, had one of Europe's most liberal
abortion bills signed by the college of ministers, a procedure provided by
the Belgian Constitution for situations when there is no King. Then they
had the King voted back on the throne the following day. I wrote about the
whole affair in a critical follow-up article for The Wall Street Journal
and was subsequently fired by my newspaper "for grievous misconduct". A
few weeks later, I met Herman at the wedding of a mutual friend. I
approached him for a chat. I could see he felt very uncomfortable. He
avoided eye contact and broke off the conversation as soon as he could. We
have not spoken since.
Herman's political career continued. He became Belgium's Budget Minister
and Deputy Prime Minister, Speaker of the Chamber of Representatives and
finally Prime Minister. He kept publishing intellectual and intelligent
books, but instead of defending the concept of the good, he now defended
the concept of "the lesser evil." And he began to write haiku.
Two years ago, Belgium faced its deepest political crisis ever. The
country was on the verge of collapse following a 2003 ruling by its
Supreme Court that the existing electoral district of
Brussels-Halle-
Brussels and the surrounding Dutch-speaking countryside of
Halle-Vilvoorde, was unconstitutional and that Parliament should remedy
the situation. The ruling came in response to a complaint that the BHV
district was unconstitutional and should be divided into a bilingual
electoral district Brussels and a Dutch-language electoral district
Halle-Vilvoorde. This complaint had been lodged by Herman Van Rompuy, a
Flemish inhabitant of the Halle-Vilvoorde district.
In 2003, however, the Christian-Democrats were not in government and
Herman was a leader of the opposition. His complaint was intended to cause
political problems for Belgium's Liberal government, which refused to
divide the BHV district because the French-speaking parties in the
government refused to accept the verdict of the Supreme Court. The Flemish
Christian-Democrats went to the June 2007 general elections with as their
major theme the promise that, once in government, they would split BHV.
Herman campaigned on the issue, his party won the elections and became
Flanders' largest party.
Belgium's political crisis dragged on from June until December 2007
because it proved impossible to put together a government consisting of
sufficient Dutch-speaking (Flemish) and French-speaking (Walloon)
politicians. The Flemings demanded that BHV be split, as instructed by the
Supreme Court; the Walloons refused to do so. Ultimately, the Flemish
Christian-Democrats gave in, reneged on their promise to their voters, and
agreed to join a government without BHV being split. Worse still, the new
government has more French-speaking than Dutch-speaking ministers, and
does not have the support of the majority of the Flemings in Parliament,
although the Flemings make up a 60% majority of the Belgian population.
Herman became the Speaker of the Parliament. In this position he had to
prevent Parliament, and the Flemish representatives there, from voting a
bill to split BHV. He succeeded in this, by using all kinds of tricks. One
day he even had the locks of the plenary meeting room changed so that
Parliament could not convene to vote on the issue. On another occasion, he
did not show up in his office for a whole week to avoid opening a letter
demanding him to table the matter. His tactics worked. In December 2008,
when the Belgian Prime Minister had to resign in the wake of a financial
scandal, Herman became the new leader of the predominantly French-speaking
government which does not represent the majority of Belgium's ethnic
majority group. During the past 11 months, he has skillfully managed to
postpone any parliamentary vote on the BHV matter, thereby prolonging a
situation which the Supreme Court, responding to his own complaint in
2003, has ruled to be unconstitutional.
Now, Herman has moved on to lead Europe. Like Belgium, the European Union
is an undemocratic institution, which needs shrewd leaders who are capable
of renouncing everything they once believed in and who know how to impose
decisions on the people against the will of the people. Never mind
democracy, morality or the rule of law, our betters know what is good for
us more than we do. And Herman is now one of our betters. He has come a
long way since the days when he was disgusted with Belgian-style politics.
Herman is like Saruman, the wise wizard in Tolkien's Lord of the Rings,
who went over to the other side. He used to care about the things we cared
about. But no longer. He has built himself a high tower from where he
rules over all of us.
Paul Belien is the author of A Throne in Belgium - Britain, the
Saxe-Coburgs and the Belgianisation of Europe, Imprint Academic, Exeter
(UK), Charlottesville, VA (US).
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