Britannia Radio

No Democracy Without National Identity

From the desk of The Brussels Journal on Thu, 2011-01-20 23:36

A quote from Daniel Hannan in the European Parliament, 19 January 2011, reading from his book "The New Road To Serfdom - A Letter Of Warning to America":

Faced with a choice between democracy and supra-nationalism, the European Union almost always opts for supra-nationalism and nowhere is this clearer than in its policy in the Western Balkans. We are maintaining to all intents and purposes protectorates in Bosnia, in Kosovo and arguably even in Macedonia for the sole purpose of preventing ethnographic boundaries along the lines of what local people there would choose.

It is very difficult to have a functioning democracy unless people feel enough in common one with another to accept government from each other’s hands. If you want government for and by the people, you have to have a people that everyone recognises some identity with, some allegiance to.

To put it in another way, democracy needs a ‘demos’, a unit with which we identify when we use the word ‘we’. I am not saying it is simple. People can sustain multiple loyalties, populations can be interspersed, but our prejudice, other things being equal, should be towards national self-determination. If you take the ‘demos’ out of democracy, you are left only with the ‘kratos’, with the power of a system that must compel by law what it dare not ask in the name of civic patriotism.

Daniel Hannan

Submitted by Atlanticist911 on Fri, 2011-

It seems to me that Hannan's message to the American people on this subject serves as a perfect excuse for doing precisely nothing substantive about his own people's predicament at home. What for example, if anything, is Hannan doing to obtain an annulment for the shotgun wedding his own country was forced into when it signed up to our current European nightmare? In a word, nothing, that's what.