Europe is ill. How seriously, and
why, are matters not always easy to judge. But among the symptoms three are
conspicuous, and inter-related. The first, and most familiar, is the
degenerative drift of democracy across the continent, of which the structure of
the EU is at once cause and consequence. The oligarchic cast of its
constitutional arrangements, once conceived as provisional scaffolding for a
popular sovereignty of supranational scale to come, has over time steadily
hardened. Referendums are regularly overturned, if they cross the will of
rulers. Voters whose views are scorned by elites shun the assembly that
nominally represents them, turnout falling with each successive election.
Bureaucrats who have never been elected police the budgets of national
parliaments dispossessed even of spending powers. But the Union is not an
excrescence on member states that might otherwise be healthy enough. It
reflects, as much as it deepens, long-term trends within them. At national
level, virtually everywhere, executives domesticate or manipulate legislatures
with greater ease; parties lose members; voters lose belief that they count, as
political choices narrow and promises of difference on the hustings dwindle or
vanish in office.
With this generalised involution has come a pervasive corruption of the
political class, a topic on which political science, talkative enough on what in
the language of accountants is termed the democratic deficit of the Union,
typically falls silent. The forms of this corruption have yet to find a
systematic taxonomy. There is pre-electoral corruption: the funding of persons
or parties from illegal sources – or legal ones – against the promise, explicit
or tacit, of future favours. There is post-electoral corruption: the use of
office to obtain money by malversation of revenues, or kickbacks on contracts.
There is purchase of voices or votes in legislatures. There is straightforward
theft from the public purse. There is faking of credentials for political gain.
There is enrichment from public office after the event, as well as during or
before it. The panorama of this malavita is impressive. A fresco of it
could start with Helmut Kohl, ruler of Germany for sixteen years, who amassed
some two million Deutschmarks in slush funds from illegal donors whose names,
once he was exposed, he refused to reveal for fear of the favours they had
received coming to light. Across the Rhine, Jacques Chirac, president of the
French Republic for twelve years, was convicted of embezzling public funds,
abuse of office and conflicts of interest, once his immunity came to an end.
Neither suffered any penalty. These were the two most powerful politicians of
their time in Europe. A glance at the scene since then is enough to dispel any
illusion that they were unusual.
In Germany, Gerhard Schröder’s government guaranteed a billion-euro loan to Gazprom for the building of a Baltic pipeline within a few weeks of his stepping down as chancellor and arriving on the Gazprom payroll at a salary larger than he received for governing the country. Since his departure, Angela Merkel has seen two presidents of the Republic in succession forced to resign under a cloud: Horst Köhler, a former chief of the IMF, for explaining that the Bundeswehr contingent in Afghanistan was protecting German commercial interests; and Christian Wulff, the former Christian Democrat chief in Lower Saxony, over a questionable loan for his house from a friendly businessman. Two leading ministers, one of defence, the other of education, had to go when they were stripped of their doctorates – an important credential for a political career in the Federal Republic – for intellectual theft. When the latter, Annette Schavan, an intimate of Merkel (who expressed full confidence in her), was still clinging to office, the Bild-Zeitung remarked that to have a minister for education who faked her research was like having a minister of finance with a secret bank account in Switzerland.
No sooner said, than seen. In France, the Socialist minister for the budget, plastic surgeon Jérôme Cahuzac, whose brief was to uphold fiscal probity and equity, was discovered to have somewhere between €600,000 and €15 million in hidden deposits in Switzerland and Singapore. Nicolas Sarkozy, meanwhile, stands accused by convergent witnesses of receiving some $20 million from Gaddafi for the electoral campaign that took him to the presidency. Christine Lagarde, his finance minister, who now heads the IMF, is under interrogation for her role in the award of €420 million in ‘compensation’ to Bernard Tapie, a well-known crook with a prison record, latterly a friend of Sarkozy. Nonchalant adjacency to crime is bipartisan. François Hollande, current president of the Republic, sat pillion to trysts with his mistress in the flat of a moll of a Corsican gangster killed in a shoot-out on the island last year.
In Britain, at about the same time, former premier Blair was advising Rebekah Brooks, facing jail on five counts of criminal conspiracy (‘Keep strong and definitely sleeping pills. It will pass. Tough up’), and urging her to ‘publish a Hutton-style report’, as he had done to sanitise any part his administration may have had in the death of a whistleblower on his war in Iraq: an invasion from which he went on to net – of course, for his Faith Foundation – assorted tips and deals around the world, prominent among them cash from a South Korean oil company run by a convicted felon with interests in Iraq and the feudal dynasty of Kuwait. What recompense he may have earned further east for profuse counsel to the Nazarbaev dictatorship remains to be seen (‘Kazakhstan’s achievements are wonderful. However, Mr President, you outlined new heights in your message to the nation.’ Ad litteram). At home, in an exchange of favours about which he lied without compunction to Parliament, his palm was greased with £1 million into party coffers from racing car magnate Bernie Ecclestone, currently under indictment in Bavaria for bribes to the tune of €33 million. In the culture of New Labour, leading figures in Blair’s circle, cabinet ministers one day – Byers, Hoon, Hewitt – could offer themselves for sale the next. In the same years, indiscriminately of party, the House of Commons was exposed as a cesspit of petty defalcations of taxpayers’ money.
In Ireland, meanwhile, the Fianna Fáil leader Bertie Ahern, having channelled more than €400,000 in unexplained payments before becoming taioseach, voted himself the highest salary of any premier in Europe – €310,000, more even than the US president – a year before having to quit in obloquy for all-round dishonesty. In Spain, the current prime minister, Mariano Rajoy, heading a government of the right, has been caught red-handed in receipt of kickbacks on construction and other deals totalling a quarter of a million euros over a decade, passed to him by Luis Bárcenas. His party’s treasurer for twenty years, Bárcenas is now under arrest for accumulating a hoard of €48 million in undeclared Swiss accounts. The handwritten ledgers detailing his transfers to Rajoy and other People’s Party notables – including Rodrigo Rato, another former head of the IMF – have featured in abundant facsimile in the Spanish press. Once the scandal broke, Rajoy texted Bárcenas in words virtually identical to those of Blair to Brooks: ‘Luis, I understand. Stay strong. I’ll call you tomorrow. A hug.’ Brazening out a scandal in which 85 per cent of the Spanish public believes he is lying, he sits tight in the Moncloa Palace.
Over in Greece, Akis Tsochatzopoulos, successively minister of the interior, of defence and of development for Pasok, who once came within a whisker of leading Greek social democracy, was less lucky: condemned last autumn to twenty years in prison for a formidable career of shakedowns and money-laundering. Across the water, Tayyip Erdoğan, long hailed by the European media and intellectual establishment as Turkey’s greatest democratic statesman, whose conduct virtually entitled the country to honorary membership of the EU ante diem, has shown that he is worthy of inclusion in the ranks of Union leadership in another way: in one taped conversation, instructing his son where to hide tens of millions in cash, in another lifting the price of a hefty bribe on a construction contract. Three cabinet ministers fell after similar disclosures, before Erdoğan purged the police force and judiciary to make sure matters went no further. As he did so, the European Commission released its first official report on corruption in the Union, whose extent the commissioner who authored it described as ‘breath-taking’: at a low estimate, costing the EU as much as the entire Union budget, some €120 billion a year – the real figure being ‘probably much higher’. Prudently, the report covered only member states. The EU itself, its entire Commission within recent memory forced to resign under a cloud, was excluded.
Commonplace in a Union that presents itself as a moral tutor to the world, the pollution of power by money and fraud follows from the leaching of substance or involvement in democracy. Elites freed from either real division above, or significant accountability below, can afford to enrich themselves without distraction or retribution. Exposure ceases to matter very much, as impunity becomes the rule. Like bankers, leading politicians do not go to prison.
Source Perry Anderson London Review of Books
http://www.lrb.co.uk/v36/n10/perry-anderson/the-italian-disaster
In Germany, Gerhard Schröder’s government guaranteed a billion-euro loan to Gazprom for the building of a Baltic pipeline within a few weeks of his stepping down as chancellor and arriving on the Gazprom payroll at a salary larger than he received for governing the country. Since his departure, Angela Merkel has seen two presidents of the Republic in succession forced to resign under a cloud: Horst Köhler, a former chief of the IMF, for explaining that the Bundeswehr contingent in Afghanistan was protecting German commercial interests; and Christian Wulff, the former Christian Democrat chief in Lower Saxony, over a questionable loan for his house from a friendly businessman. Two leading ministers, one of defence, the other of education, had to go when they were stripped of their doctorates – an important credential for a political career in the Federal Republic – for intellectual theft. When the latter, Annette Schavan, an intimate of Merkel (who expressed full confidence in her), was still clinging to office, the Bild-Zeitung remarked that to have a minister for education who faked her research was like having a minister of finance with a secret bank account in Switzerland.
No sooner said, than seen. In France, the Socialist minister for the budget, plastic surgeon Jérôme Cahuzac, whose brief was to uphold fiscal probity and equity, was discovered to have somewhere between €600,000 and €15 million in hidden deposits in Switzerland and Singapore. Nicolas Sarkozy, meanwhile, stands accused by convergent witnesses of receiving some $20 million from Gaddafi for the electoral campaign that took him to the presidency. Christine Lagarde, his finance minister, who now heads the IMF, is under interrogation for her role in the award of €420 million in ‘compensation’ to Bernard Tapie, a well-known crook with a prison record, latterly a friend of Sarkozy. Nonchalant adjacency to crime is bipartisan. François Hollande, current president of the Republic, sat pillion to trysts with his mistress in the flat of a moll of a Corsican gangster killed in a shoot-out on the island last year.
In Britain, at about the same time, former premier Blair was advising Rebekah Brooks, facing jail on five counts of criminal conspiracy (‘Keep strong and definitely sleeping pills. It will pass. Tough up’), and urging her to ‘publish a Hutton-style report’, as he had done to sanitise any part his administration may have had in the death of a whistleblower on his war in Iraq: an invasion from which he went on to net – of course, for his Faith Foundation – assorted tips and deals around the world, prominent among them cash from a South Korean oil company run by a convicted felon with interests in Iraq and the feudal dynasty of Kuwait. What recompense he may have earned further east for profuse counsel to the Nazarbaev dictatorship remains to be seen (‘Kazakhstan’s achievements are wonderful. However, Mr President, you outlined new heights in your message to the nation.’ Ad litteram). At home, in an exchange of favours about which he lied without compunction to Parliament, his palm was greased with £1 million into party coffers from racing car magnate Bernie Ecclestone, currently under indictment in Bavaria for bribes to the tune of €33 million. In the culture of New Labour, leading figures in Blair’s circle, cabinet ministers one day – Byers, Hoon, Hewitt – could offer themselves for sale the next. In the same years, indiscriminately of party, the House of Commons was exposed as a cesspit of petty defalcations of taxpayers’ money.
In Ireland, meanwhile, the Fianna Fáil leader Bertie Ahern, having channelled more than €400,000 in unexplained payments before becoming taioseach, voted himself the highest salary of any premier in Europe – €310,000, more even than the US president – a year before having to quit in obloquy for all-round dishonesty. In Spain, the current prime minister, Mariano Rajoy, heading a government of the right, has been caught red-handed in receipt of kickbacks on construction and other deals totalling a quarter of a million euros over a decade, passed to him by Luis Bárcenas. His party’s treasurer for twenty years, Bárcenas is now under arrest for accumulating a hoard of €48 million in undeclared Swiss accounts. The handwritten ledgers detailing his transfers to Rajoy and other People’s Party notables – including Rodrigo Rato, another former head of the IMF – have featured in abundant facsimile in the Spanish press. Once the scandal broke, Rajoy texted Bárcenas in words virtually identical to those of Blair to Brooks: ‘Luis, I understand. Stay strong. I’ll call you tomorrow. A hug.’ Brazening out a scandal in which 85 per cent of the Spanish public believes he is lying, he sits tight in the Moncloa Palace.
Over in Greece, Akis Tsochatzopoulos, successively minister of the interior, of defence and of development for Pasok, who once came within a whisker of leading Greek social democracy, was less lucky: condemned last autumn to twenty years in prison for a formidable career of shakedowns and money-laundering. Across the water, Tayyip Erdoğan, long hailed by the European media and intellectual establishment as Turkey’s greatest democratic statesman, whose conduct virtually entitled the country to honorary membership of the EU ante diem, has shown that he is worthy of inclusion in the ranks of Union leadership in another way: in one taped conversation, instructing his son where to hide tens of millions in cash, in another lifting the price of a hefty bribe on a construction contract. Three cabinet ministers fell after similar disclosures, before Erdoğan purged the police force and judiciary to make sure matters went no further. As he did so, the European Commission released its first official report on corruption in the Union, whose extent the commissioner who authored it described as ‘breath-taking’: at a low estimate, costing the EU as much as the entire Union budget, some €120 billion a year – the real figure being ‘probably much higher’. Prudently, the report covered only member states. The EU itself, its entire Commission within recent memory forced to resign under a cloud, was excluded.
Commonplace in a Union that presents itself as a moral tutor to the world, the pollution of power by money and fraud follows from the leaching of substance or involvement in democracy. Elites freed from either real division above, or significant accountability below, can afford to enrich themselves without distraction or retribution. Exposure ceases to matter very much, as impunity becomes the rule. Like bankers, leading politicians do not go to prison.
Source Perry Anderson London Review of Books
http://www.lrb.co.uk/v36/n10/perry-anderson/the-italian-disaster
No comments:
Post a Comment