EUROPE, SUCK IT UP AND ACCEPT IT!

A country who’s head of state’s, Queen Elizabeth II’s fortune is largely made up by her stamp collection, cannot accept the fact that it needs to organise its life according to a consensus of 27 states, or more precisely their heads of state who alter after every few years. 

Runaway Cameron

The Queen has been on the throne since 1952. Many of the European leaders were not even born back them, including David Cameron – the boy who played with fire, lit up the house and decided to run for the hills, leaving others extinguish the flames.

The success and curse of the English is the existence of traditions. They have a monarch, the Germans don’t. It is not the business of others to question it. The Germans adapt fast and do things in a way that is reasonable and efficient. The English do things slowly and in a way that they have always been done. It is not that important to question the process. It is even less important to find a more cost-efficient way. The separate hot and cold water taps that Estonians find especially curious were once installed because hot and cold water came from different places. And so has it remained to date (although some places already have single taps as well).

The Brexit vote result might have indeed been determined by blue-collars and the retired, but the political elite was the one who gambled with the country’s future over the coming years. Popularity and vote count is not all that it takes to rule a country, it also takes reason and conscious. It may, but might always not be possible to convert the latter two into success. Many think that Cameron lacked both.

The Brits are nasty because they want to be the political dictators and dominators – the ones who tell the others how things are done. When the 28 member states of the EU complete a document after a meeting, it is normally left to the British as the only party who actually understands English. So they write what they want. They always understand everything. And if they don’t, they blame the allies who cannot speak the language. It is not only the Brits who need a makeover – the entire Europe does. Looking from London, the two billion people of the Commonwealth make up for 29% of the world’s population. A force. This is how things are seen at the heart of an empire.

This isn’t the first betrayal of the Brits

Considering the circumstances, Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania are simply old areas of the Russian Empire which are meant to be part of Russia – this is how during the war, Winston Churchill reasoned to Franklin Delano Roosevelt the acceptance of Stalin’s request to keep the borders of Soviet Russia the same they were before the German aggression against the Soviet Union in 1941. Churchill betrayed us in the interests of Great Britain back then, and so did Cameron now.

Cameron’s betrayal doesn’t lie in the fact that Great Britain is leaving or might leave the EU. It is the fact that his only plan after the battle was to run for the hills after his loss. This is not what generals and captains do. He was afraid that run-down horses will be shot.

At the same time, there is nothing tragic in Brexit. It is a normal culmination of long-term processes. Great Britain will remain at the same place it has always been. The EU leaders waving their fists – such as Donald Tusk claiming that the English cannot retain the same freedoms that member states have – will soon understand that Great Britain is a major power that Europe cannot do without. The markets will stabilise and the drop in share prices is a short-term problem affecting very few people. In comparison with the sanctions against Russians which did not bring about a famine, the possible suffering is minor. For about a period of five years, Estonian also managed to hold their promise of eating potato peels.

Nation-states must make their own decisions

The EU is certainly operating on a faulty presumption that it is possible to guarantee the unity of the wishes of the citizens from the current 28 member states – to make all the boys in the village fall in love with the same girl and then force the unlucky ones to accept their predicament. But they won’t! They never will!

The driving power of life and politics, media and business, culture and sports is antagonism, a root conflict. The leitmotif of aspiring people, companies and states is “I’m better than you!” Europe has not had a strong enough enemy (such as the Nazis) to mobilize them to temporary let go of their full-on competition against each other. A small seed of a common enemy can however be seen in migrants.

In a wider perspective, it is possible to do politics with exceptions or without them. A politics without exceptions, which is the main line of Estonia’s tax policies, for example, can be pursued in a very small social group, in a nation-state. This is because the cases to be solved are fairly similar. This could not be done even in the United States. The states want to decide on their own whether death penalty is a normal form of punishment or not. The EU as an organisation with many special interests needs politics with exceptions, which brings about the main internal conflict of the union.

The EU lacks the power of total state authority. The English must accept the euro! Make the cars drive on the correct side of the road! Well we won’t do it! When you make exceptions, some parties will get cross – the ones who want special treatment as well.

What to recommend for the European Union? It is appropriate to cite the golden classics. John Maynard Keynes was right: “The difficulty lies not so much in developing new ideas as in escaping from old ones.“