No legitimacy: Consensual government by the EU is a mere hallucination

Nobody should be remotely surprised that – according to The Financial Times – the EU is looking to raise more money to fund its culture of incompetent improvidence. It is the instinct of all ailing empires to squeeze their subject peoples until the squeaks pip and the pips squeak. According to the FT, the EU’s target will be companies with a turnover of over €50 billion, no doubt with a discretionary latitude to scoop the necessary pfennigs, sous and lire from its unwilling victims. Presumably, captive companies that are obliged to remain trading within the EU will cough up. Those that can escape will, like Britain’s mobile billionaires, be fleeing to set up single-office shell-headquarters in a tax-free jurisdiction beginning with a “The”. A definite article in a placename usually signifies stultifying heat, Panama hats, wily attorneys and loose public morals.

Squandering the continent’s resources on vainglorious projects has been the hallmark of the EU’s existence since it was a snotty-nosed little urchin known as the EEC. Expenditure today gives the impression of consensual government by Brussels: A mere hallucination. The European Parliament certainly passes laws which are then enforced by its subordinate jurisdictions, but this is not to be mistaken for “government”. The latter is an organic concept, which in monarchies, democracies and even despotisms, derives legitimacy from the assent, tacit or explicit, of the ruled. The unspeakable tragedy of Eurasia in 2025 is that Putin’s Russia has more of the blessed myrrh that is “legitimacy” than does the EU. 

One of the hardest moral challenges confronting democrats anywhere is the visible triumph of unmitigated wickedness on their front doorsteps. Such an outcome was generally accepted by the West  as being impossible after the complete defeat of European communism in 1989. The consensus was that the legal and electoral filters of democracy would henceforth separate the chaff of evil from the nutritious wheat-germ of virtue. We now know that that consensus was tragically wrong, and nobody embodies that more than Estonia’s Kaja Kallas, the EU’s grandly-named High Representative of the Union for Foreign Affairs and Security Policy.

Oh, wow.

However, that Pooh-Bah title is quite valueless, for while she has the power to denounce Russian imperialism by her words, she has none to impose that policy by force or threat. Or the EU – as the British Prime Minister Stanley Baldwin once put it, though in another context – has the prerogative of the harlot down the ages, power without responsibility. A more accurate term would be  of “a do-gooding liberal”, permitted by piety to pronounce vacuously but not authorised to enforce by tempered steel if necessary.

She also embodies the lack of legitimacy within the EU. Firstly, she is a member of Estonia’s protected political elite – she and her father have both been prime ministers of their country as well as having had successful careers in Brussels. Secondly, her Reform Party attracts at best the support of around 20 per cent of Estonia’s electorate, which also has one of the lowest turn-outs for European elections – under 38 per cent in 2024. In short, this means that she can at best claim to speak for perhaps 10 per cent of the Estonian people. The highest EU polling figure in 2024 came from Hungary at just under 60 per cent, which with Viktor Orbán at the helm, is hardly an endorsement of Brussels’ many virtues. On the other hand, Europe’s adversary Vladimir Putin, the serial-murderer and butcher of Ukraine, has never failed to win less than 70 per cent of the electorate, and last year won 88 per cent of the vote. This followed the well-publicised murder by his goons of the jailed dissident Alexei Navalny, the incompetent chumps having failed to kill him on at least two previous attempts. 

If at first you don’t succeed, slay, slay and slay again.

Of course, we all know that Putin’s electoral figures are bogus, but we also know that they were not massaged up from 10 per cent. Evil though he is, Putin has legitimacy in the way that Kallas does not – and she is not alone in the minimalism of her popular support. Some 14 EU countries achieved turnouts of under 50 per cent in the last European elections. Even the gloomily conscientious Swedes only managed just over 53 per cent, and of course the subdivisions within all those turnouts mean that almost nobody can claim the kind of “legitimacy” that Putin can.  

I don’t write these words with anything other than bitter resignation, and certainly not in triumph. Most of the attitudes and policies espoused by Kallas would in general be shared by a great many Europeans, including this one. But neither attitude nor policy has any meaning without martial steel, and the EU has very studiously chosen not to apply a military dimension to its values.  This simply means that foreign policy votes in  the European Parliament compare with Lichtenstein’s  dastardly designs on Tierra del Fuego. Furthermore, how can the EU’s sanctions against Russia be effective when the latter has a vast and almost infinitely permeable land border with China, which is likewise  governed by a gang of pathological criminals? 

Russia’s other partner-in-crime is India. The meaning of both “law” and “order” there became startlingly evident after the recent 787 crash in Ahmedabad, as news-footage showed hundreds of spectators browsing through the wreckage of the Boeing and the ruins of the medical college where 261 people had perished. This was a site of almost exquisitely forensic sensibility, being a probable crime-scene, yet it resembled sale-time in Oxford Street, London. So, yes, having observed that exercise in quite heroic demotic self-discipline, we may conclude that Mr Modi’s government will rigorously adhere to UN sanctions on Russia, and yes, he is also a devout, Mass-going, beef-eating Muslim.

Europe is not what the founders of the EU once dreamt it would become because the necessary ingredients are not there; for comparable reasons, Senegal is not going to be the AI hub of the world. What made Europe the dynamic place it once was, with all those states rubbing angrily against one another, was its geography, with landscapes sufficiently divided to create localised tribal polities but without raising  insuperable barriers that prevented trade or knowledge from passing from one state to another. Western Europe’s rivers were fordable and its mountains passable, but forging a single cohesive, coherent entity out of all those myriads has proven impossible. Estonia and España have some obvious things in common, including a beguiling nominal assonance, but they do not share defining national interests. Indeed, quite against the expectations of many outsiders, Spain has become feminised, infantilised and even Islamicised.  If I wanted to find steel behind opinions I would once have looked to Iberia: now I would look to the Baltic and, yes, Kaja Kallas.

But that steel is in the heart, not in the forge of war: And apart from Poland, perhaps no state with a land-border with Putin’s Russia is morally, mentally and metallurgically prepared for combat. Hungary has no choice but to deal with Russia: Its defenceless central plain makes it ideal tank country, and if Putin’s boys ever complete their conquest of Ukraine, the next fruit to pluck could be Budapest’s. Unlikely, I agree, but so too was Russia’s attack on Ukraine. The very purpose of the Memorandum of 1994 that oversaw Ukraine’s nuclear-disarmament was to prevent such an outcome. This agreement was guaranteed by the USA, Russia and (pause, please, for a small, sad sigh) the UK. Where was this historic memorandum signed? In Budapest, of course. 

History’s obvious lessons only become obvious to historians, hence their name. Even an infallible foreknowledge of what lay ahead would not have enabled the statesmen of the 1930s to forestall the horrific outcome. What good is knowledge if there is not armour, political willingness and large amounts of sacrificeable soldiery to  prevent that which wise men can otherwise foresee? How is such wisdom compatible with the catastrophic bloodshed necessary to validate its lessons? Stupidity is surely less costly.  Who in 1938, foreseeing 1945 with Soviet troops encamped within an artillery salvo of the Rhine, and Europe’s Jews slain, oxidised and vapourised by the million, would not have chosen some other option than the one that happened?  Yes, and then what?

It is Europe’s tragedy that what once energised and made it supreme  – its rival nationalities in close and often deadly proximity  – is now a fatal encumbrance. The chalice of greatness  remains with the USA, and with the weird, tectonic watershed that resulted from the continental collision between India and Asia. The two river systems that emerged from the stacked tectonic plates of the Himalayan mountain ranges – one the Indus, the other the Yellow – gave birth to two of the world’s oldest and still-great civilisations. Their hour awaits, whilst poor Europe’s is over. So tax on, Brussels, tax on, until the ever-swelling sow imperially digests the last of her hapless farrow, grunts with deep satisfaction and then finally slumbers.

Kevin Myers is an Irish journalist, author and broadcaster. He has reported on the wars in Northern Ireland, where he worked throughout the 1970s, Beirut and Bosnia.