European Union Parliamentary Elections As the Threat of Nuclear War Mounts

We are still waiting for Godot, or the headline which reads "this election is less important than the last one"

Published: 2024-06-09

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Equivocating as a Profession

Martina Stevis-Gridneff at the New York Times wishes for us to straighten the following Gordian Knot. With the tiniest of re-ordering and chaff removal:

Since its inception as an economic alliance nearly seven decades ago the European Union has never been more important in delivering tangible benefits to its citizens, or to the world in being a force for stability and prosperity.

The European Parliament is the least powerful of the European Union institutions. Its 720 members have limited powers ... a few are ascendant stars, a few are retired politicians, or even criminals.

The loss of sovereignty to an obscure center of power in Brussels, manned by technocrats, doesn’t sit well with many Europeans either.

The election for a powerless institution consisting of retired politicians and criminals ruled over by unelected technocrats in the EU Commission has "never mattered more". Pray tell, Martina, we're all ears.

It looks likely that centrist parties will have to work with the far right to get anything done.

Oh dear, there may be compromise in politics. Heaven forfend!

... more disruptive actors will become more powerful. And the far right is itself splintering, leading to further instability in the European political process.

The splintering far-right is becoming more powerful.

But, Martina assures us that "national governments oscillate between empowering and funding the commission, and seeking to control it, blame it for failures and grab the credit for successes." Which is to say, that all is normal in politics. Nothing, to quote Hamlet, "is rotten in the state of Denmark". Except for a minor assault on its Prime Minister Mette Frederiksen, to which we shall come.

National News

Let us swing our gaze to conglomerate news agencies and ask how important they see these parliamentary elections of a supra-national government for most of a continent which is hosting a war between two nuclear-armed super-powers.

Starting here in ity-bity Australia the national news services has the following information for its citizens on the "never so important" elections:

[ABC “world news”]

Moving closer to the centre of action, the BBC's news page provided [2024-06-09 10:00 AEST] the following coverage for the super-state across the channel:

[BBC “news”]

There is a very useful article on the elections. It begins with an explanation of the structure of the EU and why it is that participation in the elections is low, with a recent high being 50%. A wonderful introduction [italics mine]:

C.J. Polychroniou: Participation in E.U. elections has always been low. We saw a “surge” in participation in the 2019 EP elections in which just slightly over 50% of E.U. citizens cast a vote. And this was the highest turnout in 20 years. So, yes, it’s obvious that Europeans are not as excited about E.U. elections as they are about national elections. Votes to the European Parliament also tend to be uncorrelated to national elections in the various member states. They are really low-turnout protest votes. And the reason that Europeans do not take the EP elections seriously is because they are fully aware of the E.U.’s democratic deficit.

The EP is the only directly elected E.U. body, yet its authority is extremely limited. Unlike national parliaments, it cannot initiate legislation. What it does is simply debate legislation and can pass or reject laws. It can also make some amendments. It is the European Commission that is solely responsible for planning, preparing, and proposing new European laws. Those laws are then debated and adopted by the European Parliament and the Council of the European Union which consists of one government minister from each member state (and is not to be confused with the European Council which consists of the heads of government of every E.U. country). Essentially, we are talking about a rubber-stamping exercise on the part of the EP with regard to legislation. The European Commission is the E.U.’s executive body, surrounded by some 32,000 permanent bureaucrats, but the European Council is the highest political entity of the union. The commission president is proposed by the European Council and then approved by the Parliament.

In sum, the EP is not a normal legislature and is clearly the weakest of the three main institutions of the E.U. Brussels is also the home of European lobbying. There are more than 30,000 lobbyists in town, most of whom represent the interests of corporations, and they work very closely with E.U. bureaucrats and politicians. Lobby groups are involved at all levels of lawmaking. So, unfortunately, there is much to be said about the E.U. being in essence a corporate-driven entity with power vested in an unelected and unaccountable elite.

One-Dimensional Labeling

Returning to the NYT, Martina adopted the standard, brain dead, one dimensional approach to characterizing political contests in the colonial West, the old left versus right catchall: "looks likely that centrist parties will have to work with the far right", "the far right is itself splintering", "has incensed right-wing voters", "another driver of far-right appeal", "a stronger far right in the European Parliament, Trump-aligned leaders like Prime Minister Viktor Orban of Hungary, would move front and center".

A core issue is, as Martina alluded to in her introduction, sovereignty. This naturally arises when NATO warmongers are escalating a conflict which may well drive European nations further into war. A reason that the left/right labeling is so stupid is that anti-war voices come from all across that false spectrum. Voices from progressive or social democratic parties see the fiscal and human calamity which will result from the furthering of war. Voices calling for a maintenance of the core tenet of the UN, national sovereignty, can see their parliaments losing control over its ability to set policy.

The recent 'land corridors' issue captures this precisely.

The NATO supra-nationalist war mongers wish to remove from EU member states their ability to control the movement of other nation's militaries across their territory. This would be an utter disaster for eastern European states which wish to remain uninvolved in any war which a western European block wishes to wage with Russia, possibly on their territory. One is complicit in such a conflict if one allows opposing armies to cross one's territory. It is all about sovereignty and not getting sucked into other peoples' wars.

What of two existing voices for peace in the EU parliament, Clare Daly and Mick Wallace?

A call of support for the Irish pro-peace politicians was issued by actress Susan Sarandon. It received significant engagement on social media, and was covered by Irish Central.

Prospects for the pair look mixed. Daly is likely to be returned for the Dublin voting district, while Wallace looks far less likely for district of Southern Ireland.

A loss of either would, for pro-peace voices, be a sad outcome. The two support each other against the wall of warmongering upon which they have been writing their calls of hypocrisy.

Illiberal Autocrats’ Ill-conceived Nuclear War

Moving back across the pond to Scheerpost, Patrick Lawrence's article acknowledges the EP elections within this year's elections across the world. His article takes the US State Department's unexplained seizure of Scott Ritter's passport and sets it against the era of the House Un-American Activities Committee. The key backdrop for his presentation is the school of lack of thought which followed Fukushima's "End of History" essay. The neo-liberals who wrote themselves into history as the winners of the Cold War have turned illiberal autocrats undermining government institutions left, right and center while they pursue a war with non-communist Russia over the narrative of "autocracy vs. democracy". The whole thing makes less sense than Martina at the NYT. And still:

Deprived of what they considered their right as conferred by the force of history, liberals demonstrated that they would stop at nothing in the cause of retrieving it. Even those institutions that must stand above the political pit if a democracy is to have any chance of working, notably but not only the judiciary, were intruded upon in the liberal authoritarian project. Nothing was off limits

With the recent effective declaration of war against Russia by authorizing the state of Ukraine, which the US funds, to shoot NATO weapons at Russian forces in Russia, the stakes of the war between the nuclear powers has risen dramatically.

Michael Brenner who, like your author, is old enough to remember how seriously the threat of nuclear war used to be taken, has issued an article outlining some of the strategic thinking developed during the height of the Cold War which has lost currency in the current illiberal NATO regimes.

He reasonably begins [italics mine]:

The unthinkable is becoming thinkable. Nuclear war. The United States’s provocative actions are the principal reason. Desperate to remain the global supremo, our foreign affairs elites are embarked on an increasingly dangerous venture. Going mano a mano with China and Russia in a vain attempt to preserve its hegemonic standing against the tides of history, America is endangering itself and the rest of world.

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Sources

The E.U. Is Voting. It’s Never Mattered More., Matina Stevis-Gridneff, NYT, 2024-06-07

What’s at Stake in the 2024 European Parliament Elections?, Alexandra Boutri interviews (Political economist and political scientist) C.J. Polychroniou, Common Dreams, 2024-06-08

World News, ABC, 2024-07-09

News, BBC, 2024-06-09 (11:00 AEST)

Mick Wallace: ‘Myself and Clare have become probably the two best-known MEPs in Europe… there was huge pressure on us to run again’, Pádraig Byrne, Irish Independent, 2024-06-03

Election results: The candidates and constituencies to watch and what the main parties are hoping for, Jack Horgan-Jones, Irish Times, 2024-06-08

WATCH: Two Irish MEPs get pre-election endorsement from Susan Sarandon, staff, Irish Central, 2024-05-30

China’s best friends in European Parliament fighting for political lives back home in Ireland, Finbarr Bermingham, SCMP, 2024-06-03

EU elections showdown: What's at stake and how the Parliament works, Tony Connelly, RTE, 2024-06-01

Scott Ritter Silenced by Liberal Authoritarians, Patrick Lawrence, ScheerPost, 2024-06-08

Still Unthinkable?, Michael Brenner, ScheerPost, 2024-06-08

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