Blame the European Parliament!
A sceptical take on the EU’s many shortcomings takes itself too seriously.
Derk-Jan Eppink has been a member of the European Parliament since June last year, but that has done nothing to increase his respect for the institution.
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His book drips with contempt for the Parliament. Its argument (albeit incoherent) is that the Parliament is failing in its duty to protect taxpayers. He intends this book as a rallying cry for a citizens’ initiative against EU taxation.
Some fear that the citizens’ initiative (an innovation of the Lisbon treaty that gives recognition to petitions of more than a million signatures from several member states) might open the way to demagoguery. Eppink, who was elected to the Parliament for the dissident Belgian liberal group Lijst Dedecker (which well-nigh imploded in last month’s national elections), has less problem with demagoguery than with what he regards as the EU’s sham version of democracy.
Eppink has been working in and around the EU institutions for many of the past 20 years. He did an internship in the European Commission before pursuing a career in political journalism, first for the Dutch newspaper NRC Handelsblad and then for the Belgian newspaper De Standaard. He jumped ship and worked in the private office of Frits Bolkestein, the Netherlands’ European commissioner in 1999-2004. “Belgian Adventures: a European discovers Belgium”, published in 2004, was a humorous account of some of the lessons he learnt in his encounters with Belgian and European politics. He worked for Siim Kallas, Estonia’s European commissioner, for two and a half years, before going off to New York and returning to journalism. “Life of a European Mandarin”, published in 2007, was a composite picture of some of his experiences working for the EU.
Unfortunately, this book is not as good as the earlier ones. “Belgian Adventures” offered some genuine insights into Belgian society and some of Belgium’s political players. “Life of a European Mandarin”, despite some overly elaborate narrative devices, had the merit of direct first-hand experience, albeit limited. But this book lacks the insights and does not make use of first-hand experience as it might have done. Instead, it is a sustained diatribe against “more Europe” of the sort that could be heard from all manner of less well-informed Eurosceptic bar bores.
The usual targets
Eppink’s targets are staples: global warming and the European emissions trading scheme, the REACH chemicals legislation, energy-saving light-bulbs, migrants, bureaucracy and, of course, the European Parliament.
The sweeping generalisations come thick and fast and do not always stand up to scrutiny. In the first chapter, Eppink warns that Europe cannot deal with “immigration on a massive scale without a parallel process of integration”. In the fourth chapter, for a different argument (against anti-Americanism), he asserts that: “if Africans, Chinese, Latin Americans or Arabs get the chance to emigrate, where do they want to emigrate to? America!”
Fact File
Bonfire of bureaucracy in Europe
By Derk-Jan Eppink (152 pages)Lannoo, €19.95
Does it matter that he describes REACH as a directive rather than a regulation? Well, yes, it probably does in a section accusing the EU of micromanagement and when he is making a direct comparison with the Habitat (sic) Directive. The evidence against climate change is that: “A number of global warming demonstrations in Copenhagen actually had to be cancelled because of the freezing conditions!” He appears to confuse the Parliament’s budgetary control committee with the budgets committee.
There are bigger flaws: the book lacks structure and narrative coherence. It reads like an agglomeration of newspaper columns. In the opening pages, Eppink declares that: “This book was largely written on an Indian Jet Airlines aeroplane flying above the Atlantic Ocean, as I commute twice a month from Brussels to New York.” It is a dangerous admission: the reader has been warned.
Unintentionally perhaps, Eppink produces some damning evidence against his chief target, the European Parliament. Now that he is an MEP, his work is more pretentious and less entertaining. Is this merely coincidence?