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The refusal of France, Italy and Portugal to allow the private aircraft of the President of Bolivia to cross their airspace on the mere suspicion that Edward Snowden might be aboard is rather more astonishing.
The recent Snowden saga has revealed more about Europe than about the United State. Together, these revelations confirm the completion of the transformation of the ‘Western democracies’ into an entity that as yet has no recognized name.
The outrage against the Bolivian President confirmed that this trans-Atlantic entity shows utter disrespect towards int’l law, even though EU leaders will make use of it when it suits them. And this disrespect is linked to a more basic institutional change: the destruction of effective democracy at the national level. This has been done by the power of lucre in the USA, where candidates are comparable to race-horses owned by billionaires. In Europe, it has been done by the EU, whose bureaucracy has gradually taken over the critical economic functions of independent states, leaving national governments to concoct huge controversies around private matters, like marriage, while public policy is dictated from the EU Commission in Brussels.
But behind that Commission, and the US electoral game as well, is the identical anonymous power that dictates its desires to this trans-Atlantic entity.
This power is to be formally extended in near future by the establishment of a free trade zone between the EU and the US. This development is the culmination of the so-called ‘European construction’ that has transferred powers of many sovereign European states to the EU, which in turn will transfer its power to trans-Atlantic institutions, all under the decisive control of ‘the Markets’.
The citizenry is informed of the latest stage of this ongoing ‘de-democratization’ process only when it is well under way. The result is an ever-wider gap between ‘the political class’, comprising politicians and mass media, on one hand, and the general masses, on the other. The principal task of the political class is to entertain the masses with the illusion that they are still living in a democracy, and that the officials they elect are acting in their interests.
When something like the grotesque incident of the Bolivian presidential plane search occurs to expose the servility of the country’s officials, the mainstream media can be counted on to spin it out of sight. French television largely ignored this event. To measure the surrender of French independence in recent decades, one can recall that in the 1970s, President Valery Giscard d’Estaing readily granted asylum to Black Panthers who had fled the United States. However, today, the interior minister rules out granting asylum to any citizen of the United States on grounds that the US is a ‘friend’.
In Germany, anti-communist propaganda having used constant denunciations of Stasi prying to bury any recollection of the lost benefits of the East German regime, such as full employment, child care and social equality for women, the revelations of NSA prying could not be overlooked. Even leading politicians in Germany seemed genuinely indignant.
In France, political leaders made faint sounds of disapproval and rapidly changed the subject. Insofar as the incident was mentioned at all, the line was that ‘there was no point in making a big fuss about practices that we sophisticated Great Powers know all about anyway and practice ourselves’. The smug ‘we do it too’ self-incrimination is a way to claim that France is still a big bad power, and not a mere satellite of the US.
Obama’s disregard for Hollande, and Hollande’s disregard for the Bolivian President, all are part of this new world order ruled not by human concerns at all, but by ‘the markets’. It is not that the markets give direct orders in such matters. But the reduction of government to ‘governance’ whose primary function is to keep the people quiet while institutions, laws and armed forces pursue the task of making the world safe for investment capital to reap its maximum profits, people are disempowered and politics becomes an empty exercise in conformity.
The explanation for this surrender lies in the ideology that has dominated Europe, and France perhaps most of all, for the past half century. A particular interpretation of the history of the mid-twentieth century has undermined confidence in popular sovereignty, (wrongly) accused of leading to ‘totalitarianism’. This ideology has prepared elites to abdicate in favour of technical institutions and ‘markets’ that seem innocent of all political sins.
Only this can explain the extraordinary rush of European governments to obey all the whims of the American master, on the eve of the negotiations for a trans-Atlantic free trade zone which European leaders will portray as compensation for the ongoing destruction of the European social welfare model.
A couple of commentators have gone so far as to suggest that Edward Snowden must be a cog in the machine, supposedly to show people that the US government is too powerful to face. The affront to the Bolivian President illustrates this even more strikingly.
