The EU begins to blossom

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A series of stories from England displays the features of the emerging transnational order:

  • Everything has to be totally controlled by rational legal standards, up to and including:
    1. Things that precede all possible human law, like the ultimate use of force (i.e., war) to decide whose law shall prevail. See “Non-Accountable Organisations” on the extraordinary presumption that it is the NGOs that should decide whether there should be war and how it should be fought.
    2. Things in everyday life that can’t be regulated completely because people have to get a lot of different things done and you can’t have a rulebook for all of them. The EU doesn’t see it that way, though. For example, after this year they will only permit knife blades to have a maximum length of 10 cm (a bit less than 4 inches). It seems that that most knife-related injuries and deaths in EU countries are caused by blades longer than that, so they decided to clamp down.
  • Unfortunately, the totally administered society doesn’t work. It’s not simply that attempts to outlaw war or eliminate all danger fall short of their goals. Rather, the administrative state destroys informal relationships necessary for a tolerably orderly and productive way of life, partly because it rejects them as insufficiently rational and controllable. The problems come out most vividly in connection with family life and crime:
    1. For an example of the effect of the destruction of family relationships, consider “Nights away with parted parent ‘bad for babies'”. Bounce the kid around because there are no real connections, just temporary rational arrangements to satisfy current needs until they change, and they’ve got problems. The answer inplicit in the article? More studies and better-designed social policy!
    2. The bottom line: Police ‘unable to cope’ with volume of crime. In the totally administered state only direct application of force helps: “Recently, when hundreds of officers were deployed from central London to deal with a terrorist scare at Heathrow Airport, crime in the capital soared.” Things used to be quite different in England. For example, the increase in robberies in Lambeth (a south London borough) in 2001 was greater than the annual number of robberies in England and Wales throughout most of the 1920s.
  • Since the whole concept is inhuman and unworkable the obvious thing to do is drop out. Unfortunately, they’ve thought of that: a clause in the new European constitution would make it illegal to leave the EU without permission of two-thirds of member states. After all, if you could just leave there wouldn’t be universal control of everything, and how would that be?

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