The Pope joins the EU in a sad world of make-believeThere are two great acts of political make-believe in our time, so all-pervasive that it is hard for us to grasp just how much effect they are having on our lives
Pope Francis greets the crowd as he arrives for a general audience at St Peter's square at the VaticanWhat has a Papal Encyclical calling on the world to end its use of fossil fuels and to pray to God for the success of the global “climate summit” in December got in common with the Greek euro crisis, the ominous rift between the West and Russia, and the shambles Europe is making over the desperation of African and Syrian refugees to find safety this side of the Mediterranean? They are all different aspects of the two greatest acts of political make-believe of our time, so all-pervasive that it is hard for us to grasp just how much effect they are having on all our lives
When future historians come to look back on our age, few things will puzzle them more than the extent to which our politics became so dominated and bedevilled by two belief-systems, each based on an obsessive attempt to force into being an immensely complicated political construct which defied economic, psychological and scientific reality.
One of these was the peculiar way in which Europe’s politicians, with full support from the US, had set out to unite their continent under a form of supra-national government unlike anything the world had seen before. The other was the way those same politicians fell for the idea not just that human activities were disastrously changing Earth’s climate, but that by taking the most drastic measures they could somehow change it back again.
Although for quite a time these two belief systems seemed to carry all before them, each was essentially based on a fantasy view of the world; and it is in the nature of trying to act out a fantasy that it must eventually overreach itself, to the point where it collides unpleasantly with reality.
The essence of the “European” fantasy was not just that it could gradually weld all Europe together in “ever closer union” by overriding and eliminating the kind of nationalism which had led to wars; but that it could continually expand its own “empire”. We now see in all directions how that sense of national interest cannot be eliminated.
We see it in the desperation of the Greeks to escape from the trap created by forcing them, through corruption and dishonesty, into the euro. We see it in how the EU’s reckless bid to absorb Ukraine into its empire aroused that sense of Russian nationalism which drove the Crimeans into voting to rejoin the country where they felt they belonged. We see it in the sense of national self-interest which makes it impossible for EU countries to agree on how to deal with that flood of refugees from across the sea.
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