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A Eurocrat called Frans Timmermans has tweeted:
I never believed Nicholas Ridley's assertion, for which he had to resign from Margaret Thatcher's cabinet back in 1989, that the EEC was a German racket designed to take over the whole of Europe, but whether that was their intention this seems to be the result. Frau Merkel has been able to force Eastern European countries, against their will, by qualified majority voting, to take refugees.
Slovakia, which had agreed to take 200 so long as they were Christian, is fighting this in the courts. Romania, predictably, agreed to do as she was told. So did the Czech Republic and, oddly, Hungary.
I wonder if Frau Merkel can insist that refugees settle permanently in member states. The numbers this week were thousands, but presumably she could have required millions to enter Slovakia or Romania and change forever those countries, had she got the majority of votes to do so. Do you think this normal, dear reader?
The EU Migration Commissioner might do. He wants politicians to be bolder in disregarding their electorates' wishes. He denied yesterday that the Commission was to blame for the chaos in Europe and blames it on elected politicians.
Our societies are getting more diverse. It's the job of politicians to prepare their people for this new reality. @TimmermansEUIn other words it is the job of politicians to tell people their societies they have to be more diverse, not allow the people to decide. If a politician decides not to, like Viktor Orban, he arouses fury. Though there is nothing in EU law that requires the free movement of Syrians in Europe nor even any strategic or moral reason why they should be allowed to enter, nor did the EU decide on the question. Angela Merkel in an unexplained spasm decided that they should.
I never believed Nicholas Ridley's assertion, for which he had to resign from Margaret Thatcher's cabinet back in 1989, that the EEC was a German racket designed to take over the whole of Europe, but whether that was their intention this seems to be the result. Frau Merkel has been able to force Eastern European countries, against their will, by qualified majority voting, to take refugees.
Slovakia, which had agreed to take 200 so long as they were Christian, is fighting this in the courts. Romania, predictably, agreed to do as she was told. So did the Czech Republic and, oddly, Hungary.
I wonder if Frau Merkel can insist that refugees settle permanently in member states. The numbers this week were thousands, but presumably she could have required millions to enter Slovakia or Romania and change forever those countries, had she got the majority of votes to do so. Do you think this normal, dear reader?
The EU Migration Commissioner might do. He wants politicians to be bolder in disregarding their electorates' wishes. He denied yesterday that the Commission was to blame for the chaos in Europe and blames it on elected politicians.
The Commission does not take the blame because it does not care about the political cost. ...The Commission is here for five years to do its job and we did it with vision, responsibility and commitment. Because what is driving us is not to be reelected. That is why for us the political cost means nothing.Elected leaders, he thinks, should be similarly blasé.
This is the message I would send all around Europe: stop thinking about the so-called political cost.
He is a Greek - have they not done Europe enough harm? - and so he has reasons of national egoism for wanting migrants landing in Greece to go elsewhere.
Are diverse societies going to be melting-pots, like America has partly been? It depends on whether the melting pot idea works in what are essentially ethnic states, but more importantly it should depend on whether Europeans want their countries to be melting pots.
European societies are not tabulae rasae but still to a very large extent extended families. More diverse societies mean each society is going to be a different society, less a community and more a community of communities. They will, at least to some extent, cease to be organic societies, with unspoken ways of doing things, and become rationally designed by experts and directed by the police.
The danger is that diverse societies belong less to the people, because instead of one people there are a number of groups, and more to the state which polices diversity.
The great liberal philosopher John Start Mill put the danger of diversity very well.
Are diverse societies going to be melting-pots, like America has partly been? It depends on whether the melting pot idea works in what are essentially ethnic states, but more importantly it should depend on whether Europeans want their countries to be melting pots.
European societies are not tabulae rasae but still to a very large extent extended families. More diverse societies mean each society is going to be a different society, less a community and more a community of communities. They will, at least to some extent, cease to be organic societies, with unspoken ways of doing things, and become rationally designed by experts and directed by the police.
The danger is that diverse societies belong less to the people, because instead of one people there are a number of groups, and more to the state which polices diversity.
The great liberal philosopher John Start Mill put the danger of diversity very well.
Free institutions are next to impossible in a country made up of different nationalities. Among a people without fellow-feeling, especially if they read and speak different languages, the united public opinion, necessary to the working of representative government, cannot exist. The influences which form opinions and decide political acts are different in the different sections of the country. An altogether different set of leaders have the confidence of one part of the country and of another. The same books, newspapers, pamphlets, speeches, do not reach them. One section does not know what opinions, or what instigations, are circulating in another. The same incidents, the same acts, the same system of government, affect them in different ways; and each fears more injury to itself from the other nationalities than from the common arbiter, the state.
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