A good deal was said last week about the humiliation of the EU. It came from accepting an American offer on tariffs which the EU said they couldn’t refuse. Maybe they’re right. Or maybe the whole thing is happening in some sort of virtual reality which may, or may not, correspond to actual reality, one day. There was another humiliation for the EU, however, wholly self-inflicted. Stevie Davignon, a beloved figure of the European Commission, was charged with being a party to the assassination of Patrice Lumumba in the Congo, more than six decades ago. Davignon is 92 years old. What does one thing have to do with the other? Let’s recall some basics. The EU is an invention. It was invented from a concept, called ‘integration’. Integration in turn derived from another concept, interdependence. Institutions like the EU were once said to be a natural or obvious response to the vulnerabilities that interdependence – a fact, not a choice – posed to state power. From such abstractions, empires are built. None of that was terribly new. Interdependence also applies to those who consume the fruits of the soil. Nearly all of Africa was colonised by European powers in part because European economies, and European power, relied on certain commodities. After the Second World War, many of these colonies wanted more independence than interdependence. Some did a brilliant job at humiliating Europeans. One such humiliation took place in Egypt, in 1956, when the British, French, and Israelis failed to topple the Egyptian government and take back control of the Suez Canal, which that government had nationalised. A founder of the European movement, Jean Monnet, suggested that a statue be built in Brussels to commemorate the failure at Suez. Another founder, the German chancellor, Konrad Adenauer, said to his French counterpart: Europe will be your revenge. In other words, time to rebuild the empire at home. Which brings us back to Stevie Davignon. Some months after the Suez crisis, a number of European governments signed the Treaties of Rome creating the Common Market and the European Atomic Energy Community. The blueprint was drawn by the Belgian foreign minister, Paul-Henri Spaak. Davignon was Spaak’s chef de cabinet and his daughter’s special plus-one. Today’s EU is the direct descendant of those institutions. Almost nobody today contests the involvement of the Belgians, French, Americans, and one or two others in the overthrow and assassination of Patrice Lumumba. The Secretary General of the United Nations, Dag Hammarskjöld, also lost his life in that conflict, along with very many Congolese. The Congo is a vast, rich territory which produces many things, notably uranium. Whatever Davignon as a novice diplomat may or may have had to do with murder, it can hardly be said that stopping Lumumba from turning over control of all that mineral wealth to the Soviet Union was not a widespread aim. Why resurface all this ancient history? The answer is obvious. Now that the Americans have shown their own true colours to the EU, Eurocrats feel bound to cast forth a scapegoat. Following the lead of the Americans, they have wrapped their empire in a legal-moral gauze. Few people speak anymore of Western values, but many still do of European values. European values evidently don’t apply to a genocide occurring right across the border from Suez, funded and supplied with arms by EU member-states. They don’t apply to those needing asylum who wash up dead on European shores, about whom much of the European media no longer bother to report. They don’t apply to commercial relations between those member-states and the nations of Africa, including the Democratic Republic of Congo. So, if it makes the EU feel a bit less demoralised, why not pin a few sins on the back of Stevie Davignon? Forget all that he did to create the Single Market and so much else. That world is shrinking. It’s about time to make him pay for what his superiors did in the middle of Africa long ago. But no matter. European values will soon go the way of the dodo as the nations of Europe revert to what they have always been, and to how the most of the world has always seen them: rapacious and self-obsessed. That is a much better sort of revenge. Talleyrand is free today. But if you enjoyed this post, you can tell Talleyrand that their writing is valuable by pledging a future subscription. You won't be charged unless they enable payments. |