Crawling from the Wreckage (27 page)

The hardest bit has been containing the misgivings of ordinary citizens in the older EU countries while this job is being done. The rapid expansion was stretching the EU’s institutions to the limit, but any attempt to streamline the institutions drew people’s attention to what was happening, usually with negative consequences. Getting the new constitution through was a four-year battle
.

You can get the Irish to agree to anything, even a European superstate that forces abortion on them, conscripts their citizens for a European army, and compels Ireland to abandon its traditional neutrality. All you need is a severe recession (Ireland’s economy is the hardest-hit of all the European Union members), and suddenly all those concerns fade away.

Sixteen months ago the Irish voted “no” to the Lisbon Treaty, a deal that streamlined decision making in the
EU
. For the first time, the twenty-seven-member union would have a president, a foreign minister, and voting rules that do not require unanimity on every single policy decision. Twenty-six members ratified the treaty in their parliaments, but Ireland’s constitution required it to ratify treaties by referendum.

This led to a campaign in which Irish nationalists and leftists, backed by the right-wing anti-
EU
press in Britain (which circulates widely in Ireland), scared Irish voters into saying no. All the allegations about abortion, conscription, and the end of Irish neutrality in the first sentence of this article are untrue, but they all played a large part in that campaign.

The Irish “no” vote brought the process of European integration to a halt, but the
EU
then issued various statements promising the Irish government not to do what the Lisbon Treaty never gave it the right to do
anyway. Last Friday, the Irish were sent back to the polls, and this time 67 percent of them voted yes.

This whole exercise became necessary, however, because the original proposal to create an
EU
constitution was voted down in Dutch and French referendums in 2005. Whenever you ask the actual people of European countries if they want to “strengthen” and “deepen” the European Union, they have this distressing tendency to say no.

So, after a “period of reflection,” the proposed
EU
constitution was re-packaged as a mere treaty, which in most
EU
countries can be ratified by a parliamentary vote without a referendum. Party discipline ensured that most members of parliaments will vote the right way, and twenty-six out of twenty-seven parliaments did. Only Ireland required special treatment, and it was duly administered.

There is an obvious democratic deficit here. The grandees decide, and the people obey. Moreover, some of the grandees are very grand indeed. Take Jacques Chirac, president of France for twelve years until 2007.

Chirac has most recently been in the news when his pet Maltese terrier, Sumo, leaped up and bit his stomach—the dog was depressed by the move from the spacious grounds of the presidential palace to a private apartment on the Quai Voltaire—but the politician’s real claim to fame is his ability to escape corruption charges.

The charges date back to when Chirac was mayor of Paris, from 1977 to 1995. Between 1992 and 1995 alone, he spent 2.5 million francs (about $500,000) in cash, mostly stuffed into brown envelopes in five-hundred-franc notes, to pay for lavish holidays for his family, his friends and their families. The money probably came from the almost one hundred million dollars in bribes and kickbacks that he’d received from companies seeking a share in a rebuilding program for schools in the Paris area.

Chirac avoided prosecution for twelve years by insisting that he could not be questioned about the affair while he was president. The legal machinery ground slowly into motion once he left office, but like banks that are too big to fail, Chirac is too grand to go to jail. It now appears that all legal proceedings against him will be quashed.

There are other current examples of this phenomenon—Italy’s Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi, for example—and many past ones. But the larger reality of which this is only one facet is that high politics in most
European countries is still an elite project. That is nowhere truer than in the project of the European Union.

If it had been left to the normal politics of European countries, the
EU
would never have happened. It was the post–Second World War elites of Europe, appalled by the wars that had devastated the continent, who conceived the goal of a European Union where the rival nationalisms would eventually wither away and Europe would live in peace.

From the European Coal and Steel Community in 1951 to the European Economic Community in 1957 to the European Union in 1993, they summoned into existence a political entity for which there was little popular demand. When local nationalism got in the way, they worked around it or waited it out—like in Ireland just now.

While the forms of democracy are always observed, the spirit that animates the
EU
is we-know-what’s-good-for you, vote-again-till-you-get-it-right. If the result had not been a Europe that is prosperous, committed to protecting human rights and astonishingly peaceful, you’d condemn the whole project out of hand.

Chirac was bad enough; Berlusconi is ten times worse. The Italians go on voting for him anyway
.

When foreigners look at Italian Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi, they see a ridiculous old goat with megalomaniacal tendencies and a history of white-collar crime, and wonder why so many Italians keep voting for him. Those who don’t vote for him explain that he controls most of the country’s television networks—and that his antics actually appeal to that considerable section of the population who dream of being rich and brazen enough to get away with blatant public misbehaviour.

Until recently, Berlusconi looked completely invulnerable, but in last weekend’s elections for the parliament of the European Union, only 35 percent of Italians voted for his People of Freedom Party. He had predicted that 45 percent would. Is it possible that Italians are turning away from “Il Cavaliere” (The Knight) at last?

The source of the funds that let him become a major real-estate developer and then a multi-billionaire media magnate remains obscure. Accusations that he had links with the Mafia have never been properly refuted. Prosecutions against him for corruption and bribery were stalled by his lawyers until they expired because of the statute of limitations. (In some cases, he used his political power to move the expiry date up.) But having an affair with an eighteen-year-old girl may have been a step too far.

Silvio Berlusconi is seventy-two years old, but his hair transplant and perma-tan make him look younger. His habit of surrounding himself with attractive young women has long been indulged by Italian voters, although it clearly annoyed his wife, Veronica Lario. When he publicly told former showgirl (and now cabinet minister) Mara Carfagna that “I’d marry you like a shot if I wasn’t married already” in 2007, Lario demanded and got a public apology. This time, however, she demanded a divorce.

As Berlusconi’s sense of invulnerability has grown, he has thrown caution to the wind. In April, he drove to the outskirts of Naples to attend the birthday party of eighteen-year-old Noemi Letizia and gave her a gold necklace worth thousands of dollars. She calls him “Papi” (Daddy), which would be awkward enough if it were true (since he has been married to Veronica Lario for thirty years), but his relationship with Letizia may not be paternal.

It subsequently emerged that Berlusconi flew Letizia, then seventeen, to his private estate in Sardinia last Christmas. Her ex-boyfriend alleged that Berlusconi had phoned her out of the blue after seeing her photographs in a model agency’s brochure. At this point Veronica Lario’s patience finally snapped: she told the media that she was disgusted by his behaviour and that she would not remain the wife of “a man who consorts with underage girls.”

As usual, Berlusconi tried to shrug it off, offering a series of increasingly implausible explanations for how he came to know the girl, but this time something was different. Despite the tight control he exercises over his own media and the state-owned channels, the story could not be contained, and many Italians who had tolerated his previous peccadilloes felt that this time he had gone too far. Hence the sharp drop in the Freedom Party’s electoral fortunes.

But is this the start of a major shift in Italian politics, or only a blip on the graph? If I were a betting man, I’d bet on the blip.

The Italian “economic miracle” ended twenty-five years ago, and the state is all but broke. Fiscal irresponsibility has been the hallmark of almost all Italian governments since 1945, and the country has only avoided the dire consequences by continuously devaluing the lira and inflating its debts away. Since it swapped the lira for the euro, however, that escape hatch has been closed.

Few voters are willing to bear the intense and long-lasting pain that would be involved in putting Italy back on the fiscal straight-and-narrow, and no sane politician wants the responsibility of imposing that pain on the country. So the field is left clear for political conjurors like Berlusconi, magical thinkers who can persuade themselves and everyone else that everything will be all right.

The affair with the teenager is embarrassing, but it will be mostly forgotten by the time there is another national election, and Berlusconi has already discovered his next populist platform. He is going to become Italy’s defender against the immigrant hordes.

“What immigrant hordes?” you could reasonably ask, for only 4 percent of Italy’s residents are foreign-born. But Berlusconi knew exactly what he was doing when he said in an election speech: “When I walk down the streets of Milan and I see the large numbers of non-Italians, I feel like I’m no longer in an Italian or a European city but in an African one.”

Up till now, openly racist talk has been the specialty of Berlusconi’s coalition partner, the Northern League, but Il Cavaliere is going to steal their clothes. He will be around for quite a while yet, and the day of reckoning will be postponed once again.

Some days of reckoning, however, finally did arrive. Towards the end of the decade, the most wanted war criminals in the Balkans were being handed over or surrendering in rapid succession—and, in the Netherlands, they began coming to terms with the Dutch part in the tragedy
.

Last week in The Hague, a Dutch court began hearing a case brought forward by the surviving relatives of the eight thousand Bosnian Muslim
civilians who were murdered by Serb forces at Srebrenica in 1995, while supposedly under
UN
military protection. The survivors are claiming four billion dollars in damages from the Dutch state and the United Nations, which had created the “safe haven” at Srebrenica and sent the Dutch troops there to protect it. It’s about time.

Good people make mistakes, and innocent people die; it happens all the time, especially in war. But Srebrenica was the worst mass killing in Europe since the Second World War, and it probably could have been avoided if the Dutch troops had shown a little more courage. If not, then they could have died fighting to stop it, because that was their duty.

Soldiers talk with understandable pride about the “unlimited liability” of their profession: the same phrase appears in many armies in many languages. Few other callings require that on some occasions you must die in order to do your duty, and the military profession is quite right in claiming that this sets soldiers apart. But you can’t just talk the talk. You have to walk the walk, and the Dutch didn’t.

The Dutch soldiers were sent to Srebrenica in 1995 to relieve the Canadian battalion that had been holding the
UN
-protected enclave. I happened to be in Canada at the time and a Dutch television crew asked me for advice on what their soldiers could expect in Srebrenica. I told them that the Canadians were very glad to be getting out because it was potentially a death trap.

I didn’t mean a death trap for the tens of thousands of Bosnian Muslim civilians who were trapped there; that was obvious. I meant a death trap for the few hundred lightly armed Canadian soldiers who were protecting the Muslim civilians from the thousands of Serbs with artillery and tanks who had surrounded the enclave.

If the Serbs attacked, the Canadians would have to fight despite the odds—anything else would be a shameful betrayal of their duty—and they might lose dozens of people. They would probably save the enclave in the process because even the Serbian commander, General Ratko Mladic, would stop short of killing hundreds of
UN
troops. But it was a dreadful situation, and the Canadians were greatly relieved to be going home. Good luck to the Dutch.

The Dutch were unlucky. In July 1995, the Serbs began to make probing attacks on the enclave’s perimeter, which was much too long to defend with only four hundred troops. The Dutch commander, Colonel
Ton Karremans, was in a difficult position, but his course was clear: protest loudly to Mladic and to the world, and call in
NATO
air strikes if the Serbian attacks continued. Meanwhile, the Muslim men within the enclave would be given back the weapons they had surrendered to the
UN
, and he would prepare to fall back to the town of Srebrenica, which could probably be held for a day or so—time enough for help to arrive, perhaps. But if the Serbs kept coming, Dutch soldiers would die.

So Karremans went to see Mladic, drank a toast with him, and agreed to hand over the Muslims in return for thirty Dutch soldiers who had been taken hostage. The Dutch commander didn’t know that the Serbs were planning to exterminate all the men and boys in Srebrenica; the Serbs themselves only decided to do so after meeting with Karremans and realizing that they faced no opposition. But this was three years into the war, and he must have known that at the very least many hundreds of Muslims would be tortured, raped and murdered.