{"id":10698,"date":"2016-12-19T22:27:31","date_gmt":"2016-12-20T02:27:31","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/admin.patheos.com\/blogs\/evetushnet\/?p=10698"},"modified":"2016-12-19T22:27:31","modified_gmt":"2016-12-20T02:27:31","slug":"bluff-way-european-economic-community","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.patheos.com\/blogs\/evetushnet\/2016\/12\/bluff-way-european-economic-community.html","title":{"rendered":"Bluff Your Way Out of the European Economic Community"},"content":{"rendered":"\n<\/head>

Or, What did Brexit look like in 1988?<\/p>\n

Months ago, in the halcyon days of May, I was browsing the cheap shelves at Second Story when I came upon Bluff Your Way in the EEC<\/em>. This is part of the Bluffer\u2019s Guide series, overgrown pamphlets designed to teach \u201980s people how to pretend they understand things like Philosophy, Accountancy, Feminism, Jazz, Japan, The Occult, and \u201cHi-Fi\u201d (??). I grabbed this thing and a saint-of-the-day guide from I think the early \u201970s, which turned out to be a really endearing mix of stern martyrology and felt-banners social concern, and threw it in a corner for a rainy day.<\/p>\n

It rained.<\/p>\n

I\u2019ve read it now; I loved it. And if you want a good guide to reasons somebody might vote Brexit\u2013specifically, reasons that aren\u2019t about hating Muslims\u2013you might read it too. I don\u2019t doubt that racism and scapegoating were part of the story of Brexit. And I don\u2019t pretend to understand the issues well enough to have strong opinions on whether Brexit was what the philosophers call \u201ca good idea.\u201d But I do have sympathies, and those sympathies are for local control and against top-down bureaucratic management of economic and social life. What I\u2019m saying is that there are three things you should never ask the British to trust: sunshine, bureaucracy, and the Danes.<\/p>\n

So the thing with Bluff Your Way in the EEC<\/em> is that under its bouncy, cynical tone it has an earnest streak. The author, Michael Toner, conscientiously notes wherever some Euroscheme has actually done its job\u2013wherever do-gooders somehow managed to do some good.<\/p>\n

But still you wonder: Was it necessary, in order to provide wheat reserves for Europe, to build a Vatican of sausage-length regulators? This is an implicitly Hayekian book, all about the reasons experts fail to know things. It\u2019s about the inability to predict economic needs, the law of unintended consequences, and the modern pressure to centralize, internationalize, and standardize<\/a>.<\/p>\n

It\u2019s also about the \u201cpork carousel\u201d (an import-export scheme in which pigs trot merrily across borders, gathering subsidies on every trip) and the Dutch manure glut. Toner, unlike the well-meaning of this world, knows how easily humans interpret law as damage and route around it. He isn\u2019t always completely prescient\u2013there are lots of muted warnings that Euro-unity is coming faster and harder than you think, but he\u2019s still very skeptical that the Chunnel and the Euro will come into play anytime soon.<\/p>\n

Hard to notice his foibles, though, when he gives you stuff like this: \u201cIt goes without saying that Mr. [Edward] Heath is more highly regarded in France, Germany, Italy, Holland, the United States, China and the USSR than he is in his own land. But then he never ran any of those countries.\u201d<\/p>\n

Toner is cheery about the traditional English loathing of Europeans\u2013my impression is that 20th-century English people were quite open about their opinions on this score, and you already know why you can hardly blame them. He notes that the Labour Party initially opposed the EEC. If I had to guess his own sordid predilections I\u2019d say Tory (apparently<\/a> he wrote editorials for the Daily Mail<\/em><\/a>), but I could be wrong, I\u2019m a bluffer here myself. He enjoys watching Maggie Thatcher stick it to \u2019em.<\/p>\n

Toward the end he glosses the term \u201cthe Democratic Deficit,\u201d meaning the idea \u201cthat the bureaucracy of the Common Market is accumulating more and more power while elected politicians suck on their thumbs on the sidelines.\u201d That section closes with this:<\/p>\n

Things have got to such a state that the President of the European Commission, Jacques Delors, has prophesied that the present system of national parliaments will give way to an \u201cembryo\u201d form of European Government by the mid-1990s. The Eurobluffer should learn what he said, in July 1988, off by heart: \u201cOne day, national parliaments will wake up to what is happening, there will be a shock reaction, and this will create problems for the Community.\u201d<\/p>\n

You can say that again, Jacques.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

I think we can end there.<\/p>\n<\/body><\/html>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Or, What did Brexit look like in 1988? Months ago, in the halcyon days of May, I was browsing the cheap shelves at Second Story when I came upon Bluff Your Way in the EEC. This is part of the Bluffer\u2019s Guide series, overgrown pamphlets designed to teach \u201980s people how to pretend they understand […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1071,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[25,46,86,455],"class_list":["post-10698","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized","tag-england-your-england","tag-our-enemy-the-state","tag-the-dark-continent-europe-in-the-twentieth-century","tag-unintended-consequences-are-a-conservative-rhetorical-device"],"yoast_head":"\nBluff Your Way Out of the European Economic Community<\/title>\n<meta name=\"description\" content=\"Or, What did Brexit look like in 1988? 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