“Those who advocate the EU’s anti-democratic system of government advocate it also for the world as a whole. If Americans do not wake up to this danger, they too will be submerged in a mud-slide of utterly unaccountable global governance.” Nigel Farage
As Europe continues to struggle with ongoing financial instability, America’s policymakers are anxiously trained across the Atlantic for even the slightest negative changes in the world’s largest economy. Like the United States government, the European Union has come under intense criticism from people all across its member states for its perceived poor handling of the Eurocrisis and the fiscal fallout it has brought to ordinary lives.
To help us make sense of the unstable situation in Europe and its global implications, I sought out the UK Independence Party Leader and South East of England MEP Nigel Farage. Speaking of what he calls a “centralization of formerly democratic, national powers in an autocratic, bureaucratic, unaccountable authority” in the EU, Farage warns that the same big government trends are dangerously at work all across the world. “If Americans do not wake up to this danger,” Farage says, “they too will be submerged in a mud-slide of utterly unaccountable global governance.”
Here now is a transcript, with light edits.
Danny de Gracia: Mr. Farage, it seems like no matter what goes wrong in Europe, the default solution offered by the European Union is “more European Union.” The question that a lot of us in the United States are wondering is whether or not Europe is going to hold together or break apart under the weight of the ongoing financial crisis and the increasing number of bailouts. What’s your thoughts on the direction the EU is headed? Is there more integration to come or is Europe seriously in trouble?
Nigel Farage: Indeed, the EU has no solution for – or vision of – anything but more of what it has been doing for 60 years. It calls this “integration” but it is really only centralization – the centralization of formerly democratic, national powers in an autocratic, bureaucratic, unaccountable authority.
This EU-scheme and process is extremely dangerous for the freedom, prosperity and peace of the world, and the abolition of the EU will mean the return of sovereignty and democracy to its present subject states. It will also mean that those states will become capable of associating cooperatively and freely in a dynamic trade area, without the strictures of a single currency or the burden of a vast mass of EU regulation.
The abolition of the EU does not mean that “Europe” will “break apart” – for one thing, only 27 of Europe’s 41 states are currently subject to the EU – and for another, their freedom from the EU will allow all of Europe to work together without the imposition of uniformity, which the EU calls “harmonization.”
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