Eeeyu

The European Union’s fundamental values are respect for human dignity and human rights, freedom, democracy, equality and the rule of law.

That all sounds good in a vaguely American way, but it looks awfully guide-linish and aspirational. Not much for the common person to align to there.

Ironically, it’s the mismatch in social and cultural values between the member states that is the root cause of their issues. Not surprisingly, these aren’t really referenced at all in the EU’s fundamental values statement.

For example, their espoused freedoms resulted in the removal of internal borders. This is great for travel but has created issues in the labour markets that has lead to increased racism. The problem here is that the folks that weren’t in a position to take advantage of the freedoms were the ones that suffered as a result of them. I’d call that an unnecessary polarising effect.

A free market is a wonderful thing unless that leads to unwanted erosion of cultural identity, regional losers in the economic battle zone and a general reduction of society to consumerism. If you’d have asked many people whether they wanted to become consumer slaves to the detriment of other values, family for example, they’d have said no.

The EU aims for sustainable development based on balanced economic growth. Not even close; only the northern countries have cultural values to match this aspiration.

It would have been sensible to slowly develop a free market but with a clutch in place to prevent excess trade or capital imbalances between the regions. To put it bluntly, the profits of a trading excess to a region should have been required to be invested in that region until things were evened up.

The EU would have been well-placed to find and articulate a set of genuinely shared cultural values and then have used these as a wedge towards the slow organic development of a proper union.

Right now the EU reminds me of an old Ford Escort that I once owned, an ill-conceived product of English and German engineering, financed by the Americans with the French sales & marketing team looking on in despair. It was sold all over Europe but loved by no one.

My particular Escort ran, but just. Missing one cylinder (the UK) and full of rust, my feet got wet every time it rained, and I was always surprised that it kept running. Until it didn’t; one night on a German Autobahn it started overheating and it was with great relief that we (me and the car) managed to limp home to Eindhoven.

But it never started again and I had to pay for it to be removed and scrapped. I am pretty sure that no one wanted any of the parts.