From Free Life, Issue 19, November 1993
ISSN: 0260 5112

Tim Evans is a freelance policy consultant and a political socio- logist. A former policy analyst and press officer at the Adam Smith Institute, during 1991 he was the Chief Economic and Political Advisor to the Slovak Prime Minister, Dr. Ján Carnogurský.

One of the most insidious features of European Community politics during the last twenty years has been the proliferation of cam- paigns designed to improve the moral behaviour of its citizens. Today, it is clear that the Community's survival has been at the expense of the liberal principles upon which it was founded. Instead of respecting free trade and issues of personal choice, its functionaries clearly believe that desirable economic outcomes in terms of standards and safety have to be imposed politically from the centre. Their attitudes indicate a total contempt for the common man. According to Brussels, individuals need to be cajoled, herded and instructed in the most minute detail for their own good.

At a time when Europe is plunged in deep recession and money is scarce, the Community is busy spending vast amounts on a range of proposals, which are at best highly questionable, and at worst an abject waste of time and taxpayer's money.

For example, Britain's booming health food industry has recently come under threat from European Commission plans to classify all but the smallest doses of vitamins and minerals as "drugs", rather than food products. The "harmonisation" plans suggested would require the UK to fall into line with some other European countries where many vitamins and minerals are classed as pharmaceutical products. Because a product classified as a drug has to go through years of testing and licensing, and costs a fortune, the effect will be to put many smaller manufacturers out of business. The directive being prepared could see the majority of vitamins and minerals disappearing from shelves, leaving the consumer with almost no choice 1. A second proposal, planned for later this year is expected to go so far as to place restrictions on the sale of herbal teas, extracts, ginseng, royal jelly, pollen, essential oils and many slimming aids.

Another Euro-lunacy is provided by the Commission's recent proposal to produce a Euro-condom. To combat the dangers of "substandard latex", Brussels wants to overthrow the British national standard, and impose its own statutory regulations. The proposed specifications of the Euro-condom, covering a variety of sizes, are being developed by the Community's standardisation office. However, a French consumer organisation, I.N.C., has decided that laboratory conditions alone cannot test the acceptability of condoms. They supplied a survey of 12,000 condoms for "field testing" by a panel of 300 prostitutes, gay men and heterosexual men and women. Their comments speak volumes compared with the raw statistical data from traditional laboratory tests. Most manufacturers would have the endorsement of the prostitute who explained why Manix was her favourite brand:

Never a tear in three years of using them at a rate of ten a day.2

Comments - on size, shape, smell and texture - were all dutifully noted, and, according to I.N.C., the test has proved what the European Commission finds so difficult to accept: what suits one person will not necessarily appeal to another.

The recent history of tobacco in Europe is relevant, as it provides an insight into the philosophy, methods and long-term strategy of the bureaucrats in Brussels. Because tobacco is unpopular, it has been used as an excuse for the introduction of a range of legislation which is unprecedentedly restrictive and potentially threatening to individual liberty. The health risks associated with tobacco have been explicitly used to legitimise the opening scenes of a paternalistic war aimed against the principle of personal choice across a huge range of other issues.3

Given the evident philosophy of the empire building Euro-crats, it seems that tobacco legislation is now billed to act as an initial wedge in the door to a host of legislation which includes not just alcohol and many foods, but almost all areas of life. For ultimately, almost every area of human activity involves personal risk and can be interpreted to inflict "social costs". Driving a car, crossing a road, drinking a cup of tea, eating a cream cake, and cutting grass - all involve elements of danger.

We all laugh at Brussels' attempts to classify carrots as fruit, and a recent directive attempting to control the curvature of cucumbers, but more seriously, if people cannot have a cream cake, a cigarette, or a pint, what is life coming to? What is the point of living?

Away from all the scare-mongering of the Brussels' health fascists, who ultimately want to ban every conceivable area of personal choice, it is important to remember that the contemporary West is a very safe place in which to live. In terms of hunger, life expectancy, and disease, industrialisation and the free market have brought massive benefits.4

Today, however, the danger facing Europe is that social regulation and the politics of control will sap the vitality of the very processes which have brought about these improvements.5 In the 36 Community buildings dotted around Brussels an estimated 18,000 directives, resolutions, and regulations, now pour out each year. With about 13,000 officials, the Commission has grown into a formidable bureaucracy.

While "modern" democratic socialists throughout Europe try to persuade voters that they are empathetic to the reality of an ever more technologically integrated world, and as such, want to unite Europe in some cosy corporatist Federal structure, I believe that those on the side of the free market should expose and use to advantage the highly contradictory, narrow, and institutionally nationalistic nature of their views.

In recent years however, many in the Conservative Party have attempted to defend the free market by hiding behind the old and familiar rhetoric of "sovereignty" and "nation", and consequently have all too often played into the hands of the opposition. Indeed, it is remarkable to think that as the defenders of modern capitalism the Bruges Group and the Anti-Federalist League are regarded today, by a large proportion of the electorate, to be espousing the politics of international division, intolerance and even poverty. These are precisely those characteristics most unattributable to the free market.

The reason why so many voters, and particularly the young across Europe, find a new Federal order so attractive is because, being the sociological products of the age of the Boeing 747, satellite communications, personal computers, the Euro-Rail card, and an unprecedented increase in personnel wealth, they find themselves to be psychologically at odds with a political group who, through, their rhetoric, appear to deny the value of this exciting, dynamic and sophisticated trans-national world. As the products of an increasingly globalised environment, many voters find themselves at odds with those politicians who seem endlessly to talk about such old fashioned, backward looking, and anachronistic concepts as "national sovereignty" and the "independent nation state". To the young of the modern European world, such rhetoric seems to be outdated, irrelevant, and destined, like Marxism, to be consigned to the dustbin of history. Recognising the psychology of the West's young today, Kenichi Ohmae has rightly asserted:

My observations over the past decade seem to indicate that the young people of the advanced countries are becoming increasingly nationalityless and more like 'Californians' all over the Triad countries - The United States, Europe, and Japan, that form the Interlinked Economy.6

What free marketeers must do is to attack the European Community for being precisely the enemy which it pretends to oppose, that is just another isolated and intolerant nation state. After all, a political authority which attempts to "standardise condoms", redefines health foods as "drugs", carrots as "fruit", and attempts to regulate curvy cucumbers, is one which can be easily exposed for its old-fashioned, intolerant and narrow minded paternalism.

While Article 110 of the Treaty of Rome committed the European Community to:

contribute to the harmonious development of world trade, the gradual removal of obstacles to international trade, and the dismantling of customs barriers,7

the reality of its trade barriers and subsidies - in opposition to third world development - can be highlighted for their anti- internationalist and murderous effects.

Instead of enhancing European unity and furthering prosperity, such collectivist policies will, if left unchecked, inevitably foster widespread disunity and a dependency culture - an environment which is inherently susceptible to instability and social conflict. By failing to endorse the dynamic vision of a truly international free market order and recognising the dangerous consequences of social engineering and economic centralisation, the Community is acting like an old-fashioned and isolated Socialist Nation State.

Following years of misuse by the bureaucratic empire builders, Brussels' bureaucracy has grown to such an extent that it is today placing the European ideal at risk: it is undermining the popular modern spirit of one-worldism which it purports to represent.

Notes

1 See: Victoria McDonald and Robert Temple, "Health food under threat from Brussels", The Sunday Telegraph, 9th August 1992, pp.1-2.

2 "Now they want a Euro-Condom", The European, 20th August 1992.

3 Although tobacco is an issue which inspires little interest, it is an indicator of how bureaucratic controls can creep into every corner of our lives. It has been used in recent years to mark out and legitimise new areas of political control. Its relative unpopularity has been used to spearhead a legislative programme which sets dangerous precedents for what amounts to European social engineering - all in the name of health and safety. Those who oppose individualism and the free market are now able to legitimise a progressive attack at a European level on a range of sectors which have been, in the past, relatively free from political control. Through the subtle re-definition of "harmonisation" and the establishment of health targets under the justification of the single market, the Commission's bureaucrats have armed themselves with powerful weapons for extending their controls and have established the precedent for virtually unlimited regulation in other spheres.

4 This point is ably made by M. Douglas, Risk, Acceptability According to the Social Sciences, Routledge and Kegan Paul, London, 1986.

5 For more on the damaging effects of imposed, non-market derived, safety standards see: Aaron Wildavsky, Searching for Safety, Transaction Books, New Brunswick, 1977; Michael S. Baram, and Kevin McAllister, Alternatives to Regulation: Managing Risks to Health and Safety and the Environment, Lexington Books, Lexington, 1982; Walter Oi, "Safety at any Price?" AEI Journal on Government and Society, Nov/Dec, 1977; John Semmens, "Legislated Society: A False Hope?", The Pragmatist, Vol.8., No.4, Feb 1991.

6 Kenichi Ohmae, The Borderless World, Fontana, London, 1992, p.4

7 For more on the economic protectionism of the European Community see Patrick Minford, (ed) The Cost of Europe, Manchester University Press, Manchester, 1992.

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Europe At Risk: Bureaucratic Betrayal of the European Ideal, by Tim Evans and Russell Lewis, is available from the Adam Smith Institute, 23 Great Smith Street, Westminster, London, SW1. Priced at 15 pounds: ISBN 1 873712 30 8.