Reason Magazine - Staff

Liberal Menace or Menace to Liberalism?

info@reason.com (John Vaught LaBeaume) — Sun, 29 May 2005 00:00:00 EDT

This Sunday, the European Union's draft constitution risks rejection or ratification at the hands of mercurial French voters. Three days later, it stares down a similar fate at the mercy of an equally fickle Dutch electorate. A "thumbs down" from either country would scuttle the grandiose document, which requires ratification by every member state to take effect.

Unlike most Americans who venture dans la campagne to soak up the quaint, rustic charm, The Washington Post's Glenn Frankel waded deep into the Loire valley in search of the lurking Frenchman who intends, with quiet resolve, to vote "non." The discovery of this political animal has come "to the great surprise of the political elite here." Frankel found him in an ex-paratrooper with a grandiloquent name that belies the vocation of a man who works the soil. A French farmer, Pierre Mercier de Beaurouvre, sits before his kitchen table and voices his apprehension that a ratified constitution will unleash a flood of regulations, directives and duties from Brussels that will render the domestic French feast spread before him, of "garlicky sausages," duck pâte and gherkins, a distant memory.

France's "partisans for the no" are not confined to the conservative countryside. A healthy majority in favor of ratification, until recently taken for granted by French pundits, is now in serious doubt.

Cosmopolitan city-dwellers, fearing a "savage capitalism" borne of "unbridled liberalism" unleashed by a new constitution, are contemplating the unthinkable: voting "non" this Sunday. When President Jacques Chirac hosted a televised discussion to pitch the E.U. constitution to skeptical French youth, a young Frenchman challenged his President, asserting that the document's "text follows a liberal logic."

Of course, that's not the "liberalism" that we know in the United States, Richard Bernstein reminds us in The New York Times, but liberalism, or "ultraliberalism" as it is sometimes hyperbolically vilified, "in the European sense of Anglo-American style free-market economics, which, many people contend, would strip away social protections."

Euroskeptics on the left may harbor a profoundly delusional vision of a European super state that manages to propagate "liberalism" and won't stifle European markets. But the centralization of economic regulation that the constitution seeks to codify is not recognizably liberal in the European sense of the term. In fact, Britain's famously Europhilic Liberal Democrats have stepped back from their previous championing of all things European and now advocate a rigorous review of the E.U.'s existing powers, refusing to rule out repatriating some of those to the various member states.

In France, respectable opinion in the mainstream press is relentlessly pro-ratification. And though each is hounded by ambitious, high profile dissenters within their ranks, both major parties, President Chirac's Gaullist-rooted U.M.P. and the opposition Socialists, are vigorously campaigning for a "oui" vote.

When mild criticism of—let alone outright opposition to—the European Union and its nebulously defined mandate is consigned without the bounds of polite debate, inevitably forces that are otherwise relegated to the margins will exploit the significant Euroskepticism that smolders in every E.U. member nation. The significance of the most recent French presidential elections seems to have eluded "the political elite here."

In 2002 when the National Front's leader, Jean-Marie LePen, catapulted past the Socialists and into a runoff with Jacques Chirac, commentators across the political spectrum stumbled over themselves to denounce LePen and his xenophobic, neo-Fascist politics. In the end, they needn't have shouted themselves hoarse. In the second round of voting, LePen managed to pick up less than a percentage point. Chirac crushed him, gaining four-fifths of the vote. But not every LePen voter was registering only his animus against immigrants. The major candidates were all confirmed Euro-enthusiasts, and LePen, decidedly, was not. (Perhaps taking his cues from the French press, some New York Times editor selected a photo to accompany Bernstein's article that depicts an angry, drab "non" poster from the National Front juxtaposed with a "oui" placard featuring an angelic little girl, looking toward her Euro-future.)

But this cavalier dismissal by "elite opinion" has driven opponents to dig in their heels. Even in the region where Chirac cut his political teeth, local notables are protesting that they "'cannot stomach' seeing the country's political elite—from the Left and Right—campaigning for the Yes vote hand in hand."

On the bright side, all this confused talk of a liberal menace has inspired a re-evaluation of once-fashionable continental anti-capitalism in one notorious ex-Sixties radical. As a profiler in the UK's Independent puts it: "Danny the Red has become Danny the Blue (with Yellow Stars)." In May of 1968, Daniel Cohn-Bendit, a student agitator, was the hero of the left-wing uprising that nearly toppled de Gaulle's government. Today, he sits in Strasbourg representing the German Greens and postures as a reborn "'liberal-libertarian' ecologist and militant pro-European" while lecturing the French Left that "no one has dared to tell them that we live in a world of market forces." Yet it is instructive to note that after that bold declaration, Cohn-Bendit immediately demurs that he "does not mean that you have to accept the extreme religion of Thatcherism or even Blairism." Rather, he reassures his former French comrades who might be considering a "non" vote that under the E.U.'s benevolent watch, "market forces can be married with social responsibility, a social market." That is hardly a recipe for "unbridled liberalism."

In the Netherlands, a liberalism that is more recognizable to American observers is animating that country's trepidation. Many Dutchmen fear their renowned tolerance for homosexuality and drug use will be vetoed by more conservative Catholic member states, or by the Islamic fundamentalism of some E.U. immigrants, which is already confounding the historic commercial and cultural crossroads.

Advocates of ratification have chided the voters of various political persuasions hailing from various E.U. member states for their manifold, and often dissonant, arguments against this constitution, dismissing their hesitation as unrealistic and obstinately sentimental for a France or Holland, that, in practice—any educated person can plainly see—no longer exists. Like the elected representatives they send to the European Parliament in Strasbourg, however, proponents and opponents alike speak in a host of tongues expressing a multitude of partisan biases.

That very cacophony of arguments on both sides of the debate, reflecting a continent of vastly diverse peoples, faiths, and political traditions, should raise a red flag. Is a constitution that cements the E.U.'s centralized, inflexible decision-making really the most forward-looking, market-savvy, and truly liberal blueprint for a 21st Century Europe?

Another Yellow Revolution?

info@reason.com (John Vaught LaBeaume) — Thu, 05 May 2005 00:00:00 EDT

Voters in the United Kingdom headed to the polls Thursday, and if you watch C-SPAN's feed from the BBC's fantabulously frenetic election night coverage, you might spy the notoriously frenzied election analyst Peter Snow darting about a giant map of the UK, washing away swaths of Labour red and some of the last redoubts of Tory blue. Opinion polls are pointing to unprecedented gains for the Liberal Democrats, the UK's historical "third party," and each constituency that Snow points to, magically lighting it up in brilliant yellow, will indicate another gain for the LibDems.

The Liberal Democrats' potential lies in deftly exploiting a gaping hole in British politics by campaigning with a positive, consistently liberal platform rooted in the party's Classical Liberal tradition. They stand to reap gains by fighting a campaign with its most coherent platform in decades, offering a fresh contrast to the dour, illiberal agendas proffered by both Prime Minister Tony Blair's "control freak" New Labour and an aimless Conservative Party, obsessed with cracking down on immigration and imposing "school discipline."

Tony Blair swept the Conservatives from eighteen years of uninterrupted power in 1997 by re-branding his party as "New Labour," jettisoning its "Loony Left" image and renouncing its devotion to centralized state planning. This audacious strategy met fierce resistance from the unions that comprise the historical base of the Labour Party, but it convinced the British middle class that Labour was ready to govern again. While it has rejected socialism, New Labour continues to advocate a technocratic hyper-management of the UK's relatively free post-Thatcher economy.

New Labour's interventionist impulse extends from the economy to the personal sphere. In 2001, Blair proudly declared in a Labour Party TV broadcast that he isn't "some 1960's style libertarian." This week, Blair took to the pages of The Sun, a racy, populist tabloid, to smear the Liberal Democrats' as "soft on drugs." This record prompted Liberal Democrat leader Charles Kennedy to reassert his party's historic defense of English civil liberty at this year's party conference, decrying New Labour's "authoritarian instincts," denouncing the government's plan for a compulsory national ID card and condemning its proposals for unprecedented curbs of the rights of the accused in the name of the War on Terror. Kennedy also noted, with glee, that Her Majesty's Official Opposition, the Conservative Party, has either endorsed each "reform" or failed to challenge Blair's Labour government, leaving the Liberal Democrats as the only voice of dissent.

While their economic policy might fail to satisfy a Chicago School economist, this election has seen the Liberal Democrats stake out the most explicitly liberal economic policy in a century. The party's website pledges to get the British government "off the back of businesses" and assures voters that the LibDems "want to cut the red tape that stops businesses from growing." Press releases during the campaign have excoriated "Labour's business record" as "complex, interfering and over regulating" and have promised that "Liberal Democrats will set business free." And though they would shift many of its current powers to other agencies, the LibDems propose abolishing the Department of Trade and Industry, claiming it would constitute "the biggest single act of deregulation in history." In contrast to the LibDems' exploration of economic liberalism, this year's Conservative Party platform marks a meek retreat from the party's Thatcherite tradition.

If the negative reaction it has incurred from both right and left is any indication, the LibDems' distinctly liberal message seems to be paying off. The Conservative-friendly Telegraph has felt it necessary to editorialize to its readership that the LibDems aren't sincere in their embrace of the market. George Monbiot, columnist for the lefty Guardian, warns left wingers that a vote for the LibDems will not only signal opposition to the war in Iraq and the Labour government's abysmal record on civil liberties, but they will also be a vote "for the further deregulation of business." And when the BBC's website pondered where the LibDems stand in this election, it threw up its hands: "The question of whether the Lib Dems are now to the left of Labour is in the eye of the beholder."

When he took the helm of the LibDem leadership, Kennedy resurrected the traditional Liberal "equidistance" between Labour and Conservative that his predecessor had abandoned, wisely determining that policy to be a strategic miscalculation. Cozying up to Labour offered immediate, limited rewards in the form of more seats won from the Tories, but the policy marked a set back for the party elsewhere, stunting its ability to enlarge it parliamentary caucus by winning seats from Labour.

A cadre of "Young Turk" MP's and advisors recognized that the Liberal Democrats no longer had the luxury of complacently contrasting itself from a Labour Party saddled by militant labor unions and academic central planners and had to forge an economic policy that didn't merely parrot New Labour's line. With the publication of The Orange Book in the fall of 2004, this group of reformers issued a manifesto that called for modernizing the party by reinvigorating Liberal Democrat policies through a reclaiming of the party's Classical Liberal heritage. Indeed, the first paragraph of the book's introduction invokes the names of some of the great lights of Britain's liberal tradition: John Stuart Mill, Jeremy Bentham, and Adam Smith. The Orange Book's authors joined party colleagues in Liberal Future, a pressure group founded in 2002, as exponents of complementing the Liberal Democrats' recently emboldened defense of personal liberty with a more explicit economic liberalism.

While some commentators have wondered aloud if Kennedy's affable demeanor is too "relaxed," it belies Kennedy's canny political instincts. He understands that his unhurried attitude has immense popular appeal as the antithesis of a scheming, grasping politician. He is also savvy enough to recognize the potential value in the reformers' explicitly liberal agenda.

Under Kennedy's watch, a Liberal Democrat party that positions itself as the lone defenders of English civil liberty and peace, while unabashedly embracing a market economy, has scored phenomenal by-election upsets, snatching away safe Labour-held seats once thought to be impregnable. He sounds like a sincere convert. In a Guardian profile, Kennedy summons language to explicate his party's core values that would stir any Classical Liberal heart: "The first guiding principle is a mindset, I think—a gut philosophical instinct—to see society in terms of the individual, first and foremost, rather than the interests of the state."

Tune in to C-SPAN tonight to see how much of the UK, inspired by the Liberal Democrats' resurgent liberalism, turns bright yellow.