Article: What is Europeism?

Václav Klaus, the liberal-conservative President of the Czech Republic, is the author of an article titled "What is Europeism?" that forms part of a booklet, "What is Europeism, or What Should Not Be The Future For Europe" (by Václav Klaus, Jiří Weigl, Petr Mach Marek Loužek, and Jiří Brodský), published in 2006 by the pro-market public policy think tank Center for Economics and Politics (CEP) in Prague (pp. 7-20).

The booklet is available free of charge here:

www.cepin.cz/docs/dokumenty/europeism.pdf

Excerpts: "Europeism is a doctrine which hardly anyone advocates explicitly and, due to this, it is insufficiently specified or systematically formulated (de facto only some of its critics talk about it seriously). It is not possible to refer to any books and articles, from which it could be 'read'. [...] Europeists are [...] characterized by their clear stances in disputes about parliamentary democracy or civil society and in disputes about democracy or post-democracy. They do not prefer standard democratic processes. [...] It is also entirely obvious on which side the Europeists stand in the disputes about the importance of various post-democratic 'isms', such as multiculturalism, feminism, ecologism, homosexualism, NGOism, etc. [...] Europeists want, in their decision-making at the supranational level, to get rid of politics (because they dream about creating an apolitical society) and to introduce the system of decision-making which would be easy and uncontrollable. That is why they advocate post-democracy and graciously smile at the obsolete and old-fashioned advocates of the good old democracy and the good old 'political' politics. [...]

"The effort to emancipate politics and politicians from democratic 'accountability' is one of the primary objectives of the Europeists. They are not alone in this, but I am certain that never in history had the people with this type of thinking reached such success as through the creation of the EU. [...] These are the interests to get rid of the state as an unsubstitutable guarantor of democracy, as a basic political unit of a democratic system (in contrast to Reichs, empires, unions, leagues of countries), as the only meaningfully organizable arena of political life, as the biggest possible, but at the same time also the smallest reasonable, base of political representation and representativeness. Europeism is an attempt to create the Huxleyian brave new world in which there will be 'rosy hours', but not freedom and democracy. [...] They trust the chosen ones (not the elected ones), they trust themselves or those who are chosen by them. [...] They want to mastermind, plan, regulate, administer the others, because some (they themselves) do know and others do not. Even though we thought that after the collapse of communism all this was a matter of the past, it is not so. It is around us again." (bold removed)