Politicians must promptly enrol Norway in the EU and stop bothering with holding a referendum on the matter, according to political scientist and Conservative Party politician Janne Haaland Matlary.
We have politicians “so that they can make decisions on our behalf”, and therefore referendums are “a bad thing in a representative democracy”, Matlary writes on Thursday in a commentary in Dagens Næringsliv. If anyone was still wondering why we have contempt for politicians, there is your answer.
If one is to believe her, we now have a “new” EU. If only.
But above all, we have a new security situation. Listen to this:
The security policy argument is that we cannot stand alone against Russia, against China, nor now against the United States.
Those three great rogue states, then. One of them is admittedly militarily present in our own country because we have no defence force worth speaking of, but never mind. That Donald fellow ruins everything, after all. And soon he will take Svalbard from us:
Trump’s role in the United States means that little Norway could suddenly receive a slap in the face such as this: “I did not get the Nobel Prize this year either? Well then, Norway can have something from me – a unilateral tariff of 25 per cent.” Or this: “Greenland? Yes, important, certainly, but Svalbard, over which Norway has a disputed legal claim, is even more important to us in the United States.”
Yes, why not? We ourselves are doing nothing except dismantling the most important activity we have ever had in the archipelago in the name of a “green transition” that is not only killing Europe’s economy, but on Svalbard is also heavily diesel-fuelled to boot.
But apparently it is neither Putin nor Trump who constitutes the greatest problem, but China. It is not difficult to agree on that point, but Matlary’s analysis goes wrong from the outset:
Xi has been strengthened following the visits of Trump and Putin, and Europe is heavily dependent on Chinese production. Europe must chart a China policy, and small countries cannot do that.
So one main argument is “safety in numbers”.
The second argument may be called the “new EU”. For the EU is no longer the EU it was before the war in Ukraine and before Trump, not to mention China’s rise. Europe must deal with China in the future, and here it is genuinely dangerous to stand alone and perhaps end up squeezed between the United States and China. The United States will pressure Europe to support its China policy, while we wish to trade with China. In that case, one ought not to be a solitary country.
Some people struggle to find words for their thoughts; with others, it is harder to find thoughts for their words. Here we are forced to guess.
It seems that Matlary believes we should continue trading with China rather than doing what we can to reduce our exposure to China as much as possible, and that we therefore should not adopt the same position as our most important ally towards the world’s largest bandit state. That is bad enough in itself.
For China has for decades waged a hybrid war against the West, both the United States and Europe, using every means short of military force, and if we allow them to continue long enough, we will enter a world dominated by the mafia bosses in Beijing. No doubt appealing to those with totalitarian inclinations, but not to the rest of us.
Matlary shows no sign of being aware of the Chinese concept of “unrestricted warfare”, but if by some miracle of the Virgin Mary she actually is, she apparently believes that a united EU possesses the necessary weight to ride the Chinese dragon without falling off and being trampled to death.
Not only that: the Union is supposed to be able simultaneously to confront the United States, China, and Russia without difficulty. And pity us if we are not sheltered beneath Brussels’ protective wing:
“The new EU” should also be called that because EU trade policy has now become security policy. Trade concerns tariffs and the United States, China and dependencies, sanctions against Russia, and the ability to withstand conflicts with all three – including the United States. Norway, outside the EU Customs Union, can no longer risk ending up caught between the ship and the quay when the ship docks. We may be punished with tariffs from both the United States and the EU.
Indeed, provided that the rascals administering us fail to use Norway’s negotiating leverage to its fullest extent, and instead give away the national wealth of the Norwegian people to the Fourth Reich.
But where does Matlary’s faith in the EU’s geopolitical weight come from? The paradox that more than anything else characterises the Union is that it consists of members that are individually quite strong, yet collectively the EU appears as a lightweight on the global stage. Matters are not going particularly well internally either. “Eurosclerosis” is the recent diagnosis of the EU issued by the National Bank of Belgium.
And that is hardly surprising, because in the final analysis the individual member states safeguard their own interests more than those of the community. This inevitably means that they will be unable to form a united front against China. In practice, the opposite is happening.
Europe’s interactions with the corrupt and totalitarian empire of the Middle Kingdom are marked by a tremendous asymmetry to our disadvantage. This applies not least to the colossal trade deficit that our continent has with China.
Beijing pretends that it wishes to cooperate with the West, but does whatever it can to exploit us. Through industrial “cooperation”, they acquire Western expertise and manufacture equivalents of Western products at a lower cost, which they subsequently dump into our markets. And through the suicidal “green transition”, Europe makes itself dependent on Chinese solar panels and batteries.
If one were to devise a plan for how China could swallow Europe, it would be difficult to come up with anything better than what Europe’s treacherous “leaders” have achieved. And it is these people, who are sending Europe into decline, whom Matlary believes will save us.
“Germany is holding back EU countries in their tougher line towards China,” reported Euronews on Tuesday. Europe’s most geopolitically backward country is also the one most firmly trapped in the tentacles of the Chinese octopus. Germany’s wealth was based on a parasitic model involving free security from the United States, cheap energy from Russia, and a Chinese market willing to import. The first two conditions have now disappeared, and the third is overshadowed by the fact that the Chinese are themselves consuming Germany as the first of the major European countries. With 10,000 fewer industrial jobs every month, there will soon be little left of it. The foolish Germans who laughed at Trump when he warned about the risks of dependence on Russian energy also failed to understand that cooperation with China was a deadly trap.
China is investing covertly with a view to global power, reports Die Welt on Thursday. The EU’s “response to China’s unfair competition is disproportionate to the challenge”, wrote the Brussels correspondent of Le Figaro on Thursday. Similar articles are published almost daily. Is no one in the Norwegian duck pond keeping themselves informed? Not even a professor of political science? What on earth are we supposed to use them for?
Matlary takes a relaxed view of Norway’s surrender of sovereignty to the EU, a process that has been underway for thirty years and which we ought promptly to begin reversing, step by step. Yet she herself believes we should become members instead.
We are already living with a gigantic democratic deficit through the EEA Agreement. We are passive members, deciding nothing. Why do we put up with it? For decades we have accepted legislation and directives from the EU. Democracy is co-determination. Yet here we are participating in an organisation where we have no seat at the table.
That the EU question should be decided by referendum was self-evident both in 1972 and in 1994. But that was then, and this is now. These are modern times.
The EU is now so complex that the utterly foolish voters understand nothing at all. Nor does the professor understand everything:
When the Danes were asked to decide on the Maastricht Treaty, that is, what was called the Union, in 1992, it was sent to them by post. That was the most foolish thing one could have done. To read an EU treaty, one must practically be an EU lawyer. I, who wrote a doctoral dissertation on the power of the European Commission and have researched the EU for many years, cannot read such a treaty.
The EU is an enormously complex organisation with rules upon rules governing all manner of decisions, and many actors doing one thing or another. My point is that it is not a democratic act to ask voters to decide this matter, namely Norwegian EU membership. It will degenerate into demagoguery and populism.
How remarkably easy it is to draw a line through popular sovereignty! For we “must” become members, and the political process is really a damned nuisance:
Politicians in government say a great deal about how important the EU has become for us, but they evade the conclusion that follows from this, namely that we must become members.
One reason is fear of a new referendum, with all the nonsense and chaos that entails.
In Matlary’s view, politicians are on the one hand cynical scoundrels:
The other reason is tactical manoeuvring to avoid losing governmental power. The national interest, which a statesman or stateswoman ought to think of first, gives way to tactical calculations: can my government survive the EU question?
On the other hand, they are somehow incarnations of rationality, which is something nobler than that troublesome popular will:
If we decide that this time there shall be no referendum on the matter, there will at least be a certain degree of rationality in the process, and people will not be burdened with having to acquaint themselves with the labyrinths of the EU. For we have politicians so that they can make decisions on our behalf.
Referendums are a bad thing in a representative democracy.
We may as well stop complaining about the monarchy, for institutional decay is even worse elsewhere. With politicians like these, we might just as well have Durek as king.