It is easy to miss the point of the EU as the UK enters the final chapter of its interminable, self-harming Brexit negotiations. Its point was hardly addressed either in the Brexit referendum when Project Fear superseded any real desire to make a positive case for Europe.
So let’s turn to Poland as a symbol of why the EU has, and will continue to be, so valuable to Europe’s development despite all the tensions embodied in the current migration crisis.
Populism’s unpleasant forces are felt everywhere from Russia to America via Turkey and Eastern Europe and there seems little that can be done about them since they are at least notionally founded on democratic structures.
Yet, with Poland, where the rise of the populist Law and Justice party (so much irony in the name…) is threatening judicial independence, the EU is making a stand. The Polish Government has just passed measures giving politicians greater powers over the judiciary. It will take control of the National Council of the Judiciary for example, allowing politicians rather than judges to appoint judges. Particularly contentious, it can force the retirement of Supreme Court judges, unless granted an extension by the President, unsurprisingly removing those disliked by the government. They are currently trying to remove Malgorzata Gersdorf, head of the Supreme Court, who has accused the government of seeking to ‘purge’ the judiciary. She is refusing to go.
The EU has had enough. Leaders of EU’s main political parties turned on the Polish Prime Minister, Mateusz Morawiecki, in the EU parliament accusing him of violating the rule of law with these reforms. The European Commission has opened a fresh legal case against Poland this week accusing the country of infringing EU law. This could end up in the European Court of Justice.
The EU had a huge role in ‘democratising’ Eastern Europe as it freed itself from the yoke of the USSR. It was responsible for the spread of democratic law in a part of Europe which could so easily have gone wrong. Hardly a widely understood debating point in the Brexit referendum but it is one of the reasons why those of us supporting Remain are so full of angst at leaving the EU.
As populism spreads to Slovakia and the Czech Republic to name but a few additional countries, threatening those hard fought democratic structures, all exploited equally by China and Russia, who else but the EU is in a position to notice, expose and now try and correct this drift.
What a loss the EU is to the UK and vice versa for so many reasons. Not least because of its role in holding the newer democracies of countries such as Poland to account. This is so important for the whole of Europe including the UK. Sadly, you are unlikely to ever read about it in the final, unthinking chapter of Brexit.
Inside Right Politics 