Post by kj on Mar 20, 2020 14:31:07 GMT
I realise I'm in a minority here, in that I'm a big fan of the EU. Here are some thoughts from Facebook on the EU and Catholic subsidiarity by a Canadian gentleman named Sidney Brett Graham I thought worth sharing. Long, but many of us probably have time now for long reading.
"With Brexit effectively accomplished and in the thick of the current crisis (which I will not name for fear of getting this post banned by a software glitch), discussing the merits of the EU may seem inapt. On the other hand, since we’ve all got a lot more time on our hands now...I mean, why not, right? So here's a long post you don't have to read.
I don’t want this post misinterpreted as a full-throated defence of the EU, but it does seem to me that a lot of enthusiastic Brexiteers may not be aware of several facts about the Union which I believe need to be taken into account before forming an opinion on it. You *can* see this as “the conservative Catholic case for the EU.” It’s not intended to be an irrefutable presentation--I have no settled opinion on the EU and Brexit myself. It is just that: The case for the EU, such as I see it, a case which you can accept or contest as your reason dictates.
We want politics informed by the Church’s social doctrine, no? Catholic social teaching affirms the principle of subsidiarity, which holds that decisions should be made at the lowest competent level of authority. The EU actually enshrines subsidiarity as an essential principle in Protocol No. 2 of the Treaty of Lisbon, which provides national parliaments with a means of assessing EU legislation for subsidiarity and raising objections if subsidiarity isn’t respected. One example of how this plays out is in the difference between Regulations and Directives: Whereas Directives are directly applicable to Member States (i.e. they’re binding on them as soon as they’re passed), Directives need to be implemented by the Member States in order to become law (although individuals can take their governments to court for failing to implement those Directives, per the principle of direct effect).
In other words, the EU gives general Directives, but normally the Member States actually put them into effect. If the Member States end up not being competent to implement Directives effectively, then the EU may step in (for example, data protection in the EU was originally regulated by a 1995 Directive but was replaced by a Regulation in 2016 after Member States apparently weren’t getting the job done). This, too, is part of subsidiarity. So, already, the EU invokes a tenet of Catholic political teaching in an explicit way that few government institutions do. (It’s also not super easy for EU laws to be passed: A measure can only be adopted with the approval of both the European Parliament and the European Commission.)
This kind of deference to Member States often extends to moral issues. Let’s take an issue of importance to Catholics: Euthanasia. In the UK, a man suffering total paralysis sought the right to medically assisted death, which is treated as murder by UK law. His appeal was rejected by the UK Supreme Court. When he appealed to the European Court of Human Rights (Nicklinson v UK 2015), it was held that this was such a contentious issue that it should be left to Parliament. (Now, wait, I hear you protest: the EU isn’t a party to the ECtHR! The EU is governed by the European Court of Justice; totally different thing! The Court of Justice even refused to become part of the Court of Human Rights! Yes, *but* Article 6 of the Lisbon Treaty says that the EU shall accede to the European Convention on Human Rights, which is interpreted by the ECtHR, so I think it’s still relevant--especially since the UK’s laws still submit to the ECHR and thus to the ECtHR even post-Brexit, which we’ll get to.)
Now compare that to Canada, where our Supreme Court’s interpretation of the Charter in Carter v Canada 2015--the same year as the Nicklinson case--not only ruled that euthanasia was permitted, but that forbidding it would actually be unconstitutional and illegal. Europe’s human rights arrangement is much more respectful of subsidiarity and, at least in this case, human dignity than Canada is.
The partner principle to subsidiarity in Catholic social teaching is solidarity, which stresses the interrelationship and social bonds of humanity. One way that this plays out is through a market economy, a point enthroned within the social encyclicals of JPII. To this end, I think conservatives need to recognize just how free market the EU is. The four freedoms of goods, capital, services, and people are key to the Single Market and this takes the form of banning customs duties (or charges having an equivalent effect to them), quantitative restrictions (quotas on how many goods can be imported from one Member State into another), and other restrictions which not only inhibit the market but, by extension, prevent “the universal destination of goods” from being achieved (and this principle is the ultimate justification of the free market and of private property).
In a move that should be dear to the Catholic heart, the Cassis de Dijon ruling of 1979 struck down a German prohibition on importing French wine and established the principle of mutual recognition (goods lawfully produced in one Member State must be free to be sold in the rest of the EU). In the wake of the 1980 case Commission v UK, which ruled against wine being taxed higher than beer in the UK, British people started drinking more wine, so these pro-competition laws have tangible effects on consumer freedom.
People freak out over the supremacy of EU law, but the case that established this supremacy was Costa v Enel 1964, where a citizen challenged the nationalization of Italy’s electricity sector based on the EU’s anti-monopoly prohibitions. Ever wonder why a leftist like George Galloway supported Brexit (and Jeremy Corbyn’s Labour Party was kind of flaky about it)? This is why: The EU prohibits any monopoly, including government monopolies on services.
The fact is that you need a legal order imposing uniformity for there to be a free market, otherwise one member of the market can cheat by passing laws that are preferential to its own manufacturers. You can’t have transnational free trade without some sort of transnational legal system (and yes, you absolutely need a legal system to have a market, otherwise there’s no standard by which you know which contracts are valid or who owns which property that’s being used for exchange), which means some kind of transnational government (not a novel principle for Catholics who are heirs of the Holy Roman Empire, which Pius XI indicated was “the true League of Nations”).
For the Catholic Social Teaching scholars who want to point out that the market is not an absolute good and needs to be regulated by morality, Member States are allowed to derogate from the four freedoms on grounds of public morality, e.g. Customs and Excise Commissioners v Schindler and Schindler 1994 which allowed the UK to have rules against large-scale lotteries. In van Duyn v Home Office 1974, the UK was allowed to deny an entry permit to an employee of the Church of Scientology despite the free movement of workers based on the possibility that Scientology could be harmful to people with mental health issues. In the 2004 Omega case in Germany, the government was allowed to ban laser tag games on the grounds that they were seen as violating that country’s constitutional protection of human dignity. So there’s a lot of allowance for policy and morality exceptions to free market principles.
The complaint that the EU is forcing a foreign legal system onto the UK is intriguing in the light of how much it borrows from the English legal tradition. For example, the principle of vertical direct effect established in Pubblico Ministero v Ratti 1979 (which holds that a member state’s failure to implement a Directive is not a legal defence for it failing to respect the rights of citizens under that Directive) is based on the English legal principle of estoppel. Indeed, some Member States (such as France) have criticized the EU’s recognition of lawyer-client confidentiality as foisting “on the Community what was no more than a domestic rule of English law” (with reference to AM&S Ltd v Commission 1982).
The UK was not the only Member State that was dubious about the EU’s supremacy. The German, French, and Italian constitutional courts have all reserved the right to reject Community measures that contradict their national constitutional principles. This is not incompatible with retaining membership, and the benefits that accrue to it.
The principle of direct effect *does* strengthen local judiciaries considerably to the point where even lower courts can throw out legislation that conflicts with Community measures, which seems at odds with the British principle of Parliamentary sovereignty, but prior to the defeat of the Jacobites, courts had the authority to throw out unjust laws (as Dr. Bonham’s Case of 1610 showed), and there’s a good possibility that parliamentary sovereignty itself is a creation of the courts (as the recent Supreme Court ruling throwing out Boris Johnson’s prorogation of Parliament demonstrated). In this way, the EU also seems like something of a return to pre-1688 times, before the British constitution was fully Protestantized.
The whole principle of an “independent” UK governed by its sovereign parliament is very much a creation of nationalist Protestantism (which is why Belloc, a one-time MP himself, was so critical of the House of Commons), and the UK breaking off from a European political and moral order informed by Catholicism sounds an awful lot like what happened when Henry VIII commandeered the English Reformation and founded the modern Church of England. Even a traditionalist Catholic Brexiteer like Jacob Rees-Mogg has praised King Henry for forbidding any legal appeals to authorities above the English government, including (by Rees-Mogg’s own admission) to the Papacy. Is this the kind of spirit we want to be stoking up again today?
Auberon Waugh, son of Evelyn and a Catholic Tory like his father, supported membership in the European Community and even the adoption of the euro as a way of insulating the UK against cultural homogenization by the USA. This reminds me of how the Anglican philosopher of religion George Parkin Grant noted that the purpose of Canadian confederation was to protect the individual provinces from being culturally and politically observed into the liberal Protestant technological melting pot of the US. Given that Brexit is being celebrated as the UK’s “Independence Day”, the concern that this is a form of quasi-Protestant Americanization is probably somewhat valid."
Additional points made by SBG in subsequent debate.
"The European Convention on Human Rights. Ok, here’s one additional point: Brexit won’t even make a difference for the foreseeable future. A ton of UK legislation explicitly defers to EU measures (such as the Human Rights Act 1998 which defers to the ECHR). The UK bill effecting Brexit explicitly says that not only are those laws still in effect (the idea is that they’ll be phased out gradually over time), but the interpretation of them by the European Court of Justice binds the legal interpretation of them in the UK. So, while the EU can’t add any new laws to the UK, for all intents and purposes they still govern the UK legally for years to come. All those people cheering and partying the night Brexit allegedly occurred won’t notice any difference in their lives for the foreseeable future.
It's good and necessary because you need to have laws in place and an adjudicating court to have a free market, whether that's between individuals or between states, and Europe's economy and the trade between Member States has improved considerably because of the four freedoms and the articles of the TFEU. It's necessary because it's allowed goods to cross borders without being prohibited by stupid arbitrary rules (like that margarine needs to be in a certain shaped container, as in the 1982 Rau case, or the alcohol taxes mentioned in the post). And this is about more than non-essential consumer goods. The reason the European Economic Community was originally formed was to prevent another European war from happening by making sure European states had common rights to steel and coal. And, as it happens, there haven't been any intra-European wars since the Community was came into existence. Funny, that. And, without those legal structures in place, one European state could impose tariffs and quotas that advantage itself to the disadvantage of all the other states. With the Common Customs Tariff, the only tax is on imports from "third countries" (non-Member States) and it's a uniform rate. This is just simply not the sort of thing you can just do as an individual nation. Subsidiarity *requires* the lowest competent authority be in charge. A small town isn't competent to regulate intra-national trade. Neither is a single nation.
What about the Schengen Area? Couple of things. First off, it came into existence in 1995, two years after the Single Market was formed. I'm dubious that, without the legal structure of the 4 freedoms already being in place, the Area would have been feasible; it's essentially an appendix to them. But suppose they could have all voluntarily agreed to form this Area: What if one member breaks the Schengen Convention? What recourse is there? Not too much if it's just a voluntary assembly. (We all know how effective treaties are, right?) The only way for it to be effectual is if there's some legal order attached to it. This is actually how the principle of supremacy was formed in the first place: The Van Gend en Loos case in 1963 found that the only way the Treaty Establishing the European Economic Community could actually have any effect is if it created a new legal order with supremacy over its member states. Otherwise, it's just a dead letter. Suppose the Schengen Area formed on its own; if it lasted and was going to be effectual, it would end up forming its own legal order, too. (Remember once again that the European Community began as just an agreement to share coal and steel rights.) Finally, two years after the Schengen Convention, the Amsterdam Treaty incorporated it into EU law, so arguably it's only effective because of the EU. Using it as an example reminds me of those libertarians who say that we don't need a government to run the courts because private arbitrators work just fine, forgetting that the only reason those private arbitrators are effective is because of legally binding agreements that the parties will abide by their decisions (and who enforces those agreements? Why, the government does!) The Schengen Area probably only works because of the EU, and if there were no EU, it would effectively become the EU.
Finally, flip this question around. What's so *bad* about the EU? Why is it *so* necessary that the UK break off from them? Because they want complete autonomy in forming their own laws (which they don't actually have)? I can respect that in principle (and it's understandable coming from an American, though Americans have a history of being a bit squeamish when their own states pull that on the federal government), though if you hold to that you should also be thrilled that the British Empire ended and support Irish independence. But besides this constitutional tenet, in what way is the EU making the UK so much worse? Is it imposing an anti-Christian morality, as I sometimes hear? Assuming that's true (and it's at least somewhat dubious given the euthanasia example), do you really think the UK wasn't already going down the same road on its own, and is going to be better about moral issues post-Brexit? As Peter Hitchens often points out, Boris Johnson isn't the faintest bit socially conservative, and even if someone like Jacob Rees-Mogg were PM, it isn't obvious how the EU would be a bigger deterrent to his social agenda than the British people are (for example, the EU has imposed no rules on abortion, so the laws about it are completely disparate; some places, like Germany, are *far* harsher on abortion than the UK is, and the British abortion laws date back to 1967, over half a decade before it entered the European Community). So tell me, why was so Brexit necessary and why was the EU so bad? (I don't know of evidence that the UK's immigration crisis owes anything to its EU membership since freedom of movement rights to not extend to non-European nationals.)
The *Agreement* was signed in 1985, because the European Community couldn’t agree about border controls, but the Area wasn’t actually formed until 1995, after the four freedoms were implemented. (Maybe that Agreement was an important factor in their inclusion.) I obviously can’t say for certain that it wouldn’t have come into existence at all if the EC didn’t already exist. My point is that, even if it did, the only way it would survive is if it ended up establishing its own legal order with supremacy over the individual states that belonged to it. Remember, the European Community started as a treaty, too, but when member states broke it, that’s when the principle of supremacy emerged—all the way back in 1963. This in turn led (inevitably?) to the European Union being formed because it’s basically just a logical conclusion from those principles. So I think the more important point is that the Area could only survive by becoming its own EU—but since the EU already happens to exist, it doesn’t need to."
"With Brexit effectively accomplished and in the thick of the current crisis (which I will not name for fear of getting this post banned by a software glitch), discussing the merits of the EU may seem inapt. On the other hand, since we’ve all got a lot more time on our hands now...I mean, why not, right? So here's a long post you don't have to read.
I don’t want this post misinterpreted as a full-throated defence of the EU, but it does seem to me that a lot of enthusiastic Brexiteers may not be aware of several facts about the Union which I believe need to be taken into account before forming an opinion on it. You *can* see this as “the conservative Catholic case for the EU.” It’s not intended to be an irrefutable presentation--I have no settled opinion on the EU and Brexit myself. It is just that: The case for the EU, such as I see it, a case which you can accept or contest as your reason dictates.
We want politics informed by the Church’s social doctrine, no? Catholic social teaching affirms the principle of subsidiarity, which holds that decisions should be made at the lowest competent level of authority. The EU actually enshrines subsidiarity as an essential principle in Protocol No. 2 of the Treaty of Lisbon, which provides national parliaments with a means of assessing EU legislation for subsidiarity and raising objections if subsidiarity isn’t respected. One example of how this plays out is in the difference between Regulations and Directives: Whereas Directives are directly applicable to Member States (i.e. they’re binding on them as soon as they’re passed), Directives need to be implemented by the Member States in order to become law (although individuals can take their governments to court for failing to implement those Directives, per the principle of direct effect).
In other words, the EU gives general Directives, but normally the Member States actually put them into effect. If the Member States end up not being competent to implement Directives effectively, then the EU may step in (for example, data protection in the EU was originally regulated by a 1995 Directive but was replaced by a Regulation in 2016 after Member States apparently weren’t getting the job done). This, too, is part of subsidiarity. So, already, the EU invokes a tenet of Catholic political teaching in an explicit way that few government institutions do. (It’s also not super easy for EU laws to be passed: A measure can only be adopted with the approval of both the European Parliament and the European Commission.)
This kind of deference to Member States often extends to moral issues. Let’s take an issue of importance to Catholics: Euthanasia. In the UK, a man suffering total paralysis sought the right to medically assisted death, which is treated as murder by UK law. His appeal was rejected by the UK Supreme Court. When he appealed to the European Court of Human Rights (Nicklinson v UK 2015), it was held that this was such a contentious issue that it should be left to Parliament. (Now, wait, I hear you protest: the EU isn’t a party to the ECtHR! The EU is governed by the European Court of Justice; totally different thing! The Court of Justice even refused to become part of the Court of Human Rights! Yes, *but* Article 6 of the Lisbon Treaty says that the EU shall accede to the European Convention on Human Rights, which is interpreted by the ECtHR, so I think it’s still relevant--especially since the UK’s laws still submit to the ECHR and thus to the ECtHR even post-Brexit, which we’ll get to.)
Now compare that to Canada, where our Supreme Court’s interpretation of the Charter in Carter v Canada 2015--the same year as the Nicklinson case--not only ruled that euthanasia was permitted, but that forbidding it would actually be unconstitutional and illegal. Europe’s human rights arrangement is much more respectful of subsidiarity and, at least in this case, human dignity than Canada is.
The partner principle to subsidiarity in Catholic social teaching is solidarity, which stresses the interrelationship and social bonds of humanity. One way that this plays out is through a market economy, a point enthroned within the social encyclicals of JPII. To this end, I think conservatives need to recognize just how free market the EU is. The four freedoms of goods, capital, services, and people are key to the Single Market and this takes the form of banning customs duties (or charges having an equivalent effect to them), quantitative restrictions (quotas on how many goods can be imported from one Member State into another), and other restrictions which not only inhibit the market but, by extension, prevent “the universal destination of goods” from being achieved (and this principle is the ultimate justification of the free market and of private property).
In a move that should be dear to the Catholic heart, the Cassis de Dijon ruling of 1979 struck down a German prohibition on importing French wine and established the principle of mutual recognition (goods lawfully produced in one Member State must be free to be sold in the rest of the EU). In the wake of the 1980 case Commission v UK, which ruled against wine being taxed higher than beer in the UK, British people started drinking more wine, so these pro-competition laws have tangible effects on consumer freedom.
People freak out over the supremacy of EU law, but the case that established this supremacy was Costa v Enel 1964, where a citizen challenged the nationalization of Italy’s electricity sector based on the EU’s anti-monopoly prohibitions. Ever wonder why a leftist like George Galloway supported Brexit (and Jeremy Corbyn’s Labour Party was kind of flaky about it)? This is why: The EU prohibits any monopoly, including government monopolies on services.
The fact is that you need a legal order imposing uniformity for there to be a free market, otherwise one member of the market can cheat by passing laws that are preferential to its own manufacturers. You can’t have transnational free trade without some sort of transnational legal system (and yes, you absolutely need a legal system to have a market, otherwise there’s no standard by which you know which contracts are valid or who owns which property that’s being used for exchange), which means some kind of transnational government (not a novel principle for Catholics who are heirs of the Holy Roman Empire, which Pius XI indicated was “the true League of Nations”).
For the Catholic Social Teaching scholars who want to point out that the market is not an absolute good and needs to be regulated by morality, Member States are allowed to derogate from the four freedoms on grounds of public morality, e.g. Customs and Excise Commissioners v Schindler and Schindler 1994 which allowed the UK to have rules against large-scale lotteries. In van Duyn v Home Office 1974, the UK was allowed to deny an entry permit to an employee of the Church of Scientology despite the free movement of workers based on the possibility that Scientology could be harmful to people with mental health issues. In the 2004 Omega case in Germany, the government was allowed to ban laser tag games on the grounds that they were seen as violating that country’s constitutional protection of human dignity. So there’s a lot of allowance for policy and morality exceptions to free market principles.
The complaint that the EU is forcing a foreign legal system onto the UK is intriguing in the light of how much it borrows from the English legal tradition. For example, the principle of vertical direct effect established in Pubblico Ministero v Ratti 1979 (which holds that a member state’s failure to implement a Directive is not a legal defence for it failing to respect the rights of citizens under that Directive) is based on the English legal principle of estoppel. Indeed, some Member States (such as France) have criticized the EU’s recognition of lawyer-client confidentiality as foisting “on the Community what was no more than a domestic rule of English law” (with reference to AM&S Ltd v Commission 1982).
The UK was not the only Member State that was dubious about the EU’s supremacy. The German, French, and Italian constitutional courts have all reserved the right to reject Community measures that contradict their national constitutional principles. This is not incompatible with retaining membership, and the benefits that accrue to it.
The principle of direct effect *does* strengthen local judiciaries considerably to the point where even lower courts can throw out legislation that conflicts with Community measures, which seems at odds with the British principle of Parliamentary sovereignty, but prior to the defeat of the Jacobites, courts had the authority to throw out unjust laws (as Dr. Bonham’s Case of 1610 showed), and there’s a good possibility that parliamentary sovereignty itself is a creation of the courts (as the recent Supreme Court ruling throwing out Boris Johnson’s prorogation of Parliament demonstrated). In this way, the EU also seems like something of a return to pre-1688 times, before the British constitution was fully Protestantized.
The whole principle of an “independent” UK governed by its sovereign parliament is very much a creation of nationalist Protestantism (which is why Belloc, a one-time MP himself, was so critical of the House of Commons), and the UK breaking off from a European political and moral order informed by Catholicism sounds an awful lot like what happened when Henry VIII commandeered the English Reformation and founded the modern Church of England. Even a traditionalist Catholic Brexiteer like Jacob Rees-Mogg has praised King Henry for forbidding any legal appeals to authorities above the English government, including (by Rees-Mogg’s own admission) to the Papacy. Is this the kind of spirit we want to be stoking up again today?
Auberon Waugh, son of Evelyn and a Catholic Tory like his father, supported membership in the European Community and even the adoption of the euro as a way of insulating the UK against cultural homogenization by the USA. This reminds me of how the Anglican philosopher of religion George Parkin Grant noted that the purpose of Canadian confederation was to protect the individual provinces from being culturally and politically observed into the liberal Protestant technological melting pot of the US. Given that Brexit is being celebrated as the UK’s “Independence Day”, the concern that this is a form of quasi-Protestant Americanization is probably somewhat valid."
Additional points made by SBG in subsequent debate.
"The European Convention on Human Rights. Ok, here’s one additional point: Brexit won’t even make a difference for the foreseeable future. A ton of UK legislation explicitly defers to EU measures (such as the Human Rights Act 1998 which defers to the ECHR). The UK bill effecting Brexit explicitly says that not only are those laws still in effect (the idea is that they’ll be phased out gradually over time), but the interpretation of them by the European Court of Justice binds the legal interpretation of them in the UK. So, while the EU can’t add any new laws to the UK, for all intents and purposes they still govern the UK legally for years to come. All those people cheering and partying the night Brexit allegedly occurred won’t notice any difference in their lives for the foreseeable future.
It's good and necessary because you need to have laws in place and an adjudicating court to have a free market, whether that's between individuals or between states, and Europe's economy and the trade between Member States has improved considerably because of the four freedoms and the articles of the TFEU. It's necessary because it's allowed goods to cross borders without being prohibited by stupid arbitrary rules (like that margarine needs to be in a certain shaped container, as in the 1982 Rau case, or the alcohol taxes mentioned in the post). And this is about more than non-essential consumer goods. The reason the European Economic Community was originally formed was to prevent another European war from happening by making sure European states had common rights to steel and coal. And, as it happens, there haven't been any intra-European wars since the Community was came into existence. Funny, that. And, without those legal structures in place, one European state could impose tariffs and quotas that advantage itself to the disadvantage of all the other states. With the Common Customs Tariff, the only tax is on imports from "third countries" (non-Member States) and it's a uniform rate. This is just simply not the sort of thing you can just do as an individual nation. Subsidiarity *requires* the lowest competent authority be in charge. A small town isn't competent to regulate intra-national trade. Neither is a single nation.
What about the Schengen Area? Couple of things. First off, it came into existence in 1995, two years after the Single Market was formed. I'm dubious that, without the legal structure of the 4 freedoms already being in place, the Area would have been feasible; it's essentially an appendix to them. But suppose they could have all voluntarily agreed to form this Area: What if one member breaks the Schengen Convention? What recourse is there? Not too much if it's just a voluntary assembly. (We all know how effective treaties are, right?) The only way for it to be effectual is if there's some legal order attached to it. This is actually how the principle of supremacy was formed in the first place: The Van Gend en Loos case in 1963 found that the only way the Treaty Establishing the European Economic Community could actually have any effect is if it created a new legal order with supremacy over its member states. Otherwise, it's just a dead letter. Suppose the Schengen Area formed on its own; if it lasted and was going to be effectual, it would end up forming its own legal order, too. (Remember once again that the European Community began as just an agreement to share coal and steel rights.) Finally, two years after the Schengen Convention, the Amsterdam Treaty incorporated it into EU law, so arguably it's only effective because of the EU. Using it as an example reminds me of those libertarians who say that we don't need a government to run the courts because private arbitrators work just fine, forgetting that the only reason those private arbitrators are effective is because of legally binding agreements that the parties will abide by their decisions (and who enforces those agreements? Why, the government does!) The Schengen Area probably only works because of the EU, and if there were no EU, it would effectively become the EU.
Finally, flip this question around. What's so *bad* about the EU? Why is it *so* necessary that the UK break off from them? Because they want complete autonomy in forming their own laws (which they don't actually have)? I can respect that in principle (and it's understandable coming from an American, though Americans have a history of being a bit squeamish when their own states pull that on the federal government), though if you hold to that you should also be thrilled that the British Empire ended and support Irish independence. But besides this constitutional tenet, in what way is the EU making the UK so much worse? Is it imposing an anti-Christian morality, as I sometimes hear? Assuming that's true (and it's at least somewhat dubious given the euthanasia example), do you really think the UK wasn't already going down the same road on its own, and is going to be better about moral issues post-Brexit? As Peter Hitchens often points out, Boris Johnson isn't the faintest bit socially conservative, and even if someone like Jacob Rees-Mogg were PM, it isn't obvious how the EU would be a bigger deterrent to his social agenda than the British people are (for example, the EU has imposed no rules on abortion, so the laws about it are completely disparate; some places, like Germany, are *far* harsher on abortion than the UK is, and the British abortion laws date back to 1967, over half a decade before it entered the European Community). So tell me, why was so Brexit necessary and why was the EU so bad? (I don't know of evidence that the UK's immigration crisis owes anything to its EU membership since freedom of movement rights to not extend to non-European nationals.)
The *Agreement* was signed in 1985, because the European Community couldn’t agree about border controls, but the Area wasn’t actually formed until 1995, after the four freedoms were implemented. (Maybe that Agreement was an important factor in their inclusion.) I obviously can’t say for certain that it wouldn’t have come into existence at all if the EC didn’t already exist. My point is that, even if it did, the only way it would survive is if it ended up establishing its own legal order with supremacy over the individual states that belonged to it. Remember, the European Community started as a treaty, too, but when member states broke it, that’s when the principle of supremacy emerged—all the way back in 1963. This in turn led (inevitably?) to the European Union being formed because it’s basically just a logical conclusion from those principles. So I think the more important point is that the Area could only survive by becoming its own EU—but since the EU already happens to exist, it doesn’t need to."
