An Ever Closer Union?

[Khandro]

If anyone has interest in the formation of the EU & its aspirations, particularly the European Court of Justice, this article is for you. It's a long article - over 15,000 words, you may not have the stamina to read it in it's entirety but the opening section is quite an eye-opener on the ECJ formation, (& continuance).
It is possible to read it as a single article without fully subscribing to the LRB.

https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v43/n01/perry-anderson/ever-closer-union

If OPs have to have a question attached, it could be, what do you think?

[KARL]

Yes, I have not read it all but the first part is interesting. The storyline looks so familiar - like the way the "establishment" is tightly packed around the levers of power and that secrecy plays a strong role. It could be a description of the UK.

[Khandro]

karl: How you can see any connection in principle, between the European Court of Justice & the Government of the United Kingdom defeats me.

[allenlondon]

Only read the ECJ section so far, but it is bloody amazing how the European establishment was so frightened of the Soviet ‘threat’ that they had prominent fascists in leading positions as a bulwark against the red menace.

Or maybe not so amazing. For all its faults (and there were many) the Soviet Union stood as an ongoing threat to world capitalism.

[Khandro]

Keep on reading Allen :0)

[KARL]

Khandro 09.28 That is to be expected. I said levers of power, nothing like all of them reside in the hands of governments.

[ichkeria]

“ the Soviet Union stood as an ongoing threat to world capitalism”

For all its faults world capitalism was/is saintly compared to the death machine that was the Soviet Union.
Freedom of speech might not feed my children but at least it doesn’t pack its parents off to the gulags :-)

[KARL]

Allen, 10.04 My assumption would be that the former affiliations of individuals were well known where it mattered. The point is that those with extensive experience will have been sought for positions of weight and pretty much all fitting the bill will have gained their experience in important roles under previous conditions.

To choose instead people who have little of no experience would have been riskier by far, and a complete clean-out and exclusion was chosen much more recently in Iraq with utterly disastrous consequences (making the point). In theory, valuable lessons should have been learned by that time (Iraq), from the post-WW1 debacle in Europe - actually they were (viz Marshall plan, the progenitor of the EU, etc.) but then apparently forgotten again (or was it the "they're all ragheads, screw-em" that ruled the day ?).

Had the Iraq model been applied in Europe post-WW2 then, make no mistake, we would feel Covid was a minor disaster by comparison. And the UK would have had its share of misery, even now it would still be a basket case with debts way across the horizon, no resurrection from the war years, in a desert of a trading environment.

Individuals make the best of survival in the circumstances they find themselves. Once the regime changes, they adapt again. I have never been very keen on the idea of forcing a resignation/humiliation on some high publicity error which, as often as not, affected nobody at all.That sort of thing smacks of tribalism and/or vindictiveness together with lots of lower tendencies. To me it is self evident that people learn from their mistakes and never make them again, that much better for it (admittedly not everyone but the vast majority).