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Grímur Thomsen, a nineteenth-century Icelandic poet, worked in the Danish Foreign Service, as Iceland was then a Danish dependency. Once, he was chatting with a Belgian diplomat of noble birth who could not hide his disdain for the Icelanders, a tiny nation on a remote island. They spoke in French. The Belgian asked haughtily: ‘And which language do the natives in your country speak?’ Thomsen wanted to teach his Belgian colleague a lesson, so he replied: ‘Actually, they all speak Belgian.’ Whereas Belgians speak either Dutch or French, a strange language which might be called Belgian is developing in Brussels, the capital not only of Belgium but also of the European Union. Four words from it are: euromantics, Procrusteans, gigantomania, and conferencitis.
Euromantics
The Euromantics have formed an emotional attachment to the European Union. They often, but not always, have a financial interest in it also. The Euromantics ignore the fact that the EU was formed as a customs union. Instead, they emphasise what they romantically see as its historical mission, to bring peace and unity to Europe. They also ignore the fact that the EU fundamentally changed in the early 1990s after successfully concluding economic integration, creating a European free market, and beginning political integration, or centralisation. When problems emerge in the EU as a result of centralisation, the Euromantics usually respond by demanding more of the same. The failure of a project is seen as an argument for spending more money on it.
Procrusteans
In Greek mythology, Procrustes was the rogue who invited passer-bys to stay overnight. If his guest was too short for his bed, he stretched him on the rack. If he was too long, he chopped his feet off. The advocates of European centralisation are Procrusteans. They believe in one-size-fits-all, blithely ignoring Europe’s incredible diversity. I borrow a mundane example from Daniel Hannan. It is an EU regulation aimed at stimulating competition between ports. But in Great Britain, there are many small ports, privately owned, competing with one another. On the continent, however, the ports tend to be sparser and bigger, and usually state-owned. This regulation imposes unnecessary costs on British ports, while it may make sense on the continent. There are hundreds, or thousands, of such misguided EU regulations. I shall only add a non-economic and dramatic example: abortion. This is an issue that should be entrusted to individual states.
Gigantomania
Gigantomania is the naive belief that the bigger a project is, the better. To the extent that gigantomania is plausible, it is based on economies of scale. But diseconomies of scale should not be dismissed. The bigger an operation is, the less transparent and flexible it becomes. Companies are not more efficient because they are bigger. They are bigger because they are more efficient. It is also sometimes argued that producing public goods on a large scale is efficient due to fixed costs. But the evidence does not bear this out. The cost per capita of producing public safety, a typical public good, is actually higher in some large countries such as the United States than they are for example in the five small Nordic countries. The public good which is, however, best produced on a large scale is defence, a lesson learned by the many small states conquered by Hitler and Stalin in the 1930s and 1940s.
Conferencitis
The liberal German economist Wilhelm Röpke coined the word ‘conferencitis’ to describe the many futile conferences in the 1920s and 1930s on the restoration of monetary stability and disarmament. Unsurprisingly, the talking classes taxing the working classes in Europe believe in talk. The more meetings, the merrier. But the truth is that usually conferences, especially in the social sciences, serve to create unwarranted entitlements and excessive expectations. Most of them are a waste of time, money and talent. As Karl Kraus could have said, conferencitis is that illness for which it regards itself as therapy.