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Volgend bericht verscheen onlangs in het Engelse toonaangevende dagblad The Times. Lees en frons de wenkbrauwen!
THE TIMES (London)
Opinion
April 24, 2004
I've seen the future: it's scary and Belgian
STEPHEN POLLARD
THE PRIME MINISTER makes much of the "scare stories" and "myths"
which opponents of further deepening of the EU supposedly
propagate. They are based, apparently, on paranoia, and are
products of not-so-latent xenophobia.
Well here's a very scary story which is not speculation but fact.
This week democracy -- the right to vote for the party you wish
to support -- ended inside one EU member state.
On Wednesday, the Belgian judiciary banned a political party from
operating in Belgium. The reason? The country's political
establishment dislikes its views. The party it banned is not some
obscure fringe organisation but one which has 18 MPs in the
150-seat Belgian parliament, many local councillors and two MEPs.
The opinion polls were predicting that it could win the most
Belgian votes at the European and local elections in June.
The banned party is Vlaams Blok (VB). The Court of Appeal in Ghent
-- notorious for its left-liberal bias -- deemed it to be an
"undemocratic and racist" organisation because of its policy that
immigrants should be given only two choices: "to assimilate or to
return home".
Maybe such a policy is indeed racist; maybe it isn't. The VB
itself, which has much in common with the Fortuyn List in the
Netherlands, has been accused of this. But in a democracy, surely,
that is a decision which voters should make, not judges. But the
VB's racism was merely an excuse. The real reason why the Belgian
authorities have been bent on banning the VB for years has nothing
to do with racism and the rights of immigrants. It is that the
party advocates secession from Belgium and the establishment of a
Republic of Flanders. Worse still, as Belgium's only conservative
party it upsets the country's cosy political applecart. The
Belgian Establishment has responded not by defeating it in
argument but by banning it.
After Wednesday's ruling, it is now illegal to distribute VB
publications and its politicians are barred from state radio and
television. The party is appealing against the ruling, but the
Belgian judiciary's predisposition to do the bidding of the
political class means that the appeal has almost no chance of
succeeding. When the ban is confirmed, the VB will be proclaimed a
criminal organisation and disbanded, unable to exist, let alone to
field candidates and argue its case.
I hold no brief for the VB; and were I to have a vote in Flanders,
I would not vote for it. But that is not the point. What happened
in Ghent on Wednesday is a frightening, but classic demonstration
of the political mindset which lies behind the EU's "ever-closer
union": if you do not sign up to certain beliefs then your
politics are, by definition, beyond the pale and thus
illegitimate.
The ruling was merely the latest in a series of attempts to
destroy the VB because of the threat it posed to the Belgian
status quo. In 1999, "undemocratic and racist" parties were banned
from receiving state funding (private donations of more than 125
euros are illegal in Belgium). This decision was immediately
followed by an action against the VB on those grounds. When a
Flemish judge refused to issue a judgment, arguing that these were
matters for the electorate rather than the courts, the head of the
Centre for Equal Opportunities, the quango which had brought the
case said that he would continue appealing until he had found a
judge who would find against the VB. This week one emerged: Alain
Smetrijns, who happens also to be the chairman of the Lions Club
in Ghent, a francophone pro-Belgian unity group.
Belgium is in many ways a mini-EU: an artificial state created
(much like Europe's three former such states, the Soviet Union,
Czechoslovakia and Yugoslavia) as a result of political ideology
rather than any sense of national unity, and held together by a
political class which is prepared to subvert democracy to achieve
its ends. Add to that a judiciary which, far from being
independent of the political establishment, is an important part
of the problem -- and you have a recipe for what took place in
Ghent this week: democracy, Belgian-style, in which you may vote
only for a party whose views are approved by the elites.
The actions may be specific to Belgium, but the lesson is of wider
import. The EU is in the process of becoming just such an
artificial state. The fate of the Vlaams Blok shows that worries
about the future of democracy are not scare stories. They are real
dangers and they are with us today.
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The author of this article (Stephen Pollard) is a senior Fellow at the Centre for the New Europe, a
Brussels-based think tank.
Stephen Pollard, "I've seen the future: it's scary and Belgian"
Nieuws: The Times KG-redactie Woensdag 28 April 2004
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