Elon Musk is right about the EU

Europhiles – the most maddening tribe on the internet – are coming for Elon Musk. After Musk dared to blaspheme against the Brussels bureaucracy that they so fervently simp for, they called him a stooge of Vladimir Putin. ‘Putin wants a weaker EU’, said the EU-loving centrists of Renew Europe, and now Musk is doing his bidding by calling for a ‘break-up [of] the EU’. It’s the same low trick every time – utter one word of dissent against their beloved EU oligarchy and they’ll have you down as a running dog of Russia.

They said the same about the 17.4million Brits who clocked Brussels’ ravaging of national sovereignty years before Musk did. When we voted to leave the EU in 2016, they said we were hoodwinked by a shady army of ‘Russian bots’ planting ‘disinfo’ about the EU on our social-media feeds. ‘How Russia pulls strings in the UK’, said one headline, conjuring up an image of idiot Brits being led by the nose into the ‘hell’ of Brexit. Wails about ‘Russian influence!’ are the last refuge of the centrist scoundrel. From Trump’s electoral victories to Musk’s mutinous EU talk, these saddos see the hand of Vlad everywhere.

The truth is, Musk is right about the EU. He’s right to say it is a menace to the ‘sovereignty’ of European nations. He’s right to troll Ursula von der Leyen, president of the European Commission (EC), by tweeting in response to her recent preening speech about democracy: ‘If democracy is the foundation of freedom, surely your position as leader of the EU should be elected directly by the people?’ He’s right to say ‘I love Europe, but not the bureaucratic monster that is the EU’. Indeed, one wonders if he saw spiked’s rallying cry in the Brexit years: ‘For Europe, Against the EU.’

Musk’s irate philippics against the Brussels machine might be driven by self-serving impulses. His conversion to what we might call the Brexit spirit followed the EU’s slapping of a €120million fine on X for breaching the transparency rules in its authoritarian Digital Services Act. In response, Musk taunted EU officials on X and openly called for the EU’s dismantling. ‘The EU should be abolished and sovereignty returned to individual countries, so that governments can better represent their people’, he tweeted. So it was the EU’s meddling with his bank balance, rather than its meddling with the European people’s sovereign rights, that pushed him over the edge into Euroscepticism.

He’s still right, though. Some of us have been arguing for years that the entire purpose of the EU is to hoover up the sovereign rights of member states. And to fashion a Brussels superstate whose laws and courts would enjoy primacy over those of silly little nations. And to ensure compliance by threatening, bullying and fining any Euro nation that dares to put its own people’s concerns ahead of those of the faceless bureaucrats who run Brussels. You might not care about a billionaire businessman being hit with a stiff fine for breaking EU rules, but you should care that literal nations have faced the same treatment.

The EU doesn’t even make a secret of its burning hostility to the principles of nationhood. Witness the ruthlessness with which it compelled the Dutch, the French and the Irish to hold second votes on the EU Constitution 20 years ago after a majority of their pesky voters rejected it. Recall its virtual colonisation of the Irish economy in 2010, when it dispatched ‘the Troika’ – the EC, the European Central Bank and the International Monetary Fund – to impose hyper-austerity on the Irish. Even the pro-EU Irish Times felt compelled to wonder if ‘this is what the men of 1916 died for’. We have ‘surrendered our sovereignty’, the paper said. Perhaps Russian bots brainwashed the editorial team.

Recall its imposition of savage austerity measures on Greece, causing immense social hardship and the fall of an elected government. Or the determination with which it sought to frustrate Brexit, which was voted for by more Brits than anything else in the entire history of these isles. Or its continual fining of Hungary for the crime of implementing policies that are popular with the Hungarian people rather than policies drawn up in stuffy rooms in a faraway citadel by commissioners not one person in Hungary could name. Right now, the EU is fining Hungary a million Euros a day for failing to adhere to the bloc’s ‘refugee rules’ (ie, for closing its borders to unvetted migrants).

None of this is a glitch. None of it is a case of Brussels going ‘too far’, as even its admirers sometimes feel compelled to say. Antipathy to sovereignty courses through the very veins of the EU. It is established in EU law that its courts and their judgements take precedence over those of member states. Strip away all the blather about ‘European unity’ and what we have here is a regime under which the law-making of your elected representatives can be overruled by the deliberations of distant, unelected commissioners. Musk is right that the dismantling of the EU is the first step to European governments ‘better representing their people’.

Musk’s EU-bashing has gone viral. The digital right is echoing his cry of ‘Abolish the EU’. My only question for these people is where have you been? It’s 50 years since Labour grandees like Barbara Castle warned of the creation of a European ‘superstate’ that would throttle democracy. It’s 30 years since radical Labourite Tony Benn called the EU an ‘empire’ in which all the key positions are ‘appointed, not elected’. It’s nearly 10 years since the largest electoral bloc in UK history voted to ‘Take Back Control’ of our sovereign affairs from Brussels. It’s nice, I guess, that rich people and meme-makers have finally noticed the struggle to restore sovereignty that some of us have been waging for decades.

That’s what worries me about the Trump administration’s recent policy document promising to ‘cultivate resistance’ in Europe against the illiberal, undemocratic excesses of the EU. This will allow the cynics and tyrants of Brussels to depict opposition to their rule as a foreign import, when in truth Europeans of both left and right have been agitating against their superstate since Trump was a twentysomething realtor in New York City. By all means, carry on trolling Brussels, Elon. But when it comes to actually rebuilding democracy across Europe, we’ve got this.

Brendan O’Neill is spiked’s chief political writer and host of the spiked podcast, The Brendan O’Neill Show. Subscribe to the podcast here. His latest book – After the Pogrom: 7 October, Israel and the Crisis of Civilisation – is available to order on Amazon UK and Amazon US now. And find Brendan on Instagram: @burntoakboy.