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some quotes from this brilliant, debunding piece by perry anderson on brexit... https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v43/n02/perry-anderson/the-breakaway
The European Union, as it has come to take shape, speaks continuously of democracy and the rule of law, even as it negates them. No ill intention need be ascribed to it.
What it has become was inscribed in the minds of those who took possession of the project: a unification of the Continent from above, by stealth where possible, by diktat where necessary.
In these conditions, the extension of internally representative political systems into a quasi-confederation of continental dimensions was virtually bound to produce a structure of power fundamentally oligarchic in nature.
Those from the EU actually living and working outside their country of birth in the Union form a number smaller still, less than 4 per cent of its total population in 2015, of whom the large majority were manual labourers of one kind or another.
That its top ranks have long been corrupted by immunity in their occupance of power is plain. It is enough to make a roll-call of its leading ornaments.
Christine Lagarde, current president of the European Central Bank: suspected of complicity in fraud and malversation of public funds in covering for the crook Bernard Tapie, improperly paid €404 million by Crédit Lyonnais in 2008, when she was minister of the economy
Ursula von der Leyen: charged in 2015 with plagiarism on 43 per cent of the pages of her 1990 doctorate at Hannover Medical School; the university commission that absolved her, headed by an old acquaintance from the alumni association at the institution, was heavily criticised
Jean-Claude Juncker of Luxembourg: survived repeated exposure of his involvement in the tax avoidance and policies facilitating money-laundering for which his country is famous.
Josep Borrell: forced to resign as president of the European University Institute in Florence for concealing the annual salary of €300,000 he had been receiving from a Spanish energy company
Michel Barnier: showered with ‘donations’ amounting to more than 300,000 francs – more than seven times the total received by his seven rivals – when running as a Gaullist candidate for Haute-Savoie in the legislative elections of 1993.
Olaf Scholz, finance minister and vice-chancellor of Germany, hoping to succeed Merkel next year: caught in the media headlights after appointing – a first in the country – the co-chief executive of Goldman Sachs in Germany and Austria,
Jörg Kukies, as his deputy for financial market and European policy, only to have to admit that he knew Kukies had been on intimate terms with Markus Braun, fraudster boss of the now bankrupt Wirecard company (assets once valued at $28 billion), the largest financial scandal
Overarching them is the reality that the centrist bloc of opinion encompassing moderate conservatives, temperate liberals, pragmatic social democrats and self-satisfied Greens is much larger than its opponents on right or left, and remains overwhelmingly dominant in the Union.
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