Apparently, we have been taking the saying ‘What happens in Brussels stays in Brussels’ a bit too seriously for our own good.
Much is happening in Brussels, but little of it reaches our shores by way of news. Apart from the occasional article by Alfred Sant (as he did in this case) there seems to be little critical engagement on that front.
The European Union today is not the same that we joined in 2004. Back then, ‘Unity in Diversity’ was the thing. Now diversity seems to have become quite problematic for the Brussels bureaucracy, and whatever doesn’t conform to their narrative has become ‘dangerous to democracy’.
The war in Ukraine is being used as leverage to drive towards measures that will eventually result in an autocratic imposition to diminish the rights of free expression and thought.
A ‘Report on foreign interference in all democratic processes in the European Union, including disinformation’, adopted by the ‘Special Committee on foreign interference in all democratic processes in the European Union, including disinformation’ on May 15, makes for quite a read.
It gives one the impression that the EU is at war with the whole world. Everyone outside of its sphere of control, including privately controlled digital platforms like Youtube, Twitter, Meta, etc., is – according to this report – guilty of manipulating European public opinion and disseminating falsities.
Reading this report, one gets the impression that the inquisition will soon be back in town, with the EU acting as the exclusive source of truth and whoever disputes it will be liable to censure.
The notion of ‘foreign interference’ should immediately ring the alarm bells to anyone who knows a bit of history. It is an excuse to impose censorship and control, frightening the population with the ‘menace’ coming from the outside.
It is the logic of McCarthyism and the logic that inflamed anti-semitism; it is the logic of Stalinist purges and North Korean isolationism.
And yes, we also had a ‘Foreign Interference Act’. Despite it being largely inconsequential and lame, it wasn’t the most shining example of democratic freedoms. When the Nationalists came to power in 1987 they did well to rid us of it. Pity that it is now one from their ranks that seems inclined to have such an abomination imposed over the whole of the European Union!
To be completely fair, the report, for now, is just that – a report, adopted by a committee. But in itself it is very indicative of a paradigm shift within the EU. Clearly there is a drive for the Union to interfere and homogenise areas which to date are outside of its jurisdiction. The area of private access to information is one particular target.
Banning Russian broadcasts across Europe was perhaps one of the first experiments in tampering with the right to private access of information.
The above-mentioned report is now targeting India, China and even the Arab countries.
The moment dissenting opinions start being silenced then it’s the moment that democracy begins to erode itself- Aleks Farrugia
So far, the European populations – perhaps because they didn’t rely on Russian sources of information anyway – have not yet raised their voices against such meddling with their rights. But imagine the irony where, for example, we have brought down the whole edifice of censorship even on matters that still matter to our society like religion, only to have censorship re-imposed by the EU using the excuse of war.
I would have expected our representatives to object to such an imposition, if anything because it goes against a principle our parliament deemed fundamental for our democratic freedoms.
We are all children of the Enlightenment. This was even acknowledged way back when there was an attempt to write a constitution for the European Union.
The Enlightenment was based on the idea that every individual human being is capable of reason and that the freedom to use one’s reason is the highest value in an enlightened society.
In his famous letter to the editor titled ‘What is the Enlightenment’, Immanuel Kant makes the distinction between the age of darkness and that of light based on the fact that in the age of Enlightenment, humanity doesn’t require pre-fabricated truths because each individual has the capability of arriving to the truth by their reasoning.
Modern Europe and modern democracy are based on that principle, and –whether fighting the Nazis or tearing down the Berlin Wall – freedom against the autocratic imposition of the truth was always the watchword. Generally it has been accepted that the only limit to one man’s freedom is the freedom of another man, in the sense that while one is entitled to one’s free opinion, one is not entitled to use that freedom to suppress another.
Dissenting voices are the meter by which the health of a democracy is measured. It does not mean that they shouldn’t be challenged or that all opinions have the same value, but the moment dissenting opinions start being silenced then it’s the moment that democracy begins to erode itself.
Because in the end, who will decide whose truth is to prevail? Many in the past (and present) have laid a claim to truth and proved to be charlatans or warmongers, and their claim to truth rather than the affirmation of freedom and knowledge was an exercise in the tyranny of power and profit.
Yes, it’s one of the risks of democracy that some may be swayed by ‘misguided opinions’, but it’s a minor risk in comparison to democracy imposing on itself limits that by their very nature are contradictory to itself.
True, the world is changing and today we are inundated by information coming from all directions. The solution is not big brother filtering it for us. It’s by educating people in the skills of managing and evaluating sources of information that we can make up our own mind about the information we receive.
If it’s true that the European Union still holds to those Enlightenment values, then it’s in educating about processes that it should invest in, not in controlling content and fabricating truth.