Maastricht Monnet Lecture

European Ombudsman Emily O’Reilly “Will the EU survive another 25 years?”

9th February 2017

Good evening.

Thank you for the invitation to address you here this evening. Maastricht is a particularly important place for the office of the European Ombudsman as this is where it was born, back in 1992, following a European Council meeting that cued the Maastricht Treaty, a meeting I covered at the time as a journalist, and so it’s very nice to be back here again.

For today’s lecture in honour of Jean Monnet, I picked the pressing and intriguing topic: Will the European Union survive the next twenty five years? But I’d like to begin by introducing you to the last group of well informed people who made confident prediction about future political events.

While preparing this talk last week I found it hard to focus solely on our Union as my eyes kept being dragged to my smartphone or TV and the latest news from Washington. It’s of course impossible to consider the so called existential

1 crisis of the EU without considering the bizarre playing out of the new Trump administration in the White House.

Not even the Atlantic Ocean is likely to protect us from its destructive nihilism. Ted Malloch, a man reported as being under consideration as the next US Ambassador to the EU, said in a recent interview, "I had in a previous career a diplomatic post where I helped bring down the Soviet Union. So maybe there's another union that needs a little taming."

Last week the European Parliament political groups called on the EU not to accept Mr Malloch’s appointment with two political group leaders calling his comments on the Union an ‘act of outrageous malevolence’ so, if President Trump does go ahead with that appointment the showdown will be instructive vis a vis future relations.

When I first sat down to write this talk last week, Donald Trump had just fired his Attorney General , accusing her of ‘betrayal’ given her refusal immediately to regard as legal the executive order banning certain categories of people from entering the United States and the detention for ‘extreme vetting’ of others.

The firing was not quite as dramatic as it may have appeared given that she was shortly leaving office anyway but the use of the word ‘betrayal’ was revealing. It’s the language found also in the Brexit debate in the United Kingdom highlighting the ever sharper and uglier divide between the two sides and the equation of honest dissent with a type of national treason. And it’s dangerous.

Two days later, on prime time TV, President Trump, Apprentice style, introduced the winner of the Supreme Court appointment run-off. The new judge is predictably conservative just as, an Obama appointment would have been predictably liberal. This peculiarity of the US justice

2 system makes it difficult for some western democracies to lecture others on judicial independence but, as is clear from the court challenges to Trump’s executive order vis a vis entry to the US from certain countries, it may be the courts that will ultimately decide the fate of the Trump revolution, or insurgency, as some commentators have called it. One can only hope that the US judges, and particularly those in the Supreme Court, are having many sleepless nights as they wrestle with their conscience.

Arguably of more interest than Trump’s judicial appointment is what he did immediately after his announcement spreading his arms wide and asking for affirmation of the surprise nature of what he had done. Those of us with children will recognise the phenomenon. He did it several more times in the course of the week, opening an address at a military base with a comment on his election victory and then, incredibly even by his own standards, asking the audience at a prayer breakfast to pray for Arnold Schwarzenegger, his successor on The Apprentice and whose audience numbers, much to Trump’s delight, have yet to match his own.

He looks like an excitable child – a seventy year old seven year old as one commentator called him – someone who’s not alone been given the contents of the world’s biggest toy shop to play with but who can get the world to watch as he does it. And we do.

Several US mainstream media outlets now carry live coverage of the daily White House press briefings on their opening website pages, further testimony to Trump’s successful subversion of the role of President from calm head of state to entertainer in chief. Even the normally sober Euronews channel went live to his address at the military base.

The White House “is distilling Donald to his essence,” his biographer, Michael D’Antonio said last week. “If he could have commanded the attention of the world media every day of his life in the past he would have. The fact that the press corps is captive in the White House and can be dragged into these executive order signings is, for him, like mainlining heroin”.

Trump is of course, rich pickings for writers, both pro and anti his incumbency, evaluated by every professional type from journalist to psychiatrist with the word ‘narcissist’ most commonly used to capture the essential Donald Trump.

For Trump there has been no transition. His reality TV studio has simply been relocated to Washington DC. He is motivated solely by his desire to be front and centre of every play and to be extravagantly admired for being so.

In a street interview just days after 9/11 Trump did not look like a man stunned by the tragedy of what had just happened, telling the interviewer instead about the ‘hundreds’ of his staff members that he had personally ordered to clear up the rubble and seek out the dead.

Parents are often told that a child who is misbehaving is attention-seeking. The grown up child that is Trump is the proof. And world leaders trying to figure out this administration, should know that this is the prism through which it must be seen.

Playing the game by the old rules no longer applies. Trump, and his closest advisors, thrive not just on unpredictability and surprise but on disruption. It’s what they get their kicks from.

And the really clever ones, such as the now chief strategist Stephen Bannon, will attempt to leverage Trump’s aching desire for constant, global, attention by feeding him the lines and the policies that not alone will have the media salivating, but which will also advance Mr Bannon’s, nativist, misogynistic, white, protectionist, world view unless of course, the world moves to stop him.

This is a White House fuelled by weapons grade testosterone, with little sign – to date – of a counterbalancing force. The trouble will arise for Mr Bannon only if the President considers that Steve, and not Donald, is getting too much of the world’s attention. The internet is currently awash with cartoon images of Trump as Bannon’s puppet, a characterisation of the relationship unlikely to please the President.

But Trump will also seek to be a success. He will want a second term and he will try to achieve that precisely on the terms laid out during his campaign. Trump’s supporters were said to take him seriously but not literally, the opposite of his opponents. Now we see both sides were wrong, Trump really did mean it literally.

And he will not try to win over those who did not support him as to do so would weaken his base and his gambler’s instinct will lead him to bet only on the Trump faithful. We do not yet know the limits of the disruption he will attempt and quite how effective the checks and balances of the American constitutional system will be. But keeping a steady gaze on the Trump psychology as opposed to the old rules of the diplomatic game will be critical for the EU already coping with high levels of both internal and external disruption.

Many leaders will find themselves morally and ethically compromised by Trump, the extent of the compromise

5 determined by their trade or economic or defence or other dependence on the United States.

In my own country, Ireland, our Prime Minister has been urged by some not to attend the traditional St Patrick’s Day event with the President. Yet Prime Minister Kenny is damned if he does and damned if he doesn’t given our high dependence on US investment and high migration rates to the United States.

Even the Mexican President took a few days to decide not to go to the US to meet with Trump after all, Chancellor Merkel obviously feels strong enough to give him a lecture on the Geneva Convention while the UK Prime Minister, desperate for future trade deals after Brexit condemned the executive order only after political and media pressure to do so.

Yet we have to guard against hypocrisy. Extreme vetting did not begin under Donald Trump. The actions of Obama in restricting visas lacked the crudity and implicit racism of Trump’s executive order but the idea that under Obama the US administration somehow ran its immigration programmes to the highest ethical and human rights standards is a myth.

And few people questioned visits to the White House while Guantanamo Bay was in operation – as it still is – even if Obama did meet with significant political opposition to his attempts to close it – or while the US was freely using European airports to refuel its so called rendition flights, flights suspected of bringing people to foreign sites to undergo at the very least, extreme interrogation. And how many innocent people were killed by US drones under Obama?

The European Union does not take its value system either from the United States of Barack Obama or the United States

6 of Donald Trump. The mistake is to believe that our cultures are closer than they are. The United States, whether under Republican or Democratic rule continues to impose the death penalty to which non white people are disproportionately sentenced, continues to permit the distortion of its electoral system through its campaign funding regulations, runs a prison system that is in places breathtaking in its cruelty, venerates extreme wealth and therefore huge inequalities, has great difficult in finding united political support for social programmes that are standard in the EU, and tolerates a system of ‘revolving doors’ between the public and the private sector that must inevitably lead to corruption.

We have our own values, created from the millions who perished during a period where those Europeans who venerated extreme nationalism, denied the basic humanity of others, and believed in the magic powers of one spellbinding single man to give them all that they wanted, held sway.

Those values, painfully realised on the back of that murderous history are incorporated in the European Convention on Human Rights, the EU’s own Charter of Fundamental Rights and a history and a culture that has led us, even if imperfectly, to the creation of a society that at least attempts to live out those values in how we conduct ourselves.

What Europe most needs to do now, is hold its nerve and not follow the populists down a road that will ultimately serve no one’s interests not even their own unless their goal is simply destruction for its own sake.

But that won’t be easy. We still need to learn the lessons of history even as we are told, and particularly you young

7 generation of Europeans, that the old story is tired and has no resonance and that we need a fresh narrative. The challenge is to find, of course, that fresh narrative but also to be wise enough to see that the embers of the old narrative still lie across the expanse of this union and that embers, by their very nature, can quickly again become flames. States that have lawfully joined the European Union can still be bound by invisible chains to old cultural habits and beliefs that didn’t die off at the stroke of a pen in Brussels.

It is said that the first person to mention Hitler in a modern day debate on politics, loses the argument and what I am about to say is not to equate Trump’s United States with Nazi Germany but rather to illustrate how we can all be blinded to new realities that we need instead quickly to confront., The outcomes may be vastly different, but the impulses that gave them birth, are not.

A former British Prime Minister David Lloyd George visited Adolf Hitler in his mountain retreat in Bavaria in 1936 and wrote the following on his return to England.

“I have now seen,” he wrote, “the famous German Leader and also something of the great change he has effected. Whatever one may think of his methods - and they are certainly not those of a parliamentary country - there can be no doubt that he has achieved a marvelous transformation in the spirit of the people, in their attitude towards each other, and in their social and economic outlook.

“One man has accomplished this miracle. He is a born leader of men. A magnetic, dynamic personality with a single-minded purpose, a resolute will and a dauntless heart. He is not merely in name but in fact the national Leader. He has made them safe against potential enemies by whom they were surrounded. He is also securing them against that constant dread of starvation.

“Those who imagine that Germany has swung back to its old Imperialist temper cannot have any understanding of the character of the change. The establishment of a German hegemony in Europe which was the aim and dream of the old pre-war militarism, is not even on the horizon of Nazism.”

The Daily Express (London) November 17, 1936

Interesting too is a brief description of Hitler’s campaign to become German President in 1932.

“In the campaign that followed, Hitler criss-crossed Germany in an airplane, descending from the clouds into the arms of growing numbers of fanatics, at ever larger rallies. He gave them a positive message, promising something for everyone, and then ascended back into the clouds. "In the Third Reich every German girl will find a husband!" Hitler once promised.”

It is of course wrong to the point of offensiveness – and I mean offensiveness to the victims of Hitler – to make any comparison between then and now but what is important is the psychology of the crowd when stirred up by a charismatic leader at a time of national unease, the willingness not just to suspend its disbelief in the capacity of one individual to transform their lives, but also its acceptance that this may necessarily involve the denial of the human rights of others. Populists attract by finding scapegoats for the ills of those they hope to attract.

Last week, in an open letter to his 27 member state colleagues. EU Council President Donald Tusk analysed the current state of the European Union.

“The challenges currently facing the European Union are more dangerous than ever before in the time since the signature of the Treaty of Rome. Today we are dealing with three threats, which have previously not occurred, at least not on such a scale.

“The first threat, an external one, is related to the new geopolitical situation in the world and (including) worrying declarations by the new American administration that make our future highly unpredictable.

“For the first time in our history, in an increasingly multipolar external world, so many are becoming openly anti-European, or Eurosceptic at best. Particularly the change in Washington puts the European Union in a difficult situation; with the new administration seeming to put into question the last 70 years of American foreign policy.

“The second threat, an internal one, is connected with the rise in anti-EU, nationalist, increasingly xenophobic sentiment in the EU itself. National egoism is also becoming an attractive alternative to integration.

“The third threat is the state of mind of the pro-European elites. A decline of faith in political integration, submission to populist arguments as well as doubt in the fundamental values of liberal democracy are all increasingly visible.

Tusk calls for courage ‘to oppose the rhetoric of demagogues” and says “It must be made crystal clear that the disintegration of the European Union will not lead to the restoration of some mythical, full sovereignty of its member states, but to their real and factual dependence on the great superpowers: the United States, Russia and China. Only together can we be fully independent. “

Tusk’s fear of “national egoism becoming an attractive alternative to integration” is one we recognise in Brexit, in Trump and in the increasing anti-EU sentiment or euroscepticism on display in some member states, the idea that a citizen is best protected by their own government, and particularly by a government that seeks to keep tight borders between it and the wider world. On a persoanl level, and speaking as an Irish woman whose life and career possibilities were enabled not by my own gvernment which sought to confine women to the domestic sphere, but rather by our entry into the European Union where laws that restricted women in the workplace were very quickly vetoed.

Such stories can be repeated in every member state where the EU thankfully imposed standards in vital areas of our lives are frequently immeasurably higher than those that our own governments were willing to provide.

Residual xenophobia in some parts of the Union is now in danger of being legitimised by the political fallout of both Brexit and of Trump’s election. What was previously unsayable is now sayable.

But even as we criticise Trump and his soulmates in Brexit Britain, we need to guard against assuming that citizens want to abide by the highest ethical standards themselves, something that is possibly true only for a very tiny minority. Most people operate at a level of basic self-interest. They simply want a good and secure life for themselves and may willinging disregard the finer points of human rights standards if doing so serves their own interests.

Edward Snowden, the man who leaked details of Government surveillance records on US and other citizens has spoken his surprise at the relative lack of public concern at what he had revealed. The same could be said for even

11 more concerning leaks that showed demonstrable human rights abuses on the part of the USA even if unsanctioned.

Part of the shock of the Trump election is the so called liberal elites incapacity to imagine a world in which someone like him could become President of the United States. Sometimes we fail imaginatively to understand our own ‘others’. Perhaps we too are narcissists, overly convinced of the dominance of our own world view or at least incapable of understanding why it isn’t universally shared.

Tusk and many other EU leaders are convinced that only Europe united and working together, as Jean Monnet planned in decades past, trumps working separately. But the race is on and the road on which that race is taking place is is littered with people and forces who would seek to disrupt it to the point of disintegration.

What happens next will happen partly by design, partly by accident, partly by serendipity. Historians seek to put neatness and order on what are very often random and untidy events. I cannot see Marine Le Pen winning the French Presidency but if she did would the difficulties that currently the centre right candidate Francois Fillon finds himself in in relation to the hirng of his wife as a parliamentary aide be a part cause of that?

The head of UKIP and the dominant force in the holding of the UK referendum, Nigel Farage, once said in an interview that he found the European Parliament boring until YouTube came along and he discovered how far his voice could carry and how popular his populist statements could and did become. Was it actually YouTube that tipped Nigel into a space big enough to unnerve David Cameron thus forcing Brexit?

The only thing we can control is our own behaviour, as individuals, as politicians, as corporations or as leaders. If the EU wants to beat the populists at their own game then it has to not alone ensure adequate living standards and possibilities for its citizens but also insist on and live by the highest standards when it comes to governance.

As European Ombudsman a large part of the issues I deal with are precisely in this domain, whether it is access requests for documents, conflict of interest cases, ‘revolving doors’ cases in which institutional networks are monetised, sold to the highest bidder, cases in which the private interests of those who work in or lead them are seen to conflict with their public service obligations. The institutions sometimes complain that their standards are often higher than those of the member states and while that is true, it is also true that so they should be. If the EU institutions want to lead, want to influence, want to convince, then they must do so by example.

The most high-profile case I dealt with recently concerned the decision of former Eureopan Commission President Barroso to become a non-executive chairman of Goldman Sachs bank, the US bank implicated both in the sub-prime mortgage scandal in the US leading to the financial collapse of 2008, and in the shielding of the extent of the Greek debt as it was seeking to join the Eurozone. Barroso’s decision provoked considerable and widespread anger not least among EU officials themselves who could immediately see how this could encourage further euroscepticism.

Following my intervention, along with many others, the President Juncker did ask its three-person ethics committee for an opinion on Mr Barroso’s move. While implicitly critical of what he had done, the committee said that they

13 did not see a violation of his treaty obligations of integrity and discretion. I continue to evaluate the matter.

The Irish singer Bono once said that the EU is a thought that has to become a feeling. In truth the EU at certain times, and for many member states, has indeed been a feeling and a very strong feeling, but perhaps that first burst of energy and excitement and enthusiasm for a project that promised and delivered so much now needs to be reawakened.

Trump in some ways may have done the Union a favour, may have awoken us not just to threats it faces but to how its inherent values contrast so much with the ugliness and anger and hate of what is now in extravagant display in Washington.

And the very means he uses to promote himself and the empty ugliness of his vision could also be the means that will destroy him. Few people outside of 1930s Berlin and outside the concentration sites run by the Nazis could really know what was going on at that time. But now we can see a very great deal. Trump and his people are not hidden as others were in history. We know precisely what Bannon thinks of Muslims, what Trump thinks of women. We know the depths of the new education secretary’s ignorance, the vast pools of money that eased the passage of his friends and supporters to key White House positions. We hear and can call out the lies. The White House leaks and increasingly those leaks tell of chaos and division and outside people march and tweet and precisely name what is going on.

Even giant corporations have found their voices and are calling this administration out.

And Europe should be strengthend by this and not cowed. The current state of the US should serve to remind us of the preciousness of what we have in this European Union.

I believe that the EU will survive, for another 25 years and more, it may be not as it is now, and perhaps it will exist in concentric circles and not a single one. But no matter how old its old narrative becomes we must never forget that it came from a place, learning from Hitler’s wars in Europe, that put the rights of the individual, rights born of nothing more than the fact of our individual humanity to the front and centre of our European value system.

And that is the only guarantee that any of us need in this world.

Thank you.