Now that Brexit has been completed let’s take a look at what the UK has left. Perry Anderson has an article in the London Review of Books, ‘Ever Closer Union?‘. In it he covers the five principal institutions: the European Commission, the European Court of Justice, the European Parliament, the European Council and the European Central Bank. The most withdrawn of these is the European Court of Justice.
Today the court remains, of all Union institutions, the most withdrawn from the public. Discreetly situated in Luxembourg, not exactly a European crossroads, and composed of judges appointed – one per country – by member states, its proceedings are hidden from public scrutiny; its decisions permit no admission of dissent; its archives grant minimal access to researchers. In modus operandi, the ECJ is the antithesis of the US Supreme Court, whose emoluments it comfortably tops – its president receives a salary worth $400,000, plus many allowances; the chief justice in Washington a measly $277,000.
Its history features some illustrious persons.
Thanks to the pioneering work of a young historian from Luxembourg, Vera Fritz, we now have a detailed scholarly study of the composition of the court in the rst twenty years of its existence. Her findings are illuminating. There were seven founding judges and two advocates-general. Who were they? The Italian president of the court, Massimo Pilotti, had been deputy secretary-general of the League of Nations in the 1930s. There he acted as the long arm of the fascist regime in Rome, advising Mussolini on what counter-measures to take to shield Italy from condemnation by the League for its actions in Ethiopia. On resigning his post in 1937, Pilotti took part in the celebrations in Genoa of the conquest of Ethiopia; and during the Second World War headed the high court of occupied Ljubljana aer Italy’s annexation of Slovenia, where resistance was met with mass deportations, concentration camps, and police and military repression. The German judge on the court, Otto Riese, was so devoted a Nazi that without any duress – he spent the war as an academic in Switzerland – he retained his membership of the NSDAP until 1945. His compatriot Karl Roemer, an advocate-general to the court, spent the war in occupied Paris managing French companies and banks for the Third Reich; aer the war, he married Adenauer’s niece, and acted as defence lawyer for the Waen SS charged with responsibility for the massacre of the occupants of the French village of Oradour. The other advocate-general, Maurice Lagrange, was a senior functionary in the Vichy government, fully committed to the ideology of a ‘National Revolution’ to sweep away the legacy of the Third Republic. Acting as link-man between the judicial apparatus of the Conseil d’État and the political apparatus of the Council of Ministers, Lagrange was in charge of co-ordinating the rst wave of persecution of French Jews. When Laval took over the reins of Vichy in 1942, transferring Lagrange back to the Conseil d’État, Pétain thanked him for his ‘rare perseverance’ in the regime’s legislative and administrative work, to which Lagrange replied that ‘for me it has been a great privilege to be so closely associated with the enterprise of national renovation you have undertaken for the salvation of our country. I am convinced that every Frenchman can and should take part in this work.’ Aer the war he was chosen by the Americans to help democratise the civil service in Germany, and by Monnet to help dra the treaty establishing the Coal and Steel Community.
That gures like these were the ornaments of Europe’s rst Court of Justice reected, of course, the closing of political ranks aer the Cold War set in, when what mattered was not the misdeeds of the fascist past but the menace of communist present. It was a time when the last commander of the Charlemagne Division of the SS, ghting to the last bullet to defend Hitler in his bunker, could emerge as best choice for the Robert Schuman Prize for services to European unity.* Why should European justice too not let bygones be bygones? More generally, appointments to the court had little or nothing to do with juridical qualications. Nearly all were political. The Belgian judge was a leading gure in the Catholic Party of his country; one of the Dutch judges was the brother of a prewar foreign minister; the French judge, Jacques Rue, a former deputy governor of the Banque de France, was one of the founders of the Centre National des Indépendants et Paysans; a Catholic trade unionist from the Netherlands and a socialist magistrate from Luxembourg rounded out the set.
He concludes ominosly.
If the Union’s advertisements for itself, on which it spends a fortune in euros every year, meet no more than a listless acquiescence, rather than active endorsement from the populations over which it presides, that is sucient for its purposes. Fear of the unknown is the more important integument.
Read the whole here.
Evocatively Ambiguous 