Young Visions for Europe (Vincent De Roeck)

On Monday September 30th, the Mises Youth Club held its most recent political event in the Brussels headquarters of the “Brewers for Europe” lobby. The topic of the debate was “young visions for Europe” and the two speakers were both active in the EU sphere, and both were aiming for a seat in the EU Parliament after the June 2009 elections. Gawain Towler is the spokesman of the United Kingdom Independence Party (UKIP), a self-described British “anarcho-monarchist” and a Europsceptic blogger. Aloys Rigaut is the president of the European Liberal Youth Movement (LYMEC), a French-Belgian liberal and a committed Euro-federalist. Although both speakers claimed to be knights of liberty and tended towards liberal ideas, the differences in opinions and visions were really apparent. And the pretty huge ideological gap between them could not be bridged at all on this occasion, in spite of numerous efforts by myself - I once again figured as the debate’s moderator - and similar voices from the audience. The nearly forty attendees participated very well in the discussion and numerous interesting views were ventilated. Especially the Euro-enthusiasts enjoyed this debate since powerful anti-EU political movements don’t exist in Western Europe and their stances are only extremely seldomly mentioned in our countries’ media.


Gawain Towler talked about his work in the “belly of the beast” and addressed the recent turmoil he had caused in the British press with regard to the imposed censorship by the EU Parliamentary authority. A couple of days before, he was forced to stop blogging on classified information regarding EU procedures and upcoming EU projects, and during the debate, to prove the actual hotness of that topic, he even had to leave the room briefly to give an interview to the BBC on the silencing of free speech in the EU. Towler criticized the lack of democracy in the EU, the alleged corruption and fraud in the annual EU accounts, the disrespect for the outcome of the Irish referendum, the harmonizations within the European Union, the overregulation and Keynesian policy, the European monetary system, the wasteful spending and unaccountable budgets, and the destruction of national cultures by the Berlaymonster. Towler defended NATO and EFTA, and demanded the immediate withdrawal of Britain from the EU, since the only alliance with the continental countries the British envisaged and signed up to when joining was a Common Market.


Aloys Rigaut could not disagree more and highlighted the impressive resumé of the European project. Starting with three Benelux countries, the European Union grew at an unprecedented pace throughout the last half century to the 27 member states we know today. Democracy was gradually installed everywhere on this continent and the market economy was on the rise everywhere as well, even in countries who did not have any free-market history at all, like those of the former Eastern bloc. Peace was also enforced on this continent by the EU institutions and the multilateral approach of ever-closing EU integration. Rigaut agreed with virtually every critique on EU misgovernment - from petty bureaucracy and red tape, over unfair competition with non-EU countries through schemes like the CAP, to the democratic deficit and the lack of accountability - but refused to turn his back on the EU as a whole because of these imperfections. According to him, the positive aspects about EU integration still outnumbered the negative ones by many to none, and he even dared to make pleas on the Mises Youth Club’s floor for deeper EU integration through better regulation, the harmonization of many domains of socio-economic policy, a common foreign affairs doctrine and more information on EU issues for the general public.


Vincent De Roeck is the co-founder and secretary of the Mises Youth Club. The Patrons of this Brussels based social and political debating society include a.o. former EU Commissioner Frits Bolkestein, British Conservative Syed Kamall MEP, former Estonian Prime Minister Mart Laar and Belgian Minister of State Herman De Croo.