Eso’s Chronicles 265 / 5

The King & I

© Eso A.B.

All comments appearing within brackets [ ] are editorial in origin. This blog series begins at 264.

 

THE KING & PREUSSENSCHLAG

 

Though kings in our time have no other function than perhaps a ceremonial one and have been dismissed as a politically outdated institution, some of the arguments of Carl Schmitt, reputedly a Nazi legal expert

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carl_Schmitt , are worth noting and given greater attention than he is presently accorded.

As the link notes, Schmitt justified dictatorial power not as a consequence of being dictatorial per se, but because “If the constitution of a state is democratic, then every exceptional negation of democratic principles, every exercise of state power independent of the approval of the majority, can be called dictatorship.”

In the case of my own country of birth, Latvia, the ‘exceptional negation’ most recently occurred when the ‘democratic’ state refused to hold a referendum, which is mandated by the Constitution. Such a referendum would clearly bring up and let the people debate and vote with regard of whether to join or not join the Euro monetary union. As it is, the State refused to hold the referendum, arbitrarily upped the number of people required to sign the petition that would ask to hold such a referendum (from 10,000 to 30,000), and argued, instead, that Latvians had voted for the Euro when they agreed to join the European Union as such.

This arbitrary and authoritarian negation of the Latvian people’s right to determine their future as a sovereign nation, but to submit to the dictates of the European Central Bank (ECB) has undermined the community’s (ethnic* or national ability to cultivate and develop its own culture. Of course, this applies not only to Latvia, but in so far as it is a member of the EU, effects the futures of all European nations, especially the smaller ones. For lack of a handicap of size that sometimes affords an advantage, Latvia has no such thing as a culture that it may call its own.

Admittedly, the cultural difficulties of Latvia are many and among the foremost are the consequences of a lengthy occupation (roughly half a century, 1940-1991) of its territory by the Soviet Union and that Union’s planned dilution of the ethnic base of the Latvian Soviet Republic. Another problem is the privatization of its land subsequent to the country’s joining of the EU, which facilitated the loss of productive land to proxies solicited by foreign investors, who then left the land underutilized. Another disastrous consequence of renewed independence was the “shock” transition to a capitalist economic system, which in effect forced an economic outmigration of some 900,000 Latvians (out of a base of about 2 million) and a consequent demographic collapse of population statistics. This has also left Latvia with little of a literary culture it may call its own. Though the Latvian language persists, most books published at this time are translations, autobiographical works, but there is little to nothing of what may be called original literature. With the dismissal of the director of the National Opera Company in Riga, the last bastion of ‘high’ culture has been surrendered to the invasive influence of Western and other foreign ‘pop’ cultures.

Given the collapse of a national and/or ethnic cultural base, one necessarily looks for its causes, which are not only to be found in the above mentioned, but derive from the imposition of parliamentary democracy by an alleged ‘greater democracy’ said to have its base in the European Union. In effect, ‘democracy’ came to Latvia, when it was not prepared to make a sudden and essentially uninformed transition to it, and when its own political intelligentsia was undereducated and could be taken easy advantage of by commercial interests indifferent to the country and its people as entities of dignity.

In fact, ‘democracy’ was imposed on Latvia by an authoritarian ‘democracy’ based in the very institution of the EU, and succumbed to this ‘foreign’ influence beyond its ability to recover (due to the unavoidable exposure of its weakened institutional base to various commercial corruptions)—unless such a recovery is enjoined by a ‘King’ like authority.

This brings up the question of how such a ‘king-like’ authority may be legitimately enjoined? This takes us back to Carl Schmitt and the case called “Preussenschlag”; which, re (at above link) led: “…to the de facto destruction of federalism in the Weimar republic…." One is probably justified in believing that an effort to deny the federalization of the EU will find supporters not only among Latvians, but many smaller European States similarly threatened by forced federalization into a Parliamentary, liberalist, and authoritarian ‘democracy’ of the EU to form an illegitimate Empire that is of an advantage only to its own bureaucracy, government heads including.

*Ethnic—a word that in our times has lost its meaning. It would be, in my opinion, proper to replace it with the word ‘organic’; thus not an ‘ethnic Latvia’, but an ‘organic Latvia’, ‘organic Scotland’, and not their current mechanical ‘democratic’ equivalents.