Is the E.U. an Unimportant Tower of Babel?

With 24 official languages, the E.U. spent about 1 billion euros on translation and interpretation in 2016. The defense that diversity and language-learning were promoted is based on the specious reductionism of cultural diversity to language and the faulty assumption that E.U. business being conducted in a myriad of languages prompts E.U. citizens to pick up an additional language. After all, such an undertaking is not like changing clothes or knitting a sweater. Meanwhile, the true cost of using the E.U. to make ideological claims using language as a symbol goes beyond euros to include the foregone ability of the E.U. to integrate even enough to adequately conduct its existing competencies, or domains of authority.

Fortunately, officials and staff at the European Commission “usually write internally in only three [languages]—English, French and German—and often speak in English.”[1] That this has annoyed French-speakers disproportionally (relative to German speakers) is but one indication that practicality could too easily be sacrificed in the very functioning of the E.U.’s federal institutions even at a baleful time for the E.U.

The movement to recognize Luxembourgish is similarly at the expense of practicality. At least as of 2016, residents of the state of Luxembourg spoke German and French too, and the state laws were in French! Incroyable!  Could the E.U. afford to add such an unnecessary language, especially given the anticipated secession of Britain and the toll that that could take on the Union even just psychologically? Why hamper the E.U.’s functioning in such a baleful context—literally adding to its budget on translation and interpretation—just to enhance the status of Luxembourgish—a specious, sophist assumption anyway.

Incredibly, some politicians on the state level were urging the removal of English as one of the languages after the secession by the British even though the language had been so useful functionally at the European Commission. That Ireland and Malta relied at the time on English and the language was “extremely popular in Central and Eastern Europe”[2] just adds ammunition to the charge that government officials in the E.U. are not taking its existential threats seriously enough. The implication of the movement is that the functioning of the E.U. at the federal level is not really very important, as word-games are more so. Priorities matter, especially at turning points. The secession of a big state is a big deal for a federal system; going on to enhance integration anyway, Europeans would need to put the E.U. at a higher priority than was the case amid the jealous language-games in 2016.

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1. James Kanter, “As the E.U.’s Language Roster Swells, So Does the Burden,” The New York Times, January 4, 2017.

2. Ibid.

The Electoral College Hampered: The Case of Nixon’s 1968 Campaign Treason

While he was running for the U.S. presidency in 1968, Richard Nixon told H.R. Haldeman “that they should find a way to secretly ‘monkey wrench’ peace talks in Vietnam” by trying to get the South Vietnamese government to refuse to attend peace talks in Paris until after the U.S. election.[1] Specifically, Nixon gave instructions that Anna Chennault, a Republican fundraiser, should keep “working on” South Vietnamese officials so they would not agree to a peace agreement before the U.S. election.[2] “Potentially, this is worse than anything he did in Watergate,” said John Farrell, who discovered evidence of Nixon’s involvement from Haldeman’s notes on a conversation with the candidate. That Nixon committed a crime to win the election is itself an indication that the way Americans elect the federal president was flawed. That he went on to cover up the Watergate crime committed during the 1972 campaign only to win by a landslide should give pause to anyone having faith in an unchecked popular election.  I contend that the American Founders had designed the Electoral College in part to catch such a candidate from becoming president, even if the College had never operated as such. Yet it could.

 Through surveillance, President Johnson learned of Chennault’s intervention at the behest of the Nixon campaign. Privately, the president believed that the intervention amounted to treason, though he said nothing publicly, lacking proof of Nixon’s personal involvement. “There’s really no doubt this was a step beyond the normal political jockeying, to interfere in an active peace negotiation given the stakes with all the lives.”[3] Johnson was planning on announcing a bombing pause precisely to encourage the South Vietnamese to the table. Thanks to Farrell’s discovery, we know that Nixon did indeed attempt to undermine U.S. policy. Put another way, he put his own ambition above his country’s national security and interest.

One of the purposes of the Electoral College, as designed, is to act as a check on the American electorate, which can be misled by designing candidates. With so many Americans—even just the seven million at the time of the commencement of the U.S. federal constitution—it could not be assumed that the voters could have enough information on the candidates to take their actual activities into account. The relatively few electors in the Electoral College, however, could uncover non-publicized information pertinent to a good judgment on whom should be president. Electors, for example, could have spoken with Johnson and done some digging on their own to get to the bottom of whether Nixon had committed treason to get elected. Because the electors “work for” the American people, which is sovereign over the government, government intel would have rightly been available to the electors.

“It is my personal view that disclosure of the Nixon-sanctioned actions by [Anna] Chennault would have been so explosive and damaging to the Nixon 1968 campaign that Huber Humphrey would have been elected president, said Tom Johnson, the note taker in the Johnson White House meetings about this episode.[4] So had the presidential electors of the Electoral College been free of the Republican party and cognizant of their function to make up for deficiencies in the popular election, Nixon may not have been elected president in 1968. The “great national nightmare” of Watergate would have been averted. Unfortunately, the selection of president was limited to public information, and the media was not able to make up the difference by getting to the root of the story.

We can look back at all this as a failure in the Electoral College and ask how the electors therein can be selected in such a way that their function as a check on the deficiencies of the popular judgment is enabled and protected. Allowing the political parties to select the electors can be regarded as an obstacle. Perhaps a given state’s electors could be selected in several ways—each elector being determined in a different way—such that no dominant power could subvert the College. The state legislature, for instance, could select one, the governor another. The state’s supreme court still another. A few more could be elected directly by the people by region. Perhaps having electors serve rotating multi-year terms might protect electors from undue external influence so they could resist popular or concentrated private pressure at election time. Paradoxically, American democracy would be strengthened, rather than diminished. The unearthed evidence of Nixon’s pre-election treason demonstrates how faulty the grounds of popular, public judgment can be at the ballot-box.

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[1] Peter Baker, “Nixon Sought ‘Monkey Wrench’ in Vietnam Talks,” The New York Times, January 3, 2017.

[2] Ibid.

[3] Ibid.

[4] Ibid.