VIEWED from today, the images of Lech Walesa being carried shoulder-high by the Gdansk shipyard workers on his return from police custody, and the West Germans who dared climb on to the Berlin Wall and dismantle it, in full view of the East German border guards, are much more important in the story of the development of the EU than last week's EU Parliament election.
A decade earlier, in the first direct elections to the European Parliament in 1979, voters in Scotland were a bit unsure as to its exact role and importance. But, 62 per cent voted, compared to the slightly more than one in three Scots who put their
cross in the box last Thursday.
For the next decade, there was a vague notion that membership of the EC would be good for Scotland, and that it would allow direct access to the wider world – in much the same way as the Republic of Ireland saw its chance to get round having to filter foreign contacts and projects through London.
The cosy club of the liberal democracies around the North Sea and the recently democratised Mediterranean countries was on borrowed time when the Iron Curtain was torn down, though.
The countries oppressed and submerged by Russian Communism couldn't wait to get into the EU. They saw it as a land of milk and honey, and protection for the civil, legally enforceable liberties that they'd been denied by the controlled economic plans of dictatorial governments.
So, from its original six members, the EU has grown to a membership of 27 states, which it has attempted to govern and direct from Brussels.
True, the concept of "subsidiarity" was around for a few years, but as the EU extended its footfall, so too did the Brussels Eurocracy. Decision-making happened at the centre and fewer and fewer of the older member states could remember how to practise "subsidiarity."
Meantime, the world was becoming the global village promised by Marshall McLuhan. Countries were doing transcontinental business, and citizens from the southern hemisphere were happily mixing with their northern European cousins to enjoy each other's countries.
What was the EU's role in the new world order? High-flying professional Eurocrats and politicians created a role for the EU alongside the leading G8 economies. They lived the Euro-life, usually in Brussels, while Europe's peoples more or less ignored them.
As it has adopted the trappings of a state, regulating and directing any number of policies that are traditionally the responsibility of member countries to attend to in a manner that suits them, actual opposition to the EU has grown
Ever-closer political union was not what the UK citizens had in mind when they voted to join the Common Market, and echoes of their protests could increasingly be heard as new members joined. Add to that a growing awareness of the UK's £40 million a day membership, and the accompanying question "What for?" At this point, last week's UKIP's vote starts to become understandable.
We're seen as quite "bad" Europeans from Brussels or Strasbourg, but as this week's results show, scepticism is present across the entire EU.
This election's pathetic turnout of fewer than one in two voters isn't an aberration, it's part of a trend. Younger citizens of the 27 EU states don't wonder open-mouthed at open borders and free movement between countries. They take that for granted as they do the co-operation amongst the EU member countries' national services that allows recognition of educational qualifications or cross- borders crime prevention, for example.
They have no interest in, and probably question the need for, such an extensive, expensive bureaucracy. Older EU citizens have not homogenised like Brussels EU movers and shakers. As the EU has enlarged, their appetite for more Europeanisation has diminished, and they share their young fellow-nationals distrust of EU politicians.
The idea of pan-European, concerted action has been rendered redundant by the sheer size and national diversity of the member states. The current economic recession will do nothing to narrow the economic, and social policy differences between member countries. Some might put their citizens through torture as they apply fierce cuts in public spending in an attempt to meet EU criteria for joining the euro. This means more far right parties and groups will be helped into the legitimacy bestowed by the ballot box, no matter how few people vote.
If the UK's Tories are elected to Westminster, and if they keep their promise to hold a referendum on the Lisbon Treaty, we could do the EU a great service by properly debating the EU's role as a grouping of 27 very different countries. Other countries would be encouraged to do likewise, and as a bonus, the BNP could be seen in its true colours.
