What would Edmund Burke think about the debate on Europe?

It occurred to me to wonder what Edmund Burke might think about the approaching referendum on membership of the European Union.

Edmund Burke, 1729-1797

Image: blogs.telegraph.co.uk

For all his claims to be a Whig, rather than the Tory many might assume him to be, or indeed because he was Whiggish, he would , I suspect have doubtless not been keen on referenda. His Reflections upon the Revolution in France would suggest grave doubts about such popularism.

On the other hand he might have considered the British capable of making a suitable decision within the bounds laid down by the Constitution he celebrated in his penetrating critique of the mounting disaster in France - and he was writing as early as 1790 remember.

As a politician who believed in reform as it was needed he might endorse the Prime Minister's package of changes. He might also endorse, either as a Europhile or as a Eurosceptic, the idea of continuing reform of the EU. Too often today is has rigidities which inhibit change - hence the limits to what the Prime Minister has been offered - or, as in regard of the Euro-crisis and the flood of refugees displays the sort of panic Burke scorned when he looked at France and its financial and electoral expedients in 1789-90.

Here for reflection are three quotations from Burke which are food for thought, and by that I mean serious thought, in the present discussions:

" Those who don't know history are destined to repeat it."

"A state without the means of some change, is without the means of its own conservation." 

 "... the age of chivalry is gone; that of sophisters, economists, and calculators has succeeded, and the glory of Europe is extinguished forever."

Being something of a Burke

The other weekend I finished reading through the text of Edmund Burkes's Reflections on the Revolution in France. Although I knew Burke's ideas and argument, and the famous passages so often cited, I had not previously read the entire book, an omission which I have now made good

First published in 1790, before things got considerably nastier on the other side of the Channel, the book is, somewhat ironically, intended as a celebration of the British Whig genius in having had a limited constitutional adjustment in 1688-89 - in contrast to the wholesale rejection of the past implicit even ion the first months of the French experiment - which has come to be one of the the key texts of British Toryism as reinvented by Pitt the Younger and his allies in the face of the horrors in France.

Edmund Burke

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To the modern reader Burke's style can seem somewhat laborious and loquacious  - his training as a barrister shows as he carefully, meticulously, builds up his indictment of the new regime in France with less concern than other might have today to carry his case by rhetoric alone. Today we expect something more punchy and less verbose in our political commentators. It takes a bit of time to read and digest. Nonetheless his case is good, the follies of the revolutionary changes exposed, the impending horrors apprehended, if not directly anticipated.

 

Image. tower.com 

Regular readers may not be surprised to learn that I already saw myself as being Burkean - a bit of  Burke you might say - and having read the Reflections I am, and am happy to be, a bit more of a Burke.