In Summer 2013 Utrecht University invited me to teach graduates from China, US, UK, France, Germany and the Netherlands about the present European Union. The students were asked to study the syllabus (5 pages) and Antony Alcock’s A Short History of Europe (Palgrave, revised edition 2002), which, of course, none of them did. Anticipating this I had asked them to bring their smartphones and lap-tops to grill my thesis in real time: That the construction of the Ever Closer Union since 1989 DDR’s Fall of the Wall had very little to do with administrators benignly addressing “an ever more globalizing world” (Utrecht University), but had very much to do with a skilfully planned and executed scheme by Brussels’ officials to irreversibly shift sovereignty from the supporting states to the superstructure of the EU –a coup d’état. It’s a success story of building with bureaucratic precision and patience an ever expanding new European empire on new and non-democratic fundaments – a revolution.

Why not? European history is littered with the rise and ruin of empires. The bureaucratic variant is a rarity, but not without its precedent. The Spanish-German-Belgium/Dutch- Austrian-Burgundy-Italian cluster with its capital Brussels and headed by Habsburg emperor Charles V, only came into existence after decades of cunningly grooming Europe’s numerous hereditary sovereignties and lieges by Habsburg’s dedicated officials. To make this maddening complexity of countries and cultures tick, an ever closer and centralizing union was key –and the new and gaining force of taxing bureaucrats made it click. Centralism became the pattern of political progress, which only a Medieval relic such as the federal Dutch Republic of Seven United Provinces successfully defied.

The rise of the British Empire two hundred years later is elucidated by eminent historian John Brewer in his The Sinews of Power. War, Money and the English State, 1688-1783 (London, 1988). He perceives the English seminal perfection of a centralized and controlled tax system as crucial in becoming and remaining the global superpower in the 18th Century: London could structurally outspend all its warring competitors. The increasingly more complex and ever expanding state and tax apparatus was gradually controlled by an ever more separate class of professional administrators, loyal not to King but to Crown and its dozens of differing Departments. Government service came to run in families, and these families came to run the empire. Government and Public, State and Society were separated, and officialdom was institutionalized and defined. Brewer puts it thus: “The roles of officials are more precisely drawn, the procedures they are obliged to follow become set in tables of stone, the public and other departments are kept at arm’s length and their actions are treated as a regrettable and ill-informed intrusion upon the orderly workings of the office (…) The bureaucracy had arrived” (84-85).

In Paris Britain’s major foe, Napoleon, positioned the even more perfectionist French bureaucracy throughout his Empire. One of his legacies to the Continent was that by the 1820’ies even the meanest household was controlled by a systemized and secular city-and state administration. Being either a British, French, Prussian, Austrian or a mixed system the separated, hierarchical and often hereditary and autocratic officialdom that went with it, became every nations’ backbone. A new class within the middle class mushroomed, which with the demise of aristocracy during and after the First World War became leading culturally as well.

To think that West-Europe’s post Second World War welfare state bureaucracies merely have been carrying out orders while being securely guided and checked by its democratically elected governments, is highly erroneous. More often than not politicians were (and are) state paid officials who again became (and become) officials after their political careers. And important and often neglected: bureaucrats are voters too, and political parties were and are mainly structured by non-elected state paid bureaucrats. On every level the political system and its executing bureaucracy has become an intertwined hybrid, with bureaucracy often outliving the political checks and balances: departmental careers were and are largely immune to the sudden vicissitudes of political elections. Consequently the elite of departmental bureaucracies did become the Fourth Power controlling the longue durée policy of a nation (including its Bank), and cutting the Gordian knot when politicians would or could not: sustaining (and often deciding over) non-Western mass immigration; regulating (and often deciding over) cultural, agricultural and housing subsidies; regulating education, legal affairs, science and innovation; regulating public space; shaping everyday life’s multi- culturalism; shaping cross border collaboration of secret services; shaping the secret services themselves; monitoring media, internet, telephone and traffic; and so on. In many European countries civil servants and officials had and have their own legal parameters, tax system and pension plans, and are ‘untouchable’ on and off duty. Additionally, governmental departments on city and state level were and are highly autonomous in shaping their own hierarchy and structure, resulting in a ‘cloned’ population of civil servants who regard any elected politician as a mere passenger by or a future colleague –which they are.

In every West-European nation since the 1970’ies state paid public services have become the biggest employer resulting in spiralling public expenditure and pressing prominence in the public and private. However, parliaments on city and state level could presume with reason that the real power and control were in their hands when really needed. Real decisions were democratically made –through the representation of the people’s vote.

With this philosophy in mind of an empowering but not overpowering highbrow bureaucracy in Brussels, prompted by an elitist Europarliament, the rather modest EEC vehicle of Monnet, Schuman and Spinelli was handed its much wider authority to speedily envisage and structure the Ever Closer Union after the collapse of Cold War’s status quo in 1989. The European Union project was advocated to remedy Europe’s terrors of the past and prevent possible future chaos. To curb an united Germany. To tie Germany and France close and show them a shared future. To include and civilize the former Soviet vassals. To prevent another war on European soil. To elevate the West-European populace and to educate them into embracing the ‘other’. All the ‘others’. To create an open and single market with a single currency. To harmonize labour, unemployment and pension regulations. To create a superseding European Court of Justice. To construct an inclusive Union without internal borders –a new pan-European synergy guided by Brussels, but guarded by Paris and Berlin.

It’s too easy to say that events after the euphoria in 1990 just took an unexpected turn. The entire construct of the EEC and its successor the EU is rooted in layer upon layer of blueprints of bureaucracies so successfully operating in and on West-European societies since the 1780’ies. Routinely generations of seasoned bureaucrats sought to control the state apparatus and, hence, to shift the balance of power. The ever seeping and nearly teleological transference of sovereignty from Cabinet to Department was struggled over in every society differently and at different times. The Marshall period after the Second World War was a reboot moment all together, or could have been, but from the 1970’ies onwards bureaucracies in West-European nations have become powers paralleling parliaments. Increasingly regulating the public sphere non-democratic departmental bureaucracy also succeeded in controlling its rivals: the unions were put on a leash by the mid 1990’ies and the big industries curbed after the liberalisation hype of the late 1990’ies. Backed by the supporting states the EU in the 1990’ies incorporated and augmented these national developments with acts such as the anti-Cartel and Monopoly Act, which effectively cuffed even the biggest multinationals. And since the start of the Euro-crises in 2010 Brussels, innately, took full advantage of the immense finance and power vacuum by clinching the struggle over the span of control on the European continent: outmanoeuvring French and German aspirations, constraining Goldman Sachs, facing IMF, crushing the commercial banks, and subduing the national banks to the European Central Bank.

With hindsight EU’s impotence during the Bosnian War and the Kosovo crisis (1992-1999) merely proved a blessing in disguise to achieve ambitions. Plans which were embryonic in the Maastricht (1993) and Amsterdam (1999) treaties and laughed at by politicians and media, were fast forward put into irreversible effect. Within nine years the functionalistic vehicle of the previous five decades metamorphosed into an ideologically driven federal state with its own currency, the Euro, introduced 1st of January 2002. On the first December of 2009 the traditional and separately controlled EEC-entities were cast aside by the Treaty of Lisbon. The EU became one, undivided “consolidated legal personality” (europa.eu).