Daniel Hannan represents South East England in the European Parliament. He is also a journalist, author, and the secretary-general of the Alliance of European Conservatives and Reformists. He spoke at the Kirby Center Oct. 7 in Washington, D.C, and sat down with the Collegian for an interview.
Tell us about your new book.
It’s called “Inventing Freedom: How the English Speaking Peoples made the Modern World,” and it is a study of Anglosphere exceptionalism, or the things that made Britain and the wider Anglosphere, the U.S., Canada, Australia, New Zealand and so on the exceptionally free societies they are.
And what are those things?
Private property, sanctity of contract, religious pluralism, the elevation of the individual above the collective and above all, the rule of law, constitutional liberty. In other words, the idea that the law is above the executive, which is the exception not the rule. Most of humanity at most times has lived under a kind of racket where a tiny number of people come into power and then systematically loot the resources of the state.That’s the normal thing, and I suppose what I was trying to do was tell the story of the place where the circle was broken. The first time in 10,000 years of agrarian mankind where we evolved a mechanism to hold our rulers to account. It began in England and was taken to a higher level here.
From the perspective of across the Atlantic, what do you see occurring politically in America right now?
Well, I think theres been one of those periodic bursts of government activism that often come after a crisis. The biggest expansion of the state in the U.S. came with F.D.R., but it didn’t come in a vacuum. It came as a response to a genuine crisis, and it came because people around the Roosevelt administration genuinely believed that they were saving the country from oligarchs. The financial crash five years ago created a similar opening and when people say, “Obama hates America,” I think that is totally missing the point of him. It’s a very bad thing in politics to dismiss your opponent like that without understanding why he is popular. I think, like Roosevelt, he thought he was standing up for the little guy in a system that had broken, and I think he genuinely is, as Roosevelt was, impatient with any criticism because he is so convinced of his own moral rectitude and that is the much more dangerous thing in politics. The people who believe sincerely that they are acting morally and therefore the opposition can be dismissed.
What should be done about ISIS and other similar entities?
I’m not a great intervenor. I backed the first war, the war against Saddam, but I didn’t back the second one. I didn’t back bombing Assad, and although I supported overthrow of the Taliban I didn’t support the prolongation and extension of our mission there. I’m not a natural intervenor but I think in this case, the murder of U.S. and British citizens and the implied threat to more changes everything. I think you have a duty as a government to protect your people, and if you don’t react in a way that shows that there is a cost to doing this, then you are betraying your duty to the next guy who might be in a similar position somewhere else in the world. So I think there needs to be a corrective. I also think that because this murderer, the guy we see in the videos, speaks English, you see how banal this philosophy is. You listen to his sort of stupid, teenage, showing — off way of talking and you think, this isn’t some alternative philosophy. These are narcissistic boys getting off on violence. So you shouldn’t treat it so much as a geopolitical issue as a policing one, as a crime prevention issue. If someone is behaving that way, they suffer the consequences. I think sometimes when you’re only watching it with subtitles you get the impression that it is more exotic and more consistent than it really is. When you hear someone speaking English as his first language you realize how empty this whole way of living is. It’s not a revival of seventh-century mysticism. It’s not a rejection of liberal values. It’s just the same kind of thuggery that led previous generations to join the Baader Meinhof gangs or the Red Brigades or whatever other outlet for violence that teenage kids get attracted to.