Perhaps the most foundational principle of a democratic society is that the right to participate in organised opposition to the Government or Governing body is sacrosanct. There are many countries that have elections without being truly democratic. The people of China, for example, are permitted to vote, but only for one party. Speaking out openly against that party in China can land you in prison, and in some cases cost you your life.
In Brussels, today, the right to participate in organised opposition was openly, and thoroughly, trampled. The organisers of the National Conservatism conference found themselves, and their guests, effectively barricaded inside their venue by the Belgian police, with those who left the venue unable to re-enter.
This is currently the scene outside (via Reuters) the @NatConTalk and inside. No-one allowed in, no-one allowed to re-enter. This also applies to journalists. At the moment I’m very much stuck inside #brussels pic.twitter.com/jC5cbNwUE6
— Darren McCaffrey (@darrenmccaffrey) April 16, 2024
It should not be relevant, but must nevertheless be said, that the conference in question is not some fringe event. It was due to be addressed by no less a figure than the Prime Minister of Hungary, an EU member state. Other speakers included a Cardinal of the Catholic Church; the former British Home Secretary; Germany’s Dowager Princess Gloria of Thurn and Taxis; and the former chief speechwriter to Margaret Thatcher. However, the right to organise opposition is not granted to statesmen and cardinals alone: Had the conference simply featured a collection of sixteen ordinary citizens, the right to organise opposition would still have been sacrosanct.
The official reason for the attempt to cancel the conference was given as being based around a supposed threat to public order and safety. Yet there is no credible person alive who believes that any threat to public order and safety arising from the conference would have originated with the participants. Instead, the local authorities in Belgium chose to enforce a kind of heckler’s veto on political opposition – a risk of trouble may have perceived to have come from those in Belgian society violently opposed to the ideas expressed at the conference, rather than from those attending.
Governments certainly have a role in defending public order – but that role is not and never can be a neutral one. Their first duty, as the sole legitimate wielders of physical force in a society, is to use that power to vindicate the rights of their citizens. A Government that sides with those who threaten to use force to silence their opposition, by actively pre-empting those threats by using force to silence the opposition themselves, can no longer call itself democratic. It can barely even call itself western.
Indeed, we must consider the reality that the Mayor of the division of Brussels who ordered this decision is not of western heritage. Emir Kir, a member of the socialist party of Belgium, is the second generation son of Turkish immigrants to Belgium. He is Mayor of a district that has the highest proportion of immigrant voters in all of Belgium, with more than 44% of voters either being first or second generation immigrants, and a majority of those originating from countries that are either not democracies, or are Islamic, or both. When it comes to questions of immigration, we are often asked to think in purely mathematical and resource terms, about whether a country can cope with the demands placed on its infrastructure and housing needs. We are less often asked to think about how significant immigration over the long term can alter the fundamental values of a society.
These are, ironically, the very questions that the National Conservatives seek to discuss. They are important questions: The nations of Europe are divided in many ways, culturally, and linguistically. By and large, however, they share a particular set of values around individual liberties and rights that, many people feel, are worth preserving.
The irony is that in the suppression of their conference today, the National Conservatives received the clearest evidence one could that their fears for the survival of those values are well placed.
It should be noted, of course, that the trend towards illiberalism in the west is not entirely – or even primarily – the result of immigration alone. The continent has far too many people of its own production who stand ready to cast aside the right to dissent in favour of enforcing what might be called tolerance and progressivism at the point of a sword. We have seen similar trends emerging here in Ireland, with the stalled passage through our parliament of legislation that purports to make certain thoughts and private communications illegal.
We have not yet, however, seen anything quite so blatant as what occurred in Brussels today.
As a general rule, a message that the authorities will go to great lengths to censor is always worth hearing, and understanding. Human progress has almost always advanced through ideas that somebody in authority has first deemed dangerous and a threat to their authority. That was true of the ideas of Gallileo, Martin Luther, Padraig Pearse, Jesus Christ, George Washington, Martin Luther King, the Suffragettes, and countless more. The National Conservatives may not have pretensions of having the stature of any of those people, but they have, by the very fact of their attempted silencing, been accorded an importance that we should all take notice of.
What happened in Brussels today is a clarion message to all of us who believe that there are values in western civilisation worth defending. We are engaged in a battle about much more than individual policies or short-term economic or foreign policy direction. The battle ongoing in Europe is about whether the things that made it Europe in the first place shall be preserved, or shall be allowed to be destroyed.