Emptying Countries

Did those who promoted the free movement of people within the European Union predict this?

Under the heading ‘Population decline’ the 18 January 2020 issue of The Week reported that the prime minister of Croatia says his country is suffering a “population loss equivalent to losing a small city every year”.

He is calling for EU-wide strategies to tackle the ‘existential’ threat in southern and eastern Europe caused by falling birth rates and mass emigration.

Last year, a study found that 230,000 Croatians left (mostly for Germany, Austria and Ireland) between 2013 and 2016.

That’s in a country with a population is just 4.2 million. The populations of ten of the EU’s 28 member states fell in 2018, with the biggest relative drops recorded in Bulgaria, Latvia, Lithuania, Croatia and Romania.

One can imagine it as the rich countries sucking the creativity and vigour out of the poor satellite countries. Was it foreseen?

We can think back to the decades before the free movement of people was written into the laws of European Union. People emigrated to the United States, for example, because of lack of opportunity or persecution in their home countries.

Not everyone left their homes to find a new life. Some held back. It was those willing to take a chance who went. That is true whether they were running from oppression or running to something.

The result was that the United States thrived (along with other reasons of geography and natural wealth) because it was populated by people who took a chance. I don’t think it is a stretch to picture it that way.

And in that case, the depleted populations of Croatia and the other countries are also the populations that didn’t make the jump, that didn’t risk all. The risk takers have gone. What damage can that do to a country filled with those who stayed behind?

The Jacobite Rebellions

James Francis Edward Stuart was just a few months old when his father, King James II of England and Ireland and James VI of Scotland, was sent into exile in the Glorious Revolution of 1688. The king was exiled because he would not bow to a populace that wanted Protestantism and not Catholicism as the religion of the realm.

After King James’ exile, the country invited his Protestant elder daughter Mary and her husband William III (William of Orange) to be the joint monarchs of the United Kingdom. And so it went on until James Francis Edward Stuart, prompted by his cousin Louis XIV of France claimed the throne in 1715 in the First Jacobite Rebellion. He actually claimed the throne after his father’s death in 1701. Specifically, he claimed the English, Scottish and Irish crown as James III of England and Ireland and James VIII of Scotland. But he was not ready to make his move until the allies in Scotland were ready in 1715.

The rebellion was unsuccessful. And when he died in 1766, his son Charles Edward Stuart (Bonnie Prince Charlie) tried again in the equally unsuccessful Second Jacobite Rebellion of 1745.

The Old And Young Pretenders

James Francis Edward Stuart was known by his opponents as The Old Pretender, and his son Charles Edward Stuart was known as the Young Pretender. Pretender to the throne has such a strong negative connotation that it is no wonder that the epithets stuck.

And with the clarity borne of this distance of time it is hard to imagine how the rebellions could ever have been successful. The country had split from Rome under Henry VIII in the late 1530s. Now, nearly two hundred years later, how could anyone think the country had a taste for returning to Catholicism?

The National Archives has a photo of an exhibit from the West Highland Museum in Fort William, It is a wineglass in clear glass decorated with a white rose and two buds in frosted glass. The white rose refers to the James VIII, the exiled Stuart monarch, the ‘King across the water’. And the two buds are his sons Charles and Henry.

Henry Benedict Stuart

Henry was Henry Benedict Stuart, a Catholic Cardinal and the last of the line to claim the throne. He went to France in 1745 to help his brother Charles prepare the Jacobite rising. And in France he was the nominal commander of a cross-channel invasion force of 10,000 men of the French army. But the group never left France, and Henry subsequently served under Maurice de Saxe at the siege of Antwerp.

On 16 April 1746, at what is called the Battle of Culloden, the Jacobite army was defeated by a British force under Prince William Augustus, Duke of Cumberland, on Drummossie Moor near Inverness in the Scottish Highlands. And that was the end of the Jacobite rebellions.

After the defeat at Culloden, Henry Stuart returned to Italy and died there in 1807, aged 82.

So what do we learn? James Francis Edward Stuart suffered fits of melancholy until his death. Bonnie Prince Charles became an alcoholic.

So, if you are pushing a doomed project against the tide of history, it is better to be an ineffectual third son and die peacefully at a ripe old age.

The Revenge Of Galileo

Galileo is a global navigation satellite system. Hold that piece of information because it ties into something that happened recently, which is that the United States, the United Kingdom, and Australia announced a deal about atomic submarine procurement that enraged President Macron of France. How are the deal about submarine procurement and Galileo related? This letter, reported in The Week, issue 25 September 2021, page 31, suggests an answer. Under the title ‘France can’t complain’, the writer of the letter makes this point:

To The Times
One suspects the origins of this rift over submarine contracts lie in the EU decision to exclude the UK from the Galileo GPS system as part of the Brexit deal. Not only was an investment of more than £1bn lost, but the UK will need to find another GPS system for military use. France should not be surprised if the UK becomes a competitor to the EU in military matters.
Roger Downing, Whitchurch, Devon

Is there substance to what Mr Downing says? It seems there is from what I read about the Galileo project in Wikipedia. This is a extract of the relevant parts from the Wikipedia entry for Galileo

Galileo in Wikipedia

“Galileo is a global navigation satellite system (GNSS) that went live in 2016, created by the European Union through the European Space Agency (ESA), operated by the European Union Agency for the Space Programme (EUSPA), headquartered in Prague, Czech Republic, with two ground operations centres in Fucino, Italy, and Oberpfaffenhofen, Germany.

In March 2018, the European Commission announced that the United Kingdom may be excluded from parts of the project (especially relating to the secured service PRS) following its exit from the European Union. As a result, Airbus will relocate work on the Ground Control Segment (GCS) from its Portsmouth premises to an EU state. British officials sought legal advice on whether they could reclaim the €1.4 billion invested by the United Kingdom, of the €10 billion spent on the project.

In a speech at the EU Institute for Security Studies conference, the EU Chief Negotiator in charge of the Brexit negotiations, Michel Barnier, stressed the EU position that the UK had decided to leave the EU and thus all EU programmes, including Galileo. In August 2018, it was reported the UK would look to create a competing satellite navigation system to Galileo post-Brexit. In December 2018, the then British Prime Minister Theresa May announced that the UK would no longer seek to reclaim the investment, and Science Minister Sam Gyimah resigned over the matter.”

Victoria To The Rescue

I wrote this in 2017, after the Brexit referendum but before COVID.

I was imagining a scene. It’s the grandees of the Conservative party, mostly men and older. They are watching television in the privacy of their club or a private room at the House Of Commons.

They are beaming. I can hear exclamations of pleasure at what is happening on the screen. It is an episode of Victoria, a dramatised series about Queen Victoria.

She is telling her beastly German in-laws not to try to treat her like a cow to produce children. She tells them off and they step back, abashed. Oh, she is magnificent even In her youth. And now she is on board the deck of HMS Trafalgar and she is telling the crowds how the defeat in Afghanistan is bad, but the Britain has the strongest army and navy in the world and will snatch victory from the jaws of defeat.

Ah, so like Brexit. Germany is that horrid EU, and Trafalgar is to be our victory in the new trade alliances that our new (as yet unfound) partners are hungry for. The production of the TV programme is first rate with a big budget.

A thought crossed my mind that when the producers proposed the series, Victoria, that someone in a corridor of power thought it would be just the ticket to prop up the failing morale of the populace.

Coda

And now in September 2021, again defeat in Afghanistan is centre stage for a little while. Or a kind of defeat, but who knows. Certainly British MPs have made no friends in the Biden Administration with cries of outrage at the US withdrawal.