Letter: EU dictatorship doomed to fail

Sir: Guy Keleny("The Euro-sceptic lie about why we fought Hitler," 2 January) raises his own bogey in order to knock it down. No one seriously suggests that Helmut Kohl is another Hitler. What he does represent is a continuing German drive to dominate Europe, and British foreign policy has always successfully resisted attempts by any one power to exercise hegemony over the Continent: against Spain in the 16th century, France in the 17th-19th centuries, and Germany in the 20th century.

Like many Europhiles, Keleny confuses the EU with Europe. The EU is merely an economic and political construct imposed upon half of Europe by officials. It is doomed to perish because it is undemocratic, economically inefficient, and increasingly remote from the needs and concerns of most people. In the words of that wise European, the late Karl Popper, it is a "Jacobin dictatorship that cannot work and will not work".

The absurdity of attempting to yoke together Scots and Sicilians, Swedes and Spaniards is self-evident. The ghastly example of former Yugoslavia is too recent a memory of what happens when politicians try to federate disparate peoples divided by religion, culture and language into an entirely bogus and artificial union, especially when one of those peoples (Serbs/Germans) has demonstrated a historical tendency to bully and boss its neighbours.

I write not as a Europhobe, but as a repentant Europhile reluctantly converted to EU-scepticism by the sobering experience of spending six years in two EU countries. Far from being a xenophobic nationalist, my two children are respectively half-French and half-Austrian. However, of the options on offer, I have sadly concluded that the nation state remains the most practical and democratic way of ordering our political future.

NIGEL JONES

Brighton, East Sussex