Debate: Foreign interference in all democratic processes in the EU
Date: TUESDAY, 8 MARCH 2022
Speaker: Clare Daly
Political group: The Left
Country: France
Language: EN

And it isn’t that we don’t think that foreign interference and disinformation are serious social harms deserving of special attention. We do, and they are. It isn’t that we don’t think that Russia and China do propaganda and disinformation. Of course they do. All powerful states do. It is because throughout the work of this committee, the focus has been selective. The report is silent on the most consequential sources of disinformation and interference in European democracy: that of large concentrations of capital, foreign and European, exercising massive influence over law-making and policy formation in the EU and Member States through private media ownership, corporate lobbying and political funding. The report makes no mention of the defence industry and how it has corrupted European policy, to drive up weapons-spending and escalation. An industry needs an enemy, and the report gives it one or two, and I think the section on elite capture shows this point very well. The report is very strong on condemning those who go to work in the Russian industry companies, and fair point, but our motion on having the similar condemnation of those who go and join American finance companies is voted down. So instead of tackling interference in democracy, the committee has actually had a one-track mind focusing on China and Russia to the exclusion of everything else. It poses a child’s version of political reality. The world is divided into democracies and authoritarian regimes: goodies and baddies. The baddies tell only lies, the goodies never utter an untrue word. And in the middle of all of this, the European Union is an innocent victim of all of this geopolitical aggression and propaganda, not a geopolitical actor itself with its own agenda. So, instead of fighting propaganda, the committee has actually become a platform for it. We had a litany of NATO-funded think-tanks all coming from the same hymn sheet to inform us. Is it any wonder that we’re left with the report the way it is, it is in their interest to spread this hysteria? And the consequence of this is insidious, it means mainstream political parties don’t have to take account of their own actions. They can blame the foreigners, the foreign interference, for that. So our concern all along has been that this poses a threat to fundamental freedoms and civil society in Europe. And it might point out that a number of the measures we’re voting for here are in direct contradiction with measures that we’ll be voting on later on to protect civil society in a LIBE Committee report, because it is calling for a ‘whole of society’ approach. Criticism of European mainstream politics has to be seen as disinformation debunked by state-funded fact-checking organisations. The correct version of reality, including EU foreign policy, has to be promoted by strategically state-funded strategic communication centres – George Orwell’s  Social media companies have to be brought to heal and pressure to censor anybody who has a different view of the official version of the truth. Political parties and politicians sceptical to NATO and EU narratives have to be placed under suspicion of being proxies of foreign powers. But you know what? Avoiding conflict and de-escalation tensions means listening to your opponent, listening to their concerns, taking them seriously, however fraught the disagreement, and looking for compromises. But the function of this committee has been the opposite. It should make them be disinformation and condemn them as such. Strong democracies tolerate internal dissent but this actually is textbook McCarthyism designed to stigmatise dissent, incite the public against internal critics, eradicate common sense and make all opposition unacceptable. It is a deliberate impairment of our society’s ability to think of extra-critical importance in these times of horrendous war. I and we absolutely reject it utterly.