Quisling invented the EU

5 May 2007

Quisling died before his ideas could come to fruition. Being on the losing side of his-tory, his career did not culminate in him becoming a European commissioner or the chairman of a UN committee. Instead he fell under a hail of bullets on 24 October 1945 in the same Akershus Fortress in which he had sat as Minister-President of Norway. But the idea to which Quisling gave his name — that it is better to collaborate than to sit carping on the sidelines — has had a better fate. Not only does it carry the day among British pro-Europeans now, it was also widely held during the second world war itself, even among Quisling’s personal enemies: the president of the supreme court which sent Quisling to his death was his old rival in collaboration, Paal Berg, who immediately after the German invasion proposed that the supreme court appoint a collaborationist council to govern the country under German occupation, and who was a member of it when it took over from Quisling on 15 April 1940. (The Council was a short-lived affair and Quisling was back in the driving seat by September.)

On the other hand, the idea that parliamentary powers should be handed over to executive bodies like the EU Council of Ministers was popular with Quisling’s enemies. The Nygaardsvold government was able to return from exile in London to execute him (on the basis of retroactive legislation to reintroduce the death penalty) only because, on 9 April 1940, the Norwegian parliament had voted to transfer all its powers to the government. This was, of course, precisely what the French parliament was to do on 10 July 1940 when it voted to hand full powers to the then prime minister, Marshal Pétain.