Stardate 20040514.2033

(On Screen): It just keeps happening. Something will come along which no author of fiction could ever put in a story, because readers would reject the result as being preposterous.

Or perhaps this is a case of life imitating art. But it's really the kind of story one would think was a hoax, except for the fact that it appears to be true.

Under the metaphoric name "www.kafka.eu", Belgium and the Netherlands have proposed to launch an EU webportal where businesses and citizens can report and complain on administrative burden caused by EU regulation.

The idea is based on similar portals in the two countries, which have proven to be highly successful. On the Belgian site "www.kafka.be", 4,000 complaints were filed about national authorities' "red tape" in less than 4 months.

One of the primary goals for the EU envisioned by a core group which has been pushing it the hardest is to Frenchify the rest of the continent by smothering it in just as much bureaucratic red tape as is currently hampering the French economy, so that no one else will have an advantage over France.

The idea of backlash against such a thing is completely reasonable. But the URL they want to use is almost a poetic touch, because Kafka's bureaucracy was insane.

Monstrous in its hold upon us, the bureaucratic mind is sustained by the self-perpetuating mechanics of government and the claptrap of its own rhetoric. Marxist critics, in all their exotic colorations, have always taken, and will naturally continue to take, great care to avoid such an uncomfortable truth, for Marxists of all sorts (like the social insects generally) possess the bureaucratic mind and need political structure to provide them with security and self-definition. If Marxism is a substitute for religion, bureaucracy is its theology.

Obviously Kafka's woeful parables are not about Marxism, as such; if they were, his work would be no more than the narrowest sort of propaganda and it would be hard to explain its continuing relevance today among readers of various ideological faiths. The object of his chronic dismay is something far more prevalent and insidious: at the heart of his obsessive and horrifying narratives is an unfathomable bureaucracy, one that has emerged through a combination of inertia, default, and the institution of political power, perpetuating itself by feeding upon the rights of the people it was ostensibly designed to serve.

... Itself devoid of selfhood, this bureaucracy nevertheless creates scenarios in which selves become increasingly irrelevant--hardly more than feckless dreams flickering on and off in the crepuscular shadow of machines that mean nothing in themselves, but paradoxically in meaning that nothing, intend that nothing and no one else should ever mean anything, or have meaning . . . or deviate in any way from the absolute meaninglessness of their tyrannical power.

...perpetuating itself by feeding upon the rights of the people it was ostensibly designed to serve. That sounds like a pretty good summary of the EU.

Can Europe avoid this nightmare? Do there exist people there who recognize the peril and who still are willing to work to prevent it? It would seem that there are. I admire the audacity, the sheer impudence of those who chose to use Kafka's name in this way. And I confess that it is extraordinary to learn that the Belgian government is actually party to it.

What author of fiction would ever be willing to include such a thing in his story, unless it was tragic farce? Here's hoping Europe does not have to live through a tragic farce...

Update: Gershom writes:

Being a native Dutch-speaker, I went to check out kafka.be. The site (now closed) seems to be a governmental initiative somewhat akin to what you call the "Paperwork Reduction Act" in the US: people can report on clumsy, ambiguous, or unclear administrative procedures and forms and offer suggestions for improvement (streamlining, contingencies not covered by existing forms/procedures,...) They may have closed submissions because it all worked a little too well: the site claims 220,000 visits and 3,700 suggestions, in a country of 10 million people with a relatively low internet market penetration.

"Kafkaiaans" (literally: Kafkaesque) in Dutch sounds rather less sinister than  in English: it's fairly commonly used in the same sense as "red-tape ridden" or "Byzantine" in English.

If one were truly living in Kafka's nightmares, one would have to be suspicious that such a web site was a means of identifying troublemakers, not a means of identifying excessively burdensome regulations.

Update 20040515: Kevin comments.