As we all expected, the Western world remains skeptical of Iran's election results. Joe Biden, following the same vague path of his President (read: dodging important issues to maintain popularity and approval), refuses to comment on what's going on until he "knows more." Well, Mr. Biden, it took me a few minutes to find this:

Yes, the president of Iran's own election monitoring commission has declared the result invalid and called for a do-over. That is huge news: when a regime's own electoral monitors beak ranks, what chance does the regime have of persuading anyone in the world or Iran that it has democratic legitimacy?

Iran is not a democracy--omg, what?! We'll hear a soft condemnation from President Obama within a week or two, when this gets "official." But already, MEP Daniel Hannan brings the heat on the European Union, in case it makes its voice heard:

It strikes me as pretty implausible, this Iranian election result.

Who, though, has the moral authority to say so? Certainly not the EU, which has a rather Iranian approach to democracy within its own borders: that is, it allows elections, provided they don't unsettle the ruling ideology. Three times, the European Constitution Lisbon Treaty has been rejected at the ballot box. And yet it has been implemented anyway in all its essentials - even down to the number of MEPs elected (18 extra MEPs were voted in last week, in accordance with the terms of Lisbon rather than those of the notionally current treaty, Nice). Like the old USSR, the EU will tolerate a measure of electoral choice, but will not suffer any challenge to the doctrine from which it derives its legitimacy - deeper integration in Brussels, socialism in Moscow, God's law in Teheran.

As I commented on Hannan's post, "what democratic society would allow opposition to its founding principles, no matter how "free" it claims to be?" Of course, none. The political culture always triumphs over ideological purity. That's why liberal parties in Sweden cannot succeed in attracting a broad voter base unless they support a socialist welfare state. That's why all the Western aid in Africa goes to supporting military dictatorships. That's why the Chinese approve of Internet censorship. And so on.

Brussels can easily be consistently anti-democratic because its top leaders decide the future of the Union, hand-picking the parties and people they want to lead the way forward. This is how empires work. Look at American foreign policy post WWII and you'll discover the same thing: first America arms allies against common enemies (remember when Osama bin Laden ran a US-supported war in Afghanistan to drive out Soviet troops?), then it disarms those same allies, who are now suddenly enemies.

Inconsequential? On the surface, maybe, but empire politics is all about maintaining central power, so it thinks pragmatically ("realpolitik"). The EU works the same way: it wants to maintain its power and grow, so depending on where parties and leaders stand in the battlefield of politics, it will use them like pawns in a game of chess. Checkmate, in the face of crowdism.