QandO

June 08, 2004

The EU's Problem
Posted by Dale Franks

Mark Steyn writes in The Telegraph that the EU has a fundamental problem that Ronald Reagan would have recognized easily. As The Gipper once put it, "We are a nation that has a government - not the other way around." Unfortunately for Europe, what the Eurocrats in Brussels are building is a government looking for a nation that does not yet--and may never--exist.

When the 13 colonies came together to form the United States, they already shared so much in common that they didn't need to express their sense of nationhood in an overbearing central government.

However, because there is no natural demos binding Scotland and Greece, the European Union has decided to come at things from the other direction. It's not a nation that has a government. So instead its plan is to start with a government in the hopes that a nation - or quasi-nation - will follow.

M Giscard and co seem to think that, if you have a commission and a council and a parliament and a president and a foreign minister and a common defence policy and a public prosecutor and a citizenship and a flag and an anthem and banknotes and a continent-wide minimum wage, then you have the bones and internal organs of nationhood and you can put flesh on them later.

That gets it exactly back to front. They're just the outward symbols, and, without the deeper assumed ties, are as meaningless for the European Union as they were for Yugoslavia and the Soviet Union. As Charles Moore pointed out on Saturday, most of the junk in the so-called European Constitution isn't in the least bit constitutional.

That's to say, it's not content, as the American Constitution is, to define the distribution and limitation of powers. Many of my New Hampshire neighbours wander round with the constitution in their pocket so they can whip it out and chastise over-reaching congressmen and state representatives at a moment's notice. Try going around with the European Constitution in your pocket and you'll be walking with a limp after 48 hours. It's full of stuff about European space policy, water resources, free expression for children, the right to housing assistance, preventive action on the environment, etc.

They may well be worthy planks in a political platform, but they're not constitutional matters. Yet what else is there? The European Constitution attempts to supplant genuine national identities with an ersatz bureaucratic identity - a government identity, from which a new national identity will follow. For Ronald Reagan, America was the "shining city on a hill". For M Giscard and his fellow founding fathers, the European Union is affordable housing on an environmentally protected hill. I can't see it working myself.

You don't have a nation just because you have a lot of people using the same currency, singing the same national anthem, and saluting the same flag. The Yugoslavians had all that for 50 years, and look where that got them.

Under the prodding of the steely-eyed State Security thugs' bayonets, the Yugos would belt out Hej, Slovenji! (Hey, Slavs!) as lustily as you please. But, as soon as they got the chance to kill each other in job lots, all of that "Hey, Slavs!" nonsense went by the wayside. As PJ O'Rourke once put it, having a shared national anthem worked about as well as you would expect a national anthem named "Hey, Slavs!" to work.

The USSR cobbled together people from across 11 time zones under what we'll just call "a strong central government" for 70 years.

Unbreakable Union of freeborn Republics,
Great Russia has welded forever to stand.
Created in struggle by will of the people,
United and mighty, our Soviet land!

Well, unbreakable until they got the first chance to break away without KGB goons pulling out everybody's fingernails.

You don't force nationhood on people from the outside. Nationhood is something they discover in themselves and in confederates bound by a common culture, language, history and/or religion. You may be able to force a government on them, as the Soviet Union did, for a couple of generations. But no matter how enthusiastically you make them sing the National Hymn, you can never quite get them to believe it.

At the other extreme, look at the Iraqis. The population consists of three different ethnic/religious groups, all of whom exist in mutual despite to one extent or another. And they still want to be part of a single country. They all consider themselves to be Iraqis, God help us.

But, somehow, despite plenty of objective evidence to the contrary, the members of the whole Giscard-Prodi-Patten axis think that they can successfully craft a nation out of the hodge-podge of Europe. Evidently, they've learned nothing from the experience of the 1918-1939 period of European history. Or about the history of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, for that matter.

They blithely assume that, once the marching orders come down from Brussels, the peasants will willingly fall into line.

You've gotta admire their optimism.

The Europeans talk a good game about democracy, and the will of the the people, but at the end of the day, this is what it comes down to: The aristocracy tell the peasants what's what, and the peasants are expected to oblige. Oh, sure, the aristocrats don't call themselves dukes, viscounts, and earls anymore. They have much more prosaic titles, like, "European Commissioner", or EU Minister for Intragovernmental Affairs". But, it's pretty much the same thing as it always was, a titled elite ordering about the unwashed masses.

Sure, the masses get to vote now, but, just to be safe, the allowable range of electoral discourse is so narrow that the elites can operate without any real fear of democratic audit.

And, who knows? As long as the European voters maintain their aspect of sheep-like compliance, the optimism of the elites is probably justified.

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