Terrifying Glimpse Into European Mind

12:40 pm, 5/30/05

Terrifying Glimpse Into European Mind
The French have voted down the European Constitution, according to some reports over concerns that the Constitution is far too capitalist and fails to turn Europe into a giant suburb of Paris. Unable to accept that "Non" means "Non", however, European Union President Jean-Claude Juncker had already proposed a contingency plan:

"If at the end of the ratification process, we do not manage to solve the problems, the countries that would have said No, would have to ask themselves the question again," "President" Juncker told the Belgian newspaper Le Soir.

"We will vote again and again and again until you get the right answer, filthy peasants!" Failing that, two Italian academics propose the Nike Solution: Just do it.

In short, the authors conclude that, in the event of one or both countries voting "no", the ratification process should be neither suspended nor abandoned. They assert that all member states have expressed a commitment to proceed with ratification by virtue of Declaration 30, appended to the Constitutional Treaty. Member states cannot unilaterally or collectively decide to change the ratification process.

Thus, member states which have not already ratified should continue with the process whence, once 20 members have done so, the matter should be referred to the European Council.

In the meantime, the authors caution that "the European Union must not remain paralysed". Rather, they say, "it must continue and intensify its efforts to relaunch its policies, even by implementing in advance, where possible, the provisions of the Treaty that do not meet with open opposition".

If the process is threatened, the people must be dragged kicking and screaming into the union against their will in the hope that once it is all over, they'll just shut up and go home. This is acceptable because a small group of sometimes-elected bureaucrats have already determined that it is in Europe's best interests to do so.

Outright hatred and fear of the public has long been visible among the Europhiles, with a BBC Brussels correspondant once worrying aloud that allowing a vote on the constitution was far too dangerous: It might undo all of former French President D'Estaing's work. (This is comparable to arguing John Kerry should've been made President without an election, because it wouldn't have been fair to let all his campaign staffers down that way due to something as trivial as the will of the people.) Apparently nothing short of armed coup will stop these guys. Mark Steyn ponders this dynamic, while clubbing a Europhile like a baby seal:

That said, even as a fully paid-up Eurobore, Hutton's at pains to establish how much he loves America: "I enjoy Sheryl Crow and Clint Eastwood alike, delight in Woody Allen . . .''

But, having brandished his credentials, Hutton says that it's his ''affection for the best of America that makes me so angry that it has fallen so far from the standards it expects of itself.'' The great Euro-thinker is not arguing that America is betraying the Founding Fathers, but that the Founding Fathers themselves got it hopelessly wrong. He compares the American and French Revolutions, and decides the latter was better because instead of the radical individualism of the 13 colonies the French promoted ''a new social contract.''

Also, mass murder, strange pagan cults, a comical dictatorship, and a war of French-supremicist imperial conquest that spanned the globe.

Well, you never know. It may be the defects of America's Founders that help explain why the United States has lagged so far behind France in technological innovation, economic growth, military performance, standard of living, etc. Entranced by his Europhilia, Hutton insists that "all western democracies subscribe to a broad family of ideas that are liberal or leftist."

Given that New Hampshire has been a continuous democracy for two centuries longer than Germany, this seems a doubtful proposition. It would be more accurate to say that almost all European nations subscribe to a broad family of ideas that are statist. Or, as Hutton has it, "the European tradition is much more mindful that men and women are social animals and that individual liberty is only one of a spectrum of values that generate a good society."

Precisely. And it's the willingness to subordinate individual liberty to what Hutton calls "the primacy of society" that has blighted the continent for over a century: Statism -- or "the primacy of society" -- is what fascism, Nazism, communism and now European Union all have in common. In fairness, after the first three, European Union seems a comparatively benign strain of the disease -- not a Blitzkrieg, just a Bitzkrieg, an accumulation of fluffy trivial pan-European laws that nevertheless takes for granted that the natural order is a world in which every itsy-bitsy activity is licensed and regulated and constitutionally defined by government.

That's why Will Hutton feels almost physically insecure when he's in one of the spots on the planet where the virtues of the state religion are questioned.

"In a world that is wholly private," he says of America, "we lose our bearings; deprived of any public anchor, all we have are our individual subjective values to guide us." He deplores the First Amendment and misses government-regulated media, which in the EU ensures that all public expression is within approved parameters (left to center-left). "Europe," he explains, "acts to ensure that television and radio conform to public interest criteria."

Yes, all we have are our subjective values: The ideas passed down from our ancestors and shared by our neighbors through generations of tradition and learning, perfected by the tests of time. Making sure everyone thinks exactly the same way is the real path to growth and innovation. Clearly, we need to obliterate all this obsolete burgeous sentimentality, and replace it with a lab-grown artificial culture, superior to nature's order in every way, with ideals piped into every home all day through loudspeakers that cannot be shut off, like they do in North Korea. It'll be just like 2112.

Speaking of freaky statists, the German ambassador to the United States would like to say a word:

Ambassador Ischinger - Artist's Conception

"As older societies, we tend to think of ourselves as more experienced in the way societies evolve, and we tend to be skeptical of Americans who seem to think that if you believe hard enough, and you muster enough resources, you can change the world...In the last year or so, as we've engaged in discussions about the transformation of the Middle East and democracy, I have told my American friends that the region in this world that has seen the most transformation and change is Central and Eastern Europe--without shedding a drop of blood. So don't preach to us. And don't think transformative change will work according to mechanistic rules. This is very complicated. Changing the way people think often has to do with religious and cultural issues--we tend to think of them as long-term, and Americans think, Let's solve the problem in the next four years!"

It being Memorial Day, I can immediately think of one German problem that was solved in about 4 years.

Then there's the ambassador's contention that Central and Eastern Europe saw so much change without bloodshed: In order to make that happen, Ischinger's cowboy betters faced down apocalyptic conflict with the Soviet Union. Ischinger seems to think all this happened in some kind of German-led vacuum. That's the true irony here: His "older society" hasn't even existed for two decades yet, reunification being the culmination a long string of events started by Germany's own spectacular failure at handling their own transformative change. Perhaps if we'd just held a friendly dialogue with Hitler on our cultural differences, we could've solved the problem without bloodshed. I mean, it worked for Poland and France, right?

Perhaps by "older", he means "elderly". His cranky, hopeless perception of the world, that no matter how hard you try, your dreams will never come true and you will never make a difference, certainly implies a culture that desperately needs to be placed in a nursing home. "So don't preach to me about your new-fangled interweb and cars with power steering, you American whipper snappers! I know it's all a trick! The Islamists are fascists? I'll tell you about fascism, because you don't have a chance against it! Nobody does! Hah! In my day, we had to goosestep our way to Stalingrad uphill, in the snow, surrounded by Jewish partisans, without any fancy-pants GPS, and I'm telling you, we sure showed... We... Master race... What? Where am I? Who are you? Nurse! NURSE!" *waving cane furiously, spinning motorized wheelchair in circles, singing German marching songs*