The Men Behind The Wire

6:40 pm, 3/11/08

The Men Behind The Wire

Irish free-market advocacy group Libertas is understandably concerned about the intentions of the European Union's "Lisbon Treaty", a rehash of the failed "European Constitution". (Former French president D'Estaing, author of the original constitution, has promised that "all of the original proposals" are included in the Lisbon Treaty, but "hidden or disguised in some way", lest mere citizens try to form their own opinions.)

The referendum bill published by the Government makes the Irish Constitution completely subject to the European Union, Libertas Chairman Declan Ganley has said this morning. Referring to a clause in the bill that states that no provision of the Irish constitution will invalidate any measure taken by the European Union, Mr. Ganley said that the Lisbon treaty did nothing to make the EU more democratically accountable while conferring on it absolute supremacy over Ireland.

The relevant clause of the bill states:

"NO PROVISION OF THIS CONSTITUTION invalidates laws enacted, acts done or measures adopted by the State that are necessitated by membership of the European Union, or prevents laws enacted, acts done or measures adopted by the said European Union or by institutions thereof, or by bodies competent under the treaties referred to in this section, from having the force of law in the State."

"The Government's referendum bill makes it completely clear that after Lisbon, the EU will have the final say over nearly all major issues of importance to the Irish people. The Treaty extends the power of the EU Courts, the Commission, and the Council, and weakens Ireland's voice in those institutions."

Politicians backing the project have apparently learned their lessons well: Ireland, this time around, will be the only country in which the people are actually given an opportunity to vote on the matter, because a prior legal decision forbids the Parliament from unilaterally surrendering Irish sovereignty. Rumors abound that some European politicians have been "bribed" with the promise of high offices in the unelected European bureaucracy in exchange for their cooperation.

After all, as any good Europhile will tell you, the EU project will not be stopped.

"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.

...and, as many on the American right predicted at the time, again, and again, until they get the "acceptable" answer. The Lisbon Treaty may well be the final go-around.

The European Union, frankly, should be just as worried about this approach as the people of the nations it means to consume. The Irish government ostensibly invited the English, too, and the relationship spent the next 800 years, shall we say, souring.

Update: Scotland may, before it's all over, end up holding their own referendum, after the London Parliament ignored the Scottish National Party's calls for a UK-wide referendum despite that referendum reportedly being supported by nearly 90% of Britons. Given that Scotland has no foreign affairs powers under the current structure of the United Kingdom, a defeat there would fuel exactly the kind of insidious, voiceless political strain that Europhiles are desperate to avoid, and that the SNP thrives on.

By the way, check out Mark Steyn's 2005 look at predictable Eurofetishist Will Hutton:

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.

"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."

I've read two of Hutton's books, and his work invariably conforms to the standard formulation. Steyn nails it. The "public interest" is that which subjugates our "individual subjective values" to the "primacy of society". This, in the eyes of the Europhiles, is the keystone of the European Union.

Historically, it's never ended well.