The EU: An Idea Whose Time Should Never Come

30 May, 2005 by John Hawkins

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There has been a lot of fretting and hand-wringing about the consequences of the French voting “non” on the EU Constitution. Of course the French — being the French — may have done the right thing, but they did it for the wrong reasons. The general consensus is that they voted against the Constitution because they were opposed to free trade and angry at Chirac, but they should have voted against it because it’s a godawful mess.

You don’t hear a lot of people bluntly pointing that out because most liberals are dopey enough to think a united Europe is a good idea and most conservatives have just written Europe’s leaders off as hopeless idiots on the topic, but there are some rather obvious points that need to be made.

First and foremost among them is that a “United States of Europe,” which is what the European elites truly want, is absolutely unworkable.

We here in America have been able to come together because for all the squabbling and complaining we do, we, unlike the Europeans, are really not all that far apart in a lot of respects. Put another way, a Californian and a Texan have a heck of a lot more in common culturally and traditionally than a Frenchman and a Pole or a Brit and Swede. Given the history these nations have with each other and the different ways they view the world, it’s hard to imagine their signing over their sovereignty to agencies run by representatives from other countries. Imagine Americans allowing Mexico or Canada to control how we use our armed forces or to have the final say over our local laws and you’ll see the difficulty this presents.

Moreover, vast, centralized and unaccountable bureaucracies seldom make life easier — especially when the starting point is a Constitution that is “252 pages long in the French version and with all the protocols and annexes comes to 850.” We here in America have had untold numbers of political wars over our relatively short Constitution. Just picture the ocean of red tape we’d have to deal with if the lawyers and judges had 448 articles to interpret like the European Constitution does.

Then throw in more than a few arrogant officials like Jean-Claude Juncker, the unelected president of the European Union, who decreed that if the Dutch and French referendums didn’t turn out in favor of the European Union that, “the countries that would have said, No would have to ask themselves the question again.“ Got that? Heads, the EU wins and tails — well, flip that coin again until it comes up heads, you peons!

While many Americans might think it’s amusing to sit back and watch the Europeans wrap themselves in a bureaucratic spiderweb of red tape, it would be bad news for America if the grubby, little Eu-acrats managed to get a death grip on European foreign policy. Some people may believe a united Europe would have a powerful military, but given the mediocrity of almost all of Europe’s militaries, it seems much more likely that any united European army would end up being a bunch of blue hat, UN style weenies rather than any sort of potent force. So if European forces integrated, we’d probably end up losing our only truly powerful and reliable military partner, Britain, and gaining…nothing actually, given that the Tony Blairs and Silvio Berlusconis would no longer be able to decide when and where in the world to send their nation’s troops.

Any way you slice it, the European Union is bad news. Bad news for Europeans, bad news for Americans, bad news all around…