National Sovereignty

As most of you already know, I'm a very Euro-skeptic person due to the fact that the whole EU construct robs the countries of Europe and its people of their national sovereignty. We'll, here's a good book to further my argument.


It's The Case for Sovereignty by Cornell professor Jeremy Rabkin. While I've seen Mr. Rabkin present his arguments in a clear and concise manner in several appearances on C-SPAN's Washington Journal and Fox & Friends, I haven't seen much by Mr. Rabkin in print. Well, here's a good Q&A with Rabkin over @ NRO on his book. See here. During this Q&A, Rabkin provided perhaps the best argument against the EU that I've seen in a long time. Just see for yourself:

All members of the EU have now bound themselves to a scheme in which the European Court of Justice treats mere treaties as superior to national constitutions — and national courts give priority to the rulings of this European Court, even against their own parliaments and their own national constitutions. This is way, way, way, beyond anything we could accept in America. To find an analogy, you must imagine that NAFTA officials in Montreal claim the authority to override the U.S. Congress and the U.S. Supreme Court — and federal judges in America agree that the NAFTA policy must take priority.

What makes the European scheme particularly bizarre — at least from our point of view — is that Europeans aren't really prepared to pursue their "Union" to its logical conclusion. They don't trust the EU to have an army or police or even criminal courts of its own. So Europeans are entrusting supremacy to a government they don't really trust — at least not enough to entrust with traditional attributes of sovereignty.

In the long run, the American scheme is bound to be more respectful of individual rights and personal liberty, because we start from the recognition that people can disagree whereas the EU is always presuming some consensus that will — supposedly — be discovered by bureaucrats and judges. In the long run, the American scheme is bound to be more alert to security threats, because we start from the recognition that outsiders may well mean us harm, so we have agreed to work together — in this country, under our own scheme of government — for our "common defense." The EU scheme always suggests that people can be protected by negotiations, since Europeans have ceded supreme power to a "construction" that doesn't have an army. Doing what bureaucrats do — which is all that the EU can do — is supposed to be enough. If it isn't, Europeans are in a lot of trouble. So the structure of the EU encourages Europeans to continually disregard actual threats to their security.

Anyway, Rabkin also notes that the US needs to pay more attention to the slow but sure decline of our sovereignty within our Courts and various institutions throughout the nation. Just look at the recent events where various Supreme Court Justices have cited international law and European Court of Justice cases in their rulings on the death penalty and countless other cases dealing with the US Constitution. When we have US judges and countless other lawmakers basing their decisions on other courts, they probably need to review the US Constitution and read Mr. Rabkin's wonderful book.