That's Life

Fire of Liberty

Anne Applebaum has a great column in today's Washington Post (registration required) which points out why the people of France as well as Holland tend to lean towards the "No" vote on the EU Constitution. All you have to do is look at how the political elites who govern the EU and have drafted it's various treaties, to realize that there is a major flaw in the system which is the utter disregard for the people and their consent. When you create a governing body that isn't elected, lacks sovereignty but still has the power to supersede all the laws that the various national governments have passed, you can clearly understand why the people in France shouted "non" and the Dutch are cheering for "nee" as they go to the polls. People in these various nations are more apt to defend their political and individual liberties when its protected by their national constitutions, rather than lose it all to a supranational megastate that only seeks to benefit the elites. I think Applebaum made a rather good point in her column on these ill sentiments of the people of these nations in the following paragraphs:

So far, the popular response to this erosion of democracy -- which has coincided with an economic slowdown in much of Europe, as well as a wave of North African and Eastern European immigration -- has been an anguished and inchoate series of "anti-establishment" protest votes. In no particular order, I would count among these the surprise second-place showing of Jean-Marie Le Pen in the last French presidential election; the success of the maverick Dutch politician Pim Fortuyn, before his assassination; the unexpected support for the Austrian anti-immigration politician Joerg Haider; the growing numbers of Belgians who vote for a Flemish nationalist party that could theoretically divide their country; and of course, the anti-constitutional campaigners in France and the Netherlands.

Although all of these politicians have had different agendas, they shared a common Euro-skepticism, as well as a common nationalism -- or a common patriotism, if you want to be more positive about it. Fortuyn defended Dutch traditions of tolerance against what he said was the anti-gay and anti-feminist rhetoric of Holland's Muslim immigrants. Haider occasionally flirted with Nazi nostalgia. But for better or worse, all were responding to their countrymen's understandable if not always eloquent feelings that in the rush to unify Europe, their own national identities, traditions and legal systems had been obscured. Indeed, a major part of the opposition to the European constitution comes from the fact that it is called a "constitution," a word usually understood to signify the founding legal document of a single country.

And that's the point, these 25 member-states of the EU are individual member states who speak different languages, have different cultures/history, laws, and policies than other nations, and they (people of these nations) are not predisposed to give this over for the sake of the European Union and the demands of its leaders. No matter how hard the elites try to mold the states of Europe into another United States of America with its melting-pot society, they will never merge these varying peoples of Europe into a single political entity because they choose to be different than their neighboring country. It's one thing to create an economic community that promotes free trade and free-market capitalism amongst a loose confederation of these 25 independent nations but quite another to forge a political superstate out of these differing nations. The Dutch will probably put an exclamation point on the whole affair around 3:00 P.M. today.