What Europe Really Needs

Paul Johnson wrote in OpinionJournal That Europe as an entity is sick and the European Union as an institution is in disorder cannot be denied. But no remedies currently being discussed can possibly remedy matters.

Basically because each country is individual, and each's view of the EU is that every country should be like it, and that at the same time it should benefit a little more than the others. It reminds me of what the pigs said in George Orwell's Animal Farm: "All animals are equal, but some animals are more equal than others"

What ought to depress partisans of European unity in the aftermath of the rejection of its proposed constitution by France and the Netherlands is not so much the foundering of this ridiculous document as the response of the leadership to the crisis, especially in France and Germany. Jacques Chirac reacted by appointing as prime minister Dominque de Villepin, a frivolous playboy who has never been elected to anything and is best known for his view that Napoleon should have won the Battle of Waterloo and continued to rule Europe.

And who played a large role in the writing of the constitution rejected by the French.

Gerhard Schröder of Germany simply stepped up his anti-American rhetoric. What is notoriously evident among the EU elite is not just a lack of intellectual power but an obstinacy and blindness bordering on imbecility. As the great pan-European poet Schiller put it: "There is a kind of stupidity with which even the Gods struggle in vain." The fundamental weaknesses of the EU that must be remedied if it is to survive are threefold. First, it has tried to do too much, too quickly and in too much detail.

This would have been a much better constitution

Jean Monnet, architect of the Coal-Steel Pool, the original blueprint for the EU, always said: "Avoid bureaucracy. Guide, do not dictate. Minimal rules." He had been brought up in, and learned to loathe, the Europe of totalitarianism, in which communism, fascism and Nazism competed to impose regulations on every aspect of human existence. He recognized that the totalitarian instinct lies deep in European philosophy and mentality--in Rousseau and Hegel as well as Marx and Nietzsche--and must be fought against with all the strength of liberalism, which he felt was rooted in Anglo-Saxon individualism. In fact, for an entire generation, the EU has gone in the opposite direction and created a totalitarian monster of its own, spewing out regulations literally by the million and invading every corner of economic and social life. The results have been dire: An immense bureaucracy in Brussels, each department of which is cloned in all the member capitals. A huge budget,

Which just failed to be approved.

masking unprecedented corruption, so that it has never yet been passed by auditors, and which is now a source of venom among taxpayers from the countries which pay more than they receive. Above all, règlementation of national economies on a totalitarian scale.

Steve Bainbridge blogged Paul Johnson's analysis of the state of the EU is a must read. Money quote on how the EU elites reacted to the French and Dutch referenda

Stefan Beck blogged It is interesting that Johnson dwells on obstinacy and blindness, because it seems Europe is nothing if not a stubborn old man, refusing to take the medicine that is readily available to it. That medicine is a deference to and appreciation of all that was good in the European past. The EU "constitution," we know by now, is a gigantic, tortuous document, descending upon the people of Europe from on high to impose its "wisdom" like the Crystal Monolith in 2001: A Space Odyssey. But the people have rejected it, and perhaps sometime soon they will begin to realize that its replacement already exists in their own cultural legacy.

Mitch Berg blogged The whole thing is worth a read - as it always is with Johnson.

Orrin Judd blogged The Continent has turned its back on both the past and the future. And the gods have in turn repudiated Europe.