|
Here's the great Mark Steyn's interesting take on the new constitution and what the Brits should do with it:
| quote: |
Mark Steyn: Vote 'No' for a federal Europe
The Telegraph (U.K.) ^ | 06/22/04 | Mark Steyn
Business as usual among the Europhiles. "The flurry of weekend opinion polling," quoth the Guardian, "has revealed a British nation that is strongly opposed to the European Union constitution and also deeply ignorant about it."
Alas, the stupidity of the people is an abiding problem of democracy. Fortunately, the EU has come up with a set of institutions all but entirely insulated from it. At least for the moment.
But for the purposes of argument, assume the Guardian is right, and the people are idiots. The paper argues that the electorate's concerns - "Many also fear that the British passport will now be replaced by an EU one", etc - can be assuaged by paying closer attention to the fine print on page 239 sub-section XVIII paragraph D(iii)e.
Maybe so. But I think in this instance the best example is that of hardcore Europhile Kenneth Clarke and his famous boast that he'd never read the Maastricht Treaty. The average non-Guardian-reading moron may not have read the European Constitution but suppose he's figured out the salient fact about it: that it's the legal framework for a new state. What else does he need to know?
When it comes to national identity, one is entitled to a measure of ignorance. If you're a Peruvian and you're happy being a Peruvian, you're unlikely to be impressed by the Guardian arguing that that's just because you haven't read all the sub-clauses of the Bolivian constitution. Identity is primal, not a matter of footnotes.
The knuckle-dragging ignoramuses have figured out that, if this new body is full of offices and institutions - president, foreign minister, citizenship, etc - traditionally reserved for states, it's a reasonable supposition that a state is what it intends to be.
In that sense, all the things the Guardian says the morons are wrong about, they're right about. For example, those passports: given that passports now come in standardised EU form, and entitle the bearer to free movement, residency and voting rights within the EU, they're already de facto EU passports.
They may have different coats of arms on the front, but essentially they're the same document - just as the fellows at Columbia Records used to joke they'd issued the Johnny Mathis Christmas album in a dozen colours. Different sleeve, same record: that's the EU passport.
Even in its attempts to reassure, the Guardian can't help acknowledging Euro-creep: "Many people believe, for instance, that the constitution gives the EU immediate power to increase taxes in Britain - a wholly unfounded belief."
"Immediate" power? What about, say, 2012? And, even if Tony Blair and other enthusiasts insist the EU is not a state, the final word may not be left to them. We're told that Britain's Security Council seat will be unaffected. Who says? Sooner or later, the rest of the world will start to wonder why the EU's foreign minister has two of the five permanent votes at the UN.
For 30 years, as the EU has acquired the organs of a state entity, the argument of British Europhiles to the people has been: who ya gonna believe?
Me or your lyin' eyes? Say what you like about those shifty duplicitous Continentals, but on this issue it's successive British governments that have been shifty and Monsieur du Plicitous who's been admirably straightforward.
The new constitution, declared the Belgian prime minister last week, is "the capstone of a European federal state".
Why can't the British Prime Minister be that honest? He could easily say: "Yes, it's a federal state. And Britain's created more federal states than anyone on the planet - Canada, Australia, India, the Federation of Rhodesia and Nyasaland. whoops, that one didn't work out so good, but you get the cut of my jib.
For two centuries, we've been the one-stop shop for all your federation needs. Today, thriving British federations can be found on every continent, except our own. So who better than us to build the federal state Europe's crying out for? We did it to New Brunswick, now we're doing it to old Brunswick, as Donald Rumsfeld would say."
But Mr Blair can't even make that argument. There's a fascinating book by Alberto Alesina and Enrico Spolaore called The Size of Nations, in which the authors note that, of the 10 richest countries in the world, only four have populations above one million: America (260 million people), Switzerland (seven million), Norway (four million) and Singapore (three million).
All the rest are small jurisdictions with few people. Small nations, they say, are more cohesive and have less need for buying off ethnic and regional factions. America is the exception that proves the rule, because it's a highly decentralised federation. As Messrs Alesina and Spolaore put it, if America were as centrally governed as France, it would break up. Yet that, in a nutshell, is what the new Europe will be: a jurisdiction the size of America, but as centralised as France.
Fact: right now, even before this new constitution takes effect, the state of New Hampshire has more control over its tax rates than the United Kingdom.
Fact: right now, the Province of Quebec has more control over its immigration policy than the United Kingdom.
Thus, even if you were in favour of submerging Britain within a pan-European state, the only pan-European state on offer is doomed to fail.
So, if you believe in the British nation state, you should oppose this new constitution. If you believe in a viable European federal state, you should also oppose this new constitution.
That doesn't leave much except a pragmatic argument: Britain can't make it on her own, any port in a storm, etc. That line worked when Ted Heath was in office. Today, the sunniest optimists project the European economy to grow at no more than about 1.5 per cent this year, or about a third of America's growth rate. And, given the EU's deathbed demographics, that gap is only going to widen. Britain's GDP per capita is now higher than France or Germany's, and its unemployment rate is half.
It's not the British people but their EUtopian elites who are deeply ignorant - of comparative data, historical precedent and basic arithmetic. The reality for Britain in Europe is simple: united we'll fall, divided we might stand a sporting chance.
|
___________________
FLUSHED THE JOHNS!
|
EU now *almost* has an constitution =P
finally it seems that everyone more or less begin to agree on some serious point ! hope they will keep this way .....
