Mid-Life Crisis For The EU Leviathan
[VDARE.COM note:
The
same thing
is happening here! See Juan Mann`s
Call It Treason: Flake-Gutierrez Bill Immigration
Insanity And Merger With Mexico.]
The 50th birthday of the European Union, born in Rome
in March 1957 as the European Economic Community or
Common Market—of Germany, France, Italy, Belgium,
Holland and Luxembourg—was a pallid affair.
Understandably so. For though the EU has expanded to
embrace 27 nations and boasts an economy equal to that
of the United States, it is like a man well into
middle-age whose career accomplishments are behind him.
The EU birthday party was further proof, were any
needed, that no transnational institution can elicit the
love and loyalty of a country. World Government is a
vision of elites no patriot will ever embrace. Men have
died in the millions for
Poland,
France,
Italy,
England and
Germany. Who would walk through fire for the
European Union?
The EU`s champions claim its great achievement is to
have kept the peace of Europe. "Sixty years of peace
means that the image of the EU as a bastion against war
is losing its resonance," said Jose Manuel Barroso,
head of the European Commission, the executive arm that
sits in Brussels. [At
50, EU defies doubters,
By David R. Sands, Washington Times, March 25,
2007 ]
Intending no disrespect to Barroso, it was not the EU
that keep Europe secure and at peace. America kept the
Red Army from the Elbe and the Rhine. America saved
Western Europe from the fate of the
Hungarians in 1956, the
Czechs in 1968 and the
Poles in 1981. America pulled the British and French
chestnuts out of the
Balkan fires of the
1990s.
German-French amity is a product of statesmanship,
but also of the
defeat of France in 1940 and the reduction of
Germany to rubble by the American, British and Soviet
armies in 1944-1945.
The 50th anniversary of the EU brought to the fore as
many questions as telegrams of congratulations. Quo
vadis? Where is Europe going?
Other than commerce, what is the EU all about? Why is
Europe so strategically impotent? What happened to the
continent that was the cockpit of history?
According to a poll published by The Washington
Times, not half the citizens of its 27 member states
think positively of the EU. Only 28 percent of Brits
think well of it. Only a third believes EU membership is
good for Great Britain.
After a committee led by ex-President Giscard
d`Estaing of France wrote a constitution, setting the EU
on course toward a "United States of Europe,"
France and Holland voted it down. Resentment of the
"faceless bureaucrats of Brussels," where the
European Commission sits, is rampant.
As the votes in Holland and France show, nationalism
is tearing at the aging fabric of European unity. Nor is
the EU deeply democratic. Giscard is demanding another
vote because, as he says, the French "got it wrong."
They must vote again and again, `til they get it right.
This is the soft tyranny of an elite that knows better
than the people what is best for the people.
Many in Europe oppose plans to bring in new members,
especially
Turkey, an
Islamic nation of 70 million, which will soon be
more populous than Germany.
This raises another issue. Not one member of the EU
has a
birthrate among its native born to enable it to
survive in its present form.
Europe`s welfare states are failing to produce the
babies to replace the aging and shrinking population.
Thus, virtually all the nations of Western Europe are
undergoing invasions—from the Mahgreb, Middle East,
South Asia or sub-Saharan Africa.
Yet, asked if they agree that "immigrants
contribute a lot to my country," only 40 percent of
EU citizens said, "Yes." Hostility to immigration
is strongest in Eastern Europe. Not one in five
Hungarians, Czechs, Estonians, Latvians or Slovakians
thinks immigration is good for their country. They want
to remain who they are, and their country to remain what
it has been.
When Chancellor Angela Merkel, hostess of the party,
drafted a "birthday card," the
Berlin Declaration, even that created dissension and
division.
Some nations objected to any mention of the new
constitution. Vaclav Havel of the Czech Republic called
the declaration
"Orwellian Eurospeak." Poland
objected to the failure to mention Christianity as
birth mother of Europe. Pope Benedict XVI called the
failure to credit Christianity an act of "apostasy."
The
Christophobic French elite got their way again.
What the malaise of the EU tells us is what patriots
have already known. Democracy and free markets are not
enough. Dry documents, no matter how eloquent, abstract
ideas, no matter how beautiful, do not a nation make.
What makes a people and a nation is a unique history
and heritage, language and literature, songs and
stories, traditions and customs, blood, soil and the
mystic chords of memory.
The EU is a thing of paper, an intellectual
construct. Unlike a
nation, it has no heart and no soul. And if and when
it passes into history because of some irreconcilable
dispute, many may regret it. Few will weep.
COPYRIGHT
CREATORS SYNDICATE, INC.
Patrick J. Buchanan needs
no introduction to VDARE.COM
readers; his book
State of Emergency: The Third World Invasion and
Conquest of America,
can be ordered from
Amazon.com.


