Newsday, NY
June 21 2005

In rejection of the EU, voices of pride

James P. Pinkerton
June 21, 2005

GENEVA

This is a great place to observe the workings – and unworkings – of
the European Union, because the Swiss were never dumb enough to get
caught up in the politico-bureaucratic trap of the EU.

The failure of the European Union to become a “United States of
Europe” provides a cautionary lesson to all those – on the right as
well as the left – who think national borders and cultural traditions
are just so many scraps of paper to be trampled upon in the name of
some abstract global Good.

The Swiss are nobody’s enemy. They haven’t fought a foreign war since
1815. Indeed, they are eager to trade with anyone, as well as offer
foreigners those famously secretive Swiss bank accounts.

But precisely because Switzerland became a rich country by doing its
own thing, the Swiss never wanted to join the EU, the 25-member-state
conglomeration that stretches from Portugal to Finland to Greece.

The EU has been in the news lately because voters in two linchpin
countries, France and Holland, voted down the proposed EU
constitution that would have cemented the Union. That constitution
was a 474-page brick of a document, written by pan-European elites
who wanted to flatten the continent, politically, so that decisions
about the fate of 450 million people would be made in Brussels, far
beyond the reach of any mere individual nation.

Americans, who prize state and local control of their government,
would immediately reject any similar attempt to move political
authority to Washington, let alone move it to a coalition of
foreigners headquartered in a foreign country. But most observers
thought that the Europeans were different and that people there would
vote for the new EU constitution, thus forever mixing the Irish and
the Spanish and the Maltese into the same Brussels blender for the
benefit of multicultural business, as well as multicultural politics.
But of course, because true democracy is impossible when the voters
speak 100 different languages, the EU constitution would have ushered
in a perpetual Eurocratic reign.

Well, now we know the stubborn truth about Europe. In voting down the
constitution, Europeans demonstrated that they, too, have a pride of
place and reverence for their unique traditions. They don’t want to
see their flags, anthems and everything else buried by red tape from
a centralized Eurocracy.

Indeed, not only has ratification of the constitution been put on
hold, but efforts to enact a new EU budget are deadlocked as well.
And now the euro currency is under siege. “People will tell you
Europe is not in a crisis – it is in a profound crisis,” Luxembourg
Prime Minister Jean-Claude Juncker told Reuters after he chaired the
latest failed summit of EU chieftains.

Of course, what Juncker, a prototypical Euro-litist, regards as a
“crisis” would be regarded by others as a somewhat belated outbreak
of common sense. That’s because the EU elites weren’t eager to create
just a hulking European superstate. They wanted to create an even
bigger Eurasian superstate, by including Turkey and possibly other
Muslim and Arab countries.

Turkey, population 70 million, is a relatively modern and democratic
Muslim country, even if it has yet to properly account for, or
apologize for, its massacre of more than a million Armenians during
World War I. But Turkey has only the barest toehold in Europe,
physically, ethnically and religiously. Its capital and most of its
population are in what the Romans were the first to call Asia Minor,
and most of its people bow down to pray toward Mecca. And so for the
EU elites to seek to bring Turkey into their union was proof those
elites were dismissive of “Europe” all along. What the EU-ers really
wanted was an intercontinental empire, as big as possible, reaching
everywhere possible.

Most people want peaceful trade and travel. The Swiss had it right
all along. And so, like an earlier polyglot project dreamed up by the
powerful, the Tower of Babel, the EU is now falling.