Friday, June 20, 2008

Constructing a Plain of Chaos

Writing in The American Thinker, Soren Kern reflects on Ireland’s Lisbon Treaty vote and the motives behind EUvium in general:

One of the main objectives of the virtually unreadable treaty is to turn the EU into a "global geopolitical actor" that can counterbalance the United States on the world stage. To achieve this, European elites say the EU needs to speak with "one voice" in international affairs. In this context, the new treaty is designed to create the job position of (an unelected) European president as well as a powerful European foreign minister. It would also establish a European diplomatic corps with European embassies and a European army.

As many observers of European politics know, democracy does not come easy on a continent where European elites view themselves as an aristocracy entitled to rule over the ignorant masses. Indeed, the entire European social welfare state has been built upon the unspoken quid pro quo of "bread and circuses" (ie, the cradle-to-grave nanny state) for the general populace, in exchange for their loyal submission to the political and intellectual classes.
It’s not that they shouldn’t be a super-state, it’s that they aren’t by any means prepared or disposed to the meaning and responsibilities of it. Case in point is the very forced looking nature of all of the stage-managed “historic steps,” conferences, and such, each named in a near Soviet manner for one city or another as if the continent were already a coherent realm or huge metropolitan plain. It isn’t – the EU’s disposition is akin to a thousand unexploded bomblets of unwanted public opinion about the overly complex, indirect, and bureaucratic to the point of always seeming to be hiding something.
Thus it should come as no big surprise that the word ‘No' does not exist in the European political lexicon. After voters in France and the Netherlands rejected the European Constitution (of which the Lisbon Treaty is an almost exact replica) in 2005, European elites famously advised the miscreants to keep voting until they come up with the right answer.\
I take these rejections for what they are: rather than fearful rejection people wanting clear rights and transparency.

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