On the EU folly
Shorter Daley on the EU: good fences make good neighbors.
“Consensus” has become coercion. The imperatives of federalism and ever closer union have come bang up against the basic principle of democracy: that elected governments should be answerable to their own electorates, particularly on matters that affect the lives of ordinary citizens, such as taxation and public spending. Federalism cannot allow democracy to disrupt its objectives, and democracy will not permit federalism to ignore its anger and frustration. Angela Merkel cannot do what her critics are insisting that she must do ”“ as George Osborne put it, show that she recognises “the gravity of the situation” and is “dealing with it” ”“ because her electorate will not wear it. She cannot commit herself to endless bail-outs and the under-writing of infinite Mediterranean debt, just as the Greek government cannot deliver the EU’s austerity measures ”“ because the people of both these countries do not wish it. The irresistible force has met the immovable object.
What’s going on in Europe is extremely worrisome. One thing I have never understood is how people ever believed that yoking the economically weaker nations of Europe to the stronger ones would benefit the whole. Isn’t a chain only as strong as its weakest link?
But then I remember that federalism is not always a bad thing. Witness the US: e pluribus unum.
[NOTE: Here’s the text of the Frost poem:
Something there is that doesn’t love a wall,
That sends the frozen-ground-swell under it,
And spills the upper boulders in the sun,
And makes gaps even two can pass abreast.
The work of hunters is another thing:
I have come after them and made repair
Where they have left not one stone on a stone,
But they would have the rabbit out of hiding,
To please the yelping dogs. The gaps I mean,
No one has seen them made or heard them made,
But at spring mending-time we find them there.
I let my neighbor know beyond the hill;
And on a day we meet to walk the line
And set the wall between us once again.
We keep the wall between us as we go.
To each the boulders that have fallen to each.
And some are loaves and some so nearly balls
We have to use a spell to make them balance:
‘Stay where you are until our backs are turned!’
We wear our fingers rough with handling them.
Oh, just another kind of out-door game,
One on a side. It comes to little more:
There where it is we do not need the wall:
He is all pine and I am apple orchard.
My apple trees will never get across
And eat the cones under his pines, I tell him.
He only says, ‘Good fences make good neighbors’.
Spring is the mischief in me, and I wonder
If I could put a notion in his head:
‘Why do they make good neighbors? Isn’t it
Where there are cows?
But here there are no cows.
Before I built a wall I’d ask to know
What I was walling in or walling out,
And to whom I was like to give offence.
Something there is that doesn’t love a wall,
That wants it down.’ I could say ‘Elves’ to him,
But it’s not elves exactly, and I’d rather
He said it for himself. I see him there
Bringing a stone grasped firmly by the top
In each hand, like an old-stone savage armed.
He moves in darkness as it seems to me~
Not of woods only and the shade of trees.
He will not go behind his father’s saying,
And he likes having thought of it so well
He says again, “Good fences make good neighbors.”]
On the collapse of the EEU, Janet Daley also writes,”This is going to be huge: so cataclysmic that it may summon up forms of ugliness that we have not seen walking abroad in Western Europe for half a century.”
Yep.
We will see the second murder of the middle class by government in a century over there, but this time over here too.
The marvelous novels of Alan Furst come to mind.
Two issues with the poem. There are dogs and rabbits and hunters and walls do get torn down. And frost heave is why New England fields never have a bad season for new rocks. They don’t have to import the material for those picturesque stone walls.
Also, if you have a wall, you know, beyond any reasonable doubt, whose property is whose. There need not be any suspicion about somebody encroaching. He is, or he isn’t. Keeps things from getting tense.
I wonder what the Eurocrats were thinking, presuming they could meld people who wanted to work at the Mediterranean pace and live at the Northern European economic level with people who worked at the Northern European level and saw their money going to folks who…didn’t.
Cultures vary, as Thomas Sowell said, and differences have consequences. Problem is, there are places where it’s not polite to point that out, and a Eurocrat conference is likely one of them.
One thing I have never understood is how people ever believed that yoking the economically weaker nations of Europe to the stronger ones would benefit the whole. Isn’t a chain only as strong as its weakest link?
thats cause you dont know that the EU was planned many decades before it was public (and then like liberalism hijacked into something else)? West European nations create the Council of Europe in 1949.
remember a council is a committee, is a soviet… all the same thing… as is a league… union… collective
they credit the ideas coming from the schuman plan
it basically was always a communist supreme soviet, negating voting of the countries, setting policy to merge them, opening up their borders.
ie… they did everything to the EU that a ruler would do if they had invaded and took control… but did so by assuming control under treaty… but its the SAME
the only way to withstand this onslaught of wild capitalism (as they called it) was to try to introduce the same socialist goals in all countries at once. Prior to that, the left-wing parties and the Soviet Union had opposed European integration…. From 1985 onwards they completely changed their view. The Soviets came to a conclusion and to an agreement with the left-wing parties that if they worked together they could hijack the whole European project and turn it upside down. Instead of an open market they would turn it into a federal state. Vladimir Bukovsky
Having failed to finish off conclusively the communist system, we are now in danger of integrating the resulting monster into our world. It may not be called communism anymore, but it retained many of its dangerous characteristics… Until the Nuremberg-style tribunal passes its judgment on all the crimes committed by communism, it is not dead and the war is not over Vladimir Bukovsky
[ergo the fame of the song “the war is not over”]
Yesterday, Angela Merkel told her party that the EU monetary union has to be preseved because 60% of German exports (and Germany prides itself on being Exportweltmeister) go to other European countries and they pay no international transaction fees. While the work ethic of Northern Europe can be contrasted with that of the Mediterranean countries, it is certainly true that Germany has not complained about those countries buying German products they could not afford, a practice that was certainly helped by loans from German banks. Of course, the multiculties have only seen the EU as evidence of their moral superiority. No one has been honest about the sacrifices, gains, and erosion of democratic control the whole project entails. And I’m not so sure the people wanted to know.
I’d just as soon kick California out of the Union. It’s not doing the country any favors. Isolate it like you would a viral flu outbreak and let it implode as an object lesson in what progressive policy does when played to the endgame.
Daley raises a good and interesting question: what is the appropriate level of organization of a polity? And her answer: that at which members draw the line between “us” and “them.”
It’s not at the level of the individual, or the family – cohesive, but too small to be effective at doing anything. And it’s not at the supranational (in contemporary terms) level – big enough to undertake large scale projects, but not cohesive enough to weather even a modest storm.
Apparently the bureaucrats of the EU hoped that they could paper over the manifest and profoundly deep fault lines dividing the various peoples of Europe. A few millennia of being at each others’ throats will do that.
On the EU: I have never thought it was going to work in the long term. Too much very unpleasant history to overcome. Various cultures too important to their people to give up. Very real differences between people groups. So unrealistic.
A lady I know from Scotland told how under the EU, farmers were told that they had to hire non- Scotts to work on their farms, and one particular crop-I think it was sugar beets-and apparently the scotts had factories to turn them into sugar- were outlawed in at least part of scotland because of EU rules. Also, individuals were told they could not grow certain types of potatoes-for their own table- because they were not up to “EU standards”.
Her and her husband are trying to permanently move to the US.
In 2007 I did a little reading on an organization called “Common Purpose” and its possible role inside England- pushing them deeper into the EU. At the time it was operating inside the US as well….
I think we have a similar problem to the EU’s here in the USA. Maybe not as bad because our states are held together more tightly by law than the countries in the EU and we have two centuries history (except for the Civil War) of fighting other enemies instead of ourselves. We (so far) have a common language.
BUT…I don’t think that people in states that have managed their affairs with restraint and common sense should have to bail out and pay for the idiocy of the states that haven’t. We in Texas and Kentucky (as examples) didn’t elect the nuts in the California state government. If we openly or in stealth have to pay for their errors, that is taxation without representation.
What’s the answer to this? How about following the plan put in place by our country’s founders? STATES RIGHTS.
I don’t give a tinkers dam what they do in California as long as it doesn’t mess with my wallet or liberty.
“Consensus” has become coercion”. Daley complains. Consensus has always been soft coercion, group-think. When consensus is reached, there is never a minority report.
The Ruling Class loves ‘consensus’, as it does ‘smartgrowth’, ‘charettes’, ’embrace’, ‘sustainable’, ‘renewable’, etc. I leave it to others to expand the list of Elitist code words.
To us, the citizens, the EU was for decades sold as a means to increase the bargaining/buying power of small countries on the world stage.
A farmers’ cooperative on an international scale, that’s all we were told it was.
Then, slowly, more and more power was stolen away to Brussels and Strassbourg, ostensibly to make that possible or more potent.
It wasn’t until quite recently, when the “EU constitution that we’re not supposed to call an EU constitution because it would upset the voters” was pushed through without any regard for democratic process or the will of the people did the full reality come to be apparent for most subjects (we’re no longer citizens of course, citizens have free will).
It abrogates all national sovereignty to the EU commission, which in turn does the same thing to the governments of France and Germany (not in name, but reality as those two together can push through whatever they want and it’s automatically law in all countries).
At last the French and Germans have their Europe wide empire, and not a shot had to be fired.
Expected collapse of EU is re-playing of its Biblical prototype, the collapse of Tower of Babel. Such structures are doomed because they are not included in the Creator’s grand strategy, that is, maintaining diversity and competition above uniformity and arrogance of inherently limited and flawed human knowledge. We have seen the collapse of previous attempt to unite Europe in Napoleonic empire. The same explosive of nationalism will put an end to this new attempt. The only force that can really unite Europe is non-political by its essence, namely its Christian identity, but exactly this glue was washed out by architects of EU.
“At last the French and Germans have their Europe wide empire, and not a shot had to be fired.”
Its going to be a short lived empire once the over-leveraged banks start to tumble and Greece defaults.
I’ve heard more than once, one time from an anti-American Canadian that styled himself Bandit something or other, that the EU was going to “balance” the American greed for Empire and military conquests…
How ridiculous is that now eh?