Melanie Phillips:
Like the demise of Mark Twain, rumours of the death of the European Union have been greatly exaggerated.
The implications of yesterday’s French referendum on the EU constitution were amply summed up in advance by Luxembourg’s Jean-Claude Juncker, the current EU president, when he declared that if the French said ‘oui’ European integration would proceed, and if they said ‘non’ European integration would proceed.
That’s what the EU means by ‘consulting the people’. That’s why France’s President Chirac threatened that if the French voted no, they would be made to vote again until they said yes. No doubt such a fate will befall the Dutch if they vote ‘nee’ in their own referendum this Wednesday, unless they do so by an overwhelming majority.
In any event, this whole crisis has been more about political momentum rather than any possible real change in direction. For regardless of the constitution, the reality is that the countries of the EU are already the helpless captives of an all-encompassing, anti-democratic bureaucracy with a life of its own.
Much of the constitution was always going to be imposed upon us anyway through the seemingly endless wrinkles in existing EU treaties. Indeed, the creation of an EU diplomatic service and the harmonisation of criminal justice are already well under way.
In other words, nothing so trivial as the will of the people would ever be allowed to derail the EU project, which has come to define the world view for a whole class of politicians, bureaucrats and lawyers who have governed the nations of Europe for a generation.
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What even the French ‘non’ voters don’t seem to grasp is that the whole EU edifice rests on a set of fantasy foundations. The first is the premise that the nation states of Europe have common interests.
In fact, they have rather more irreconcilable social, political and cultural differences — and their economic interests lie in being in competition with each other, the very thing the EU is in business to stifle.
The second great myth is that the EU can become a rival global power to the US: the social welfare state versus the unbridled free-market. Euro-fanatics are so wrapped up in this infantile hostility that they have failed to notice that the world has moved on.
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The third fantasy is that the nation state is the cause of war and only the supra-national EU has kept the peace in Europe since World War 11.
This is the most dangerous rubbish of all. Peace in Europe was guaranteed by NATO and the Atlantic alliance. Indeed, it is when self-government is suppressed and national identity threatened that people turn violent.
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