Europe’s Trash Talk

To hear Europes elites tell it, the European Union (EU) is responsible for bringing peace to a war-torn land, ensuring financial prosperity during the long years of the Cold War, and spreading democracy to the darkest corners of Europe. Its all held together, they muse, by a common civilizational bond.

These myths are crumbling now. The French and Dutch voted no on the EU constitution, eurozone economies are lagging, and social welfare systems face an impending crisis. Yet European leaders blindly press on. This time, they are peddling a new myth: Only the EU can save the world from the reckless and arrogant United States.

The EU is like Alices wonderland: words there mean whatever bureaucrats want them to mean. EU president Jean-Claude Juncker recently told reporters that the constitution was not rejected by the voters at all, as the document addressed all of their concerns. To EU leaders, no must mean yes. The strategy is to wait a year or two, then vote again, and again, until the response is favorable. Its no surprise that French President Jacques Chirac is now weighing whether the French should be asked to vote on the constitution a second time. After Denmark rejected the Maastricht Treaty in 1992, Danes were invited to return to the polls (You are just a little people. You cannot dam the Rhine, said Chancellor Helmut Kohl of Germany). Europe encouraged Ireland to hold another vote after it turned down the Nice Treaty in 2001. The only people not being asked to give it another go are the Spanish, who approved the constitution this year.

When leaders eventually go back and ask the people to approve the constitution, they will offer the standard sales pitch. They reminisce about how the EU brought peace to Europe after 1945, and about how it ensures that the continent will never see another Holocaust. But any historian worth his salt knows that peace was brought to Europe after 1945 by the military destruction and occupation of Germany, the establishment of NATO, and the defense of Europe by British, American, and Canadian forces. European integration may have helped reconcile France and Germany, but it neither created nor kept peace in Europe.

Then, of course, comes the trade myth. Britain, for example, has been told that to trade with Europe, you must be part of it. Really? Try replacing Europe in that statement with China or Chad. Does it still make sense? Britain can trade with the United States without adopting the dollar (let alone the U.S. Constitution) and neednt adopt the yen to trade with Japan.

Then theres the canard that the EU democratized Eastern Europe as well as Greece, Spain, and Portugal. In this imagining, it is the EUnot Ronald Reagan or Mikhail Gorbachevthat ended the Cold War. In fact, France and West Germany had a rather cozy relationship with the old regimes and were unhappy with Reagans policies. I do not recall the European Economic Community intervening to crush the Greek colonels, General Franco in Spain, or President Salazar in Portugal. European citizens overthrew dictatorships on their own, and then their governments applied to join the EU.

Rounding out the myths is the one about a common European civilization. Europe, on this view, is the product of progress that begins with ancient Athens, proceeds through Rome, Christendom, the Renaissance, the Enlightenment, and democracy to modernity and Brussels. From the sublime to the ridiculous, one might say. For this is very selective history. It skips over Sparta, Caligula, and Nero, the Inquisition, French and Prussian militarism, not to mention Franco, Mussolini, Hitler, and Auschwitz.

Perhaps aware of the frailty of its standard mythologies, Europes leaders have crafted a new one. According to opinion polls, Europeans consider the United States under George W. Bush the greatest threat to world peace. So European federalists now contend that there has to be a world balance of power. Everywhere it can, Europe offers itself as the civilized alternative to cowboy capitalist diplomacy. Naturally, it is dismissive of American ideas to advance democracy abroad. The EU snuggles up to the Chinese, allowing them to buy into Galileo, Europes satellite positioning system. In the Middle East, the EU is the friend of all Arabs and the enemy of Israel. On Iran and North Korea, Europe portrays itself as the mature, diplomatic alternative to Washington. The EU will aim to fulfill the anti-American dream of isolating the United States from all countries save Canada, Australia, and Britain. In this vision, Europe expands to include Turkey, Ukraine, North Africa, and perhaps even Russia. It also takes for granted that Africa, the Middle East, and Latin America will prefer to be guided by Europe, and that the Arabs and Chinese may be persuaded to someday trade in euros rather than dollars. After all, what country in its right mind would want to side with a cowboy capitalist system that threatens to impose its crude values on the rest of the planet?

But the United States should fear not. The EU will disappear far before this vision can be realized. The slow-growing eurozone has little to offer the rest of the world, unless it scraps its arcane social policies and refashions itself as a simple free trade area, such as NAFTA. It also cannot dream of providing security outside the continent, because it still relies on the United States for its own defense. For its part, Washington should stop encouraging EU expansion and realize that the arrangement is not in Americas interests.

So what will happen to the EU? One day, the whole rotten edifice will collapse beneath the weight of its contradictions, and its own electorates will help it crumble. In the meantime, the EU will roll along. Brussels has already sent an ambassador to Washington, set up the European Defence Agency, and laid down common judicial proceduresinitiatives that rely on the twice-rejected constitution to be legal. In 1992 after all, complaints about the smell emanating from Dutch pig farms prompted the EU to declare that the dung and slurry from all European farms should smell the same. Teams of sniffers or olfactrometists were created to carry this out. The EU is the only body in history to legislate the harmonization of bullsh*t. At least for now, we should expect more of the same.