Steyn On EU-And What The Broohaha Means

[Annie]

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/opinion/main.jhtml?xml=/opinion/2005/06/21/do2102.xml

An everyday fantasy of farming folk
By Mark Steyn
(Filed: 21/06/2005)

My favourite headline last week was in the International Herald Tribune: "EU leaders and voters see paths diverge." Traditionally in free societies, when the paths of the leaders and the voters "diverge", it's the leaders who depart the scene. But apparently in the EU this is too vulgar and "Anglo-Saxon", and so the great permanent Eurocracy decided instead to offer up Euro-variations on Bertolt Brecht's jest about the need to elect a new people. Whatever the rejection of the European constitution means, it certainly doesn't mean the rejection of the European constitution.

"I really believe the French and Dutch did not vote no to the constitutional treaty," insisted Jean-Claude Juncker, the "President" of "Europe", continuing to celebrate his stunning victory in the referendum. Even if the French and Dutch had been boorish enough to want to vote no to the constitution, they would have been incapable of so doing, as the whole thing was designed to be way above their pretty little heads.

"It is not possible for anyone to understand the full text," declared Valery Giscard d'Estaing. "Europe's Jefferson" has apparently become Europe's Jefferson Airplane, boasting about the impenetrability of his hallucinogenic lyrics. The point is the French and Dutch shouldn't have read beyond the opening sentence: "We the people agree to leave it to you the people who know better than the people."

The Guardian is still sufficiently Anglo-Saxon that it's not entirely comfortable signing on to such exquisitely Gallic disdain, so yesterday they settled for that familiar refuge of the pompous - the old lofty sonorous plague-on-both-their-houses shtick: "The European democratic deficit is not only a matter of secretive or unresponsive leaders but of muddled and unrealistic citizens, and both must change their ways."

The Guardian seems to resent the way Europeans refuse to vote as "Europeans": instead, Britons vote as Britons, Dutch vote as Dutch. For years, Britain's Eurosceptics were presented as some kind of aberration in a union of sophisticated continentals at ease with their European identity. But it turns out even the principal beneficiaries of the European Union aren't that European: French farmers vote as French farmers. The thinness of the veneer of European identity among its core demographics ought to bother the Europhiles far more than the UKIP voters do.

In that sense, who's being "unrealistic"? The European political landscape is like a reverse version of Hans Christian Andersen - the Emperor's subjects' new clothes. "To a fool, Your Majesty, the people in the streets as your carriage rolls by will appear as gnarled old French rustics grasping for their Euro-booty or German racists twitchy about Turks. Only a wise man such as yourself and the Guardian's editorialists will see them as sophisticated post-nationalist Europeans fully committed to pan-continental institutions." [...]