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Giscard demurs
One wonders when and how the EU fantasy will collapse. Even today, some seem dubious about the basic principle of managerial universalism, and if they’re French they sometimes say so: ‘Asiatic’ Turkey is threat to EU, warns Giscard. Among many interesting features of the article, note the response of the right-wing reporter (Ambrose Evans-Pritchard) for the right-wing Telegraph: “M Giscard’s outburst in Le Monde raised doubts about his fitness to continue presiding over the Convention on the Future of Europe.” Something so crazy couldn’t be a “comment,” it could only be an “outburst,” and it seems that one’s fitness to plan for the future depends on his commitment to the common fantasy. As the Pim Fortuyn situation and other recent events show, they just don’t make right-wingers like they used to. Posted by Jim Kalb at November 12, 2002 11:05 AM | Send Comments
Giscard is right, of course, although I suspect he will soon recant. (His statement has already been refuted by the Euro Commission.) A “European Union” with Turkey as a member is not European at all. But the point of the enterprise is Union, not European. At the same time, Giscard’s “outburst” exposes his own hypocrisy. He is an arch-eurofederaliser, working to subsume Europe’s historic nation-states in the uninspiring, socialist, technocratic blob that is the EU. No true conservative he. But even as he seeks to destroy the distinct national characters of European nations, he does not want to admit Asiatic nations. Why has he not applied his wariness of the Asiatics to Moslem immigration to France, which is proving ever more destructive to the former first daughter of the Church? When he was president of France, he only made Moslem and African immigration easier. Giscard is not as perceptive as General de Gaulle, who understood what the goals of the Common Market (as it then was) really were. Not that it was hard to understand: the blueprint for a federal European super-state predates the Treaty of Rome. De Gaulle’s alternative of “l’Europe des patries” was more faithful to Europe’s traditions, and certainly would have had no room for the Turks. The General remembered Lepanto and the sieges of Vienna, reluctant though he might be to discuss France’s collaborations with the Ottomans. Many claim the mantle, but Charles de Gaulle’s heirs in French politics today are Jean-Marie Le Pen and Philippe de Villiers, not Giscard or Chirac. It is sad to see E-P, whose dispatches from Washington were the most honest coverage of the Clinton scandals and who has always covered Brussels with a gimlet eye, succumb to mandatory multiculturalism. Conrad Black must be requiring it. In American terms, the Telegraph is neo-conservative, and one should remember how eager U.S. neocons and The Wall Street Journal are to see Turkey brought within the EU. Some of it is to buck up Israel’s only Middle Eastern ally, and some of it must be to introduce to Europe, via an open Turkish conduit, the delights of diversity that mass immigration across our unguarded southern border brings to the United States. We should ignore the fact that the Turks just elected an Islamist government, of course. HRS Posted by: Howard Sutherland on November 12, 2002 1:23 PM |