Terrible news: European integration movement is stronger than ever

Despite the defeat of the European constitution in a couple of national referenda, and the resulting conclusion, so sweet to our ears, that the constitution was stalled or even dead, it turns out that European integration is nevertheless proceeding full speed ahead. Writing in The Times (around November 25, I can’t find the web page), Anthony Browne offers a catalogue of integration measures that were passed over a period of a few days. When I first read this I thought it was a parody, but it’s not:

[T]he government has indeed agreed in principle to give up its final say on which airlines fly into Britain as part of a harmonised EU aviation-safety regime. The main part of the regime—which, an official admitted to me, involves a wholesale transfer of powers from the UK’s Civil Aviation Authority to the European Aviation Safety Agency in Cologne—was announced last week by the European Commission. Whatever the merits of transferring control of aviation safety in Britain’s skies from London to Brussels, Luxembourg and Cologne—and they do exist—don’t expect to hear a debate about it. ‘It is very politically sensitive,’ one EU official told me.

The day after the Commission announced it was taking control of ‘the entire field of aviation safety’, it announced plans to control the regulation of much of the biotech industry. It unveiled ‘new EU-wide rules to facilitate gene, cell and tissue-based therapies’ which will cover ‘all advanced therapies within a single, integrated and tailored European regulatory framework’—a potentially critical development for the UK, which leads in this vital technology. A few days later, European governments took a major first step to creating a single European defence market, as part of their strategy of turning the EU from simply an economic and political power into a military power, with a military-industrial base to rival America’s. The following day the EU declared an ‘historic’ agreement by its members to harmonise their overseas aid policies, saying it will add to the geopolitical clout of the Union.

And that was all in one week, during the so-called period of reflection after the Dutch and French rejected the European constitution. Reflection is, apparently, EU-speak for exhausting action—and for doing things the same old way.

Brown concludes:

It is awe-inspiring, living in Brussels, to see the fight for power between national governments and the EU capital. What is even more awe-inspiring is how the EU capital’s determination to gain power always—one way or another—trumps the national capitals’ rather limp insistence on the need to keep it. The French and Dutch ‘No’ votes may have killed off the constitution. They certainly didn’t kill off European integration.

A correspondent writes:

With all possible respect, anyone who thought the EU was going to collapse because it couldn’t get the constitution passed was so utterly ignorant of how the EU works that I must advise you never to listen to another word they say on the subject. This idea is not just poor analysis, it is barking mad cloud cuckoo fantasy on a par with imagining that the US government would collapse the day after Kennedy was shot. No seriously informed person I know would even bother debating such a bizarre notion.

The EU has functioned for decades without a constitution, operating on the basis of its enabling treaties, and has no fundamental need of one, to do what it does, whatsoever. (I would point out that the EU itself, and its member governments, say this openly; it is not a canard of mine.) The EU will gladly go fishing, like the governments of Jordan, the USSR, China, or Kuwait, for the window-dressing of democratic legitimacy, as this makes things easier for it on a PR level, but it is fundamentally and essential a non-democratic, indeed anti-democratic, undertaking that does not sincerely believe it needs democratic legitimacy.

I mean this not as angry hyperbole, but as a 100% cold statement of fact. I have been trying for years to get Americans to understand how bad the EU is. It is ten times as dangerous as al Qaeda and four times as dangerous as China. It is a rival aspiring nucleus to world government and a much more seductive adversary than either, as shown by the fact that Americans have yet to realize it is even an enemy. It is a more deadly enemy than the USSR, because it has a much better chance of winning: its ideology doesn’t require economic self-sabotage and it is infinitely more sophisticated in the liberal-authoritarian techniques effective under late consumerism.

Posted by Lawrence Auster at December 04, 2005 05:21 PM | Send