The European Dis-Union

Sometimes I wonder if I'm being a bit too harsh on the Eurocrats and their dream of a unified Europe. I'm very much against the idea of the EU, not because of what it creates, but for what it destroys. I believe that it will be the end of many nations as we know them. I also believe that the EU is nothing more than an attempt to copy and "improve on" the institutions of the US. It seems rather arrogant of the Eurocrats to think that they can improve on the system that we've been tweaking and perfecting for over 210 years.

So as I'm surfing the web tonight, I come across this article in the New Zealand Herald which seems to provide an independent third party verification of my belief that the EU is unworkable politically.

There is a quote in the article from the Danish Prime Minister, who says:

"You can talk as much as you like about a common foreign and security policy," Danish Prime Minister Anders Fogh Rasmussen said. "But the fact is that when the moment comes along, a series of countries - the big ones - do not want to give up self-determination."

I wonder if Chriac will tell Mr. Rasmussen to shut up. The basic problem with the EU, and the cause of the current rift in the organization, is now out in the open. The EU is essentially an attempt to annex the smaller European nations into the bigger ones. Small nations like Denmark, Holland, and Luxembourg would lose everything - they would cease to exist - while the big players like France and Germany would be enhanced by being able to "speak" for the new European citizens. The big nations get bigger, the small disappear. Is it any wonder that there is a split in the EU between the large nations and the small ones?

And all of this with the goal of establishing a political counterweight to the US. The primary proponents of the EU truly believe that they can create a federalist government, in the image of, but better than, the US government. They believe that because European civilization goes back thousands of years that they will have some special insight that will make their federalist experiment more successful than ours.

But they have forgotten why the US is so successful. It isn't the government that makes us successful, it is the American people that make America successful. Are we better or smarter than Europeans? No. The playing field is pretty level in all reality. So what advantages does an American have over a European that makes us more successful?

We really have three major advantages: true freedom of the press, laissez-faire capitalism, and a common language.

Is our press really more free than the European press? Well, our major news outlets are private. We don't have an equivalent of the BBC or the French state media. The closest we come is NPR Public Radio. We can get our news in any form we want: filtered, unfiltered, conservative, liberal, whatever. We can choose between Fox and CNN, instead of BBC 1 or BBC 2. We can read the NY Times or the Wall Street Journal. Our choice isn't limited to Le Monde or La Figaro. Think about the coverage of the war in the US. We were simultaneously in a quagmire and a cakewalk (the truth turned out to be in the middle), depending on what news source you chose to read. But you had both sides available to you. In France, they apparently still think we're stuck in a quagmire outside of Umm Qasr. The French press is so tightly interlaced with the government that they weren't able to accurately report on the progress of the war. Is that true freedom of the press?

If there is any one trait that truly gives us an advantage, it is laissez-faire capitalism. Capitalism isn't the perfect system, it does allow for unfair suffering, but at the same time no one has developed a better system. Communism failed. And the European socialist experiment will fail as surely as the Soviet Socialist experiment did. Why? A government can't support unemployment of 10-15%. It will bankrupt them. Capitalism also encourages innovation in Americans. We have been creating most of the truly important advances of the last 30-40 years. Why? Because we let people reap the rewards of their efforts, as opposed to the socialists who attempt to redistribute those rewards to the "less fortunate."

Someone once said that representative governments fail when people realize that the can vote themselves government handouts. Our government has survived so well for this long because capitalism allows for better rewards than the government dole. Socialism, however, attempts to make everyone more or less equal in economic stature, which makes the dole seem like a pretty good alternative.

Short term, however, it will appear that our common language is our greatest strength. In America, a person in California can read and understand what a New Yorker has done, without the need for translation and all of the potential problems inherent in translations. But someone in Warsaw will need a translation to learn about what someone in Madrid has done. At the governmental level this isn't a big deal. But at the laborer level, where wealth is truly created, this will be a big problem. The inefficiencies of multiple languages will forever retard the growth potential of the EU.

All of this will only serve to weaken the EU federal government. Our federal government works so well not because of its structure or design (although those certainly help), but because of the American people.

Until the Germans and Brits are willing to call themselves French and vice versa, the Federalist EU is doomed to be an impotent failure. You can copy the system, but not the people that make the system.