Thanks for the post, AF. I think the small but significant voter "cold feet" around the EU toward its endorsement is a sign that people aren't satisfied with the issues surrounding sovereignty; I think it could relate to the lack of progress in that direction. For example, if I were living in England and the Euro were to replace its currency, I would miss the British pound, for example. It expresses history and nationality, and every citizen whose hands it contacts is reminded where he is and why that's important.
Furthermore, I don't think the EU constitution is a trivial issue. It has sovereignty implications. As you so aptly put it, "[T]he evolution of the EU as something that has begun to compete with the nation-states in terms of sovereignty." I think the challenge of these states is to focus on improved freedom and commerce -- both among themselves and for other people outside the EU. To the extent that the EU can encourage those goals, it can benefit Europeans of every member country. To the extent that it serves as a Trojan horse for socialism, collectivism, and the decay of European culture, I want to fight it, and put everything I can lend Europe into fighting it. Which will it be? Americans are not so sure. If Europeans aren't so sure, then isn't there a lot more work to do?
I realize that to the average "multiculturalist" European, there is no risk involved with unlimited immigration, diluted empire, and a resignation to one-continent government. But in the days after the 60th anniversary of D-day, this American is not so willing to go in that direction. I would like to stir up a Reagan Revolution of sorts in Europe. I want to reignite an enthusiasm for independence from government, passion for the Anglo-Saxon definition of freedom, and the respect for human dignity and life that fueled the American revolution, the industrial revolution, and most recently unified us in opposition to Hitler and Stalin. I want Europeans to put down their lattes for just long enough to realize that WWII is still being fought out in our own minds, and we could lose it if we're not careful. This surreal sense of freedom and economic "independence" we share across the northern hemisphere, including Japan, may not last if we do not revisit the formative principles that set us on a course for modernity and intellectual progress.
We could lose it all to apathy and indifference. The arrogance of humanism, and of assuming that history is continually progressive will end all that we have paid so dearly in blood over the past 400 years to achieve. I am not at all certain that an EU is going to help us rekindle the spirit of watchfulness and guardianship that we most need now. In that sense, I find it irrelevant.
Our American universities are filled with Marxist professors who detest dead, white European intellectuals. Must we have the collapse of their homelands, as well? I want the western half of the northern hemisphere to continue leading the world toward Liberte, egalite, and fraternite, only perhaps with a little less Rousseau and a little more Benjamin Franklin. With what we've seen in the last 35 years, I think it's safe to say that our pan-Atlantic obligation to fan the flames of freedom is on shaky ground. It's one reason we are so lucky to have you online with us and striving for a vantage point from which both sides of the Atlantic can see the way forward together. As we have often discussed, the war for hearts and minds is also being fought at home, right here on our own university campuses, in our own media, and in our own primary schools.
I'm sure Margaret Thatcher would say something about there being no such thing as society. And she would say that the battle is being lost at the family level. American, British, French, and German families should be raising their young to idealize a bright future for the separate nations of the North Atlantic separately on an individual basis and together on an economic one; there is a lot to share culturally, as well as to appreciate in our differences. But the EU will fail if it doesn't take the latter into consideration.
Ten years ago now, I was thrilled by the music of Zbigniew Preisner in Krzysztof Kieslowski's of Rouge, a film that indirectly addressed the groundbreaking effort to create the EU. The central character's husband had been a composer who was writing a symphony to celebrate the inauguration of the union, but he was killed in a car accident. The optimism of the early 1990s was very strong in this film, and it was contagious. Was I for the EU? Then, I can say yes. Now? Many of the assumptions we all were making then have fallen away. I now have an even deeper sense of optimism, but it comes with the painful knowledge that history is not over, and war is always only as far away as a free peoples' unwillingness to sacrifice to preserve it. Today I think there is a global union of those who strive for freedom. We know each other, and we know ourselves. It transcends states, and it transcends cultures. Today, I would take more of a lesson from the Poles in their struggle for their freedom. I wonder what would Kieslowski have Van den Budenmayer composing today?
Valentine contemplating the music of her lost husband.