Europe's Problem--and Ours (Will E.U. Choose Collectivism Over Individualism? Will We?)

Vaclav Klaus, president of the Czech Republic, was recently in Washington to meet with President Bush and release his new book, "On the Road to Democracy." When the Berlin Wall fell in 1989 and the Velvet Revolution came to Czechoslovakia, Mr. Klaus became finance minister in the new democracy. He became prime minister in 1992, and later president. His market principles replaced communism with freedom and choice; he liberated prices and foreign trade, deregulated markets and privatized state ownership of assets. Communism was dismantled and prosperity came to his country.

But now President Klaus sees an unsettling new challenge: the zeal of Old Europe--France, Germany, Brussels--to impose collective choices on New Europe--Poland, Denmark, the Czech Republic, Ireland. "Ten years ago," Mr. Klaus writes, "the dominant slogan was: 'deregulate, liberalize, privatize.' Now the slogan is different; 'regulate . . . get rid of your sovereignty and put it in the hands of international institutions and organizations.' "

"The current European unification process is not predominantly about opening up," he continues, "It is about introducing massive regulation and protection, about imposing uniform rules, laws, and policies." It is about a "rush into the European Union which is currently the most visible and the most powerful embodiment of ambition to create something else--supposedly better--than a free society."

That "the premise that government is ultimately a benevolent force, obliged to guarantee equal outcomes by redistributing benefits and privileges between individuals and groups."

This is well put. But it is largely between groups that such benefits and privileges are redistributed, regardless of the status of individual group members. For one thing, it's easier, for another, it fits with the intellectual currents that have prevailed in Old Europe for the last half century or so.

Herein lies the real problem, IMHO. It isn't a difference in emphasis between individualism and collectivism that is the proximate cause of this conflict, it is the very existence of the individual as a creature apart from the groups in which he is classified, however arbitrarily, that is the issue, an existence Marx and his heirs stoutly denied.

Certainly this seems reflected in the relentless insistence on centralization within the EU political structure and its concentration of power within the hands of a supposedly enlightened few. That is not only poor economics, it is poor politics as well, but it is extremely attractive for those accustomed to dealing exclusively in group dynamics. It is not an open society in the Popperian sense at all.

We see this in the United States all the time in the "diversity is our strength" argument for whose proponents diversity on an individual level is ruthlessly discouraged. To a Brussels bureaucrat the wonder of Europe is this sort of limited diversity - it is made up of Greeks and Poles and Danes and Germans, to be sure, but a Greek Buddhist who likes Mozart has no place in it at all. He isn't Greek enough. As an individual he doesn't exist, only as a unit of a collective identity.

This is a severe philosophical problem masked as politics, and it makes one wonder if the Western intellectual tradition isn't truly dead.

good post my man...

also check out the EU commisssion and their accounting rules. basically the EU comission get 5 or 6 billion each year to run.

they are using single entry accouting (not the usual double entry-- debit and credit)...something the accounting had abandoned maybe 300 year ago due to obvious potential for huge fraud. about 200 MILLION disappears each year and they cant find it! I AM NOT MAKING THIS UP!!!

these are the people we should trust...not with my cash you dont!

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