Free Republic

The headquarters for the company I work for is just outside of Paris. I got back this last Saturday from a week long business trip. Being as right wing as a guy can be, I really did not want to go. I was in the Navy and have traveled abroad extensively. I had been to Europe on vacation in 1996 as well. Since 9/11, I have had no desire to leave the US. My classmates hailed from the countries of South Africa, Brazil, Spain, Thailand, and Hungary. I decided to leave the Justin's here in the States and go incognito...

Three years ago -December 2002 - I was asked to take part in a symposium on Europe and began with the observation: "I find it easier to be optimistic about the futures of Iraq and Pakistan than, say, Holland or Denmark." At the time, this was taken as confirmation of my descent into insanity. I can't see why. Compare, for example, the Iraqi and the European constitutions: which would you say reflected a shrewder grasp of the realities on the ground? Or take last week's attacks in Jordan by a quartet of Abu Musab al-Zarqawi's finest suicide bombers. The day...

The European Right? Rimbauds, Not Rambos By Mark Steyn Most of us are familiar with the subtle differences between even relatively compatible cultures. One notes, for example, that what’s known to Americans as “The Hokey-Pokey” is called in Britain “The Hokey-Cokey.” Just when you think you’ve figured out what it’s all about, it turns out you haven’t quite grasped all the nuances. Accustomed as I am to these linguistic variations, I was nevertheless brought up short browsing the Guardian the other day and reading that Angela Merkel’s election victory would make Germany “the 20th of the 25 EU nations with...

After the 2000 elections, George W. Bush became president without a majority vote. Many Europeans snickered at the sorry spectacle of the world's oldest continuous democracy devolving into Third-World election chaos. Few critics cared to hear about the nature of America's two-century-old Electoral College.

The new chasm between Europe and the United States seems to widen still — even as transatlantic diplomats assure us that it has narrowed — despite a common heritage and a supposedly shared goal of global democracy, free markets, and defeating terrorists. Europeans sell arms to autocratic China that will threaten democratic Taiwan. They legitimize the terrorists of Hamas and Hezbollah, and mostly caricature the American efforts at democratizing the Middle East. All this follows the past appeasement of Yasser Arafat, strife over the Kyoto protocols and the International Criminal Court, and the use of the United Nations to hamstring...

Responding to Islamist terrorism in Britain and elsewhere, Germany is considering introducing a Muslim public holiday. As Mathias Dopfner, chief executive of Axel Springer, put it: "A substantial fraction of Germany's government - and, if polls are to be believed, the German people - believe that creating an official state Muslim holiday will somehow spare us from the wrath of fanatical Islamists." Great. At least the 1930s' appeasers did it on their own time. But, in recasting appeasement as yet another paid day off, the new proposal cunningly manages to combine the worst instincts of the old Europe and the...

WASHINGTON — The NATO alliance so far has refrained from considering the withdrawal of hundreds of U.S. tactical nuclear weapons from military bases in Europe, despite growing calls to do so by members of European governments and political figures (see GSN, April 22). Opponents had hoped to see the question discussed at a biannual meeting of NATO defense ministers in Brussels on June 9. That did not occur, NATO spokesman James Appathurai said in a telephone interview yesterday. During a classified meeting of NATO’s Nuclear Planning Group during the session, he said, German Defense Minister Peter Struck described the state...

My favourite headline last week was in the International Herald Tribune: "EU leaders and voters see paths diverge." Traditionally in free societies, when the paths of the leaders and the voters "diverge", it's the leaders who depart the scene. But apparently in the EU this is too vulgar and "Anglo-Saxon", and so the great permanent Eurocracy decided instead to offer up Euro-variations on Bertolt Brecht's jest about the need to elect a new people. Whatever the rejection of the European constitution means, it certainly doesn't mean the rejection of the European constitution. "I really believe the French and Dutch did...

A couple of days before Sunday’s referendum on the European constitution, Jean-Claude Juncker, the “president” of the European Union, let French and Dutch voters know how much he values their opinion: “If at the end of the ratification process, we do not manage to solve the problems, the countries that would have said ‘No,’ would have to ask themselves the question again,” “President” Juncker told the Belgian newspaper Le Soir. Got that? You have the right to vote, but only if you give the answer your rulers want you to give. But don’t worry, if you don’t, we’ll treat you...

The Eurofetishists can't seem to agree their line on this referendum business. On the one hand, the Guardian's headline writer was packing up and heading for the hills — "Europe is plunged into crisis" — and EU leaders warned that "Europe" might cease to function. Oh, come on. We won't get that lucky. On balance, Jean-Claude Juncker, the "president" of "Europe", seems closer to the mark in his now famous dismissal of the will of the people: "If it's a Yes, we will say 'on we go', and if it's a No we will say 'we continue'." And if it's...

WESTERN EUROPE It is likely Western Europe will slowly be Islamicized over the next two centuries, even in time the remoter areas like Norway, Ireland, and Portugal, as Muslim populations, through high birthrates and immigration, surpass the numbers of native Europeans. Only if the Muslims become more secular, in the manner of many Turkish Muslims, by several generations in Western Europe will that region avoid becoming Austro-stan, Belgo-stan, Holland-stan, etc. What might eventuate will be some sort of hybrid Euro-Middle Eastern culture, such as Albania and Bosnia have today. Both those nations, formerly purely European racially and at least nominally...

If I were Pope - and no, don't worry, I'm not planning a mid-life career change - but, if I were, I'd be a little irked at the secular media's inability to discuss religion except through the prism of their moral relativism. That's why last weekend's grand old man - James Callaghan - got a more sympathetic send-off than this weekend's. The Guardian's headline writer billed Sunny Jim as a man "whose consensus politics were washed away in the late 1970s". Is it possible to have any meaningful "consensus" between, on the one hand, closed-shop council manual workers demanding a...

If I were Pope — and no, don't worry, I'm not planning a mid-life career change — but, if I were, I'd be a little irked at the secular media's inability to discuss religion except through the prism of their moral relativism. That's why last weekend's grand old man — James Callaghan — got a more sympathetic send-off than this weekend's. The Guardian's headline writer billed Sunny Jim as a man "whose consensus politics were washed away in the late 1970s". Is it possible to have any meaningful "consensus" between, on the one hand, closed-shop council manual workers demanding a...

Q: Conservative essayists have been tossing around the idea that America's natural allies are in a cultural alliance known as the Anglosphere: the U.S., U.K., Australia, New Zealand, and Canada (with perhaps India as an honorary member). I have also heard that Margaret Thatcher is somehow involved in the creation of a foundation to promote the idea. What are your thoughts? Hanson: I’ve read bits and pieces of such doctrines, though not the book by, I think, James Bennett on the topic. At first glance, it makes sense. Australia, the UK, and the United States in the present war against...

I am, as Tony Blair might say, deeply passionately personally deeply personally opposed to abortion. But, unlike him, I think it ought to be an election issue.Not because of my personal beliefs: I happen to believe a lot of what we call "late-term abortion" is in reality early-term infanticide, but, if you don't accept that that's a human life that's being destroyed, my deeply personal passionate beliefs aren't likely to sway you one way or another. That's where so-called progressive politicians such as Blair and John Kerry have it all backwards: the point about abortion is not that it's a...

BEIJING -- Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice suggested Sunday that European governments are irresponsible if they sell sophisticated weaponry to China that might one day be used against U.S. forces in the Pacific. "It is the United States, not Europe, that is defending the Pacific," Rice said. She spoke in Seoul, the penultimate stop on her weeklong tour of Asia

President Bush supposedly charmed the Europeans, and now they purportedly don't hate us any more. But from the recent trip, it is clear that Americans can still expect two things from the European public and its leadership: deep-seeded anti-Americanism and embarrassing contradictions. In that context, let us examine all the recent Eurobabble.

Austin Bay goads me into losing my blogospheric virginity. It was over in minutes, but the audience made me nervous. -snip- 8. Well, since you asked, Austin… First, it’s true that the Central and Eastern European nations are markedly more America-friendly than the western ones. However, their long-term prognosis is not significantly different: they face the same deathbed demographics — right now, the only European country breeding at replacement rate is Muslim Albania. Declining population isn’t necessarily a problem — my own New Hampshire town, for example, survived a 130-year population decline from 1820 to 1950, caused by the opening...

The adage goes that the European Union counts on a more sophisticated and nuanced "soft power." In reality, that translates to using transnational organizations and its own economic clout to soothe or buy off potential adversaries, while a formidable cultural engine dresses it all up in high sounding platitudes of internationalism and multilateralism. Everything from idly watching Milosevic and the Hutus butcher unchecked to unilateral intervention in the Ivory Coast or no action in Darfur usually finds either the proper humanitarian exegesis or the culpable American bogeyman. Yet contrary to the mythologies of Michael Moore and the high talk of...

U.S. can sit back and watch Europe implode February 27, 2005 BY MARK STEYN SUN-TIMES COLUMNIST Advertisement A week ago, the conventional wisdom was that George W. Bush had seen the error of his unilateral cowboy ways and was setting off to Europe to mend fences with America's ''allies.'' I think not. Lester Pearson, the late Canadian prime minister, used to say that diplomacy is the art of letting the other fellow have your way. All week long President Bush offered a hilariously parodic reductio of Pearson's bon mot, wandering from one European Union gabfest to another insisting how much...