Free Republic

Back during the election campaign, I was on the radio and a caller demanded to know what I made of the persistent rumor that Barack Obama was born in Kenya. “I doubt it,” I said. “It’s perfectly obvious he was born in Stockholm. Okay, maybe Brussels or Strasbourg.” And the host gave an appreciative titter, and I made a mental note to start working up a little “Barack Obama, the first European Prime Minister to be elected President of the United States” shtick for maybe a year into the first term. But here we are 20 minutes in, and full-scale...

The continent's politicians think the undemocratic character of the European Union is a virtue. They have miscalculated. Sometimes truth just has to speak to powerlessness. Addressing the EU's sham parliament in mid-February, the Czech Republic's refreshingly tactless and refreshingly Thatcherite president, Václav Klaus, raised the awkward topic of what the EU euphemistically refers to as its "democratic deficit" and told MEPs that they were part of this problem, not its solution: Since there is no European demos-and no European nation-this defect cannot be solved by strengthening the role of the European parliament either. This would, on the contrary, make the...

Complacent Europhiles just love the status quo, but the EU is a solution to yesterday’s problems When to the moment I shall say ‘Linger awhile! so fair thou art!’ Then mayst thou fetter me straightway Then to the abyss will I depart!Most of us bandy the term ‘Faustian’ fairly loosely — I do myself in this week’s Star Wars review. But Goethe’s version of the actual bet is much more particular than it’s generally summarised as: when Mephistopheles shows up, he promises he’ll do anything Faust wants of him. But if Faust ever becomes so content, so happy with ‘the...

By the time the Iraqi crisis is over, it may already be too late for the Government to stop a political disaster in Europe. The European Union's first constitution will be a done deal, and, from what we have seen of the text so far, it will usher in a new order that overturns the governing basis of British parliamentary democracy for ever. The EU will no longer be a treaty organisation in which member states agree to lend power to Brussels for certain purposes, on the understanding that they can take it back again. The EU itself will become...