[Geoff Winnington-Ball (RIP)]

I thought I'd reprint this from today's nation Post... not sure how long it will be available online as a link.

Comments, please.

A bigger, scarier EU


National Post


May 1, 2004
With the addition of 10 new members, the European Union will today expand to 25 members. It is a historic day. From the tribal squabbles of the Bronze age to the industrial butchery of Nazi Germany, Europe has been wracked by war for millennia. As recently as the 1980s, thousands of tanks and missiles were arrayed on either side of the Iron Curtain in anticipation of yet another apocalyptic conflict. The idea that these nations might be joined in common purpose would have then seemed a fantasy. But today, it is a political reality.

And yet, it is not a reality most on this side of the Atlantic would embrace. Here in North America, the brief media reports about EU enlargement typically focus on its symbolic and historical ramifications. Less discussed is the intrusive manner by which the EU will impose its writ on the economic, cultural and social life of member states. The EU being an essentially utopian enterprise, its architects are disproportionately drawn from the continent's left-leaning bureaucratic and intellectual classes. As a result, the Union has developed an ambitious set of dirigiste human-rights norms and labour standards. It has also created a new level of government without removing existing layers, thereby expanding the cost of governance for the people of Europe.

As Theodore Dalrymple argued on these pages last Tuesday, the new EU Constitution would grant yet more powers to Brussels. If accepted by members, it would create what is essentially a federated superstate, complete with a common foreign policy that members would be required to follow "actively and unreservedly in a spirit of loyalty and mutual solidarity." And since the new members are relatively poor, the union will also become a tool of redistributionist economics, with billions flowing East from Paris and London to Warsaw and Riga. This is a generous gesture on the part of Western Europe. But we doubt it is how most rank-and-file European citizens want their tax money being spent.

Indeed, there is something fundamentally undemocratic about the European Union project. While the EU legislature is elected, the body's activities are so obscure that few Europeans bother voting, or even understand its functions. Moreover, in many cases, the most intrusive decisions -- regarding everything from trade to culture -- are made by politically unaccountable judges and functionaries. In Canada, such unaccountability often leaves individual citizens powerless. But in Europe, that impotence now plagues whole states.

It is not for us to lecture the Europeans about how to organize their continent. But we are gratified that, here in North America, we have far less expansive ambitions for our own supranational bodies. Co-ordinating trade under NAFTA, or defense under NORAD, is well and good. But would anyone have any use for, say, a "North American Court of Human Rights," in which judges from Montreal and Mexico City would lecture Alabama companies about the way they treat gay employees? The scenario seems absurd. Yet this is the model the European Union is embracing. And one need not be European to find it frightening.

PS: Mr. Ashby, do your worst, sir! Ply me with alcohol, give me the .. *gasp * COMFY CHAIR!

I WILL NEVAH SURRENDER!