Brian Micklethwait asserts that Americans ought to be anti-EU then finds some Americans who are anti-America (you can see where ‘Un-American’ came from).
I’ve got news for you. Plenty of Europhiles love the institution of the USA. They wish to copy bits of it. In fact there is a love affair between the liberal vision of the US (‘liberal’ as in anti-gun, federal welfare programme, political correctness agenda) and the socialist vision of the EU (anti-gun, euro-welfare state and political correctness): hence Blair’s popularity in Washington when Clinton was in charge.
‘The EU’ doesn’t hate America anymore than the board of directors of Manchester United Football Club hates Real Madrid. The people who are trying to complete the creation of a European Unionist state see the USA as a competitor, a rival, a model and a partner, often all at the same time. The relationship is love-hate between the EU builders and the edifice that is the US federal government.
What does ‘anti’ mean? I don’t think that Schadenfreude over the short-comings of the US in trying to crack Islamic fundamentalist terrorism (nasty, spiteful and short-sighted as it might be) is the same thing as wishing Euro-fanatics had flown passenger jets into the World Trade Center. The most paranoid EUnionist probably doesn’t expect a gang of Montana militiamen to fly an Airbus into the Europol HQ, though I’ve heard some wonderfully wacky conspiracy theories about the US programme to destroy Western (European) civilisation. Do the Yanks really rig the EU Common Agricultural Policy to suit mid-west farmers? Did the Yanks really push Saddam Hussein into invading Kuwait in 1990 in order to have an excuse for stopping the French armaments industry from selling kit to Iraq? Did the Yanks really bomb Serbia as part of a Zionist plot to create an Islamist state in the Balkans? They’d love the US anti-cold war stuff put out by isolationist Libertarians if they knew about it. I think the European parliament is the most vocal opponent of the Echelon mass surveillance project around (for a mixture of good and bad reasons).
In France I’ve heard several conservatives claim that the EU is a Yankee plot. I’ve also been assured by a social-democrat politician that the British opt-out from Maastricht and Tony Blair are CIA operations, but that the US will follow the EU and go completely metric by the end of 2002, and the UK adopt the €uro by 2004. He was very good at forecasting the weather in the mountains so I’m not completely confident that he’s wrong on all counts. You don’t have to be a Europhile American to prefer a European Union (as long as it can hold together), to a bigger version of the break-up of Yugoslavia, where the US ends up taking sides and making enemies.
I suspect that a European Unionist state would break-up, possibly in a major war. For this reason I am skeptical about the outcomes proposed by the Euro-unionists. The reason however that I am not affiliated to any Euro-sceptic organisations is that I see no automatic salvation in nation states. Cuba is a nation state. Unification in a NAFTA super-state (with USA, Mexico and Canada) wouldn’t obviously be worse for the Cuban population than independence under Castro and his successors. Germany was a real nation state in 1939: it would take some doing for the EU to be worse. The UK did badly enough as a nation state between 1945 and 1973, not just in the economic sphere.
A question I’m pondering is whether a global market creates a market for a “government standard” with a single currency, single police force, one body of contract law, single crime database, single language, etc. There is a problem of “no exit” from such a state without space travel. There is also the problem of lack of innovation in a monopoly. Absence of tax and regulation competition is another issue. My question is whether ‘government’ is a natural monopoly. If true, this suggests a pragmatic libertarian objection to economic globalisation. As I’m opposed to ‘anti-trust’ law and ‘perfect competition models’ which ‘justify’ state regulation of businesses, this makes my opposition to a world government weak, if this order emerges peacefully, consensually, and with a generally economic liberal agenda (i.e. by a market process).
Only the anarcho-capitalist option of voluntary exchange and contract seems capable of offering a peaceful alternative to a World State. I’m left with the choice of opposing all government, and making the best of the largest chunks of state possible (to reduce the number of border disputes).
