I don’t know whether we have just signed up to a new EU Constitution or not. Strange as it sounds, I truly have no idea. Judging from the opening paragraphs of this Telegraph report, it’s already a done deal:
To the strains of Beethoven’s Ode To Joy, the Convention on the Future of Europe proclaimed agreement yesterday on a written constitution for a vast European Union of 450 million citizens bringing together East and West.
Valery Giscard d’Estaing, the chair of the 105-strong body, held up a text that he said could be offered proudly to prime ministers next week as a permanent settlement for a free and democratic family of nations.
So is that it then? Are we now all Euro-serfs? Has the knot been tied, the deal been struck and all the irons shoved deeply into the fire? If so, well that was pretty sneaky of them, wasn’t it.
On the other hand, further down in the same article, there is room for doubt:
EU governments will have their chance to chip away at the 224-page text in an intergovernmental conference running from October to next spring, although Mr Hain said the essential architecture is now written in stone.
That sounds like there’s still room for an argument, doesn’t it? Though perhaps not much argument. More like wiggle room.
Well, I must confess I’m stumped. Like every other Euro-project it’s all camouflaged in double-speak and drenched in high-concept gobbledegook. Maybe salvation lies in the hope that possibly the EUnuchs don’t understand it either.
Holy cow. The EU constitution is 244 pages long?! The mind boggles imagining the things you could hide in there. How many pages is the US Constitution? Low double digits? I have a version that fits in your pocket that I picked up in law school.
A better idea would be to give the U.K. and Ireland (along with any Baltic, Scandanavian or Slavic countries that are interested) the opportunity to to become full-fledged states or independent commonwealths of the United States. If they choose the latter, they can adopt the dollar and
all barriers to trade can be removed.
There has been discussion of annexing the provinces of Canada as states, as well as Guyana and the Phillipines. Perhaps New Zealand could join too, along with Australia (as a commonwealth) or its individual territories (as states).
Here are some interesting sites that discuss the
possibility:
http://www.unitednorthamerica.org
http://www.geocities.com/us_int/
I do like the concept of the countries of Europe uniting within a singular political entity, but not under the tutelage of the Franco-German-Belgian axis.
–chris
The US Constitution was originally hand-written on four pieces of parchment, using a goose-quill pen.
Seems to me that if the EU committee had been forced to do the same they might have ended up with something much more brief and elegant than they did.
Here’s my question.
Once the European Union IS officially a unified government, what happens if the UK decides it really doesn’t like being a member? Is all hope lost? Would the rest of the EU attack the UK to prevent it from seceding? Maybe Blair should’ve read a little American history before leading the country into this ‘deal’. I’d hate to see Britain left in ruins from a Euro-Civil War. Especially since the rest of the EU would then prey upon the remains of the British people for the next 150 years and leave the area in a permanent state of poverty (Hmmm… my Confederate roots seem to be showing).
The same paper carries a report also by Ambrose Evans-Pritchard which clearly makes the case that it is set in stone.
I posted the full text of the Preamble to the Constitution yesterday, which is quite horrendous and surprisingly hardly reported upon elsewhere as far as I can see.
I am in the course of a point by point dissection of the many problem areas as I see them and hope to have them posted on my blog later today
Martin Cole
Hmm, Chris’s idea has merit. I write under correction, but I believe the richest & most populous state is California -? If the UK joined (or maybe just England) we might immediately replace California in no.1 position… Of course, we’d need to adopt the gun laws of,say, S.Dakota or Vermont rather than those of California…
They should have played the “March to the Scaffold” movement from “Symphonie Fantastique” by Hector Berlioz. (And not just because the composer is French.)
Hey, maybe somebody could get a boombox with mass quantities of wattage and set up shop across from 10 Downing Street or Parliament (or one person at each) and serenade the fearless leaders with some appropriate theme music.
What is the whole new collection of countries going to be called? France? Or Belgium? Will French be mandated as the new official language?
Too bad the common people in all these countries were for all intents and purposes disarmed over the years; this could have been interesting.
It’s worth reading the draft constitution in the context of the Laeken declaration, which is a darn sight clearer about the object of the exercise. And a lot more difficult for the UK government to deny complicity in.
Stephen M:
Nominally a state may leave of its own accord, but only on terms it agrees with the Union… Many things have already been assimilated and assigned to the Union over, so that we couldn’t automatically “take them back” when we leave, as they are no longer identifiably ours. “Attack” is scarcely an issue here since the institutions of the Union will penetrate the fabric of the member states so completely that it is not clear how any member state could go about leaving.
The implicit US Civil War analogy doesn’t bear much weight, I think. Even today, US States are in most respects less under Washington’s control than even EEA members, never mind the EU states, are from Brussells.
A 220-page constitution, eh? I’ll bet a year’s salary on any of the following:
1. It guarantees the individual no rights against the State;
2. It’s filled with contradictions, occasionally with the pieces separated by enough text that people will miss them;
3. There’s enough ambiguity in it to allow a “jurist” to interpret it to mean whatever he wants it to mean;
4. It vests the State with final authority over literally everything.
The Soviet Constitution was over 200 pages, too. You need a lot of words to put over a fraud this large.
My avaricious inner attorney sighs longingly for the opportunity to bilk clients by interpreting and arguing a 220 page constitution. I make a handy living off of the 4 page US Constitution; multiply that by 55 – heaven.
I was hoping UK citizens would stage mass protests, anything, to stop the UK from taking part in anything that involves yielding up national rights.
Ancestors on both sides of my family are from various parts of the UK. Many of them fought and died so the UK could remain free. (My family has only been in the US since the 1890’s.)
I bet they are rolling over in their graves right now.
I wish I could see this working out for all involved, but I don’t. All I see is France and Germany achieving via bureaucracy what they could not achive via force of arms. (Control of Europe and the UK.)
I think EU citizens will either become ‘good little EU surfs’, or there will be some type of civil war in the future.
Once the reality of what has happened (yielding away sovereign rights) sets in, and people feel the impact of being dictated to, I can’t see EU citizens putting up with it for very long.
I’ll never understand the current mania for glomming nations together into larger and larger collectives. So you have larger pools of resources…so what? You have proportionately larger needs. What’s the net benefit, that smaller sovereign nations with mutual trade and defense treaties wouldn’t accomplish more efficiently? It’s like arguing you’ll starve to death if you don’t join the local food co-op.
The UK is the world’s fourth largest economy (poised to become the third, if Germany keeps on present course). You don’t need to join Europe or North America as part of anybody’s frankenstein empire.
The bovine docility of the British people has finally led them to the door of the abbatoir…..
Will they, like the humble beast, smell trouble ahead?, I do not think so, their brains are so befuddled with socialist claptrap, they will welcome the stungun with the same idiotic smiles on their faces as they have every other disastrous step the ‘elites, have foisted on them.
Wake up Britain, just say “NO!”
“The bovine docility of the British people … ”
Tony Blair’s man at the convention, Mr. Hain, drew flack for claiming the constitution was mostly a matter of “tidying up”. I’ve been hoping that claim was crap, but multiple independent sources (including the Telegraph and Spectator) convince me Hain is right. There seems to be rather little that’s actually new in the draft constitution. What has happened is that, over the course of 30+ years, much of the draft’s contents were accepted, piecemeal, by EU members while no one was really paying attention. The transfer of sovereignty (by Britain and others) to the EU is old news at this point.
Chris Josephson writes:
“All I see is France and Germany achieving via bureaucracy what they could not achive via force of arms. (Control of Europe and the UK.)”
That’s about it, in a nutshell.
And yes, I tend to agree with George Peery, too – all this document really does is apply a little legal cement to what is, in most respects, a done deal.
The degree of autonomy left to the British government is already extremely small.
Thomas Sowell is fond of saying that the truth is often very simple–it’s evading the truth that becomes complicated. Thus the need for 225 pages of text.
I have to disagree with Guy very, very strongly, that EU nation-states are under less direct control from their “central” government than American states. The American civil war proved the precise opposite–that the federal government was willing and able to use extra-Constitutional means to forcibly prevent any of the states from seceding, and that the idea of “consent” concerning rule from Washington is a total farce. “Try to leave us and we’ll raise the militias of neighboring states to wage total war on your citizenry; then we’ll occupy your capitals and rewrite your state Constitutions FOR you at gunpoint”–I’d say that’s pretty direct control, wouldn’t you? It is that memory alone that has kept the U.S. so united for so long. After all, what choice does any of us have?
That said, I do believe that intra-European war is precisely the end toward which the EU is heading.
A strong negative, the saying goes, evokes a strong positive. So will Britons take to the streets and shout down this piece of self-serving elitist verbiage?
Well no, not when you consider that for forty years the British people and all their elected politicians have allowed the social agenda to be captured by cultural marxists AND NEVER NOTICED IT … and not when you consider that we, along with the rest of the developed world, are in the (admittedly lengthy) process of giving our country away to total strangers, AND ARE TOO FRIGHTENED OF POINTED FINGERS TO MENTION THE FACT.
It’s going to take some strong negative to do the trick. All any of us can do is cry freedom and hope that someone somewhere is listening. It certainly won’t be messers Blair and Hain, though.
Guessedworker, What do you mean you say you hope ‘someone somewhere is listening’? Why should that ‘someone somewhere’ care more than the British have for the last 30 years? They are the ones who have never held politicians to account for their lies as they secretly bargained away our freedom and independence. They feared being called xenophobes or rascists or little englanders, so they kept quiet and hoped for the best. Of course, people who are relieving you of your freedom are never going to deliver the best, so this was an abject surrender in itself.
The only ones bold enough to get themselves organised were UKIP, but not enough people supported them for fear of the epithets. ‘Someone somewhere’ isn’t going to ride in on some galactic mission to save Britain. The British gave their history, their liberties, their weights and measures, their domain over their own law, which has never, in history, been bettered for fairness and the delivery of justice, their currency (?) and their folkways away themselves, thread by thread and never held anyone to account. They allowed themselves to be shouted down and now they are being subsumed into a system which is antithetical to Anglo-Saxons but they’re disarmed and can’t fight it. No one protested the BBC being compulsorily funded by the electorate 20 years ago when it began to morph into a very potent agency with its own agenda.
I hope someone will write in with an encouraging opposing view and give us some heart – and suggestions!
Stirring words, “Belle”. Some will find your enthusiasm unseemly, but your description of what has happened – what is happening – seems hard to dispute.
A day or day ago I mentioned, on this site, several of us mentioned a Telegraph column by Janet Daley. Ms. Daley considered the question of European integration and then asked, when is someone from HMG going to explain to us (British) why this is such a fine idea? — because to date, nobody has.
Britain is (as I would put it) like a ship adrift and without power, floating toward some undetermined fate. From here in North Carolina, I pray for you guys, but it’ll take more than prayer.
Liberty Belle, you are a fine writer but your sentiments are finer. I don’t mind in the slightest that you criticise my comment. Its my own fault for saying that we can only piss in the wind in such a way as to sound hopeful of external salvation.
You know well enough, my friend, that right now we Brits are ingloriously losing three wars. These are the marxist culture war better known as identity politics and PC, the gene war that began so innocently with the Windrush in 1958 and was coopted sometime in the late sixties or early seventies into the general marxist attack on white hegemony, and the war for our nation state.
These are each extraordinarily complex and great issues that defy summation in a brief comment such as this. But there are many profitable ways to approach each one. Those among us who, like you, understand that can do something everyday to oppose the drift to enslavement. What else is there anyway? Do we just give up, go home and knit socks til it’s over?
Like many Americans, I’m looking at where your nation is headed with a mixture of disbelief and outrage. Not at those who have sold you out, but by the vast majority of you who seem to be standing by doing nothing. Some of you, in an earlier thread, faulted America for not fighting for you. How could we when Americans aren’t even aware of what you’re facing. Do you know why we know so little about it? It’s because of the deafening silence coming from your country.
Your liberty and freedom is being stripped from you. The fundamental rights to engage in freedom of speech and economic activity are at risk. The most basic right of them all, the right to vote for your government, is being pitched into the trash bin of history and none of you seem to be lifting a finger. I hear some people sigh and shake their head sadly, resigned to their fate. I hear others saying “why doesn’t someone do something” but what I don’t see is anybody joining in the fight.
In America we took a page from the Marxist playbook and ran with it. We saw the power of grass roots activism. We saw how knocking on doors and talking to whoever you could grab could change the course that society was headed in. Burning through foot leather and making calls pushed Reagan into office. It gave Republicans control of the white house and congress. It forced the other side to hide under a rock and play to the middle. It didn’t happen because of people writing columns. it didn’t come about because of the media. It came because there were thousands of Americans who were willing to work a phone bank, willing to talk to their neighbors, willing to raise money and spread the word. Those Americans weren’t even fighting for anything that important, in comparison. It was just important to them at the time to do it. Americans might make many mistakes, and give power to the State, but at the end of the day the State knows that it has a limit to it’s power. The fired up volunteer group can swing the tide of an election and the politicians know it.
So in the nation that contributed so much to the notion of democracy, where the hell is everybody? In the nation of Churchill where are the people willing to spend a few hours a week working to protect your liberty? How, in a nation whose fathers fought the Hun twice in one century can there not be even a few thousand willing to fight him again?
There might be some of you who are thinking “what can I do? I’m just one person”. Perhaps, but there are thousands more who would stand with you. How many of you have talked to your neighbors about the EU? How many have brought it up at work or at a party? Have you convinced anyone to fight against the EU? Have you called people at their homes to warn them? Have you done anything other than to grumble to yourself and post angry rants on the internet?
While you still have elections you have a chance. This chance won’t last long.
Your ancestors were willing to drop their lives and shed blood for your nation. Many of them never returned. They risked death to defend your freedoms. What are YOU willing risk? Social embarrassment? Angry words? Your job? Seems like you’re paying the bill cheap, in comparison.
I don’t mean to be preachy, but you have a delima ahead of you. History if written not by those who did nothing, but by those who tried to do what was important. Feel free to ignore this tirade, but years from now when your children are under the yoke of the State, you’re going to have to look them in the eye and told them that you did nothing. When they asked you if you fought, you’ll have to be the one to tell them “I didn’t even knock on a door to warn people”. It’s your future, but someone has to the first to move forward. You can wake up tomorrow and spend the whole day NOT fighting for your freedom or you can engage the enemy. Too many days of doing nothing have already passed.
I agree with G. Bob.
I’ve been watching for the outrage, the demonstrations, the strikes, etc.. Ordinary Britons organizing to stop the plundering of their sovereign rights as Britons!!
I’m very sad to think the UK will yield so much to the EU. It’s like watching someone you care very much about commit suicide and there’s nothing you can think of to do that will help. (So you watch in horror.)
If/when it comes to a civil war, I will urge my then
-current members of Congress to support the UK.
Horrible thought. All of it. Like a nightmare.
Anybody know what the IRA thinks of the EU?
Liberty Belle writes: “I hope someone will write in with an encouraging opposing view and give us some heart – and suggestions!”
You’ve excelled yourself with that post, Ms. Belle – I think I’ll have it printed and hung on my wall.
But as for optimism? I find it hard to summon any. The sense of sheer frustration as Britons allow themselves to be sold to the Continent is like watching someone sleepwalk off the edge of a cliff and being unable to wake them – however loudly you shout.
Which doesn’t mean we should stop shouting, of course.
The question that echoes unanswered in the silence is … why?
I’ve lived in France for a couple of years, and what is interesting is, the French have never been bamboozled and lied to by their policitians (over the EU). They have been aware of the federal nature of the goal all along and, by and large, are in sync with it. I have friends who work in Germany, and they report the same. The Europeans are pleased with the way integration, with the ultimate goal of a giant federal state, is going. They are convinced that a large federal Europe will enhance their safety, economies, whatever. They may be right. They may be wrong. But they are marching into a federal EU with their eyes wide open. Their bafflement at the British attitude is genuine. They can’t understand how we can be half in, yet hanging back reluctantly from greater commitment. They don’t know the energy and duplicity it took to get us this far down the road.
This, by the way, is why the French and German governments have no qualms at all about according their citizenries a referendum on this “constitution” – and why Tony Blair is flat out scared.
I contend that politicians of every hue – with Edward Heath being the most repellent – knew from day one that this whole programme was antithetical to British ideals of individual liberty and free trade. To bend us to their will, they had to lie, lie and lie again, as Blair, Hain, Chris Patten et al are doing today. They had to soothe, to reassure, to dismiss people who warned of a loss of sovereignty as ranting lunatics on the fringe – rather than perfectly rational people with perfectly normal concerns they’d like addressed. They have never engaged in a civil dialogue because they dare not.
To save themselves the embarrassment of trying to answer thinking adults with a coherent argument, they began a programme of indoctrination in the state schools. This brainwashing of the young has included erasing British history from the curriculum and explaining why Britain should be ashamed of its mightiest achievement, the British Empire, later the British Commonwealth of Nations, and is preached with relish by far left/Marxist teachers. Also, it’s undeniable that around the same time, the BBC was given an expanded remit – that of the purveyor of unalloyed propaganda.
Now, knowing the British have a deep and warranted distrust of many continental European countries, and knowing that divorcing Britain from the Commonwealth and the US was bad and dangerous, why did these politicians use all that energy pushing, prodding, lying, briefing, reassuring? Why were they hellbent on going against the will of 57 or 58m British people (always barring a scattering of a few hundred thousand, or even a couple of million, Europhiles)?
This is what mystifies me. Why, after 30 years, are they still persisting? What is the goal?
There is no shortage of answers to your question, Ms Belle. You can take your Salade Crocodil with or without conspiracy. Without is perfectly palatable.
Multi-national business in the UK wants it because supra-national government suits is aims and operating procedures.
Guardian hacks and their boho readership want it because it’s inevitable and only hidebound, right wing arseholes stand out against the forces of history. True, Marxist-Leninism was inevitable, too. But didn’t they switch horses to feminism, anti-racism and ismism in general. Anyhow, get a load of what Habermas and Derrida say these days.
Geoffrey Howe and Douglas Herd want it because they went native at the FO and stopped believing in their own people. It is, to quote the fallen wooly one, the profoundly patriotic choice.
Our Tone, the Windbag and “Castrol” Hain want it because it’s bright and shiny and as a club it’s really radical and it’s the future with lots of stick-on, go-faster jobs with some great exes. And it’s a place in history. And it’s not that flag- waving Tory thing. And it’s not Glasgow Parkhead.
The Scots and Welsh Nats want it because it’s the longed-for leap out of the English frying pan.
The Lib Dems want it because they thought they were being different at the time they made their choice. Drat.
Well, if you add it all up it’s a majority of opinion formers and decision takers. It excludes the people, of course. But they’re hopeless anyway and would never understand.
That is the kind explanation, the one we can know something about. The other one hints darkly at the Bilderberg, the Bonesmen, The Group, the jewish banking dynasties and all the undemocratic, power-mongering forces of darkness that may or may not decide our fate to their own perpetual advantage.
Take your pick. Either way, the only recourse for honest citizens is an unwavering insistence on small government.
Guessedworker – thanks for the superb analysis. But you say the only recourse … is an unwavering insistence on small government”. I am afraid the British no longer have any right to insist on anything. Sadly, I also think they lack the will.
Well, then, what are the conditions under which they can take back right, or will feel emboldened to do so?
Well, then, what are the conditions under which they can take back that right, and will feel emboldened to do so regardless of the obstacles?
Do we need a heightened sense of national injustice? Or national pride?
Can we learn anything from the marxisant left that instituted a long-term, non-centralised programme of re-education of peers and students – the intellectual present and the future, so to speak – at least thirty years ago?
Personally, I don’t know the answer. But if we are heading for national dissolution (and cultural and racial, but that’s another story) I’m disinclined just to mourn the fact and slink away into history.
Guessedworker – A heightened sense of national injustice after 30 years? How much higher could it get without being sucked out through that famous hole in the ozone level? The problem is simple: the British have been sated with bread and circuses and their will is sapped. They have endured 30 years of sneering from the Marxists and have never summoned the will to tell the Marxists to stuff a large sock firmly down their throats or go live in Cuba. For some reason, they’ve allowed themselves to be bullied by exponents of a system that not just failed, but failed on a massive, intergalactic scale. Except for a valiant few, who are prepared to be sneered at, they will shrug their shoulders and try to find comfort in positives. [I was going to cite some trite examples of positives here, but couldn’t think of any, trite or otherwise.]
Belle,
Ya gotta keep punching, kid. And especially you, because I rather think that a lot of blog folk respect your contributions and may expect a little more fibre than you are showing here.
I remember years ago reading a piece on Terry Eagleton in one of the Sundays. The Evil Empire was going downhill fast. The Labour Party was duffel coats away from electability. But there was this Marxist historian boasting about being the worm in Thatcher’s apple. How many triumphalist, aspiring Tory MP’s heard that and scoffed, and didn’t bother to find out what he meant? Every one, I should think. I’ll bet they’ve got a better handle on things now. But in the meantime, of course, the moral compass has changed and they’ve been silenced by PC.
For what it’s worth, I agree that we cannot extricate ourselves from this morass as we are. We need the same kind of non-centralised, directional cohesion that the left has used to such astonishing effect. I mean, these people tell us that diversity is strength and that race is a social construct with no objective meaning, and not a soul objects! A week on Friday, Demos hosts a conference to advance the cultural revolution in our cities via the risible idea that homosexuality and other groovy diversities are the future for British inventiveness. Well, fuck me, we must be in more trouble than even I thought.
Put crudely, the left has instituted the philosophy of the Frankfurt School, mostly Adorno I think, via a methodology remarkably similar to Gramsci’s. It is all deceit and foul play but how it has worked.
How much more, though, could be done with the truth. A lot more, because the prevailing wind of (real) public opinion and common sense would be behind it. The starting point is for a few good men and women to come together and resolve to take back the public agenda. The intellectual means already exist, these being sociobiology and libertarianism. I don’t think that the task is impossible. Only long and very, very difficult.