LETTER FROM PARIS: "Europe" at 50
Harriss, Joseph A.
LETTER FROM PARIS “Europe” at 50 Are We Having Fun Yet? by Joseph A. Harriss N CASE YOU DIDN’T NOTICE, this spring the European Union, a.k.a. “Europe,” celebrated the 50th anniversary of...
...JUNE 2007 THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR 51...
...The tab for that was $3 billion in the first 20 years alone, meaning the Europeans could save that much on their defense budgets and spend it on other things like creating the Club Med...
...Don’t feel bad if you missed it—most Europeans didn’t pay any attention either...
...But you can’t fool all the Europeans all the time...
...The EU acts more like an insecure, defensive teenager struggling for identity...
...Later, with a war on its doorstep in Bosnia and Herzegovina, the EU boldly declared in 1995 that “Europe’s time has come...
...Or it might have referred to the leaders of the EU’s 27 member states, who came to Berlin to wine and dine, attend a gala concert, and slum at street parties...
...The Berlin Airlift kept the city alive for 11 months, delivering over 2 million tons of food, fuel, and other supplies by plane at a cost of $224 million...
...Crooked importers collect the value added tax from cross-border commerce and then conveniently forget to pass it on to governments, costing them some $130 billion a year in lost revenue...
...This kind of juvenile gaucherie is pardonable...
...Every chance they get to express an opinion, they show their monumental indifference, when not outright hostility, to “Europe...
...That was the situation when on June 5, 1947, Secretary The French and Dutch contemptuously of State George C. Marshall proposed the European Recovery Program to get Europe off its bloodied knees after yet another perverse attempt at collective suicide...
...Virtually every program lends itself to woggish corruption...
...In the end, only three persons—Merkel and two EU functionaries—signed as the others headed for the exits...
...Thus goes European unity...
...When a majority of British and French respondents recently told pollsters they thought life had gotten worse under the EU, the Euro Elite Oligarchy magisterially dismissed them as “nostalgic and insecure...
...The EU can decree the regulation shape of a Eurocucumber or the permissible number of bacteria in a camembert, but can’t formulate a 50 THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR JUNE 2007 position on questions concerning the real world...
...Joseph A. Harriss is a Paris-based American writer whose latest book is About France...
...by Joseph A. Harriss N CASE YOU DIDN’T NOTICE, this spring the European Union, a.k.a...
...The Brussels Eurocracy threw a party and nobody came...
...Of course, EU leaders knew we would end up defending them anyway, so they could afford the luxury of pretending independence, some even parroting Putin’s line of “Encirclement of Russia” and “New Cold War...
...Even the feckless Berlin Declaration begins, “We the citizens of the European Union…” (Now where do you suppose they got that...
...Some are even wondering if they really want the most massive redistribution of wealth ever attempted this side of the shot down the proposed EU constitution in 2005...
...They could...
...Europe,” celebrated the 50th anniversary of its founding Treaty of Rome...
...Well, at least 50 is a nice round figure...
...Tree plantings for the Estonians...
...Aside from the fraudulent claim of producing peace and prosperity all by itself, “Europe” takes pride in having created a free trade area...
...Socially, economically, politically, it poses and preens as everything we are not...
...Instead of an “ever closer union,” European citizens have surrendered their national sovereignty for an ever more clumsy, unwieldy, and basically undemocratic organization answerable to no one and riddled with scams—in 1999 the hanky-panky was so rampant in Brussels that the entire executive Commission had to a breeding ground for pestilence and hate...
...The Soviets and their Warsaw Pact puppets, showing remarkably little interest in rebuilding Europe, understood only force...
...Free trade...
...Whether this is worth replacing beloved national currencies with the hated, misbegotten euro that sent prices soaring and consumers’ heads reeling, or opening borders—a nation’s immune system—to allow illegal immigrants and organized crime to circulate freely, or creating a 20,000-strong unelected, entrenched Brussels Eurocracy to run it is the question many Europeans openly pose today...
...A marathon run for the Czechs...
...It’s hard to suppress an amused smile at the way “Europe”—the quotation marks distinguish the artificial, calculated, soulless creation from the genuine home of Western civilization—defines itself by contrast to the U.S...
...On second thought, they decided not to...
...But that was a stopgap...
...Pity, that, considering how hard they worked at it, spending over $11 million on forced jollity...
...Subsidies...
...And yet its creative exhaustion is glaringly visible in the way the EU constantly apes America in its search for national symbols: its frequent references to its “founding fathers” (haven’t I heard that somewhere before...
...In fact, he says that the EU just might already have reached its high-water mark...
...When, predictably, it failed to act, it took NATO air strikes against Bosnian Serbs to save Sarajevo, and a NATO force to keep the peace...
...They can...
...After Jacques Chirac had gallantly nibbled at hostess Angela Merkel’s knuckles they were supposed to sign the Berlin Declaration, one of those vacuous statements of grand principles steeped in the self-satisfaction and moral superiority “Europe” is so good at...
...Can the sophisticated, courtly Europeans be so inelegant as to make no mention in this year’s anniversary celebrations of America’s extraordinarily gener JOSEPH A. HARRISS ous support for European recovery and unity, all the while protecting it from the Soviet ogre...
...S OLET’S JOG EUROPEAN MEMORIES with a bit of reality, starting with Winston Churchill’s description of postwar Europe as “a rubble heap, a charnel house, Soviet Union and Communist China, with subsidies to just about every special interest except the long-suffering middle classes...
...The French wanted to laud the European social model guaranteeing plenteous welfare for all...
...It would step up and settle this little matter...
...Even though it studiously avoided any mention of the controversial, now-defunct EU constitution (the Brits and Czechs wouldn’t hear of it), the 27 still couldn’t agree on the text...
...This, friends, was ten years before “Europe” was even a gleam in the eye of “founding father” Jean Monnet, French cognac salesman by trade...
...The French and Dutch contemptuously shot down the proposed EU constitution in 2005...
...Europe is facing a serious political crisis, thinks Charles Kupchan, a professor of international relations at Georgetown University and senior fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations...
...And, given the EU members’ inability to agree on their fraught relationship with the United States, it was wonderfully symbolic how dithering about deployment of the American anti-missile defense shield loomed over the self-congratulations in Berlin...
...Fifty years old indeed...
...The Poles, backed by Pope Benedict XVI, fought for some reference to a Christian heritage, but were reminded that Europe is now in its post-Christian era...
...Even the EU’s own auditors refuse to sign off on its accounts, citing scams like phantom cattle declared by Slovene farmers to get grants, non-existent subsidized olive groves in Italy and Greece, and $10 billion worth of subsidized Italian hospitals that have never treated a patient (though one was put to good use as a Mafia weapons stash...
...Both times the Eurocracy ordered them to vote again (and if necessary, again, and again) until they got it right...
...Could the polished, classy Continentals possibly be so crude as not even to invite the United States to send a representative to the Berlin festivities...
...Germany eschewed God but wanted to plug a new constitution...
...But when “Europe’s” flacks claim that its greatest achievement is to have single-handedly preserved peace and brought prosperity to the Continent, it’s a bit much...
...Things like how to deal with Russia’s aggressive play to dominate the European energy market, or the swift rise of China, or whether Turkey is European enough to become a member, or the alarming swell of a potentially explosive Muslim minority...
...When the Soviets responded in 1948 by using their 40 divisions in East Germany to close access to West Berlin, America took up the gauntlet...
...Or not...
...British pop star Kim Wilde even sang her hit, “You Came,” reflecting the general gush of ecstatic joy...
...the proclaimed goal of “ever closer union” (shades of the Constitution’s “more perfect union”), a hastily designed flag with—guess what—stars on a blue background...
...So America cobbled together the NATO defensive alliance in 1949 and backed it up with the threat of nuclear retaliation...
...Even before that the Danes had voted against the Maastricht treaty creating the European Union in 1991, and the Irish nixed the important Nice treaty in 2001...
...The list goes on and on...
...Over the next four years the Marshall Plan rained some $13 billion of American money on 17 European countries, boosting their economies by up to 25 percent...
...The alleged fun included free buns for the Danes...
...Maybe this arrogant, top-down construction without grassroots support can stagger on...
...resign...
...Naturally the French produced a toujours l’amour TV film about a Parisian barmaid and a former German occupation officer, and, perhaps most appropriate, there was a giant puzzle for the Spaniards to figure out...
Vol. 40 • June 2007 • No. 5
