dailytelegraph.co.uk
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Bush, too, is worried about this place called Europe
By Mark Steyn
ACCORDING to Goran Persson, currently the "EU President" (in media shorthand) and Prime Minister of Sweden, the purpose of the European Union is that "it's one of the few institutions we can develop as a balance to US world domination". Sweden was scrupulously relaxed about Nazi world domination and Soviet world domination, but even in the chancelleries of Stockholm there comes a time when you have to get off the fence.
Had President Persson made his remarks on the EU's global ambitions to Condi Rice and Colin Powell, they would have followed official State Department guidelines and nodded politely while trying not to giggle. But, unfortunately, he chose to announce this latest rationale for the EU as part of a general suck-up to an anti-American rabble, and evidently they took his claims to be a new superpower seriously. By Friday, the mob were rampaging through the streets of Gothenburg torching not just the Stars and Stripes but those gold-starred Euro-flags, too. As far as I could tell, the anti-EU guys dancing up and down in the street weren't yet shouting "Death to the Great Wannabe Satan!" but it's only a matter of time.
By comparison, "Bush the cowboy, the thug, the gunslinger" (thank you, Suddeutsche Zeitung) behaved with remarkable restraint for a man bent on world domination. Bill Clinton may have been Elvis as President, but Mr Bush is Elvis as foreign policy: aside from the odd gig in Toronto and a stint at a US military base, the late rock colossus had no truck with abroad, eschewing it his whole life.
A President cannot, alas, toss his passport on the Graceland compost heap, but, within the constraints of his position, this one's doing his best. Before he left for the Continent, the White House announced that with immediate effect US/EU summits would be cut from two per year to one, re-framing the Administration's European policy in the language of a Bruce'n'Demi trial-separation agreement: while we continue to be committed to the long-term success of our relationship, we believe this can best be achieved by seeing less of each other. Who's to say they're wrong? On every side, the President was assailed by boorish Perssons and Pattens. An innocuous observation that he'd like to see more countries in the EU prompted a terse rebuke from the Union's ersatz Foreign Secretary: "The United States is not a member of the European Union," snapped Chris Patten. Really? In that case how come it's got lumbered with footing the bill for 90 per cent of your defence costs?
We all know the jokes about Dubya: ignorant Yank, no idea what country he's in, Slovenia, Slavonia, Slovakia, what's the diff? But who can blame him? I mean, what country exactly was he in last week? At one level, he was in Spain, Belgium, Sweden. But at another he was in a strange shadow state called "Europe". It has a government, but no political parties. It has a defence policy, but it doesn't have an army. It swanks about like a superpower, but half its members are neutrals. It wants to meddle in North Korea, but it's paralysed in the face of genocide on its own frontier. It's happy to recognise Macedonia but only by a name other than Macedonia. It has a currency, a passport, a citizenship, an anthem, a flag and people who like to burn it, but it doesn't have any of the inner organs of democracy, accountability or basic constitutional principles, and on the whole it's the guys who lose the elections (Mr Patten, Neil Kinnock) who get to run the joint.
Although the The New York Times maintains that "US-Europe Split Casts Long Shadows", it's difficult for the US to have a split with Europe because there isn't a Europe to have a split with. There's Mr Persson and a few dozen other persons who've got together, ordered up some headed notepaper and issue press releases on this and that on behalf of "Europe". It's a fine place, this "Europe", and entirely unperturbed by anything so inconvenient as Europeans. Why, there was Ireland's Bertie Ahern assuring his chums in Gothenburg that it would be a mistake to interpret his ingrate electorate's vote against the Treaty of Nice as a vote against the Treaty of Nice. Don't worry 'bout a thing, he says. "I do not see any reason why any of this should change the timetable."
No, indeed. If we've learned anything this last week, it's that there's certainly a gap between America and "Europe", as there is between America and the Land of Oz or the Planet Krypton. It's the gap between reality and fantasy. Take capital punishment, on which "Europe" has been busy lecturing the President. On this question, Mr Bush is more in tune with the British public than Mr Blair and the European Commission are. In fact, he's closer even to the Dutch, 52 per cent of whom favour capital punishment, than their official Eurospokespersons are. The difference is that individual American states are free to go their own way in this area: as I'm sure Louise Woodward would be the first to confirm, if you kill someone in America, make sure you do it in Massachusetts rather than Texas. "Europe", by contrast, has ruled that abolition of the death penalty is a prerequisite of membership. Thus, as I recently pointed out to a distinguished Senator, the US is ineligible to enjoy the benefits of EU membership. "Thank God for that," he said.
I make no comment on the moral arguments, though I note that, unlike the peacenik Swedes, we in North America manage to police our anarchist riots in Seattle, Washington and Quebec City without shooting unarmed civilians. However, the assumptions behind the EU line on capital punishment underpin everything else in "Europe", too: the governing class knows best; its duty is to nullify the baser urges of its peoples - not just on the death penalty or the Treaty of Nice, but on anything that comes up.
Not so long ago, Jean-Pierre Chevenement, then France's Defence Minister, insisted that the United States was dedicated to "the organised cretinisation of our people". As a dismissal of American pop culture - Hollywood, McDonald's, etc - this statement is not without its appeal, though it sounds better if you've never had the misfortune to sit through a weekend of continental television. But the reality is that no one is as dedicated to the proposition that the people are cretins as Mr Chevenement and the panjandrums of the new "Europe". The EU is organised on this assumption. If, like the Danes and now the Irish, they're impertinent enough to tick the wrong box, we'll just keep re-asking the question until they get it right. If, like 29 per cent of the Austrian electorate, they tire of choosing between the Left-of-centre soft-Rightists and Right-of-centre soft-Leftists and vote for something a tad more robust, we'll slap 'em with sanctions and boycotts.
Until the Nineties, continental leaders of both Left and what passes for Right were content with "moral equivalence" between the US and USSR. But, with the present regrettable lack of big-time totalitarian dictatorships for America to be morally equivalent to, Europe has now embraced moral superiority. It's not a pretty sight and, given the thin ice on which continental democracy skates, it's also preposterous. Who's really the swaggering cowboy? The well-mannered, modest Texan? Or the insulated Euronomenklatura sneering at him as they blunder around the world? It's the difference between a responsive democracy, and a poseur democracy. Or to put it another way: America believes in the will of the people, "Europe" in the will of the Perssons. |
