A referendum in a small island off the European mainland about an incomprehensible document sounds dull. Yet Ireland’s vote on October 2nd in favour of the Lisbon treaty marks a milestone for the European Union. The treaty””which, despite a flurry about the Czechs, now looks certain to be ratified””is likely to be the last big piece of EU institution-building for years to come. It also poses serious questions about the world’s biggest economy. Is Europe evolving inexorably into a federation of states? Could it become an economic trendsetter? Will Europe wake up and take a bigger role in the world? Or are the affairs of man to be decided largely in Washington and Beijing, with the new “G2” occasionally copying in the Brussels bureaucracy on its decisions?
Very few of the answers to these questions can be found in the moderately useless Lisbon treaty. It is a deliberately obscure reworking of the draft EU constitutional treaty rejected by French and Dutch voters in 2005. This newspaper opposed the constitution because it failed utterly to achieve the goals set by the Laeken European summit in 2001: simplification of the rules, a clearer distribution of power between the centre and national governments, greater transparency, bringing the EU closer to voters. That the Lisbon treaty is being driven through despite having been rejected by three out of a total of six referendums, and with ten governments reneging on promises to hold votes of their own, is deeply shabby.
My in-laws are European (one Dutch, one Hungarian), so this is not some distant academic discussion. Europe faces phenomenal problems, and they have not yet the tools nor the will to deal with them.
a) They face demographic implosion. Birth rates are such that most nations will see their population halved within 30 to 50 years.
b) Their vaunted social programs are consequently unsustainable beyond a few more years. That those programs were possible only because the USA shouldered their defence burden is another story, but it underlines their grave decadence and weakness.
c) They cannot absorb the immigrants they already have, who now refuse to integrate, yet many-fold more are the [i]sine qua non[/i] of any possible maintenance of the social programs the current US administration now seeks to implement here.
d) Despite its recent forex strength, the Euro is in desperate trouble, most likely to originate with the PIGS — Portugal, Italy, Greece, and Spain — any or all of whom will soon withdraw from the Euro group in order to regain control of national monetary policy … so as to print worthless paper in hopes of papering over exploding political discontent.
Into this mix does Brussels wish to insert itself, telling Brits they can no longer sell beer in pints, attempting to enforce equal pay rates in Romania and Germany, informing the Irish they must increase taxes in the midst of economic chaos, and so on.
The underlying problem with the Euro-document (now a back door attempt at a ‘constitution’) is that it seeks to enshrine as quasi-constitutional law nearly every favoured policy developped by Euro-socialists in the last two generations.
The US Constitution describes quite succinctly how government is to function. The Euro document by contrast provides a detailed laundry list of what governments [i]must[/i] do, [i]’for'[/i] their people.
At a time when European governments from Sweden (not a member) to Germany to Hungary to Britain are desperately trying to reverse the last generation of political folly, the document in question seeks to make that reversal constitutionally impossible.
Within it lies the path to Europe’s utter collapse.
And the current US administration believes it is something to be imitated and implemented here.
Like it or not, the EU is being colonized from the South and the East whose culture will ultimately overwhelm those once predominant and mighty societies. The primary colonists will be Muslims from both directions whose will within a few short generations exceed those of the indigent populations. Thus the EU will, in a strong sense, become irrelevant except that all the useful structures will be in place for the new order (the Caliphate). Christianity which is being rendered more and more impotent by the present constituent countries will become a meager minority with a fate not too different from that faced in countries such as Turkey, India, Iran.
It is almost too late to reverse this remorseless advance, and will take a strong and immediate output of continental will to do so.
We here, in the United States, must carefully note the patterns of events that are unfolding before our very eyes. We, of course, are facing our own somewhat similar assimilation into a dual culture peopled equally by both present Americans and the intake from, primarily, the South.
This has been a state of human motion for millenia. Genghis Khan and his hordes were swallowed up, Egypt withered, the Roman Empire collapsed, the Napoleonic Era was defeated, and the third Reich was barely a horrible blip in History.
So here we are, no new territory to spread to, facing a future that, to me -a white English transplant to the United States- is bleak.
Oh man, being a European from the “Heart” of the EU and also working within the “machinery” of Brussels, it is getting more and more annoying to see Americans make themselves feel better by trying to bad-mouth the EU.
Yes, Europe faces many challenges ahead, but so do the US as well as China, if we want to limit ourselves to the most important players in the near future. The US faces “demographic problems” in a similar way as the EU: US birthrates are relatively high, but this is not thanks to the birthrate of WASPS which have birthrates just barely higher than those of Europe, 1.7 or 1.8 if I’m not mistaken. The high birtrates in the US are thanks to all other ethnic groups, primarily Hispanics “from the south”. By 2050, non-Hispanic whites will make up less than 50% of the US population. In Europe we are still far away from a situation like that, so there is ample time to recover while the birtrates around Europe are going down. Tunisia, Turkey and others all have total fertility rates below 2.0 already. So yes, the number of muslims and non-Europeans will increase, but since those cultures are getting richer at fast paces, their TFRs are going down fast, too. As for Europe in this challenge, our Scandinavian members are leading the way out of this situation, high TFRs without religious aftertaste. China is aging faster than anybody else, the one child policy results in an extreme aging process that cannot be stopped. Apart from that, China has economic, environmental and stability problems that we will not face.
As regards economics, Americans are in no position to critizise Europe. The US financial sector, national debt, infrastructure, declining influence of the dollar are but a few of the problems the US faces or – better yet – chooses to ignore. The “scoialst” EU has been successful in market liberalisation – which is not socialist at all if you ask me. The inclusion of new member states is a remarkable success story, countries want to be part of Europe and align their legal and market systems with the rest of Europe, while most of the rest of the world wants to get away from the US as far as possible. Still a number of Commission decisions are questionable, but who has an administrational entity that is doing a sound job 100%.
The EU needs to face a number of major challenges, but we are also in a learning process that no one else has been in before. 60 years ago we were killing each other and now we try to work out ways to cooperate and integrate, while overcoming nationalism which is normal in nation states grown over centuries. While the process is difficult, tedious and costs a lot of money, what we learn and develop is hard to weigh in money already. A generation of well educated young europeans is growing up who are used to study for one or more semesters in another EU member state. For them, a united Europe is the only way forward, as it should be. These things take time, building a united Europe takes generations. But once Europe is not a “project” any more but a grown entity, I’m convinced we have a bright future ahead.