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Why the French vote was good for Europe

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  • Why the French vote was good for Europe

    New Republic , D.C.
    June 1 2005

    WHY THE FRENCH VOTE WAS GOOD FOR EUROPE.

    For Better
    by Efraim Karsh


    On Sunday, Europe's "grand political project," as Romano Prodi,
    former president of the European Commission, has termed it, took
    a major beating when French voters decisively rejected the new EU
    constitution. The defeat followed a scare mongering campaign by pro-EU
    politicians across Europe on the dangers of voting no. While Jacques
    Chirac merely threatened his constituents that their neighbors
    were bound to regard a no vote as a French rejection of Europe,
    other politicians went further. Dutch Prime Minister Jan-Peter
    Balkenende warned that rejection of the constitution could lead
    to a new Holocaust. "I've been in Auschwitz and Yad Vashem," he
    said. "The images haunt me every day. It is supremely important for
    us to avoid such things in Europe. We really ought to think about that
    more." Sweden's European commissioner Margot Wallstrom followed suit in
    a speech on the sixtieth anniversary of V-E Day at the Theresienstadt
    concentration camp in Prague. "There are those today who want to
    scrap the supranational idea," she warned. "They want the European
    Union to go back to the old purely inter-governmental way of doing
    things. I say those people should come to Terezin [Theresienstadt]
    and see where that old road leads."

    But in truth, France's vote against the constitution is an important
    victory for European unity, because the document posed a serious threat
    to the great European experiment in peace and prosperity. What began 53
    years ago as an idealistic attempt to use economic cooperation to heal
    a war-torn continent has deteriorated with the passage of time into
    a gigantic imperial machinery that has largely eroded the democratic
    values and objectives for which it was originally established.

    As the European Coal and Steel Community evolved (in 1957) to
    the European Economic Community and then (in the mid-1980s) to the
    European Union, and as its membership expanded from the original six
    to a staggering 25, the organization's vision of a confederation of
    states collaborating on an equal footing was increasingly replaced
    by the reality of an empire in the making--a consensual empire, yes,
    but an empire all the same, one in which a metropolitan center run by
    a new kind of bureaucratic political elite is responsible for more
    and more European decision-making and increasingly determined to
    remove control of lawmaking from member state governments. As Czech
    president Vaclav Klaus has warned:

    The dangers are that Europe is departing from the foundations of
    democracy and liberty. I cannot imagine a democratic society without
    a nation state. I do not mean an ethnically pure nation state, which
    I reject. Democracy needs an identifiable state as its base--otherwise
    we are in a post-democracy and the European Union is a post-democratic
    institution.

    The distinction between this outlook and that of Chirac and his
    likeminded EU supporters is hardly a matter of academic sophistry. It
    is the difference between individualism and universalism, between
    independent paths of development and the expansionist impulse--in
    short, the difference between nation and empire.

    Taking their cue from a dominant post-World War II school of thought,
    the so-called pro-Europeans hold nationalism to be the scourge of
    international relations and the primary source of conflict and war;
    and they regard a tightly unified pan-European super-state as a
    panacea. In fact, there is nothing inherently ugly or violent about
    the desire of a specific group of people, sharing attributes including
    a common descent, language, culture, tradition, and history, to live
    their lives as they see fit in a territory they consider to be their
    historical or ancestral homeland.

    Rather, the real problem is imperialism, which has constituted the
    foremost generator of violence throughout world history. The desire
    to dominate foreign creeds, nations, or communities and to occupy
    territories well beyond the ancestral homeland contains the inevitable
    seeds of violence. The worst atrocities in human history--from the
    exile of entire nations by the ancient Mesopotamian empires, to the
    decimation of the native populations of North and South America,
    to the Armenian genocide of World War I, to the Holocaust--have been
    carried out by imperial powers seeking regional or world mastery. Even
    some of the worst outbursts of recent violence, from the Middle East
    to Rwanda to Kosovo to Chechnya, are remnants of the bitter legacy
    of longstanding imperial domination.

    Notwithstanding its universal pretense, each and every great empire
    throughout history has been dominated by a specific religious, ethnic,
    or national group, which has viewed its preeminence as a vehicle
    for the promotion of self-serving interests and the assimilation of
    attributes and value systems in the subject populations. This is how
    the great monotheistic religions of Christianity and Islam expanded
    well beyond their original habitats to become world religions, and how
    so many languages--Arabic, Spanish, Portuguese, English, and French,
    to mention but a few--transcended their origins to be assimilated by
    numerous countries and communities.

    The same rule applies to the EU. It is no mere coincidence that the
    initiative for the coal and steel community came from two former
    great European empires--France and Germany--both of which have
    subsequently provided the main impetus behind its steady expansion.
    Beginning with Charles De Gaulle, French leaders, left and right,
    have viewed the European Union as a central tool for the restoration
    of imperial grandeur and influence. "We have to recognize," explained
    former French Euro Commissioner Pascal Lamy, in 2003, "that [within the
    EU] there are some countries which remember that they were once great
    world powers and which believe that this was not an accident--that they
    still have special qualities that deserve recognition." Given these
    sentiments, it is hardly surprising that the EU's smaller nations have
    remained wary of anything that smacks of imperialism--or that they have
    generally expressed greater affinity for the United States than France.

    Indeed, Lamy should have added that many of those who support further
    European political integration--beginning with ratification of the EU
    constitution--do so because they see it as the best way to counter
    U.S. global predominance and establish the EU as a major challenger
    to the United States in the international arena. One of Chirac's
    foremost arguments for a yes vote in the referendum was that Europe
    needed a much deeper level of integration as it was "faced with this
    great world power." EU foreign policy chief Javier Solana was even
    blunter when he argued in April 2005, in a speech at the Institute of
    Political Science in Paris, that France must vote for the Constitution
    because otherwise "you run the risk of negating the hope for a better
    Europe and for a greater balance in the world. ... Some American
    neoconservatives are also hostile to the constitution precisely because
    they are see it as a sign of a new rise in Europe's power." So not
    only does the frenzied rush toward integration risk turning the EU
    from an egalitarian community of states into an imperial ogre, but
    it predicates the organization on a negative footing--challenging
    U.S. global power--rather than giving it a positive rationale. Should
    their resounding non lead to a more modest EU, French voters will have
    done their continent a favor. For if history tells us anything it is
    that imperial overextension is a recipe for disaster--a destroyer,
    rather than a guarantor, of peace and unity. The version of the EU
    constitution voted down on Sunday was an imperial document, not a
    democratic one. Europe and the European Union are both better off
    without it.

    Efraim Karsh is the head of the Mediterranean Studies Programme at
    King's College, University of London.
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