Spareink

I had not realized until reading these posts about the EU the extent to which that political experiment is just a restated version of what is being debated in the war on terror.

Although I am ignorant as to whether the EU constitution contained an actual Bill of Rights or was it more like the Magna Carta, it seems as if your French libertarian friend was, not surprisingly for a libertarian, seeing the virtue of a federalist arrangement shared between France and the EU, where France has no such distinction between two levels of government today. It is ironic that a trans-European political consciousness would arise from such a perspective, given that the defeat of the EU constitution was rooted in nativist fear of a federal superstate.

As a side note, I’ve noticed that the weirdly post-modern shape of the EU seems to be an almost rorshach-style inkblot test for people to project their various political baggage onto. One person’s socialist megalith is another person’s corporate oligarchy. All of which is no coincidence of course: Valery Giscard d'Estaing, the French socialist president, was a huge supporter of the EEC, managed to set up the G8 in 1975, started Davos and first coined the term globalization. Almost everyone perceives it as anti-democratic, although I can think of no political system in which an extension of political powers was put to, and defeated, by a popular referendum.

As for France becoming muslim, it’s nice that you recognize the inherent tension between claiming that the promotion of capitalist democracy in Iraq is counterterrorism, but the incorporation of muslims into capitalist democracy in Europe (or Palestine) is likely to result in a sort of cultural extinction.

The economic arguments against the EU make sense to me, at least to the extent that a schlerotic, aging Europe will not be able to support it’s welfare state indefinitely (unless, of course, it is productive enough to successfully export it’s euro debt to, say, China)- but I think it’s going to have to change its attitude about immigration if its truly going to float as an economic superpower. In the US, Bush realizes that an open policy on immigration is vital for America to afford it’s standard of living, those yahoos on the tex-mex border be damned, as long as Mexican migrants are willing to work and vote republican. He also realizes that demography may, in fact, be inevitable.

As for Iraq, there are those who argue that the bombing in London disproves the “flypaper” theory of invading Iraq. I don’t think that one terrorist event discredits democratic enterprise (and neither does one Iraqi election validate the flypaper theory), but I think it misses a larger, and more disturbing point. If merrie olde England is capable of producing it’s own homegrown terrorist underclass today, than how long can we expect for jihadism to be discredited in Iraq? Does it even matter how prosperous Iraq is or is not to underclass muslims in other countries?

In Europe, regardless of the immediate political system, the demographic shift seems likely. Of course, we would hope that in two generations of life in secular and non-oppressive Europe, these future descendants wouldn’t be spouting jihadism and trying to impose sharia. In any event, if history is any guide, the political maintenance of a civilization has something to do with- and here I agree with Samuel Huntington- a credo that goes beyond ethnic identity. This is how the Roman Empire, the British Empire, the United States, and really, even the Soviet Union functioned. If Europe as a whole is experiencing a demographic shift, it would do well to have more French libertarians like your friend who see enough political commonality with other Europeans to conceive of the EU as a liberating force, rather than an alienating one. Of course, that’s not what the EU Constitution was really about- socialist or free-marketeer, it was an economic document that lost sight of the fact that it needed to be the product of political consciousness. How Europeans process the London bombings and its implications (and, of course, Europe is no stranger to politically disenfranchised bombadiers) will, I think, portend the fate of the EU project.