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Thursday, June 02, 2005What's going wrong with Europe...Austin Bay now has more analysis on what's gone wrong with the European Constitution. But the short answer has already been talked about elsewhere: it's too damn big. Continent-wide civilizations are formalized in law, not created in it. If all the EU fans really want a European superstate, there's an easy way for them to get it: wait. It's noted that the U.S. Constitution is a pretty small document, and that even with 200 years to add to it we've only tacked on a few pages. How come? Because that's all we could get consensus on for the permanent structure of our society. Is that tenable? Well, we're the most powerful nation on earth right now, possibly in history. And yet, it seems, there's not a single word in the Constitution about wheat farming in Nebraska, dairy farming in Wisconsin or defense contracting in California. By creating a Constitution that described how to make laws and in what matters laws could be made, the US got itself a framework for loosely confederated mini-states to work together 200 years ago on the things they trusted each other on. It also got a framework for a federal behemoth as the dominant force in a society where you couldn't do business if you had to visit the customs office and your attorney every time you wanted to ship cheese from Madison to Indianapolis. If the Europeans truly want a superstate, they will realize that no bureaucracy, however smart, can actually make one - ask the Soviets -, it can only tame one as it emerges. If the Eurocrats could just sit on their hands fifteen years, refraining from adding more rules and regulations, they'd have a mass of businesses and workers that, after 30 years of hopping across borders without a thought, were clamoring for harmonization of trade and other rules to make it easier to work cross-border jobs and do cross-border business. Instead of a committee figuring out what the European identity should be, they'd see it emerging in French folks who'd picked up Swiss ideas about efficiency, German citizens who admired the laissez-faire attitude of Northern Italians and Spaniards eager to bring to their products the cachet implied in all things French. The U.S. wasn't formed by bureaucrats deciding what America should be. We weren't even supposed to be a single nation, just a union of states. Our coming together has been one of the pols and the people alternately leading us toward a nation state on those areas where we had become too closely enmeshed to function as independent units. Hence, we have 50 different sets of rules concerning murder, robbery and the like but harmonized rules where cross-border trade makes it necessary. We've also got lots of nationalized nonsense, but at least it took legislatures a couple hundred years to stretch our understanding of the Constitution enough to get away with it - and even then only because we'd come to think of ourselves as Americans, not Minnesotans, Michiganders, Californians, etc. The EU, in contrast to the US, is trying to create the superstate first and fit the people in afterward. This is the classic European approach. We'll see how it works. It didn't work so well with Napoleon, Hitler or Stalin, however. It barely worked for Bismarck. Our best hope for the EU is that it will kill fewer people over the course of its rise and fall than its forerunners. And then, one day, should the EU manage not to scrap the open borders when the rest falls apart, a foundation will be laid for a real Europe - one made by real Europeans whose identity came not from political planning but the practical necessities of finding more and better common ground with the folks next door. 
posted by gbarto at 8:39 PM |
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