Another Blow to the EU Pipe Dream
Dutch Voters Reject EU Constitution

For years, I've been telling people that the European Union is just a bad idea, doomed from conception. Sovereignty is a big deal, and the whole premise of the EU is an erosion of sovereignty.

The dreamers envision the EU becoming a "United States" of Europe. But, they fail to understand the fundamental differences in history that make such a vision a fallacy. Where the colonies of the United States shared not only common backgrounds and language, they also shared an isolation from the rest of the civilized world, and a recent ancestry based on separation from that world (they and their recent forebears bailed out of Europe to try a new experiment). The commonality of their history of separatism, and their isolation from Europe, combined with shared interests (like expansion and defense/offense against indeginous peoples) served to form a strong bond between the colonies.

And, yet, despite all of these commonalities, the United States still found itself in a war to the death with itself, less than a hundred years after its founding.

Europe has none of the United States' historical shared motivations. Rather than a new society, Europe is a group of very old societies. These societies are not terribly open to new ideas, as were the colonies; rather they're set in ways, established over centuries of history and routine. Language, rather than a uniter, divides the population of Europe into dozens of separate entities. Culturally, the difference between an Athenian businessman, an Irish farmer and a German millworker make Alabama sharecroppers and Massechusetts lawyers seem like family. The interests of each population are so distinct, and so misunderstood by the elitests driving the European unification as to make centralized authority over them absurd.

50 short years ago, the entire continent was slaughtering each other. 25 years before that, the same. Europe couldn't even maintain a unified front as a military power in the face of 40 years of Soviet threat, and now they're selling the concept that socialist economic unification will provide sufficient impetus for people to relinquish sovereignty that, in most cases was only achieved through war in the first place?

I'll say it again. The European Union is a pipe dream. - served up by Nomad @ 5:37 PM