Well, what a joyous day. France has voted "no" to the EU. I say this not because, as an American, I wish badly for Europe, but rather because I wish her well.
So what was wrong with the EU Constitution? Well, for one, the government it created would be basicly totalitarian in nature -- bereft of any real protection for civil rights, with an unelected "Council of Ministers" making calling all the shots, and Parliament merely acting as a rubber stamp.
Americans -- or Europeans, for that matter -- who wish to dispell some of the general ignorance on this matter are advised to study Helen and Richard's commentaries on this over at EU Referendum. Some helpful links:
Of course, it may be a bittersweet victory: from what I'm reading, it sounds like the French may have worried that their cradle-to-grave state provisions might have come under threat, meaning they were worried they hadn't traded their liberty for quite enough security, to paraphrase Benjamin Franklin's warning.
It's interesting to watch the (oh-so-biased) BBC's reactions, cheerleaders for elitism that they are. Front page, among the headlines, we are told French 'No' vote is a real crisis. Yes, heaven forbid Europe should continue along as it has exists today. How could such an intolerable state of affairs continue?
Dig, if you will, this commentary:
This is not like Britain saying "No". That would be a problem. This is a crisis. It means that something is rotten in the state of Europe. The institutions of the EU have got ahead of the peoples of the EU.
Of course. The grand European experiment is "ahead of" the will of the people. It is not possible to interpret this result as indicating said institutions were "behind" the people, or had veered dangerously off to one side. No, the direction is inevitable, we just ran a bit too far ahead of the sheep. Must now drop back, and scoot the buggers along. Perhaps we'll fiddle with it a bit, and keep asking over and over until they give us the result we demand.
Will of the people? Riiiight. "The people will do bloody well what we tell them to, or else."
Perhaps it wasn't authoritarian enough:
It is possible that some bits of the constitution could be picked out and put together in a modest bundle - a more permanent presidency for example, rather than the everyone gets a turn principle which operates at the moment.
Yes, hated all that power-sharing. That was what offended the people. To the contrary, Americans (and probably many Europeans) may not know that recent surveys demonstrated that the more people were familliar with the proposed EU Constitution, the more likely they were to vote against it.
And of course, it's not over, anyway. Even if the present constitution were totally derailed (it is not yet), French vainglory and creeping antiamericanism would provide a pretext for a unified power structure. Indeed, the institutions for such have already been created -- for the elites, the question is merely one of how and when, not if.
One of my commenters seems obsesed with Europe having a "powerful" government. But pursuing power for it's own sake is a deadly thing: France was most "powerful" under Napolean, German was at it's most "powerful" under Hitler. The US, on the other hand, has historically never sought power. Even our involvment in Iraq and Afghanistan can be seen as little more than an adjunct for our national security concerns.
There is a kind of organic power which comes from trade and democracy, the kind of power West Germany used to have, the kind of power Japan has accumulated. This kind of power makes nations more likely to be at peace than war. But Europe, it seems, isn't interested in all that.
So the tragedy has undoubtedly been deferred, not derailed. My guess is that an entirely different approach will eventually be tried: perhaps consolidating power by direct fiat through the executive heads of various nations, without bothering to ask the people what they think of the matter, using the US as a pretext. And we'll probably see some sort of small core of more tightly aligned nations arise within, centered around the French/German/Belgian axis.
UPDATE: Glenn Reynolds:
Reader Jonathan Smith emails: "I have yet to see an american blogger that has recognized that a lot of people that voted Non want France to be a MORE socialist state. It's a fear that the EU will be more capitalist."
Well, not that anybody reads me, but here's one.
UPDATE 2: Richard North:
The reason it isn't over is because, when push comes to shove, there really isn't a "plan B". The European Union only has one policy and one objective – political integration. It does not know anything else and cannot do anything else, so it will continue with the only thing it knows how to do.
In this, the Daily Telegraph leader comes closest to divining the reality, declaring that: "Mere democracy won't stop the EU machine." The project was never meant to be democratic, it says.
In particular, it says:
On the contrary, almost every Euro-poll has produced a No vote, whether in Ireland, Sweden or Denmark. On any normal measure, the EU has lost the confidence of its citizens. But the project was never meant to be democratic. From the first, the EU's founding fathers understood that it needed to be immune to public opinion. The genius of Jean Monnet and Robert Schuman was to design a system in which supreme power was wielded by unelected officials, and in which the peoples were presented with a series of faits accomplis. When, in 1992, they got their first No vote in Denmark's referendum on Maastricht, our masters were too set in their ways to consider respecting the result, and so pushed on regardless. They will do the same thing today.
Of course. Who needs that democracy garbage? Where has that ever gotten us, when compared to the magnificent heritage of totalitarian systems?