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Dying EU Is Good for America, and Here’s Why

After arriving a few days later in Washington, and reading neoconservative op-ed commentaries and watching the pundits on Fox News television, I had no choice but to conclude that the anti-EU Constitution votes in France and Holland were nothing less than a great victory for the United States. Of course, many of the American foreign […]

After arriving a few days later in Washington, and reading neoconservative op-ed commentaries and watching the pundits on Fox News television, I had no choice but to conclude that the anti-EU Constitution votes in France and Holland were nothing less than a great victory for the United States.

Of course, many of the American foreign policy “experts” who were spinning the French and Dutch votes as reruns of the collapse of the Berlin Wall were also the same guys who had predicted that Americans would find weapons of mass destruction (WMD) in Iraq, uncover the links between Saddam Hussein and Osama bin Laden, and be welcomed as “liberators” by the Iraqis. So in a way, I shouldn’t have been too surprised that Washington’s faith-based community would once again impose their wishful thinking on the reality in Europe and elsewhere.

Hence the new scene in the neocon-produced theater of the absurd. Recall that only recently, we were asked to believe that the coming-to-power in Baghdad of a radical Shi’ite political-religious bloc with links to Iran marked the triumph of Western-style liberal democracy. Now we are expected to buy into the notion that it’s a great day for the US of A when a coalition of radical left-wing anti-globalization activists, veteran communists, anti-immigration groups, and ultra nationalists in France and Holland – anti-Americanism is the only idea that unites them – succeed in winning the support of the majority of voters. ~Leon Hadar

This is not an argument for the credibility or intelligence of the neocon pundits who are celebrating the collapse of the EU’s political structure. They are ignorant chauvinists beating their same old drum of supremacism, and they have all of the insight into European politics of an American schoolboy. The failure of the EU superstate is good news for all Americans committed to the survival of the real, historical America founded in Anglo-European Christian culture and organised according to her English political inheritance, because the failure of the EU constitution is the failure to create the ultimate fake “proposition nation.” The neocons enjoy this because it preserves America in their minds as the one and only ideological nation left standing, thus giving it some mandate to dictate that ideology of the world. They are, as usual, delusional.

But they have missed the point: one “proposition nation” has been strangled in its crib by popular indignation and contempt, and the neocons’ ideological nation is next. The neocon celebration of EU failure is the same typically short-sighted response we would expect from people who cannot plan or think a month in advance–they are really cheering the approach of their doom and historical irrelevance. The failure of the EU is the first sign that Western peoples have some limit to how long they will suffer distant, obnoxious managerial fools controlling their lives, even if in the European case the rejection came from those who want to keep the managerial elite closer to home. Even in the European left’s bizarre view that the EU is an evil capitalist enterprise coming to destroy the welfare state there remains some hint of identification with their individual nations, if only by default.

Nonetheless, it is good news for America, though not necessarily for Washington’s plans, that anti-American blocs are winning majorities in referenda. Most of these so-called anti-Americans, particularly those of the right, are tired of being deluged with our tawdry culture, commerce and politics, and who can blame them? Most serious conservatives here are tired of the same things. Whether or not they “like” Americans, they would have far fewer problems with the United States if Washington did not loom so large on the European scene. Besides, come regular general elections, the same staid conventional Atlanticist parties will form the governments of the main western European states, so there is no need as yet to run screaming in panic.

I should add that Mr. Hadar’s observation that Chirac and Schroeder represented the relatively pro-American side of the constitution debate is correct. This is what the neocons have somehow missed: the EU is the soft power support to American hegemony in Europe and beyond, and it is aimed at the same goals overseas, broadly speaking, that they are. Those who perceive the EU as a “balancing” force against hegemony are forgetting how closely tied in to Washington all the ruling establishments in western Europe are; what is actually a global “good cop, bad cop” routine has been mistaken for real strategic disagreement. Of course, the Europeans would usually prefer not to bomb every country that becomes slightly inconvenient, but they got over their reluctance when it came to Yugoslavia and I’m sure they could find plenty of other “humanitarian” causes to support with heavy weapons. However, the neocons, spoiled brats that they are, cannot play well with others and insist on reaping all the glory (or dishonour) for themselves. There is nothing they could have done to save the EU constitution, and their support would have been toxic, but it shows how dense they are that they see the failure of the EU as a good thing.

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