The EU's Problem

Dale Franks at QandO makes a very interesting observation riffing on a theme by Mark Steyn: bq. Mark Steyn writes in The Telegraph that the EU has a fundamental problem that Ronald Reagan would have recognized easily. As The Gipper once put it, "We are a nation that has a government - not the other way around." Unfortunately for Europe, what the Eurocrats in Brussels are building is a government looking for a nation that does not yet--and may never--exist. Dale's commentary: bq. You don't have a nation just because you have a lot of people using the same currency, singing the same national anthem, and saluting the same flag. The Yugoslavians had all that for 50 years, and look where that got them. bq. Under the prodding of the steely-eyed State Security thugs' bayonets, the Yugos would belt out Hej, Slovenji! (Hey, Slavs!) as lustily as you please. But, as soon as they got the chance to kill each other in job lots, all of that "Hey, Slavs!" nonsense went by the wayside. As PJ O'Rourke once put it, having a shared national anthem worked about as well as you would expect a national anthem named "Hey, Slavs!" to work. And more: bq. You don't force nationhood on people from the outside. Nationhood is something they discover in themselves and in confederates bound by a common culture, language, history and/or religion. You may be able to force a government on them, as the Soviet Union did, for a couple of generations. But no matter how enthusiastically you make them sing the National Hymn, you can never quite get them to believe it. bq. At the other extreme, look at the Iraqis. The population consists of three different ethnic/religious groups, all of whom exist in mutual despite to one extent or another. And they still want to be part of a single country. They all consider themselves to be Iraqis, God help us. bq. But, somehow, despite plenty of objective evidence to the contrary, the members of the whole Giscard-Prodi-Patten axis think that they can successfully craft a nation out of the hodge-podge of Europe. Evidently, they've learned nothing from the experience of the 1918-1939 period of European history. Or about the history of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, for that matter. bq. They blithely assume that, once the marching orders come down from Brussels, the peasants will willingly fall into line. bq. You've gotta admire their optimism. Heh...