A PEOPLE FIRST (via Tom Morin):

Reagan knew why the EU won't work (Mark Steyn, 08/06/2004, Daily Telegraph)

'We are a nation that has a government - not the other way around." Of all the marvellous Ronald Reagan lines retailed over the weekend, that's my favourite. He said it in his inaugural address in 1981, and it encapsulates his legacy at home and abroad. [...]

[R]eagan's line about nations that have governments is a good way to weigh up the world. Across central and eastern Europe, from Slovenia to Lithuania to Bulgaria, governments that had nations have been replaced by nations that have governments - serving at the people's pleasure.

The intelligentsia persist in believing this had nothing to do with Reagan or Thatcher: they maintain that the Soviet empire would have collapsed anyway, their belated belief in the inevitable failure of communism being in no way inconsistent with their previous long-held belief in the inevitable triumph of communism. And anyway, they continue, if anyone was responsible, it was Mikhail Gorbachev.

In fact, it was Reagan who was responsible for Gorbachev. The Politburo would have gone on rotating the same old 1950s waxworks - Brezhnev, Chernenko, Andropov - for another decade or three, had not Washington's military build-up so exposed the old guard's inability to keep up that, in 1985, it turned in desperation to someone new.

Gorbachev was doomed from the beginning. He couldn't turn the Soviet Union into a nation that has a government because at heart it was only a government, not a nation: its purpose was to facilitate communist rule, and nothing else. Or, as David Frost put it after Gorbachev was detained at his dacha during the abortive 1991 coup: "He went for a weekend in the country and returned to find he didn't have a country to have a weekend in."

Today, it's easy to apply Reagan's line around the world. Grenada is a nation that has a government; Mugabe's Zimbabwe is a government that has a nation. Those are the easy ones. But Reagan's distinction also cuts to the heart of the European question. When the 13 colonies came together to form the United States, they already shared so much in common that they didn't need to express their sense of nationhood in an overbearing central government.

However, because there is no natural demos binding Scotland and Greece, the European Union has decided to come at things from the other direction. It's not a nation that has a government. So instead its plan is to start with a government in the hopes that a nation - or quasi-nation - will follow.