UNGRATEFUL PAMPERED SERVANTS

French farmers dig in against Chirac (Harry de Quetteville, The Telegraph, April 17th, 2005)

When President Jacques Chirac made a crucial televised plea to his countrymen to approve the European Constitution this week, Fabrice Rognault, a French farmer, was too busy to watch.

"I was desperately filling in my application for this year's EU subsidy," he said. "I have to submit it in the next few days."

For Mr Rognault, 39, the form will prove far more profitable than the crop from his smallholding in the rolling arable land of Champagne, where he is the first to admit that French farmers have been "the big winners from the European Union's common agricultural policy".

He said: "We couldn't exist without it. We have a pretty good standard of living."

Yet instead of directing his undying gratitude at the EU, and heeding Mr Chirac's appeal to vote Yes in France's critical referendum on the constitution next month, these days Mr Rognault has nothing but scorn for the Europe that keeps him in business. "Frankly it is driving me up the wall," he said, in his farmyard in the village of Juvigny, nestled among some of the most valuable vineyards in the world.

"Brussels can keep its constitution. There are rules for everything - a directive for this, a directive for that," he said, voicing a determination to block the constitution which polls show is shared by almost three quarters of French farmers.

"It is all going too far. The further we go into Europe, the more unfair it seems to get. We have to follow rules that countries in the east like Poland don't. The costs are becoming enormous."

The generously subsidised French farming community, for years the bête noire of British Eurosceptics, is now at the vanguard of France's own Europhobe coalition. Together, the two groups seem set on forming one of the most uncomfortable cross-Channel alliances since Charles de Gaulle fled into the arms of Winston Churchill in 1940. Their common enemy is not Nazi Germany but what Frenchmen such as Mr Rognault have come to regard as the domineering attitude of the EU.

France's farmers represent a small, if influential, element of France's Eurosceptic alliance that spans the political spectrum.

Mark Steyn once wrote that the European Achilles heel is the “big idea”, meaning abstract, ideological goals that come to grip the intellectual and political elites and are pursued singlemindedly without any reference to the popular will, local culture, human nature or even decency. Most of these have promised the Holy Grail of European unity, and while the modern secular statism embodied in the EU is obviously to be preferred over the brutalities of a Hitler or Napoleon, they have more in common that one might think. Here is an excerpt from the diaries of a Canadian diplomat in London during the Blitz that recorded his thoughts after a meeting with a liberal, anti-Nazi Hungarian diplomat:

I can see that despite his hatred of the Nazis Tony is half-fascinated by the idea of a united European bloc by whatever means achieved. Some Europeans may be tempted to think that if the small sovereign state entities can be broken down and Europe united it is worth the price of temporary Hitler domination, because Hitler will not last forever, and after he is gone it will be as impossible to reconstruct the Europe of small states as it was to reconstruct feudal Europe after the fall of Napoleon.

The spiritual and cultural sterility of the EU project, and the realization that it can never be democratic or responsive to popular opinion, is gradually dawning on a heretofore inarticulate European public (notably on the left) and awakening both worthy local and national prides and unworthy ancient animosities. Immigration controversies and the recent spate of soccer violence may show what is bubbling just below the surface, but the defection of privileged French farmers threatens a coup de grace. If the constitution fails in France, it is very hard to see how the European political elites, who have bet the farm on an ever-expanding EU for three generations, will have any coherent leadership to offer for many years.