ATOMIC WAIT:

The triumph of the Eurocrats (Geoffrey Wheatcroft, March 23, 2007, International Herald Tribune)

Behind the resentment is a great gulf, between the politicians and bureaucrats who created the EEC and then saw it evolve into the European Union, and the ordinary people of Europe. At heart, the "European idea" has always been a clerical enthusiasm, in the ecclesiastical sense: like certain episodes in church history, it has been much more cherished by the clergy than the laity.

Our clerisy today are the political and administrative class, the Eurocracy, the "soi-disant élites," as the contrarian French politician Jean-Pierre Chevènement calls them. Again and again they have tried to make Europe run before it could walk; have pushed toward political integration much faster than most of their voters wanted; have written one treaty after another that the electorate greeted with hostility.

Shocking as that French "non" in 2005 was to the clerisy, it was nothing new. Every European treaty is meant to be ratified by each member state, through parliamentary vote or referendum. The Danes voted against the Maastricht treaty and the Irish voted against the Nice treaty, before they were both told to go back and vote again until they got it right.

This dissonance between rulers and ruled is illuminated by comparing the European Union and the American Union. [...]

[T]he American republic was an organic growth, a lay movement, "We the people" speaking as a nation. The EU has too often been the other way round, the clerisy deciding what is good for "you the people."

So close--as the American "We" is an organic outgrowth of our Judeo-Christianity, so too is the European "I" an organic outgrowth of their secular rationalism.

Posted by Orrin Judd at March 23, 2007 12:00 AM