In a speech this morning, EU President Herman Van Rompuy (poet, and writer of Japanese and Latin verse) warned that if Europe’s leaders mishandle the current crisis and allow the eurozone to break up, they will destroy the European Union itself.I'm on record as preferring the death of the EU.
“We’re in a survival crisis. We all have to work together in order to survive with the euro zone, because if we don’t survive with the euro zone we will not survive with the European Union,” he said.
Well, well. This theme is all too familiar to readers of The Daily Telegraph, but it comes as something of a shock to hear such a confession after all these years from Europe’s president.
The article's author gets to the heart of the legitimacy of the EU:
My own view is that the EU became illegitimate when it refused to accept the rejection of the European Constitution by French and Dutch voters in 2005. There can be no justification for reviving the text as the Lisbon Treaty and ramming it through by parliamentary procedure without referenda, in what amounted to an authoritarian Putsch. (Yes, the national parliaments were themselves elected – so don’t write indignant comments pointing this out – but what was their motive for denying their own peoples a vote in this specific instance? Elected leaders can violate democracy as well. There was a corporal from Austria … but let’s not get into that).
Ireland was the one country forced to hold a vote by its constitutional court. When this lonely electorate also voted no, the EU again disregarded the result and intimidated Ireland into voting a second time to get it “right”.
This is the behaviour of a proto-Fascist organization, so if Ireland now – by historic irony, and in condign retribution – sets off the chain-reaction that destroys the eurozone and the European Union, it will be hard to resist the temptation of opening a bottle of Connemara whisky and enjoying the moment. But resist one must. The cataclysm will not be pretty.
Still, as much as he may dislike the EU or its pretense to democracy, he recoils from urging the failure of the EU political union.
As for me, I remain firmly opposed to the EU as a matter of American national security. We defeated the Soviet Union in the Cold War only to support the Soviet Union Lite run out of Brussels? Really?
Ireland was forced to vote until they provided the pro-EU answer that their betters demanded. Good luck with getting the Irish--or the Greeks and their fellow PIIGs--to get their finances in order any time soon, if that is what the EU is banking on. Not all problems are as easy as manipulating elections and treaties.
With festering boils, just die.
UPDATE: Delingpole doesn't think much of the EU, it seems:
Increasingly, the EUSSR will look as irrelevant as the old USSR, burdened with entirely unnecessary eco-taxes and regulations, destroyed by the watermelons of the green movement. Sad, isn’t it?
Europeans think they will have a kinder and gentler version, but with the super-state strong enough, kinder and gentler relies completely on what the rulers decide to do. Get new rulers who like the idea of regulatory and physical force to compel obedience, and kinder and gentler goes out the window.
