This is a long and interesting discussion of Britain and political Europe. But this just astounded me:
The European Union, as it has come to take shape, speaks continuously of democracy and the rule of law, even as it negates them. No ill intention need be ascribed to it. What it has become was inscribed in the minds of those who took possession of the project: a unification of the Continent from above, by stealth where possible, by diktat where necessary. Europe was ultimately too large and too various for the results to be otherwise. ...
Of the 27 countries currently comprising the Union, none has a continuous parliamentary history comparable to the record in England, which with the exception of the eleven years of Charles I’s personal rule avoided the absolutism that snuffed out representative assemblies across most of the Continent from the 16th century onwards. For quite a few of them, indeed, their modern experience of constitutional politics dates no further back than a quarter of a century. In these conditions, the extension of internally representative political systems into a quasi-confederation of continental dimensions was virtually bound to produce a structure of power fundamentally oligarchic in nature, whose only lingua franca is that of the country that has abandoned it.
"Europe"--that is the European Union--can't help but be an autocracy? "No ill intention need be ascribed to it?" That's a defense of what it is becoming? Really?
My view is that the European Union is a proto-imperial project. The EU's goal is to strip away the prefix.
And when it does it will be a threat to America and to Europeans:
The unofficial reason for NATO after World War II was to "keep American in (Europe--unlike after World War I), keep the Russians (Soviets) out (of Western Europe, after the Soviets advance to the Elbe River), and keep Germany down (after starting two world wars)."
The modern purpose of NATO is to keep America in Europe, keep Russia out, and keep European autocratic impulses down. The third reason is a real threat that is easy to forget in the post-World War II time frame that we remember as the normal state of European affairs. And the first reason is the means to achieve the third.
We forget the role that America played in creating the free and democratic Europe that we wrongly assume is the natural state of now-free Europe[.]
And yes, constitutional politics have a shallow foundation in Europe, and not just in the ex-Soviet vassal states in the east. American influence after both World War II and the Cold War has built democracy in Europe.
The European Union is built on ejecting American-dominated NATO from Europe. That won't end well. For America or Europeans.
