The European Union is seeing internal resistance to its proto-imperial project.
Will political opportunism save European freedom?
Whatever happened to Michel Barnier? As the head of the EU negotiating team on Brexit, the patrician Frenchman became famous for his insistence that the EU must never deviate from its core principles — including the supremacy of European law and the free movement of people.
Now Brexit is done and Barnier has moved on. He is running for the presidency of France and has adopted many of the ideas he once rejected. ...
The supremacy of EU law, a principle established in the 1960s that is fundamental to the European project, is increasingly under challenge.
One key reason for these challenges is that the EU has expanded its powers into policy areas that used to be at the heart of the nation state: borders, budgets, currency and civil rights. As a result, many politicians chafe at having to accept European legal supremacy on subjects, such as immigration, that are deeply controversial at home. This problem is compounded by the fact that the EU club now has 27 members — making it harder to agree on a common rule book that suits everyone.
Over the past 20 years, the EU has been engaged in a rolling argument over where sovereignty and power is best located: Brussels or the nation-states?
My view is that the European Union is a proto-imperial state eager to erase the prefix.
But I wouldn't say the EU has been arguing about sovereignty and power. The EU wants all of both. What is unclear about "ever closer union"?
What is happening is resistance from nation-states and their citizens in the EU who don't want to be imperial subjects under Brussels
If the EU wins that argument, it would be a threat to American interests.
And it would be crippling for European freedoms.
The European Union bureaucracy is relentless in its mad drive to stitch together a European empire from the nation-states is gathers under it. Round up the peasants, pitchforks, and torches.
May the EU imperial project die with festering boils.
UPDATE: Macron is fully on board the "ever closer union" plan:
President Emmanuel Macron, in a rare news conference, called on Thursday for the European Union to change from a “Europe of internal cooperation to a powerful Europe active in the world, fully sovereign, free in its choices and master of its own destiny.”
But then again, he aspires to be Emperor Macron, First of His Name, to control that "fully sovereign" EU that has mere ruled provinces where once there were member nation-states.
