But back to subject -- on which I will be brief. I regard the EU as a plot, mainly by senior civil servants but with fellow-travelling senior politicians in the main European countries, to form a larger and superior form of nation-state which will, of course, give them more career opportunities and more power. Being far more intelligent than politicians, the civil service have been able to manipulate them by giving them plenty of junkets and fulsome opportunities to claim money on expenses. (European MPs elected from England can claim first-class travel expenses from London to Brussels every week, even if they travel economy class, and even if they don't travel at all that week-end. It's a normal item which boosts their income and helps to turn them from ordinary politicians into something more resembling hemi-millionaires.)
Formally, the EU is supposed to bring about all sorts of economic benefits and to prevent future wars between nations. In fact, it is scarcely of any economic benefit, it has raised stresses between nations and the increasing number of regulations is binding member-states with ligaments which are gradually strangling them, particularly in the two largest countries, Germany and France.
The fundamental fault of the EU is that, in its attempt to become a very large nation-state, it is trying to dam the course of history. The developed nation-state is really at an end now. While many more ethnic groups in the world, such as the Kurds, will try to become nation-states (and may succeed) and thus amplify the number that are already registered with the United Nations, and while many existing, though backward, nation-states, such as those of central Europe, want the subsidies given out by the EU in order to be able to develop their economies more rapidly, nevertheless, the age of the nation-state is now drawing to a close.
I think we can show this by making a couple of observations:
1. Different forms of governance throughout history, from cities, city-states, empires and onwards have come to an end when they can no longer protect themselves from a new type of weapon. A quite new form of governance has then got to arise in order to make itself as invulnerable as possible and further develop the new weapon. The nation-state, to name the last form of governance as it arose from about the 1800s and onwards, was a product of the artillery regiment combined with a long-distance railway system -- a composite innovation, but still a new weapon of war, as WWII was mainly fought. The beginning of the end of the nation-state came when the nuclear bomb was invented because this meant that, sooner or later, a rogue nation or even a terrorist group such as Al Qaeda, will be able to bring a nation-state to its knees by exploding the device at the location of its highly centralised government and civil service;
2. The big problems of the world, such as resources, wildlife and pollution cannot now be solved by entities which sit entirely within one territorial boundary. We need highly specialised, lateral forms of governance. To some extent, the EU was trying to tackle some of these lateral problems, such as North Sea fish stocks, and control of the Iron and Steel industries across Europe, but they were doing this within the ambit of a centralised super-nation-state. Almost all the other lateral problems still remain on the shelf despite 30 years of effort.
All institutions take a long time a-dying and so we can't expect a brand new sort of governance -- or, rather, sets of specialised transnational governances -- in the world for perhaps two or three centuries. But we can begin to see the cracks forming within nation-states already. The best proof is to look to the hardest case. The most advanced nation-state in the world is America. And what do we see there? We see steadily growing cynicism about the nature of politics, the electoral system and the ability of the government to look after the welfare of its citizens over their long term future. We also see that America is no longer large enough to maintain its economy by normal methods. It needs more oil, for example, than it can gain by normal free trade -- as we have seen in the case of the invasion of Iraq and its placement of special forces all around Saudi Arabia. Amerfica's economy is rapidly integrating with China. As a sort of intermediate condition towards future transnational, functional governances, we are already seeing the formation of an American-Chinese "dumb-bell"-shaped economy. Chinese profits are sustaining the American federal exchequer; American industry is leading the way to the westernisation of the Chinese economy by means of its vast investments there.
We certainly live in interesting times.
Keith Hudson <<<< EUROPEAN UNION CAN'T REACH DEAL ON CONSTITUTION
John Tagliabue
BRUSSELS, Dec. 13 The leaders of 25 current and future members of the European Union failed to reach agreement on Saturday on a draft constitution, stumbling on a problem familiar to Americans: how to apportion power among large and small states.
At issue was a proposal to discard a voting system agreed upon three years ago that gave Spain, a member of the union, and Poland, which joins next year, almost as much voting weight each as Germany, which has more than twice the population of either. Spain and Poland insisted on retaining the expanded rights.
Germany's chancellor, Gerhard Schröder, called the summit meeting "largely a failure," and said, "We don't have a consensus on a constitution here because one or another country put the European ideal behind national interest."
Officially, the leaders said they would meet to try again next year. But the failure touched off bitter recriminations that underscored differences between current and soon-to-be members of the union. The war in Iraq also played a part: the deep divisions in "old" and "new" Europe over whether to go along with the United States' military action contributed to the wedges driving the leaders apart.
France's president, Jacques Chirac, said the failure galvanized his interest in creating a smaller union in the form of a "pioneer group" perhaps of the union's six founding countries, but open to others. He framed it as something that would accelerate integration. "It would be a motor that would set an example," he said at a news conference after the talks. "It would allow Europe to go faster, better."
But others read it as a move toward scaling back Europe's unification. Mr. Schröder, acknowledging the temptation to do so, said, "We will work that it not happen."
Italy's prime minister, Silvio Berlusconi, chairman of the talks, agreed. "I am not a partisan of the idea of six countries," he said.
Prime Minister Tony Blair of Britain, who had sought unsuccessfully to soften the Spanish and Polish positions, said, "It is in my view entirely sensible that we take the time to get it right." He added, "To look at this in sort of apocalyptic terms is, I think, rather misguided."
Poland's prime minister, Leszek Miller, left Brussels and was expected to call a cabinet meeting to discuss the outcome, Polish diplomats said.
The meeting was not without its successes. On Friday, the leaders took a first important step toward striking a deal on the constitution's draft text, the subject of almost two years of discussion, when they agreed unanimously to a common defense policy that included planning abilities independent of NATO.
The constitution is considered crucial in light of the coming enlargement, by which the union, which began as a customs union of Germany, France, Italy, Belgium, Luxembourg and the Netherlands, will become a 25-member club, bringing into its embrace many former East Bloc states, including Poland, Hungary, the Czech Republic and Slovenia.
"The striking thing is that 95 percent of the issues are largely resolved," said Kevin Featherstone of the European Institute at the London School of Economics.
He said it was the very fact that agreements had been reached in most areas that had narrowed the room for the usual horse trading that lies at the heart of European compromises. With little else to decide, the voting rights issue became "crystal clear."
But he also said the stewardship of the talks might have contributed to the failure. "Berlusconi has this putting-your-foot-in-it tendency," he said.
As with the American leadership in Philadelphia in the 1780's, Europe's leaders are acting because they recognize that the challenges facing an enlarged union require more efficient government structures. Recent moves, including the introduction of the euro and the creation of a central bank, have fueled the drive beyond simple economic integration toward common policies in defense and foreign affairs.
The analogy with the United States, which moved in the 1780's from a confederation to a stronger national government under the Constitution, has not escaped the Europeans. When Valéry Giscard d'Estaing, the former French president and chairman of the convention that framed the draft constitution, left for vacation last summer, he took along a copy of David McCullough's best-selling biography of John Adams, the author of the Massachusetts Constitution, the oldest such text still in use.
Mr. McCullough said by phone from his home in Massachusetts that in Philadelphia, "all the small states were afraid of the large states; they feared they would take the ball and run with it." To provide equal weight in the councils of power, the founding fathers created the Senate, where all states are equally represented. "They called it the balancing wheel," he said.
Europe's leaders toyed in the past with the idea of transforming the Council of Europe into a kind of senate. But the idea was discarded in favor of a voting system agreed upon three years ago in Nice, France, that gave mid-sized countries like Poland and Spain almost as many votes each in the European Council as heavyweight Germany.
Poland and Spain are now relatively isolated, because the Nice system has been jettisoned in favor of an arrangement known as the double majority, which seeks to assure the rights of smaller states by defining a voting majority as at least half of the member states representing at least 60 percent of the total population.
Poland's foreign minister, Wlodzimierz Cimoszewicz, had dug in his heels on Saturday morning. "If it is not possible to agree on the change today we shall wait," he said before the day's talks began.
Large countries like France, Germany and Britain, which embraced the double majority because of a worry about the risk of giving too much voting power to the smaller states, have also built measures into the constitution that would assure their continued influence.
Largely at British insistence, the states will retain veto rights over fiscal matters, leaving the door open to divisive issues like one that erupted recently over decisions by France and Germany, two of the largest nations, to run budget deficits that exceed limits governing the euro.
Veto rights will also be kept in matters of foreign and defense policy and changes to European treaties.
For the moment, other differences appear to have been overshadowed by the issue of voting weights. Some countries, including Poland, have in the past insisted that the preamble of the constitution evoke Europe's Christian heritage. The draft text refers to Europe's "cultural, religious and humanist heritages."
Mr. Featherstone, of the European Institute, said there was not a sense of immediate crisis if the states failed, "but there is a climate of ideas across Europe that something must be done."
New York Times -- 14 December 2003
Keith Hudson, Bath, England, <www.evolutionary-economics.org>
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