June 01, 2005

Nr: The Dutch Turn Thumbs Down to the EU Constitution

"Nr" means "no" in Dutch (I think...correct me if I'm wrong). And that's what the Dutch people overwhelmingly said today when they voted against ratifying the proposed EU constitution. Turnout was 62%, with 63% voting no.

What's next?

In France, the prime minister stepped down (he was probably prompted to), and replaced with Jacques Chirac's pal Dominique de Villepin after the French people said "no" quite clearly.

Britain may not hold its referendum as a result of the French and Dutch results.

Turkey, a country with hopes of entering the EU, played down the significance of the French no, even though the possibility of Turkey becoming a member state partly prompted the no vote.

The completion of a European Union, which just six months ago seemed a foregone conclusion, has now been thrown into a state of confusion, its future cloudy and unclear. If six members vote against ratification before the deadline in September of 2006, the constitution is as dead as the Colonel's fried chicken.

Ralph Peters, writing in today's NY Post, has a theory: good old fashioned tribalism.

If anything should strike us about this turn from Greater Europe back to a Europe of competing parts, it's how wildly the intellectuals were wrong and how ineffectual elite power monopolies proved in the end. For a half century, Europe's approved thinkers insisted that a new age had begun, that historical identities were dying. The wealth and power of a borderless Europe would rival, if not exceed, that of the United States.

Instead, we see a squabbling, grasping continent. Far from feeling solidarity with their Polish or Hungarian counterparts, French farmers view them as the enemy. Labor unions in Germany and France have turned Slavic job-seekers into bogeymen who'll rob the daily bread from the native-born.

Indeed, we cannot forget that Europe is made up of many distinct, separate peoples and cultures. Just 60 years ago, many of those countries were involved in the devastation known as World War II, where Germany and ultimately Japan (though not European) sought to conquer friend and foe alike.

And only a couple of weeks ago, a poll taken across Europe about the French revealed many negative attitudes toward those would-be leaders of the EU. (Pretentious, vain, self-obsessed and humorless are among the adjectives used to describe them.)

Alliances are one thing. They're necessary and usually beneficial to all concerned. But as Peters says in his column,

Group identity is indestructible. Despite genocide, Armenia rose again. Poland's back. The phony Yugoslav identity died in a storm of bullets, leaving behind antique nations. The Soviet empire dissolved into bloody nationalism. Irish pubs have conquered the world, but it's hard to find an EU-themed watering hole.

Nationality first...that's why the EU is in dire straits.

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