I have read two articles in two days that suggest that Americans have a better grasp of the dangers of the European Union, and its aim to destroy the nation state, than many in Europe. On a day when we remember those who died fighting for our freedom, we see our freedoms being drained away, drip by drip, by a new wannabe Super-Power. One such article is by Roger Scruton, the writer and philosopher, in The American Spectator. The whole article is one of those "Must Reads'. An extract is shown below:
Meanwhile, the nation-state was undergoing a strange transformation, in the very continent where it had been born. In 1951, under pressure from a coterie of civil servants and politicians who met in secret and whose names are only now becoming known, the "European Coal and Steel Community" was formed. It seemed innocent enough, though the acute observer might have suspected, in the word "community," an agenda that went beyond the topic of raw materials.
The Coal and Steel Community was joined in 1957 by the European Economic Community and the European Atomic Energy Commission. Between them these formed the "Common Market" which, despite the odd language, was generally assumed to be a well-meaning attempt to secure free trade and economic stability on a continent that had been ravaged by war.
Half a century later, following a process whose forward movement had been somehow embryonic in those initial "communities," we find a Europe in which the nation-states have lost control of lawmaking, of immigration, of commercial regulations, and of effective sovereignty, in which their parliaments are obliged to adopt a code of law (the acquis communautaire) that now extends to 100,000 pages, not one item of which they can reverse and not one error in which they can correct -- and all for purposes that have never been confessed to and which indeed were hidden within the original treaties as part of a secret plan. The process whereby this plan was advanced, regardless of the perceived national interests of the member states, and regardless of public opinion, has been carefully exposed by Christopher Booker and Richard North in The Great Deception (UK, 2005). The claims made in that book have not been refuted by the Eurocrats, who are in any case now invulnerable to criticism, and therefore in the habit of ignoring it.
The EU Text Book
The EU-sponsored history textbook, which is now proposed as a basic text for both French and German schools, says little about France or Germany as nation-states, representing their history as a series of unfortunate conflicts on the way to a Union where conflicts can no longer occur. The textbook is consistently anti-American and equates America with the Soviet Union as joint causes of the Cold War and of the tensions that divided Europe. It is also unstinting in its praise for the European Union, as a cosmopolitan project spreading peace and order where the nation-states (the last example of which is America) spread only violence, exploitation, and distrust.
The book is the work of ten learned professors, five French and five German. And I doubt that any of them believes a word of it. But its purpose is that of historical narratives at every time and in every place: to provide a new myth of the past. The EU cannot create a rival identity to the nation-state, unless it can identify itself as something superior to the nation-states. It must become a project of release from the errors and crimes of nationhood. And this means identifying the nation-state as a symptom of the adolescence of mankind, a stage on the way to transnational maturity. And it also involves identifying the last great nation-state in the modern world -- the United States of America -- as an example of what must be overcome, if mankind is to enter into a secure and peaceful possession of its patrimony.