Vote ‘No’ for a federal Europe
Business as usual among the Europhiles. “The flurry of weekend opinion polling,” quoth the Guardian, “has revealed a British nation that is strongly opposed to the European Union constitution and also deeply ignorant about it.”
Alas, the stupidity of the people is an abiding problem of democracy. Fortunately, the EU has come up with a set of institutions all but entirely insulated from it. At least for the moment.
But for the purposes of argument, assume the Guardian is right, and the people are idiots. The paper argues that the electorate’s concerns - “Many also fear that the British passport will now be replaced by an EU one”, etc - can be assuaged by paying closer attention to the fine print on page 239 sub-section XVIII paragraph D(iii)e.
Maybe so. But I think in this instance the best example is that of hardcore Europhile Kenneth Clarke and his famous boast that he’d never read the Maastricht Treaty. The average non-Guardian-reading moron may not have read the European Constitution but suppose he’s figured out the salient fact about it: that it’s the legal framework for a new state. What else does he need to know?
When it comes to national identity, one is entitled to a measure of ignorance. If you’re a Peruvian and you’re happy being a Peruvian, you’re unlikely to be impressed by the Guardian arguing that that’s just because you haven’t read all the sub-clauses of the Bolivian constitution. Identity is primal, not a matter of footnotes.
The knuckle-dragging ignoramuses have figured out that, if this new body is full of offices and institutions - president, foreign minister, citizenship, etc - traditionally reserved for states, it’s a reasonable supposition that a state is what it intends to be.
As usual, he’s spot-on.
