Britain and America

Europe still wants the rest of the world to go away

A few years ago I commissioned the artist Krieg Barrie (also responsible for the shields in BritainAndAmerica's masthead) to produce the drawing above.  Click on the image to enlarge it.  The drawing depicts four bureaucrats sat around a table.  The cloth underneath their wine and cheese is the EU flag.  Unnoticed at the base of the table a hungry African begs for attention.  Also unnoticed, from the East, stalks a terrorist.

The EU remains inward looking.  The new EU Treaty, discussed here 48 hours ago, will not produce a more outward-looking Europe.

As Con Coughlin wrote in yesterday's Telegraph, the EU is probably more introspective than ever before:

• The new PM in Warsaw, Donald Tusk, may reverse the Law and Justice Party's support for the US missile defence shield to be located on Polish soil.  This will leave the whole of Europe more vulnerable from missile attack but the short-term desire to pacify President Putin and secure Russian energy supplies has over-ridden that strategic defence need.
• It is the US that is leading on sanctions again Iran.  Europe is dragging its feet.
• Only Britain and the Netherlands are committing adequately to Afghanistan.  Other NATO European nations are keeping their troops away from the frontline battles with the Taliban.  This despite the fact that most terror plots aimed at Europe originate from Afghanistan and Pakistan.
• A reluctance to encourage Turkey in its ambitions to join the EU means Europe has less and less influence on this pivotal Muslim-majority nation.

Many European nations are not banning extremist groups.  Europe continues to invest inadequate sums in its military capacity.  And, only yesterday, Britain's Conservative leader David Cameron signalled that Conservative security policy was becoming more European, less globalist.

The same insularity is seen in other areas of policy.  Europe lectures the world about global warming but can't meet its own modest Kyoto targets.  The EU aid budget is heavily politicised.  Its trade barriers hurt some of the poorest nations in the world.  Labour market rigidities and bloated welfare states are seeing Europe tumble down the world trade league.  Something has to change soon.

Venezuela, Nicaragua and the USA should work towards a joint foreign policy...

Don't worry.  The headline is just a tease.  But now I've got your attention, the point this post wants to make is an important one.  Britain is being asked to accept such forms of pooled sovereignty on a scale and in ways that Americans wouldn't begin to contemplate.  Nile Gardiner and Sally McNamara sketch out what America might look like if it absorbed the kind of changes that might be about to be imposed on Britain:

"Imagine if the citizens of the United States were handed a new Pan-American “constitution” or “treaty” drawn up in Buenos Aires, and crafted by unelected foreign officials behind closed doors. The several hundred page document, the centerpiece of a grand political union of the Americas, would pave the way for the creation of a Pan-American foreign minister, a permanent Pan-American president, and a Pan-American diplomatic service. Under the proposed treaty the United States would be expected to pool its sovereignty with dozens of countries, stretching from Canada in the North to Argentina in the South, and work towards a unified foreign and security policy as well as a common defense policy, which would involve the likes of Venezuela and Nicaragua.

The U.S. would also be encouraged to join a Pan-American common currency to replace the dollar, with a Central Bank in Mexico City, which would set interest rates across the entire Americas. Imagine also if the American people were told that this treaty was so clearly in their interests that they would not be allowed a popular vote on whether to sign up to it. Referendums after all can rock the boat and disrupt the best laid plans.

This all sounds like a nightmarish vision of the future dreamt up by Aldous Huxley or George Orwell. The vast majority of Americans would see this as a ludicrous exercise in futility that would destroy the sovereignty of the United States. Millions of people would take to the streets to protest their rights as American citizens.

Luckily, we are unlikely to ever see the White House and Congress sacrificing America’s independence in such a fashion. Unfortunately, for the inhabitants of Great Britain and other European Union members, this kind of scenario is a reality and not science fiction." 

The full article - from National Review Online - can be read here.  It warns America of the ways in which the special relationship between Britain and America might be endangered by the new EU Treaty.