Dearth of a Nation

People continue to ask: “who are the citizens of Europe?” Well, to begin with, it’s people from non-member states that are trying the hardest to get in, while the actual citizens are trying very hard to avoid history altogether and be a non-nation. Non-confederacy extended to anything that actually IS the role of the state (foreign policy, legal justice, defence,) while the EU itself is preoccupied by standards that can be set by industries themselves, and trying to look like they’re filling the potholes and building roads – the precise opposite of any sane definition of governance.

Then again, what do you expect? The European world-view seeks global (outsourced) governance in nearly anything that matters – so long as it’s own ideas can be injected in it and imposed on others. Such is what we find with the misperseption with the idea that the American view of free markets asn the European notion of “social markets” (whatever that is this week,) both have an impact on reversing the global economic downturn. They don’t. Arguing that point will not recapitalize banks, all it could do is change the practices in the future.



They just make one think that governance is doing something tangible, and appear to be responding to the call for someone to do “something… anything.” The confusion is permanent. From the EU Observer we discover just how fevered their minds really are when they refer to internal matters under the heading of “Global Governance”:

"The World Trade Organisation should be taken as a positive example of global governance," the 20 chambers said in a statement.

Meanwhile, the Socialist grouping in the European Parliament on Thursday issued a five-point plan from Manchester where their MEPs had been having a strategising pow-wow, for a rebuilding of the world financial system and how to boost the economy.

Their "Manchester Declaration", is a largely Keynesian document, calling for a European green investment package to put money in people's pockets and make the shift to a low-carbon economy, targetting in particular vulnerable households and small businesses.

The left-of-centre MEPs call for much greater levels of intergovernmental co-ordination and public spending.

"The European Union has a key role to play in raising and channelling funds. There should be no taboo," said French Socialist MEP Pervenche Berès, chair of the European Parliament's economic and monetary affairs committee. "The member states should discuss the possibility of the EU issuing Eurobonds to invest in European projects."

Further to that confusion is what the NGO groupies outside are saying about the very idea that personal economic behavior can be dictated:

"Let's call time on global greed," they continued. "The same systems that create poverty here – unfair trade rules and tax systems, debt burdens, privatisation and attacks on welfare spending – also create poverty in the developing world."

Good luck. Since there has never been a suuccessful economic recovery that didn't involve a reduction of trade rules, taxes, employer mandates, and public borrowing, we can see what the critic there is really looking for: some supernatural corection to whatever is historically true. Proof that the left's ideas, however bad they are, must be made to seem a success at any cost.

Wow, I say.