We’re Still Teaching the Dorks Something after 219 Years

The EU doesn’t seem to have the population believing that there is a need for separation of powers, or limits to centralized power. Must be an old instinct of theirs’, but the Irish, Dutch, and French “Nyet” votes all shared one message: everything that way too X, Y, or Z about the notion of the EU has to do with the loss of control over too many features of their daily lives, and displayed a sort of disproportionality in what powers really need to be über-national.

Limiting the scope of Brussels’ power, i.e. Justice, Defense, International Policy, Borders, interstate trade, money supply..., and an absolute separation of those supernational functions from those of the states are the basis around which people can develop a sense of trust for the European project. But the very idea of something that simple and elegant – a kind of Confederation seems impossible for them to accept. It could be a kind of closeted megalomania that can’t understand why EVERTHING isn’t standardized and centralized, it could be that the imbalance in the size of populations of the members states makes it uninviting, or it just could seem too “new world”.

Rightly, the majorities in these referenda did not appear to trust in the integrity of those to whom their sovereignty was to be evolved up to. I wouldn’t trust them either.

Take it away, Nosemonkey.

That old bogeyman of “the United States of Europe” is still all too often based on a misunderstanding. Working together but independent, independent but united is not an impossible dream - it has been done before. The flaw of the European project has always been in attempting to create - artificially and on too short a timescale - something that in America evolved more organically. And not just in America - almost all countries with a history of more than a couple of hundred years were once divided,