For EU read the Canadian Confederation.
Mike H
>---------- Forwarded message ----------
>Date: Tue, 16 Mar 1999 21:56:43 -0800 (PST)
>From: MichaelP <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
>Subject: GUARDIAN comments of Euro resignations
>
>=========================
>This institution has failed. For we, the people, have not spoken yet
>
>By Jonathan Freedland
>
>Guardian Wednesday March 17, 1999
>
>
>They looked like the Nuremberg 22, the accused lords of Europe herded into
>a dock, their translators' headphones clamped to their ears, waiting for
>the judgement that could destroy them. It took two months to come, but
>come it did - with mighty force. For Monday's finding of incompetence and
>corruption among the commissars of Brussels was not merely a condemnation
>of the pocket-lining, expenses-fiddling, nepotists at the top. It was an
>indictment of the very institution they served - if not of the European
>project itself.
>
>The scale of the problem was revealed by the reaction of the guilty. The
>normal rule dictates politicians dodge blame until they can survive no
>longer and are forced to resign. In an extraordinary act of political
>chutzpah the Brussels politburo yesterday reversed the maxim. They
>resigned at midnight, only for the Commission president to claim hours
>later that his copybook remained unblotted, while Edith Cresson - she of
>the all-expenses-paid clairvoyant and dentist - refused to concede she had
>been anything more than 'careless'. In Europe, it seems, the politicians
>resign first, deny later.
>
>But the problem is deeper than a hiring policy which owed more to Family
>Fortunes than equal opportunities. It's about more than a Commission which
>was sleepily incompetent when it was not extravagantly corrupt. That's why
>yesterday's demands for an entirely new set of commissioners or tougher
>policing on fraud miss the point. Both those demands could be met, while
>still leaving the basic problem untouched.
>
>For the heart of the malaise is the fact that the European Union fails the
>two basic tests of any political institution. It is neither effective nor
>democratic. It isn't good at what it does, nor does it represent the
>people whose money it spends.
>
>For effectiveness, just look at the record. Besides a bureaucracy running
>out of control, what else can the EU boast? It has serially failed to
>construct if not a coherent defence and foreign policy for Europe, then at
>least a robust response to successive crises in the Balkans. That's been
>left to the Americans. Less forgivable is the single largest drain on EU
>energies - and Europeans' money: the Common Agricultural Policy. It is now
>a matter of near-global consensus that the policy is broken, an absurdly
>dated subsidy for farmers. Yet on it goes, sucking up half the EU budget
>and one in five ministerial meetings. Last week's attempt to solve it
>ended in a trademark EU pile of fudge. Paralysis seems hard-wired into the
>Brussels mindset. The European Central Bank is condemned for peddling
>1980s solutions to 1990s problems, for presiding over slower growth in
>Europe than in the US, but no one seems able to do anything about it. Like
>the CAP, it remains trapped in gridlock.
>
>There might be some compensation for these defects if the union was
>democratic: then at least we could blame ourselves for choosing the
>bunglers and pickpockets of the commissariat. But no. The famous
>'democratic deficit' has given us a Commission which is wholly unelected
>and a Council of Ministers which meets infrequently and in secret. With
>the people shut out, the European Union remains what it has always been:
>the project of the elites. Since its foundation, it has been the mandarins
>and bosses who have plotted this adventure, doing next to nothing to win
>public legitimacy. In Britain, the strategy for too long was entry by
>stealth, hoodwinking the electorate to join a scheme whose merits were
>never properly argued. Instead the arch-Europhiles have relied on a cheeky
>form of post-Marxist determinism, insisting that integration and its
>mascot, the Euro, are a simple matter of chronological inevitability.
>
>But what these Hampstead Hegelians have missed is the distorting effect
>the democratic deficit is having on the project. Without the disciplining
>force of elections, the Eurocrats have pursued goals - from agricultural
>subsidy to the Euro - which Europe's citizens don't want, making the Union
>itself less effective.
>
>Even the impeccable pro-European and founding director of the
>ultra-Blairite Foreign Policy Centre, Mark Leonard, has written of the
>'gulf' between Europe's decision-makers and the rest. He notes that 94 per
>cent of the British elite favour the EU, compared to 48 per cent among
>everyone else. How telling that the people most willing to identify as
>Europeans are those nations outside the EU: the Poles and the Czechs. The
>institution is such a failure it has managed to turn Europeans off the
>very idea of Europe.
>
>If this were any other body, we would know what to do. Mere tinkering with
>sleazebusters and new faces would not be enough. As the saying goes: if it
>is broke, fix it.
>
>That means a long, hard look at the European Union from the bottom up.
>Instead of a patchwork of treaties drawn up and amended over time, Europe
>is crying out for a full-blown constitutional settlement. No more backroom
>fudging, pretending that nothing profound is actually happening. It's time
>to debate this truly enormous project where it belongs: out in the open.
>
>My preference would be for the method adopted by the last people to dream
>of building a new society from a diverse, fractious continent. Like the
>first Americans, Europe needs a constitutional convention.
>
>There it could debate whether to go the full way - and become a United
>States of Europe with an elected, federal government - or to row back and
>become a looser confederation of independent states. Whichever route is
>taken, we need to talk about it. And not we the experts and governors, but
>we the people of Europe.
>
>There is an even more recent precedent. At the turn of this decade, the
>trade unionists, clerics, citizens and politicians of Scotland gathered
>for a constitutional convention which created the consensus for
>devolution. Why not a similar process among all the nations of Europe?
>
>Of course, it will be a shock. The ways of the Old World are pragmatism
>and piecemeal change. But if we are to form a new Europe we need to learn
>from the New World. If we are to reshape our continent, we have to have
>the courage to do so as if from scratch - and out loud.
>
>
>** NOTICE: In accordance with Title 17 U.S.C. Section 107, this material
>is distributed without profit to those who have expressed a prior interest
>in receiving the included information for research and educational
>purposes. **
>
>
>
>
>
>
>--
>For MAI-not (un)subscription information, posting guidelines and
>links to other MAI sites please see http://mai.flora.org/
[EMAIL PROTECTED]
Facing the Future Inc
15003 56 Avenue
Edmonton AB T6H 5B2
CANADA
(780) 438 7342 ph or fax.
