Jay Nordlinger wakes up to the European Union

My Eureka moment about the European Union (EU) came in the course of my typical discussions with this academic numbnuts on Usenet. The academic numbnuts had boxed himself into the startling contradiction of at once pretending to oppose the enlargement of the powers of the state while rhapsodizing the coming of the European superstate. His underlying ineptitude in these discussions was easily overmatched by his refusal to deal with facts, let alone their implications, in either direction of the contradiction.

But my basic cue on the EU was taken from Arnold Toynbee, who observed that the formation of a "universal state" was the harbinger of a civilization's collapse. What I noted about the EU was that its first effect would be to destroy the diversity of the great nations and cultures of Europe by forcing them into a modern empire that would immediately begin to compete for power with individual states within it. This was before I even knew what was actually happening over there.

Jay Nordlinger, who is the furthest thing from an academic numbnuts, today admits that he finally gets the implications of the EU. I say welcome aboard. It's the first item of his Impromptus column and I'm quoting the entire item:

Begin with a quick word about the EU — about which I am awakening, at last. Years ago, I would hear my British friends — very bright, very balanced — talk about the EU in the most severe terms. They said it was a kind of Soviet Union in the making, and would lead to a host of ills. Frankly, I thought this talk was a little overblown. I thought it could be interpreted as hysterical. But my friends knew far more than I, and I was given pause.

Now I am something like a believer. As David Pryce-Jones tells us in our current issue — his piece is found here (subscription required) — Vladimir Bukovsky and Pavel Stroilov have put out a pamphlet on the EU. It bears the arresting title EUSSR. I wish to quote from the introduction (and bear in mind that Bukovsky was one of the leading Soviet dissidents, a great, clear-eyed man):

"For anyone even remotely familiar with the Soviet system, its similarity with the developing structures of the European Union, with its governing philosophy and 'democracy deficit,' its endemic corruption and bureaucratic ineptitude, is striking. For anyone who lived under the Soviet tyranny or its equivalents across the world, it is frightening. Once again we observe with growing horror the emergence of a Leviathan that we had hoped was dead and buried, a monster that destroyed scores of nations, impoverished millions, and devastated several generations before finally collapsing. Is it inevitable? Is the human race bent on self-destruction and doomed to repeat the same mistake time and again until it dies in misery? Or is the EU, indeed, simply a clone of the USSR imposed upon reluctant nations of Europe by the same political forces that created the first one?"

Look, if Bukovsky talks this way, who am I to scoff? He may not be right — but anyone who ignored him would be a fool.

At my old Union Square Journal site (dormant but not dead) I've always kept posted Jamie Glazov's article about Bukovsky's claim that it was the West that had lost the Cold War, a somewhat startling conclusion that Bukovsky nonetheless makes a very strong argument in support of. It wasn't the Russians we were battling in the Cold War, or even the Soviet Union. It was the ideology of international socialism. The contemporary understanding that most Americans have of Europe is that it's the still pretty-as-a-picture Old World whence most of their ancestors came, and the place in which the values of Western civilization, to which we are the most favored heirs, were established. Americans need to think again. Nordlinger has come awake. Bukovsky was right there for him with the terrible truth