Mark Steyn: Arrogant Eurocracy – Why the European Union elites won’t take ‘no’ for an answer

A couple of days before Sunday’s referendum on the European constitution, Jean-Claude Juncker, the “president” of the European Union, let French and Dutch voters know how much he values their opinion:

“If at the end of the ratification process, we do not manage to solve the problems, the countries that would have said ‘No,’ would have to ask themselves the question again,” “President” Juncker told the Belgian newspaper Le Soir.

Got that? You have the right to vote, but only if you give the answer your rulers want you to give. But don’t worry, if you don’t, we’ll treat you like a particularly backward nursery school and keep asking the question until you get the answer right. Even America’s bossiest nanny-state Democrats don’t usually express their contempt for the will of the people quite so crudely.

When he’s not playing European “president,” Mr. Juncker is the prime minister of Luxembourg, a country two-thirds the size of your rec room. Yet he bestrides the continent like a colossus. Just to make sure we all got the message, he spelled out precisely the impact that the people’s view of the European constitution would have on their rulers’ adoption of said constitution: “If it’s a ‘Yes,’ we will say ‘on we go,’ and if it’s a ‘No’ we will say ‘we continue.’ ”

I didn’t see the actual Euro-ballot, but evidently it’s “Check the Yes box if you favor ratification of the E.U. constitution. Check the No box if you favor ratification of the E.U. constitution. For Neither of the Above, check Both of the Above.”

In every election campaign, cautious candidates play the game of lowering expectations, but even so, the Euro-elite’s distinctive variation on this ancient ritual has been remarkable:

The whole article:

Arrogant Eurocracy

Mark Steyn on why the European Union elites won’t take ‘no’ for an answer

Mark Steyn

A couple of days before Sunday’s referendum on the European constitution, Jean-Claude Juncker, the “president” of the European Union, let French and Dutch voters know how much he values their opinion:

“If at the end of the ratification process, we do not manage to solve the problems, the countries that would have said ‘No,’ would have to ask themselves the question again,” “President” Juncker told the Belgian newspaper Le Soir.

Got that? You have the right to vote, but only if you give the answer your rulers want you to give. But don’t worry, if you don’t, we’ll treat you like a particularly backward nursery school and keep asking the question until you get the answer right. Even America’s bossiest nanny-state Democrats don’t usually express their contempt for the will of the people quite so crudely.

When he’s not playing European “president,” Mr. Juncker is the prime minister of Luxembourg, a country two-thirds the size of your rec room. Yet he bestrides the continent like a colossus. Just to make sure we all got the message, he spelled out precisely the impact that the people’s view of the European constitution would have on their rulers’ adoption of said constitution: “If it’s a ‘Yes,’ we will say ‘on we go,’ and if it’s a ‘No’ we will say ‘we continue.’ ”

I didn’t see the actual Euro-ballot, but evidently it’s “Check the Yes box if you favor ratification of the E.U. constitution. Check the No box if you favor ratification of the E.U. constitution. For Neither of the Above, check Both of the Above.”

In every election campaign, cautious candidates play the game of lowering expectations, but even so, the Euro-elite’s distinctive variation on this ancient ritual has been remarkable:

Originally, we were told that it would be a big setback if the Dutch, as one of the E.U.’s six founding members, were to reject the constitution.

Then, as the Dutch polls headed south, we were told not to worry, they’re a small unimportant country, won’t make any difference. It’s the French, as one of the two pillars of Continental integration, whose view really counts.

Then, as the French polls headed south, we were told, oh well, if it’s a narrow defeat, that won’t make any difference either. We’ll get the French to vote again and make them give the correct answer this time. The so-called driving force of the E.U. was now reduced to the status of the Irish and Danes — a faraway province of peripheral significance.

So now we’re told that French voters’ 55–45 rejection of the constitution is nowhere near the massive overwhelming defeat that would be necessary to derail the thing. Most advanced societies are reluctant to make big constitutional changes on too small a majority — look at the level of support you need to amend the U.S. Constitution or to abolish the Australian and Canadian monarchies. But, in its own perverse wrinkle on this thesis, Europe says gravely that it won’t make big constitutional changes on too small a minority — if the French had rejected the constitution by, say, 92% to 8%, well, that might have prompted the E.U. to consider possibly perhaps at least partially rethinking clause 473 paragraph H.

Throughout the campaign, it was pointed out that opposition to the constitution was incoherent: The British dislike it because it subordinates a thriving economy to a centralized statist regulatory tyranny; the French dislike it because it’s a plot to impose “Anglo-Saxon” capitalism on their agreeably pampered welfare utopia. As The Daily Telegraph’s Charles Moore pointed out, these objections are not contradictory: “Jean may want to knock off on Friday morning while Jack may want to work all Sunday: both agree that they should be able to make up their own minds about it.”

Just so. And, as Jean-Claude Juncker’s airy pre-emptive dismissal of the election result underlines, the right of people to make up their own minds is the one option that’s not on the Euro-table.The European establishment’s occasional acknowledge of the E.U.’s “democratic deficit” hardly begins to cover their disdain for the people: As the computer types say, that’s not a bug, that’s a feature. A couple of days ago, the New York Times Web site flagged a page called “Q&A: What’s At Stake In France’s EU Constitution Vote?” Naturally I clicked on it, hoping I could just copy out their great thoughts in a slightly rearranged word order and bunk off to the Bahamas for the weekend. The first question in their E.U. constitution Q&A was “What is the status of the Palestinian security services?” which hadn’t struck me as a terribly burning issue in Lyons or Marseilles. The second question was “What are the three new branches of the Palestinian security services?” And by the time I got to “What is the counterterrorism record of the Palestinian security services?” I’d figured out that this was, alas, only another New York Times screwup.

But it did set me thinking about my post-9/11 trips to the Middle East, where, until Bush and his insane Zionist neocon democracy fetishists came along, America’s “allies” in the region had spent four decades selling themselves to Washington as a necessary antidemocratic restraint on the baser urges of their primitive peoples. Now who does that sound like? Look at all those bizarre utterances from the Euro bigwigs this last month: the Dutch Prime Minister, who said “I’ve been in Auschwitz” and the Euro constitution was necessary to “avoid such things” in the future; Sweden’s European Commissioner, who said at the Terezin concentration camp in the Czech Republic that “scrapping the supranational idea” would set the European Union on the “old road” back to the death camps. What a reassuring argument: Only the Euro elite can protect the citizenry from their worst instincts. If the U.S. Constitution begins with “We the people,” the starting point for the European Constitution is “We know better than the people.” And in the long run, in Europe as in the Middle East, that won’t work.

Unfortunately, the institutional arrogance of the entrenched Eurocracy is all but indestructible. Even as the French were voting, the former British Foreign Secretary Lord Hurd was telling folks that this unsatisfactory referendum campaign demonstrated that what Europe needed was new leaders. Poor chap, missing the point as usual. The European Union isn’t floundering because of a lack of leaders. It’s the lack of followers.

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