Quote:
Originally Posted by freddie
Those are all noble ideas and I'll be the first one to stand up in applause if they come true. There's just so many diplomatic obstacles to tackle before it can come to fruition. We're talking about a country who said no to the European Constitution on a referendum. A country where many politicians still score points on blatant nationalism. And it's not like France is an isolated case.
If anything I think the political unification might be slightly easier to achieve at first. Compromising over military matters is always the most sensitive issue.
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A 'no' to the EU constitution doesn't mean a 'no' to European integration, there were many different reasons why people voted no.
True, the extreme right voted 'no' because it is really anti-European, but the extreme left voted 'no' because it considered that the treaty didn't go far enough in terms of integration (neo-trotskists basically want a new Soviet Union), and the large majority of 'no' voters actually came from the socialist side from people who thought the treaty was no constitution at all and was only a treaty that reinforced capitalism against socialism without giving any powers to a real (democratically elected) central European government.
So no, a majority of the people who voted 'no' did not reject European integration, they actually did so because they wanted a deeper and more radical integration.
The root of the problem is that many French people (and also Belgian, Dutch, German) think that the European project has lost its political goal and is slowly evolving into a loose free trade area based on the Anglo-Saxon model. People were supportive of the European project as long as it meant the abolition of internal borders balanced by the strengthening of external borders to protect the European social model and secularism from the rest of the world, but globalization has ruined that principle.
Jean Monnet and Robert Schuman (founders of the European communities) had expected that economic integration would lead automatically to political integration, but obviously that plan did not really work (well, maybe it would work after 100 or 200 years but can we really wait that long when we have to face the US and new rising powers like China, India or Brazil, i don't think so).
So now in France there are a number of intellectuals who say that now may be the time to go back to the drawing board and start something new from scratch, starting with political union this time, by creating a true federation with the countries that would be willing to take that radical step. And not just in France, the Belgian prime minister Guy Verhofstadt said the same thing in his last book, the
United States of Europe.