The conventional wisdom a week ago was that George W Bush had seen the error of his unilateral cowboy ways and was off to Europe to mend fences with our “allies.”
I think not. Lester Pearson, the late Canadian prime minister, used to say diplomacy is the art of letting the other fellow have your way [CORRECT]. All week long, Mr. Bush offered an hilariously parodic reductio of Pearson’s bon mot, wandering from one EU gabfest to another insisting how much he loves his good buddy Jacques and his good buddy Gerhard and how Europe and America share — what’s the standard formulation? — “common values.” Care to pin down an actual specific value or two that we share? Well, you know, “freedom,” that sort of thing, abstract nouns mostly. Love to list a few more common values, but gotta run.
And at the end what’s changed?
Will the U.S. sign on to Kyoto? No.
Will the U.S. join the International Criminal Court? No.
Will the U.S. agree to accept whatever deal the Anglo-Franco-German negotiators cook up with Iran? No.
Even more remarkably, aside from sticking to his guns in the wider world, Mr. Bush found time to cast his eye upon Europe’s internal affairs. He told his Brussels audience, in his tour’s first speech, “We must reject anti-Semitism in all forms and we must condemn violence such as that seen in the Netherlands.”
The Euro-bigwigs shuffled their feet and stared coldly into their mistresses’ decolletage. They knew Mr. Bush wasn’t talking about anti-Semitism in Nebraska, but about France, where for three years there has been a sustained campaign of synagogue burning and cemetery desecration, and Germany, where the Berlin police advise Jewish residents not to go out in public wearing any identifying marks of their faith. The “violence in the Netherlands” is a reference to Theo van Gogh, murdered by a Dutch Islamist for making a film critical of the Muslim treatment of women. Van Gogh’s professional colleagues reacted to this assault on freedom of speech by canceling his movie from the Rotterdam Film Festival and scheduling some Islamist propaganda instead.
The president, in other words, understands that for Europe, unlike America, the war on terror is an internal affair, a matter of defusing large unassimilated radicalized Muslim immigrant populations before they provoke the inevitable resurgence of opportunist political movements feeding off old hatreds. Difficult trick to pull off, especially on the Continent where the ruling elite feels it’s in the people’s best interest not to pay any attention to them. The new EU “constitution,” for example, would be unrecognizable as such to any American.
I had the opportunity to talk with former French President Valery Giscard d’Estaing a couple of times during his long labors as the self-declared and strictly single Founding Father. He called himself “Europe’s Jefferson,” and I didn’t like to quibble that, constitutionwise, Jefferson was Europe’s Jefferson — that’s to say, at the time the U.S. Constitution was drawn up, Thomas Jefferson was living in France. Thus, for Mr. Giscard to be Europe’s Jefferson, he’d have to be in Des Moines, where he would be do far less damage.
But, quibbles aside, Mr. Giscard professed to be looking in the right direction. When I met him, he had an amiable riff on how he had been in Washington and bought one of those compact copies of the U.S. Constitution on sale for $1 or $2. Many Americans wander round with the Constitution in their pocket so they can whip it out and chastise over-reaching congressmen and senators at a moment’s notice. Try going round with the European Constitution in your pocket and you’ll be walking with a limp after two hours: it’s 511 pages long, 500 pages longer than the U.S. Constitution. It’s full of stuff about European space policy, Slovakian nuclear plants, water resources, free expression for children, the right to housing assistance, preventive action on the environment, etc.
Most of the so-called constitution isn’t in the least bit constitutional. That is, it’s not satisfied, like the United States Constitution, to define the distribution and limitation of powers. Instead, it reads like a U.S. defense spending bill porked up with a ton of miscellaneous expenditures for the “mohair subsidy” and other congressional boondoggles. President Reagan liked to say, “We are a nation that has a government — not the other way around.” If you want to know what it looks like the other way round, read Mr. Giscard’s constitution.
But it will be be ratified, and Washington is hardly in a position to prevent it. Plus there’s something to be said for the theory that, as the EU constitution is a disaster waiting to happen, you might as well cut down the waiting and let it happen.
CIA analysts predict the collapse of the EU within 15 years. I would say, as predictions of doom go, that’s a little cautious. But either way the notion the EU is a superpower in the making is preposterous. Most administration officials subscribe to one of two views: (a) Europe is a smugly irritating but irrelevant backwater; or (b) Europe is a smugly irritating but irrelevant backwater where the whole powder keg’s about to go up.
For what it’s worth, I incline to the latter position. Europe’s problems — its unaffordable social programs, its deathbed demographics, its dependence on immigration numbers no stable nation (not even America in the Ellis Island era) has ever successfully absorbed — are all of Europe’s making. By some projections, the EU’s population will be 40 percent Muslim by 2025. Already, more people each week attend Friday prayers at British mosques than Sunday service at Christian churches — and in a country where Anglican bishops have permanent seats in the national legislature.
Some of us think an Islamic Europe will be easier to deal with than the present Europe of cynical, wily, duplicitous pseudo-allies. But getting there will certainly be messy, and violent.
Until the shape of the new Europe begins emerging, there’s no point picking fights with the terminally ill. The old Europe is dying, and Mr. Bush did the diplomatic equivalent of the Oscar night lifetime-achievement tribute at which the current stars salute a once-glamorous old-timer whose fading aura no longer threatens them. The 21st century is being built elsewhere.
Mark Steyn is the senior contributing editor for Hollinger Inc. Publications, senior North American columnist for Britain’s Telegraph Group, North American editor for the Spectator, and a nationally syndicated columnist.
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