Friday, June 03, 2005
EURO-INTREGRATION AS SOLUTION TO PAST EVILS
Yep, it’s fairly happy times for us Eurosceptics at the moment which doesn’t happen very often it must be said. And thanks to the Dutch for making my week. No reason to go slack however.
The other day on the telly I saw a broadcast from the Dutch yes-campaign, which wasn’t in the end screened in the Netherlands due to protests. Well deserved protests. It suggested that to prevent repeats of the Holocaust, the Srebrenica massacre and the Madrid train bombings it was necessary to vote yes to the silly treaty on the Euro-constitution. The invocation of this sort of thing may be becoming routine and its moral stupidity is rather too obvious to point out again.
But is there perhaps some other point in these crass comparisons? Auschwitz, Srebrenica, Madrid? Well what they all have in common is that they were directly or indirectly caused by supra-nationalism. The Nazis were animated to the Holocaust by racism which by definition is not restricted to borders and they were quite eager to kill the “undesireables”not just in Germany but all over their pan-European polity. The Madrid bombers were motivated by some form of extremist Islamism, which again is not about territory or borders but instead dedicated to a universal idea. Ok, so Srebrenica doesn’t quite fit the bill so far as the perpetrators were motivated by a very narrow hatred and territorial ambitions. But the violence that erupted there was a partial consequence of the creation of a state which did not have a nation as a foundation on which to rest. Yugoslavia was probably doomed to fail and it is just the circumstance of creating artifical borders that made possible the wars of ethnic cleansing in the Balkans.
All these, pan-Yugoslavism, Islamism and Nazism are supra-national ideas.
So is Eurofederalism.
Yep, it’s fairly happy times for us Eurosceptics at the moment which doesn’t happen very often it must be said. And thanks to the Dutch for making my week. No reason to go slack however.
The other day on the telly I saw a broadcast from the Dutch yes-campaign, which wasn’t in the end screened in the Netherlands due to protests. Well deserved protests. It suggested that to prevent repeats of the Holocaust, the Srebrenica massacre and the Madrid train bombings it was necessary to vote yes to the silly treaty on the Euro-constitution. The invocation of this sort of thing may be becoming routine and its moral stupidity is rather too obvious to point out again.
But is there perhaps some other point in these crass comparisons? Auschwitz, Srebrenica, Madrid? Well what they all have in common is that they were directly or indirectly caused by supra-nationalism. The Nazis were animated to the Holocaust by racism which by definition is not restricted to borders and they were quite eager to kill the “undesireables”not just in Germany but all over their pan-European polity. The Madrid bombers were motivated by some form of extremist Islamism, which again is not about territory or borders but instead dedicated to a universal idea. Ok, so Srebrenica doesn’t quite fit the bill so far as the perpetrators were motivated by a very narrow hatred and territorial ambitions. But the violence that erupted there was a partial consequence of the creation of a state which did not have a nation as a foundation on which to rest. Yugoslavia was probably doomed to fail and it is just the circumstance of creating artifical borders that made possible the wars of ethnic cleansing in the Balkans.
All these, pan-Yugoslavism, Islamism and Nazism are supra-national ideas.
So is Eurofederalism.
