State of the Union

DANIEL HANNAN is correct in his article in the WSJ about President Bush's wrong attitude toward the EU and its new constitution.

It is a paradox. George W. Bush, we are forever being told, is a conservative hard man, a scourge of international lawyers, a unilateralist. If he has one guiding principle in foreign affairs, it is a preference for national democracies over supranational bureaucracies. On such issues as Kyoto, the International Criminal Court or the United Nations, he takes the robust view that elected politicians are preferable to unaccountable functionaries. Yet, when it comes to the European Union, he is happy to support the Western world's most remote, backward and antidemocratic project.

European integration, he says, is a force for peace and freedom on Earth. Really? Where? In Iran, where the EU is cuddling up to murderous ayatollahs? In China, where it not only wants to lift the arms embargo but is collaborating with Beijing on the Galileo satellite system to challenge the 'technological imperialism' of America's GPS? In Cuba, where it refuses to back anti-Castro dissidents? Or perhaps within its own borders, where, through the proposed constitution, it plans to transfer yet more powers from elected national assemblies to unelected Brussels commissars?

...When it comes to the EU, though, Washington is still frozen in the Cold War, preferring to humor remote elites over encouraging democratization.

...Where the U.S. Constitution is chiefly concerned with the rights of the individual, the European Constitution is chiefly concerned with the powers of the state. Where the U.S. Constitution (in my version) is 11 pages long, the European Constitution runs to 438 pages. Where the U.S. Constitution restricts itself to delineating the authority of government and establishing a proper balance between federal and state jurisdictions, the EU Constitution busies itself with such minutiae as the rights of asylum seekers and the status of the disabled. Where the Declaration of Independence offers "life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness," the EU's Charter of Fundamental Rights guarantees the right to "strike action" and "affordable housing."

Perhaps President Bush takes the view that, if the Europeans want to lumber themselves with a top-heavy and illiberal system of governance, that is their business. He ought, though, ask himself whether the constitution is in the U.S. interest.

...Every superpower is resented, of course; but there is more to this than envy. Anti-Americanism in Europe has an ideological basis. Consider the areas where EU policy is most directly at odds with that of the U.S.: Iran, China, Cuba, Israel. There is a common theme linking these policy disputes: In each of them, the EU favors stability over democracy.

It is no surprise, then, that the EU should itself be at the point of adopting a constitution that strengthens the rulers at the expense of the ruled. When American critics accuse the EU of hypocrisy for cuddling up to tyrants, they are missing the point. Europe's apparatchiks have never been wild about democracy. When they get a result they dislike -- as when Danish and Irish voters rejected EU treaties, for example -- they simply ignore it. It is only natural that they should extend the same way of thinking to, say, Iraq or Palestine.

...Mr. Bush might glance at Article I-15 of the proposed constitution: "The Common Foreign and Security policy shall apply to all aspects of foreign policy and all questions relating to the Union's security. Member States shall support the Common Foreign and Security Policy actively and unreservedly in a spirit of loyalty and mutual solidarity." It is worth asking whether, if this clause had already been in effect, Britain would have been allowed to join the Iraq war.