The greatest folly of the modern era

Why The New York Times and American liberals worship the EU superstate

By Nile Gardiner

Across Europe, faith in the European Project is eroding. Even in Germany, for decades the powerhouse of EU integration, more than 70 percent of the public have "little", "low" or "no confidence" in the single currency according to a recent Allensbach Institute poll. The European financial crisis has been a painful shattering of illusions for Eurofederalists from Paris and Berlin to Rome and Madrid, and across the continent Euroscepticism is on the rise.

But in the United States left-wing elites continue to cling to the idea of a European superstate and the holy grail of ever-closer union within the EU. In fact some of the most zealous support for European fiscal and political integration anywhere in the world can be found in Washington and New York. And nowhere is this misguided thinking stronger than on the pages of The New York Times, which last week published an editorial that frankly could have been penned by Jacques Delors. For the Times, the break up of the Eurozone, or even the EU itself, would be unthinkable, not least because it would allow individual nation states to reassert their national sovereignty after decades of being told what to do by unelected elites in Brussels.

In the view of the Times:

European leaders have at last begun edging, haltingly and reluctantly, toward the only realistic solution to the continent’s debt and banking crises: refinancing unpayable government debts and reinforcing weakened banks. If their monetary and political union is to survive, all members must start acting more like a union and less like a collection of jealous sovereign states… If things get bad enough, the euro zone could fracture, and that could lead to the fracturing of the entire European Union.

What explains the American Left’s foolhardy love affair with the European Project? As I’ve noted before, President Obama and his administration are firmly committed supporters of political and economic integration in Europe, as are the East Coast liberal elites that back them. There are three key reasons for this approach.

Firstly, Obama and his supporters are quintessentially European in outlook. They share the Big Government mentality of the Eurocrats who have been driving the EU project for decades. They are happy to see the United States adopt European-style policies that emphasise the central role of the state, while increasing regulation of the free market. As Daniel Hannan noted in his excellent pamphlet for Encounter’s Broadside Series, "Why America Must Not Follow Europe", “Obama would verbalize his ideology using the same vocabulary that Eurocrats do… In other words, President Obama wants to make the U.S. more like the EU.”

Secondly, American liberals admire the supranational nature of the European Union, the erosion of the power of the nation state, and the pooling of national sovereignty. They believe that unrestrained sovereignty is a dangerous concept, not only within Europe but for the United States too. They actively push for America’s freedom to manoeuvre to be harnessed by the United Nations and a host of international treaties, from the Treaty of Rome (International Criminal Court) to New START and the Law of the Sea. They admire the sacrifice of national sovereignty taking place across Europe, as well as Brussels’ emphasis on deferring to international institutions. For these gilded elites, the projection of American power must be firmly constrained by a liberal internationalism that elevates supranationalism over the national state.

Lastly, American liberals cling to the myth that a unified Europe will actually reduce  the burdens of global leadership on the United States, especially in the area of defence spending. The Obama administration has actively backed the evolution of a European defence identity, which in reality threatens the future of the NATO alliance and undercuts the independence of national militaries across Europe. This of course is a grand exercise in futility. While Europe marches down the path of defence integration, military spending among EU members of NATO has dramatically fallen, a point powerfully made by former US Defense Secretary Bill Gates in his farewell speech in Brussels. Which proves the point, that a federal EU is not just bad for Europe, but bad for the United States as well.

Lady Thatcher famously remarked in her book Statecraft “that such an unnecessary and irrational project as building a European superstate was ever embarked upon will seem in future years to be perhaps the greatest folly of the modern era”. She was absolutely right. Her words should be heeded by the White House as well as its fellow travellers at the New York Times.

The EU project is going down in flames as the worst excesses of European profligacy are being copied in the United States – out-of-control government spending, spiraling budget deficits, rising unemployment, anti-business regulations, and high taxation. There is something rather pathetic about American liberals desperately clinging to a distinctly top down anti-market approach that has spectacularly failed in Europe, and is now dragging America down too. On both sides of the Atlantic, the grandiose Big Government vision of the Left is collapsing in turmoil and disarray. The New York Times may still embrace the Europeanisation of the US economy, but as the polls increasingly show, the American people themselves are firmly rejecting it.