Jun 2nd, 2005 - 15:06:26
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French and Dutch Voters Reject EU Constitution
by John F. McManus
June 2, 2005
Despite intense backing from politicians, the mass media, and corporate officials, 55 percent of those voting in France and 62 percent of their counterparts in Holland have registered disapproval of the 448-article European Union Constitution that hardly anyone had read.
Summarizing the common man's escalating objections to further integration into the "new Europe," Irish economist Anthony Coughlan, a pronounced EU foe, commented: "The EU elite, the people who liked to breakfast in Rome, have lunch in Stockholm and go to bed the same night in Dublin, were desperate to get this treaty ratified, for it would benefit them hugely, give them more personal power, and make them feel more important." He added that "trying to turn the 25 member states into one supranational EU state was not in the interests of the 450 million people of the present EU."
Reasons for the popular resistance to the EU Constitution ranged from persistently high unemployment, to fear of losing jobs to immigrants and outsourcing, to anger over dictatorial edicts emerging from unresponsive and unelected bureaucrats in Brussels, to loss of national identity, to the Constitution's rejection of any mention of God or Europe's Christian heritage, and especially to fear of greater Muslim immigration should hints of Turkey's addition to the 25 member EU become reality. But Coughlan, who had carefully studied the cumbersome document, claimed that the greatest reason for disapproval should be that it would complete the process of reducing all EU countries "to the constitutional status of provinces or regional states within a superior Federal EU." In other words, national sovereignty was at stake.
Nine nations had previously approved the Constitution, eight via parliamentary action and only Spain via a referendum. The Constitution itself requires approval by all 25 EU member nations. Even though two have now rejected it, pro-EU forces may very well revert to tactics employed to bring the EU to its present powerful, though not total, dominance. In 1992, after the people of Denmark voted against the Maastricht Treaty, a major step in the building of the EU, their country's prime minister ignored the result of that referendum and approved the treaty. In 2001, Irish voters rejected the Nice Treaty. But because that vote had gone against the wishes of the power elite, a second referendum was held in 2002 and this time Irish voters approved the treaty.
Just prior to the referendum in France when polls suggested that the vote would be NO, Jean-Claude Junker, the current president of the European Union, arrogantly stated his disdain for the people's opinion. "If at the end of the ratification process," he pontificated, "we do not manage to solve the problems, the countries that would have said No would have to ask themselves the question again." Does this mean a second referendum in France and Holland? Obviously, that is the option he suggested.
The European Union is already functioning and, if the Eurocrats who built it have their way, it is not about to disintegrate. It already has legislative, executive, and judicial branches. It has a central bank, and the euro currency is in use in most of the 25 EU nations. Its clout, already substantial, would have become near total had the Constitution been approved. The internationalists behind this huge grasp for power are not about to give up.
The Constitution itself calls for a "political solution" should ratification fail. One possible course for the Eurocrats would involve rewriting the Constitution, making it much briefer, less threatening, and not subject to referenda. With a new Constitution "on the books," amendments could then be added to bring it to the level desired by those who want a dominant EU on the way to a dominant world government. Such a tactic would follow the pattern employed here in America to get the Federal Reserve and the Social Security System launched.
After Spain had become the first European nation to ratify the Constitution, Spanish Foreign Minister Miguel Angel Moratinos happily admitted that the document would amount to a death warrant for the 25 member states. He stated: "We are witnessing the last remnants of national politics. The member states have already relinquished control of justice, liberty and security. The concept of traditional citizenship has been bypassed in the 21st Century." In 2000, Mikhail Gorbachev visited England and told a British audience that he viewed the European Union as "the new European Soviet."
Perhaps some French and Dutch voters grasped the impact of these statements. In any event, their rejection of the EU Constitution is one of the most welcome indications of good sense to come out of Europe in many years. We can only hope that the people of our own nation similarly reject the plans to have a Free Trade Area of the Americas do for the entire Western Hemisphere what European planners are already accomplishing with the European Union.
