Sarkozy and the EU - PeachParts Mercedes-Benz Forum

cmac2012 · #1 05-08-2012, 03:52 AM

Intersting article in the American Conservative:

Rod Dreher » The EU and the Somme

In his new reflection on the French presidential election, Adam Gopnik has a great line about Nicolas Sarkozy:

"People will forgive a short man with a beautiful wife if he seems sufficiently surprised; Sarkozy seemed merely showy, and his energy, over time, merely antic and self-pleasing."

Gopnik’s essay contains a challenge to conservatives like me, who reflexively dislike the European Union as a federalized superstate that exists to denature and defeat the local and the particular in Europe. It’s also a threat to sovereignty. I dislike the EU for all the reasons you would expect a conservative to dislike the EU. And yet … here’s Gopnik:

"In thinking about Europe and its union, the number that one needs to keep in mind is not the rate of the euro exchange or the measure of the Greek deficit but a simpler one, of sixty million.

"That is the approximate (and probably understated) number of Europeans killed in the thirty years between 1914 and 1945, victims of wars of competing nationalisms on a tragically divided continent. The truth needs re-stating: social democracy in Europe, embodied by its union, has been one of the greatest successes in history. Like all successes, it can seem exasperatingly commonplace. There is something uninspiring about the compromises and the dailiness of a happy marriage, and something compelling about one that is coming apart: it looks more like the due fate of all things. Yet the truth ought to remain central. A continent torn by the two most horrible wars in history achieved a remarkable half century of peace and prosperity, based on a marriage of liberalism properly so called (individual freedoms, including the entrepreneurial kind) and socialism rightly so ordered (as an equitable care for the common good). Any pleasure taken in the failure of Europe to expunge all its demons threatens to become one more way of not having to examine our own. A mild-mannered, European-minded citizen king [Francois Hollande, the twerpish Socialist candidate for president of France -- RD] is, at least, better than a passionately convinced exceptionalist. France, and Europe, learned that lesson the hard way."