The “no” votes this week cast by French voters, followed by Dutch voters, against the proposed European Constitution were not entirely unexpected.
The disquiet below the surface in both countries, reflects public skepticism with the top-down, centralized design of the European Union by Euro-elites located in Brussels.
Proponents of the 25-member European Union were never quite convinced, as Euro-elites engaged in constitution-making begun in 2001, that the people of Europe remain attached in the most basic sense of national identity to being French, Dutch, Spanish, English etc., and resentful of abandoning these historically rich identities for a bureaucratically constructed one of becoming “European.”
The distance between a European common market and a European federal state was a leap of political imaginings of Euro-elites taking for granted that they know what is good for the public.
Hence the elites produced an incredibly gothic European Constitution of nearly 500 pages—generally incomprehensible to most people—setting requirements for managing by an elaborate, unelected bureaucracy just about every aspect of life for future European citizens.
The dream of Euro-elites from Napoleon to Jacques Chirac has been one of engineering a unified European state stretching, as France’s Charles de Gaulle once opined, from the Atlantic Ocean to the Ural Mountains. Behind this dream lies the view that only a unified continent might bury the sort of European quarrels that twice exploded into world wars in the last century—and might also raise Europe to contend with the United States as a countervailing superpower.
Having come this far, the elites are not going to abandon their dream because of referendum results in France and the Netherlands, or concede that the public knows best.
There is a lesson, however, in the French and Dutch votes that should be familiar with Canadians.
There is no certainty that a contrived elite consensus can be sold to the public—as former PM Brian Mulroney learned with 10 premiers, two territorial leaders, and leaders of the First Nations when their Charlottetown Accord was repudiated in the 1992 referendum, despite fears generated by Canada’s elites that the country would fall apart after a “No” vote.
In Europe, the other lesson staring in the face of the elites is the disintegration of the former Soviet Union.
Lenin and his communist comrades constructed the most thoroughly controlled, elite-driven, federated state as a worker’s paradise. It worked, with the lashings of the elite whip, for about three generations until its rusted bolts and screws brought the collapse of an artificially constructed entity driven to exhaustion.
The elites’ main obsession in the making of the European Union has been with American influence and power.
But the U.S. is a product of a different history, its birth occasioned when 13 colonies came together in their anti-colonial War of Independence against Britain.
America’s story is the success of a free people making a union from the bottom up. The republic—the first of its kind and not duplicated since—represented the people’s will, contrary to the paternalism of Euro-elites so greatly admired by Euro-lovers in Canada.
America’s constitution, with its seven articles, is barely 15 pages in length. The thickness of Europe’s proposed document symbolizes the chasm separating it from the U.S.
It also illustrates the Euro-elites belief in the state’s capacity to meet people’s needs, in contrast to the faith of American people in themselves; to meet their needs with minimal dependence on the state.
This determination of the elites suggests the EU will proceed, regardless of its foundational weaknesses.
He is a member of the Board of Directors for the Center for Islamic Pluralism based in Washington, D.C., a Senior Fellow with the Canadian Coalition for Democracies, and an academic-consultant with the Center for Security Policy in Washington, D.C. He has been a consultant with CIDA on development issues and has published widely in academic journals on foreign policy matters and area studies of the Middle East and South Asia.
Mansur is featured on the documentary Obsession: Radical Islam's War Against the West produced by the David Horowitz Freedom Center. He also unsuccessfully ran for the Canadian Alliance party in 2000.
Mansur has been accused by Canadian Islamic Congress of using "provocative, self-serving rhetoric", and for "promoting an anti-Arab and anti-Muslim agenda".
He is an Ismaili Muslim.
At a press conference on October 2, 2008, Mansur stated that "Islam is my private life, my conscience...[but] my faith does not take precedence over my duties...to Canada and its constitution, which I embrace freely;" "I am first and most importantly a Canadian;" "only in a free society will you find Islam as a faith and not a political religion." Mansur also criticized New Democratic Party Leader Jack Layton, whom Mansur said "has gone to bed with Islamists", because he is running candidates in Ontario and Quebec who are closely identified with the push for Sharia law.
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