In an impassioned speech delivered in Czechoslovakia on October 6, British Prime Minister Tony Blair disregarded his nation’s sovereign interests by touting for the European Union to become a world superpower.
Amazingly, in his speech the prime minister clung to the fiction that “Europe is a Europe of free, independent, sovereign nations….” It patently is not. The new EU Charter of Fundamental Rights is, in fact, a blueprint for the constitution of a European superstate.
The embattled prime minister, aware of his party’s dramatic slump in the British polls, strove to allay the fears of the British public. To the majority of Britons, who balk at the prospect of further Europeanization, Mr. Blair said that he saw the EU as a superpower but not a superstate. In a terribly blind brandishment he stated that Europe was too diverse and dynamic for a single written constitution.
On this score, not only has the prime minister backed the wrong horse—this horse has truly bolted! The drive for a federal constitution has already been accepted by the EU’s constitutional affairs committee. The European Commission has stated that the new Charter of Fundamental Rights should form the basis for the drawing up of a written constitution legally binding on all EU member states. The charter will be incorporated into the next Treaty on European Union, to be ratified by member states at an EU summit in Nice, France, in December.
Chaired by former German President Roman Herzog, the convention which drew up the EU charter conducted their whole process in the complete absence of any public debate. The most controversial clauses of the charter could be used to suppress the rights of EU citizens when “necessary,” to “meet objectives of general interest being pursued by the Union.” Such statements within the body of the charter must make the hearts of old fascists glow.
Notwithstanding Tony Blair’s ostrich-like stance on these developments, it is obvious to sensible observers of EU trends that the three principle bodies which govern the EU (the European Commission, Council and Parliament) are all of one mind in cementing the various EU treaties and the Charter of Fundamental Rights into a single governing constitution. This will create the very monster that Mr. Blair says he does not want—a European superstate.
Britons are slowly starting to wake up to the fact that becoming a signatory to the next EU treaty would not only erode their power to regulate their national economy, it would restrict the use of their military forces, impose Roman law over the top of British common law, and draw them into a European super-police-state.
With time it will be plain for all to see that the EU, on its path to becoming a global superpower, will first become a superstate. Mr. Blair’s attempt to draw a distinction between the two simply denies reality.