Trick Or Treaty

By INVESTOR'S BUSINESS DAILY, 13 December 2007



[Bye-bye democracy, hello Eutopia.]



Government: The European Union's freshly negotiated "Reform Treaty" sounds

innocent enough, but it's in fact a document that, if enacted into law,

will mean the end of the nation-state there as we know it. Just two years

ago, the EU submitted its Constitutional Treaty to its members for a vote.



Two key countries - France and the Netherlands - stunned the union's

unelected bureaucrats and political appointees by rejecting it outright.

Without their support, the treaty as negotiated was null and void.

Fearing further rejection, the EU went back to work - coming up with a

"reform" treaty that would, theoretically, resolve all the issues that

worried Europeans when it was first proposed. Bye-bye democracy, hello Eutopia.



What has emerged is a nightmare of a deal that creates a powerful - and

unelected - European Commission president, a foreign policy czar, dozens of

new bureaucracies and 250 pages of rules, regulations and laws. "From this old

continent, a new Europe is born," said current EC President Jose Manuel Barroso

of Spain. And no, he wasn't joking.



Despite Barroso's comments, the "reform" creates a new, hyper-bureaucratic

super-state having all the ugliness of the European welfare state but none of

the charm of the individual countries.



For believers, the old ideal of a "common Europe" may finally come true. With

27 nations, 495 million people and a real GDP of about $13.9 trillion, it will

exceed even the U.S. in size. But it will more resemble the dystopic totalitarian

state, Oceania, from George Orwell's "1984" than the United States of America –

on which the EU was explicitly modeled. Sadly, the EU's recipe of cradle-to-grave

welfare and state-directed capitalism has failed - with the EU now lagging badly

behind the U.S. on most measures of economic progress and well-being. The treaty

won't cure this, but it will disenfranchise voters by:



* Ending the veto that countries now wield over some 60-plus areas of policy.



* Eliminating the right of European nations to craft their own laws under their

own standards, including immigration.



* Making it illegal for any member to discriminate on grounds of "sex, race, colour,

ethnic or social origin, genetic features, language religion or belief, political or other

opinion."



In short, the world's first PC state. Nor is this good for the U.S. and our relations

with Europe. We are likely to encounter more protectionism, not less, more grandstanding

on issues such as global warming and less cooperation on military affairs (and forget about

NATO).



Worse, saddled with more rules and less-free markets, the EU's economy - now about 30%

of the world's total – will continue to underperform. This too is bad for the U.S., bad for

the developing world and definitely bad for Europe. The so-called reforms are supposed

to take effect in 2009.



Already, France and Germany have pledged they'll do whatever's needed to get parliamentary

approval in their countries for the deal - even if it means subverting their own democracies.



But the very idea of reform is a joke. The "new" treaty is 96% identical to the "old" one.

As ex-French President Valery Giscard d'Estaing admitted:



"All the earlier proposals will be in the new text, but will be hidden and disguised in some way."

In other words, it's not "reform" but a sham, a lie, a fraud. There is hope, however, that

it might fail. Anger and public resistance is large and growing in Britain, Denmark and the

Netherlands.



We hope so. Europe deserves better than to let dozens of its once-unique countries lose their

identities and cultures to an overweening, all-powerful welfare Eurostate.