Selling the EU

In a few days France will vote in a referendum on the new EU Constitution. It seems, at this point, that French voters will reject this 300 page monstrosity. But not to worry, I'm certain that similar to previous votes on EU matters, if the French get this vote "wrong" they will be given the chance to vote on it again and again until they produce the answer that Chirac and Giscard actually want.

But what is interesting, is the way the bEUreaucrats are trying to sell this constitution. Mark Steyn has an interesting write-up of their campaign.

Scornful of such piffling analogies, the prime minister, Jan-Peter Balkenende, thinks a Balkan end is the least of their worries. "I've been in Auschwitz and Yad Vashem," he says. "The images haunt me every day. It is supremely important for us to avoid such things in Europe."

At the Theresienstadt (or Terezin) concentration camp in the Czech Republic, Sweden's European Commissioner, Margot Wallstrom, declared: "There are those who want to scrap the supranational idea. They want the European Union to go back to the old purely inter-governmental way of doing things. I say those people should come to Terezin and see where that old road leads."

Golly. So the choice for voters on the Euro-ballot is apparently: yes to the European Constitution, or yes to a new Holocaust. If there's a neither-of-the-above box, the EU's rulers are keeping quiet about it. The notion that the Continent's peoples are basically a bunch of genocidal whackoes champing at the bit for a new bloodbath is one I'm not unsympathetic to. But it's a curious rationale to pitch to one's electorate: vote for us; we're the straitjacket on your own worst instincts.