March 16^th

Patrick J. Buchanan is back today and using a Hoover Institute report predicts the downfall of the European Union. He cites the European unemployment rate of 11.4 percent compared with our 5.6 percent. He fails to note that the 11.4 percent may be distorted by Greece’s 27percent and Spain’s 26 percent. These two countries combined have a very much smaller population than Germany whose unemployment rate is just over 5 percent and that is less than ours. Europe is not yet a basket case. In fact many economists believe that Germany’s stock market right now is a better bet than our own.

Pat quotes at length from Bruce Thornton’s “The EU has Failed;” Thornton is a classicist and a military historian affiliated with the Hoover Institute. His background includes not a hint of training in political economy or any other kind of economics; never mind, his views appeal to Buchanan. I will try to summarize a lengthy two column quote: Thornton asks, “What comprises the collective beliefs and values…that form the foundations of a genuine European wide community?” That’s easy and that rationale formed the basis for the Treaty of Rome; it was an opposition to the continuous wars that had plagued Europe for more than a century. That is what led European nations to relinquish some of their sovereignty and form the European Union.

Thornton does not pursue this line of reasoning; he goes off on a harangue about church attendance. He claims that Christianity “gives divine sanction to notions of human rights…political freedom and equality.” These are all good things of course but where is religious freedom? Thornton leaves that out, perhaps he thinks no one will notice; but someone has! He, and consequently Buchanan, despairs because Christianity is fading as a force in the lives of Europeans and indeed it is. He maintains that, “social democracy (has not)… given reason to sacrifice for the common good.” That’s absurd on its face. The Nordic and other more socialist countries of the Union have voted themselves huge tax burdens because they see the social programs they support favoring the common good.

Europeans in the past have experienced religiously motivated wars and massacres. Witness the persecution of the Huguenots who were subjected to more rigorous social restrictions than the Nazis placed on the Jews. Then there was the plague of wars propelled by nationalistic pride: from Napoleon to Bismarck to Kaiser Wilhelm to Adolf Hitler. Is it any wonder that the people of Europe would work to avoid the continuation of such a curse? Frankly I doubt that filling up European cathedrals would help; it certainly didn’t in the past.