Newsgroups: can.general,soc.culture.canada
From: mstede@cs.toronto.edu (Manfred Stede)
Subject: Re: Bigger worries than which lane to drive in
Organization: Department of Computer Science, University of Toronto
Date: 9 Sep 92 21:13:18 GMT

buckland@ucs.ubc.ca (Tony Buckland) writes:

> Somebody correct me if I'm wrong, but I believe the current peace,
> since 1945, between the great powers of Europe - Britain, France,
> and Prussia (later Germany) (and, if you exclude wars between
> proxies, Russia) - is the longest in the last three centuries at
> least, and shows promise of indefinite extension if the momentum
> created in the early post-WWII years can be maintained.  But that
> can only be done if the individual nations continue to yield
> their traditional powers to emerging central government.

Well, this point is debatable, of course.  To my mind, the close
economic co-operation that is scheduled to take effect 4 months
from now (indepedently of the Maastricht treaty ratification) is
clearly a positive development;  yet I don't see very good reasons 
for moving further ahead and create an artificial European political
union.  What really bothers me is the way in which this unification
is being produced: basically by backroom plotting of the foreign
ministers.  While Maastricht was negotiated, no one bothered to
ask the *people* whether they might at all be interested in giving
up their individual currencies, foreign policies, etc etc, and
basically join a big new country. Now, if questions like *this* are 
not put to the people, then the politicians are very seriously
out-of-touch.  (Isn't the procedure similar to how the old Meech Lake
accord came about?)  Unifying different countries ought to be a
"bottom-up" process, driven by the wish of the people, and not be
imposed "top-down" by governments.

The Danes and the Irish were the only ones who at least planned
to decide on the ratification of the treaty by popular referendum,
and the French only joined in as a response to the Danish no-vote.
In Germany, the popular mood switched practically overnight after
the announcement of the Maastricht treaty: people just had no idea
that their beloved D-Mark was just being negotiated away.

Apart from these procedural matters, it is not clear to me what
positive results we can expect from a political union.  The most
important goal, as you say, is the preservation of piece; but it
seems to me that the already agreed-on economic union will per-
fectly accomplish this.  The other possible benefit of doing away
with nation states is the elimination of regional/ethnic conflicts,
but again I'm not convinced.  The Scottish and Northern-Irish in 
the UK, the Basques and Catalonians in Spain, the two linguistic 
factions in Belgium, the autonomy-minded Northern-Italians---they 
all resist surrendering their powers to national governments.  
Would they be more happy when surrendering them to a big, fat 
all-European government in Brussels?
Arguments?

 
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Manfred Stede                                 mstede@cs.toronto.edu
Dept. of Computer Science                                          __o
University of Toronto                                            _ \<,_
Toronto M5S 1A4, Canada                                         (_)/ (_)
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