I suppose someone might reasonably ask the importance and relevance, at this late date, of the above-named topic. Someone might also ask what such an issue is doing in a column said to be mainly about foreign policy and war. My first defense is that politics is the continuation of war by other means to reverse Clausewitz s dictum. Politics is the low-intensity conflict which normally takes place within boundaries already fixed by prior conquest.
States carry on wars against other states and wage peace, so to speak, against their subjects.
The processes have a lot in common, which is why people necessarily take an interest in politics, if only in sheer self-defense. It is nicer when these things can be worked out by appeals to precedent, documents, and so on, rather than by force. Those about to enter the maw of the European Union should sit up and take heed. Evidently some misgivings still arise about the nature of the American union. That s old hat, they say, and has no meaning for us today.