Confessing Evangelical

Mark Steyn has written a superb piece in yesterday's Telegraph on how Reagan knew why the EU won't work (registration required). He quotes a line from Reagan's inaugural address: "We are a nation that has a government - not the other way around". Steyn continues:

I like it because too often we "small government" conservatives can sound small ourselves - pinched and crabbed and reductive. Reagan made small government a big idea...

In the speech, he meant it domestically ... But, in the broader sense, Reagan's line about nations that have governments is a good way to weigh up the world. Across central and eastern Europe, from Slovenia to Lithuania to Bulgaria, governments that had nations have been replaced by nations that have governments - serving at the people's pleasure.

Which - with the European Parliament elections tomorrow - brings us to the European Union.

When the 13 colonies came together to form the United States, they already shared so much in common that they didn't need to express their sense of nationhood in an overbearing central government.

However, because there is no natural demos binding Scotland and Greece, the European Union has decided to come at things from the other direction. It's not a nation that has a government. So instead its plan is to start with a government in the hopes that a nation - or quasi-nation - will follow.

M Giscard and co seem to think that, if you have a commission and a council and a parliament and a president and a foreign minister and a common defence policy and a public prosecutor and a citizenship and a flag and an anthem and banknotes and a continent-wide minimum wage, then you have the bones and internal organs of nationhood and you can put flesh on them later.

Take the new European Constitution (...please!):

It's full of stuff about European space policy, water resources, free expression for children, the right to housing assistance, preventive action on the environment, etc. They may well be worthy planks in a political platform, but they're not constitutional matters.

Rather, they represent a mentality which:

takes for granted that the natural order is a world in which every itsy-bitsy activity is licensed and regulated and constitutionally defined by government.

Steyn then goes slightly off the rails by advising his readers to vote UKIP (United Kingdom Independence Party) tomorrow (UKIP is a fringe party which is calling for complete withdrawal from the EU). To be fair, he makes the best case I've come across so far for voting UKIP. Unfortunately, that still can't overcome the almost unanswerable case for not doing so: