Worth noting

The current issue of eurofacts quotes from an article published in Die Welt on February 23:

“From a liberal view, the EU Constitution remains a questionable document. It’s bulky, difficult to understand, and incluedes requirements that are more likely to hurt a free, competitive, western-oriented Europe than to help it … It creates an un-economic zone, whose competitiveness will be reduced and whose anti-western instincts will be written into law … nothing could be worse in view of the economic problems which the states of Europe currently face.”

I like that “western-oriented” and “anti-western”. So do we talk of developing countries in Asia or Africa. Time was, Europe was the bulwark of western liberal ideas.

In Marxist terms, the EU has turned away from “European methods of production” – private or semi-private, flexible, innovative, on an appropriate scale – to “Asian methods of production” – large-scale, centralized, geared to state glorification rather than individual or social improvement, caught up in size and unwieldiness.

The supposedly free-market, liberal Commission President Barroso and the supposedly free-market representative of the new economies, Lithuanian Budget Commissar Dalia Grybauskaitė, together with their colleagues have been bleating the same thing: we must have more money in the EU budget in order to push forward with grand EU projects.

The Constitution is undoubtedly anti-liberal, anti-western in its philosophical terms; but so is the entire structure and its denizens. And that includes, alas, the representatives of the new member states.