Fortress Europe

WHEN European leaders meet in Turin on March 29 to launch a year-long Inter-Governmental Conference on reforming the European Union’s institutions, Americans should pause for thought. The conference has two aims: to maintain the political momentum toward the introduction of a European currency in 1999 and to create a common European foreign and defense policy. Although they initially appear unconnected, these aims are in reality two sides of the same illiberal and anti-American coin.

Indeed, supporters of European integration commonly affirm that their project is incompatible with the liberal order. A recently published French textbook on the European Union argues that the main threat to European integration is free trade. “Combining the tyrannical aspects of the ‘socialist countries’ in Eastern Europe, and the organizational elements of the socialisms of Western Europe,” it argues improbably, “liberalism, in economics, has been, and still is, the major source of the European Community’s weakness.” Just as President Chirac extolled the victory of “European values” over the ideology of world liberalism at the EU summit in Madrid last December, so Chancellor Kohl insists that the European Union must at all costs avoid “descending” or “being dissolved” into “a sort of superior free-trade zone.”

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John Laughland

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WHEN European leaders meet in Turin on March 29 to launch a year-long Inter-Governmental Conference on reforming the European Union’s institutions, Americans should pause for thought. The conference has two aims: to maintain the political momentum toward the introduction of a European currency in 1999 and to create a common European foreign and defense policy. Although they initially appear unconnected, these aims are in reality two sides of the same illiberal and anti-American coin.

Indeed, supporters of European integration commonly affirm that their project is incompatible with the liberal order. A recently published French textbook on the European Union argues that the main threat to European integration is free trade. “Combining the tyrannical aspects of the ‘socialist countries’ in Eastern Europe, and the organizational elements of the socialisms of Western Europe,” it argues improbably, “liberalism, in economics, has been, and still is, the major source of the European Community’s weakness.” Just as President Chirac extolled the victory of “European values” over the ideology of world liberalism at the EU summit in Madrid last December, so Chancellor Kohl insists that the European Union must at all costs avoid “descending” or “being dissolved” into “a sort of superior free-trade zone.”