Europeans recently passed a draft EU constitution that would drain sovereignty out of the parliaments of the member nation-states and transfer it into the EU bureaucracy in Brussels. The draft EU constitution, rather than protecting the natural rights of individuals against encroachment by government, confers privileges to groups of people in the name of "rights." One such privilege is the so-called "right of access to placement services." In other words, unemployed people are given a "right" to insist that government expropriate taxes from workers in order to help the unemployed find a job.
If EU member states continue to cede their sovereignty to new bureaucratic institutions in Brussels and do this willingly and through a truly representative and democratic structure, then c'est la vie.
However, there's a serious problem with the manner in which EU integration is occurring, a problem that threatens the United States directly. The EU apparatus in Brussels seems incapable of forging the former nation-states of Europe and Britain into a new European Union by draining the sovereignty of their people without infringing upon the sovereignty of the people of other nations.
The EU bureaucrats and their American myrmidons often complain of American unilateralism. But it is the EU that has been pushing unilaterally for the erosion of other nations' sovereignty in the areas of economic policy and regulatory policy. It is EU universalism run amok that has forced President Bush to suspend military aid to 35 countries that failed to exempt Americans from prosecution before the new U.N.
International Criminal Court, just to protect members of our armed forces from politically motivated prosecutions.
Under the guise of "harmonization," the Brussels bureaucracy demands that relatively low-tax countries such as Ireland raise their tax rates, and it flies into a snit when Germany, the Continent's highest-tax country, considers lowering its tax rates to help rejuvenate economic growth.
As Washington Times columnist Richard Rahn recently put the threat to America, the European political establishment is in the throes of "an irrational and destructive jealous rage" due to the poor economic performance of the Continent. They accuse relatively fast-growing countries like the United States, which have lower tax rates than most members of the EU, of engaging in the Brussels-minted bureaucratic crime of "destructive tax competition." The enraged Brusselcrats demand that low-tax countries raise their tax rates and that they share taxpayers' sensitive personal information even with corrupt governments that might have ties to terrorists.
These and other encroachments on our national sovereignty threaten more than global economic prosperity and individual privacy; they are a threat to our very freedom and our chosen form of government. Americans did not fight and die 227 years ago to help secure each individual's God-given rights only to allow other powers to usurp our very freedoms under the cloak of seemingly benign concepts such as "harmonization" and "common interests."
Once again, our European cousins fail to grasp the nature of a sovereign people. What they derisively call "unilateralism" is, in fact, nothing more than defending our unalienable individual rights to life, liberty, private property and the pursuit of happiness.