The Californian Union

The Economist magazine reports that the European Union, long under criticism for its democracy deficit, has without publicizing it given to citizens in Europe significantly enhanced power to pass laws through referenda:

Thanks to a barely debated clause in the Lisbon treaty, the EU is about to embark on an experiment in direct democracy. Within a year, the European Citizens’ Initiative will come into effect. One million EU citizens from a “significant number” of countries will be able to ask the European Commission to put forward new draft laws.

As with so many bits of the Lisbon treaty, which came into force in December, it is not clear how the citizens’ initiative will work in practice, or even if it is a good idea. Euro-cheerleaders spent years banging on about the need for Lisbon, saying its new rules would make Europe simpler, more efficient and more democratic. Now they have the treaty, many of the same people are muttering and wailing about unresolved problems hidden in its leaden prose. Interview senior Brussels types about Lisbon, and the same phrases come up again and again: “we have no idea how this bit will work” and “of course, national leaders had no real idea what they were signing.”

Well, leave that last bit aside; this we have come to expect. What is likely to happen in an environment of empowered democracy like this? I suspect that the wall that the Eurocrats have built against the rampaging democratic mob will not hold. Anything that Europeans vote in a referendum to ask the European commission to do, the European commission will ultimately have to do.

At first blush this seems like a substantial improvement over the standard European practice of rerunning referenda until they get the results they like, of European leaders expressing contempt over the stupidity of the people they rule, etc. In fact though, the European referendum process is likely to be a problem. The most informative example is probably California. There, democracy is direct; people vote, and they make law immediately. In Europe, that is not the case, but again this is unlikely to be much of a meaningful barrier.

And results in California have been none too reassuring. Californians have repeatedly voted to reserve certain portions of the budget for specific purposes, imposing major constraints on future legislatures trying to balance budgets. They have repeatedly enacted measures driven primarily by special-interest advertising, and have shown a marked propensity to heavily discount the future in pursuit of the interests of the selfish present. The referendum process in California, which my high school-history teachers assured me was designed to break special-interest control of the California legislature, has in fact enhanced the ability of pressure groups to rent-seek. Few serious observers contend that the current California referendum pattern – where a small group of people hire signature gatherers, and then blitz the airwaves with 30-second advertisements designed to roil the emotions, has led to better governance.

Added to this effect is the fact that a prime target of European referenda is likely to be the thing that European officials don’t let Europeans talk about – immigration and cultural assimilation in particular. None of this will be good for European social cohesion. But at least it’s democratic.

European Unrest

Esther at Islam in Europe, who always does a great job presenting the phenomenon of Muslims in Europe in all its complexity, has a roundup of simultaneous low-level disturbances (riots, if you like) in Malmö (Sweden), France and Greece. The disturbances concern, respectively, the arrest of radicals in a mosque, reaction to education reform, and whatever it is that Greek anarchists riot about.

It's not 1848, but it is a little disconcerting. If I were a betting man I would look to Spain next.

Cross-posted at European Wilding.

Rethinking Europe's Ethnic Future

There is much talk lately of the demographic transformation of Europe. (Go here for a review of this small but growing and useful literature; one more has come out, which I have read and may review, since I wrote that post.) The pessimistic argument says that Europe is being swamped by immigration and by higher fertility among non-native immigrants, many Muslim, who feel no allegiance to the culture they are swamping. But the data appear to be telling a different story now, at least in one European country. The level of immigration and especially political asylum claims appear to be in decline; it is instead emigration of natives that is the biggest concern.

The statistics below are all from the population section of Statistics Netherlands. The table below shows total native-Dutch population from 1996-2008:

1996	2000	2004	2008
12,995,174	13,088,648	13,169,880	13,188,027

So population is stabilizing and on the verge perhaps of beginning to decline, which is an oft-told tale. Total “persons with a foreign background,” i.e. with at least one non-Dutch parent, have risen, although are still just a bit over ten percent of the population:

1996	2000	2004	2008
2,498,175	2,775,302	3,088,152	3,215,255

So the population of such individuals is growing, but far more slowly than a few years ago. It grew 11.1% between 1996 and 2000, but only 4.1% from 2004 to 2008. Given that it includes mixed marriages and people from other Western countries, and that some presumably nontrivial portion of this group is on the way to assimilation in all the ways that matter, the marginal impact of Third World population movement to Holland may be falling.

Immigration and asylum tell similar stories. Here are the data for “nonwestern” immigrants during a similar period:

1996	2000	2003	2006
50,259	62,465	48,834	34,492

And asylum claims, which generate the most anger because unproductive immigrants unwilling to assimilate soak the welfare system as their progeny prepare to take over, show the same pattern:

1998	2003	2007
45,250	13,400	9730

So immigration and asylum fell substantially as this decade unfolded. The conclusion I draw from this is that, at least for one country, the threat to social stability from immigration (while far from over) has probably peaked. To be sure, it is only one country; some, like Denmark, have become even more vigilant about immigration, while others, like Sweden, have yet to do much to limit immigration or promote assimilation. But evidence from several countries across western Europe indicates that the flood of refugees is on the wane, and while the population balance among ethnic groups continues to tilt, it is not occurring as rapidly as before. Talk of Amsterdam becoming majority Muslim by 2015, as Daniel Pipes asserts today, or European countries ceasing to be recognizably European, seem excessive.

The two confounding factors are lower birth rates of and emigration by the natives. Here are data for population of Dutch nationals (including those of foreign background, since Statistics Netherlands doesn’t break this group out) between 20 and 30 years old:

1996	2000	2005	2007
2,206,099	1,988,927	1,799,086	1,799,492

This is quite a substantial decline, 18.4% in only 11 years, although it appears to have halted by 2003. Emigration of 20-30 year olds does show a rise, although the numbers are fairly small:

1996	2000	2003	2006
11,223	9168	10,486	13,716

Matching up 2006 emigration with 2005 total population for this age group means that about six Dutch in 1000 of that age group are leaving each year. Given that these are the parents of future Dutch, and given that they probably self-select for ambition, risk-taking and creativity (and perhaps away from comfort with nonwhite immigrants), this is a problem, although not a civilization-threatening one. That emigration is still on the rise despite alleged economic recovery in Europe is also disconcerting.

In short, I suspect that the threat of Europe being remade in undesirable ways by immigration, which I have written about here and here, may have crested. Not through the sort of apocalyptic violence Ralph Peters has predicted in a famously overwrought way here, but through the simple act of cracking down harshly on immigration. As long as illegal immigration is also controlled and the immigrants and their children either assimilate or come most of the way down to native-level fertility (neither a sure thing), disaster will probably be avoided. But the economic impact of Europe’s emigration of the young, if Holland is in any way typical, is a potential area of concern.

Lord Keynes, whose skill with the language was always better than his economics, is supposed to have said (although it is not to be found in my Bartlett’s) that “when the facts change, I change my views. What do you do?” Immigration waves in some countries have crested, fertility rates in France, Sweden and elsewhere are rising too much to be entirely accounted for (given the proportion of those groups in the population) by differential fertility rates for nonindigenous groups, and few countries are currently in catastrophically low fertility of 1.5 or less (and most of those in eastern Europe). And so I have changed my views, at least in part, since I last wrote on this. Note though that this says nothing about Europe's economic woes, or its looming welfare-state catastrophe, which I think are still major, perhaps fatal challenges.

For a dissenting view on these demographic questions, listen to Mark Steyn promote the paperback release of his still extraordinary America Alone on Milt Rosenberg’s Extension 720, a show I had the honor of appearing on myself, with nerves that will be obvious to the listener, once.

Hooliganism

The Sydney Morning Herald carries a report about soccer rioting in Italy after a fan was killed by a police officer:

Italian police attempting to quell a brawl between rival football fans shot and killed a supporter of a Rome team, sparking riots in four cities and forcing the postponement of several matches.

Groups of youths burned police vehicles near Rome's Olympic Stadium and clashed with police firing tear gas in the northern city of Bergamo. Violence also was reported in Milan and the southern city of Taranto.

Top officials, from the President and Prime Minister to the Mayor of Rome, pleaded for calm. The Prime Minister, Romano Prodi, ordered an investigation into the shooting.
…
In Rome, youths brandishing metal bars and rocks attacked a police headquarters near the Olympic Stadium and used rubbish bins to block a nearby bridge. They smashed windows and traffic lights and torched a police vehicle and a bus.

Soccer hooliganism has long baffled Americans. We have sports-related violence too, but it is rarer; it has been twenty years since a night of destruction in Detroit after the Tigers won the World Series. Clearly, despite years of effort by law-enforcement authorities, fan violence (unlike, revealingly, violent crime more generally) is a bigger problem in Europe than the U.S.

It is tempting to blame soccer for this, but I think that is a mistake. Soccer and the tribalistic passions it generates are common around the world, but I suspect there is nothing intrinsic about the sport causing European hooliganism in particular. That hooliganism has attached itself to soccer is basically a function of soccer’s popularity; if volleyball were as popular as soccer there would be volleyball hooligans too.

The question of interest is why the hooligan lifestyle exists at all. Hooligans are generally young men in their teens and twenties who are basically full-time soccer thugs, who follow their teams (and national teams) from place to place, looking for opportunities to drink and to brawl with others of like mind but different loyalties.

What is the opportunity cost of such a lifestyle? Historically, young men in their twenties were expected to be supporting at least themselves and, more probably, their growing families. But of course the notion of self-responsibility itself is in decline in all Western countries, but particularly Western Europe, where the welfare state has taken away form individuals much of the basic obligations to provide for oneself. Don’t have a job? Unemployment benefits will look after you. Marry? Why, when a spouse is no longer needed for sustenance in old age, the state provides health care and retirement benefits, and single parenthood or absent fatherhood is just another indistinguishable lifestyle choice?

And so we are presented with the phenomenon of the idle young lad, missing either material or social pressures to settle down, get a job, become a man. If you want to understand hooliganism – young men brawling and rioting over a sports event with drearily predictable regularity – you need look no farther than the messages the surrounding society sends; therein the answer lies. Soccer is everywhere, but hooliganism is only in Europe. The mystery practically solves itself.

Euro-Doom: A Reader's Guide

Some of us have been emphasizing Europe’s current difficulties – the perfect storm of low native birth rates, being swamped by immigrants from the collapsing societies around them, the anemic economic growth that cultivates resentment against these immigrants – for awhile. But now whole books are literally being written (finally, in the view of some of us) on the subject. Some are better than others; for those with an interest in this topic, I provide my reviews of those I have read.

While Europe Slept, by Bruce Bawer. Mr. Bawer came to embrace Europessimism via a most unusual path. He is a gay man who originally left the US for Europe (Holland and Norway in particular) in search of greater tolerance. There he found deranged anti-Americanism everywhere, and the rapid spread of militant Islam, which he now judges to be a greater threat to gays than religious fundamentalism in the U.S. The book is his recounting of Europe’s irrational hatred and ignorance of America, and its rising tide of Islamism. He writes passionately, but plays fast and loose with the facts on several occasions. Once he claims, relying on an erroneous report in The Economist that they have since corrected, that Sweden now has a higher homicide rate than the U.S. This claim is absurd on its face, and that he believed it so easily testifies, I think, to the strong possibility that many of his (unsourced) claims about European demographics are probably false. Compellingly presented, but unreliable; the assertion of shocking facts without citations eventually becomes just too much.

Mr. Bawer also has a blog which is devoted not just to Europe’s troubles but to its high culture as well.

Menace in Europe, Claire Berlinski. Like Mr. Bawer, Ms Berlinski writes as a concerned secularist, who would but for Europe's troubles have much more in common with their elites than with her fellow Americans. Europe, in principle, believes in much of what she believes in. But she sketches economic dysfunction more thoroughly than Mr. Bawer, along with chilling descriptions of European youth sliding into 1930s-style nationalism; her chapter on the neo-fascist leanings of the German rock act Rammstein and their admirers is worth the price of the book all by itself. She is a terrific writer, but the book is mostly personal stories rather than hard data. Still, the stories are revealing about a Europe mired in decline and having moved beyond such trivialities as reproducing itself, despite doubts a critical reader might have about how representative they are. I recommend it highly.

America Alone, by Mark Steyn. Like Ms Berlinski, Mr. Steyn is an amazingly gifted writer; along with Christopher Hitchens he is perhaps the most compelling pundit in the English-speaking world. The book is full of terrific Steyn one-liners, and for the uninitiated it is a fabulous introduction to Euro-doom. Perhaps the most compelling story he tells is of being in a maternity ward in Paris and seeing France's future in the demographic composition of the nursery. Like the prior two books, however, it is full of demographic statistics that are not cited (the book has no notes), and some of which I know to be outdated. Don’t buy it for research purposes, but most definitely buy it to get a brilliantly written does of extreme pessimism about the future of the West.

The Last Days of Europe, by Walter Laqueur. Unlike the other authors, Mr. Laqueur is an academic. He does provide a significant bibliography at the end, but does not link particular demographic claims to particular sources. It is not as stylishly written as the others, but more solidly sourced. Mr. Laqueur was himself once a Euro-optimist, having written numerous works on the triumph of the emerging EU (a fact he ruefully acknowledges). He also wanders around from extreme pessimism to mere concern, and sometimes seems to believe that Europe is headed for Islamic rule and sometimes that Europe will come to some sort of mutual accommodation with its Islamic residents. Academic caution is admirable, but his exposition of different predictions about whether Europe will go quietly, go loudly or not go at all is a significant drawback.

One could argue (as I speculated here) that economically, things may be at last turning around at least in parts of Western Europe, although it is certainly debatable whether they can now avoid irreversible economic decline. Because the economic min-revival in France, Germany, Italy and elsewhere is so young, it is hard to fault these books for ignoring it. All the Euro-doom reading is also disappointing from the point of view of accurate demographic data. But that is hardly the fault (Mr. Laqueur aside) of the authors, who are not scholars. Reliable European demographic data, broken down on ethnoreligious grounds, is extremely difficult to get for anyone. France refuses on principle (Frenchness is said to be completely separate from nationality or religion) to even collect such data. For me, as someone who wants to understand these trends, the books are thus not as helpful as I would like. And if someone reads somewhere or another that Muslims are going to be a third of the French population by such-and-such a year, and then that finds its way into an op-ed piece, and from there into a mass-distribution book, it suddenly takes on the unjustified status of unchallengeable dogma. But for those seeking to get a picture of what may be brewing in Europe, the last three books are all an immense asset despite the lack of documentation of these demographic factors. And if you can only buy one, buy Ms Berlinski’s.


If anyone is familiar with other books along these lines please pass them on and I will read them ASAP.

Numbers Matter

I have come across a fascinating interview with Gunnar Heinsohn, a German historian, at Gates of Vienna (along with a lot of apocalyptic commentary about Europe’s likely future) about the “Youth Bulge” theory of historical events. This view holds that large numbers of idle young men cause much of history’s trouble. (A more sober Financial Times review of Prof. Heinsohn’s book, which is unavailable in English, is here.)

Every term when I talk about the sustainability of the Chinese miracle, one of the things I tell my students is that there are already significant gaps in the first few years of life of men over women, in proportions far larger than normal. This gap has been growing for some time, a result of the one-child policy of China’s government combined with a cultural preference for boys. I tell my students that this portends social instability in China because angry young men, especially at the bottom of the socioeconomic ladder, with no wives to socialize them and no jobs to occupy them are the seeds of social upheaval. And in recent years there has in fact been a huge surge in protests in China over land seizures. The idea of idle young men causing a fair amount of the troubles documented in the world’s history books is the only idea offered up in any of my classes that some of my students greet with outright laughter. (Believing in free markets in ideas, I tolerate this good-naturedly.)

It is Prof. Heinsohn’s provocative claim that most interpretations of the great events of history are bunk, in that the ideological causes that drive war, peace and conquest are not the root causes; demographics are. Any society with enough idle young men will have violence of all sorts, and any ideology accompanying the violence is just the sheen on the phenomenon, not the phenomenon itself.

If so, the violence in the Arab world over Palestine, American troops in Iraq, the lack of an Islamist government over Algeria or whatever is simply going to get worse for awhile; there is no pacifying it. The good news is that the jihad may be living on borrowed time; the always-provocative Spengler claimed two years ago that the jihad is going to start running out of fuel some time in the middle of the next decade.

It is a rather dispiriting view of history – the idea of ignoring ideas because they don’t matter; only raw biological energy does. Human society is just a glorified baboon tribe, with fancier tools. But like any view, the only thing that matters is how well it fits the facts.

Us and Them

I had an interesting experience at a professional conference this weekend. A paper was being presented on a rather arcane but interesting problem -- what to do about the low degree of competitive balance in European soccer leagues. Year after year, the top places in the league are dominated by a very small number of teams. In any given year, most members of most of these leagues have a vanishingly small shot at the league championship.

The professor presenting the paper, who was from a European country, quickly drew the conclusion that what was needed was European Union regulations to enhance this competitive balance. The audience was probably half American and half European, and the presenter knew that this would be a tough sell with the American audience. Thus, he immediately tried to impress upon them the importance of "non-market" factors to many Europeans -- the value of tradition, of the need for social fairness, harmony and solidarity, etc.

What was striking about his proposal and sales pitch was the ease with which he got to justifying that the EU, having evidently solved most of its other difficulties, should take on soccer standings as part of its purview. But all of this assumes so much. First, why assume that competitive imbalance is the worst outcome? One could easily come up with many reasons why such leagues might confine their winners to a small subset of their members. For example, the possibility of relegation to an inferior league for the teams at the bottom already adds extra suspense. When you add to that the idea that transnational European competitions like the Champions League have created many fans in other countries, and not just in Europe, for marquee teams like Manchester United or AC Milan, it might well be that the welfare-maximizing outcome is one in which those teams get a lot of global exposure.

But even if it were true that competitive imbalance was bad for the leagues and their fans, why do the leagues not recognize this problem? Why run to government at all, and if so why to the highest possible level of government? Leagues have every reason to solve this problem if it exists because they internalize all the positive and negative consequences of competitive imbalance, and yet they choose it anyway. Perhaps the economist analyzing such problems should first think long and hard about the consequence of his remedy, the possibilities he has ignored, and the possibility that his services might be limited to pointing out the problem to a private actor rather than running not just to his own national government but to a transnational solution to impose a single, rigid solution on over a dozen leagues (or, more generally, on hundreds of millions of people).

And this is fundamentally the difference between the attitude of many (but not all) Europeans and many of their American sympathizers and many (but not all) Americans. Europeans are sure they see problems everywhere (lack of “social justice,” “monopoly abuses,” whatever), and default to central planning to solve them. The possibility that the remedy for a particular problem (assuming it is a problem to begin with) might create other, worse problems does not enter their mind with as much force. Americans are sure they see opportunity everywhere, believe that things happen because some people had a good reason for making them happen, and default to individual freedom to solve whatever problems do indeed exist. It is a difference that appears to be growing with time, making the transatlantic ties needed to address honest-to-goodness global problems harder to forge than ever.

An American in Paris

I can hardly believe what I am seeing out of the City of Light. Here is Nicolas Sarkozy, whom I am falling for more and more with every passing day despite a previous spasm of doubt, on the campaign trail yesterday (from The Daily Telegraph):

He summoned memories of the student revolt of 1968, saying: "In this election, it is a question of whether the heritage of May '68 should be perpetuated or if it should be liquidated once and for all."

If elected, Mr. Sarkozy promised to break with the "cynicism" of the "gauche caviars", who he blamed for a crisis of "morality, authority, work and national identity". Citing the recent mini-riot in Gare du Nord, he repeated his accusation that the Left "systematically takes the side of thugs, troublemakers and fraudsters against the police".

1968 was a turbulent year in the U.S., with, among other things, the assassinations of Martin Luther King, Jr. and Robert Kennedy and violence at the Chicago Democratic National Convention. I can dimly recall from my childhood in the 1970s that my parents had saved a copy of Life magazine (a weekly then) devoted to that incredible year. But we had nothing on France, where the “revolt” of 1968 was devastating, with the country shut down for weeks on account of student protesters, despite their ignorance about the ways of the world. No less a leader than Charles De Gaulle was shoved aside by the thuggery of "the people," and the New Left moved into power with even more devastating effect there than here, with France’s stagnation and ethnoreligious turmoil the primary result a generation later.

But Mr. Sarkozy is talking truly amazing talk. I assume that "gauche caviars" is the French equivalent of "limousine liberal," and to take on the cherished totems of the left this way – on economics, on integration, on the social model – is remarkable. He talks like a fire-breathing American conservative. His opponent has predictably tried to paint him as a Bush clone, but the attacks seem to be bouncing off ineffectively.

Many people predict that the French are too attached to their social model to make meaningful change, and I myself have long believed this. But the way Mr. Sarkozy is campaigning and the language he is using at crunch time now suggest to me that he is serious. Assuming he has the political strength, I anticipate him to try to make major change, especially on labor rigidities, probably the most compelling of the big three (along with high taxes and unemployment benefits) economic deficiencies of France. I also anticipate that his biggest challenge, the one that may deprive him of the political oxygen his fire desperately needs, will come from the suburbs. I expect an angry, riotous challenge to arise thence to meet him very soon after his inauguration; how he handles it will determine the success of his grand vision for a new France.

Europe's War Between the Generations

A theme of this blog is trying to predict the future. It is difficult under the best of circumstances. My prediction of the Chinese economy being headed for a crash, for example, has yet to be vindicated. But in "The Welfare-State Squeeze," I wrote the following in 2005: "Population aging there [Germany, Italy, France] means a future of diminished expectations and intergenerational bitterness." The argument was that welfare-state spending will in aging nations more and more crowd out other public spending, including that which would benefit the young. Instead, they will be hit with a gigantic tax burden.

Now William Underhill and Tracy McNicoll write that fundamental resentment of the old by the young has arrived:

It's election time in France, and the promises are flowing fast. If you believe the candidates, young voters are in line for a fat slice of state largesse, no matter who wins the vote. On offer from Nicolas Sarkozy, the right's presidential candidate: interest-free loans for young entrepreneurs and a €300-a-month allowance for training. Not to be outbid, his rival, meanwhile, the Socialists' Ségolène Royal, has pledged more housing, €10,000 loans and guaranteed jobs or training after six months of unemployment. As Royal told a party rally last week: "As a mother, I want for all children born and raised in France what I wanted for my own children."

They now seem unlikely to get it. Young adults in France, like their contemporaries across Europe, face a slew of problems never experienced by their middle-aged leaders. Consider: a 30-year-old Frenchman earned 15 percent less than a 50-year-old in 1975; now he earns 40 percent less. Over the same period, the number of graduates unemployed two years after college has risen from 6 percent to 25 percent, even if they typically have better degrees. Thirty-year-olds in 2001 were saving 9 percent of their incomes, down from 18 percent just six years before. Young people who snag stable jobs, gain access to credit and buy homes later in life are particularly angry that the older generations continue to rack up public debts for which they will get the bill. And they are very skeptical of the pledges of boomer-generation politicians. "If all this were financially possible, it would have been done long ago," says Clément Pitton, the 23-year-old leader of Impulsion Concorde, which recently circulated a petition declaring "We will not pay your debt."

The whole article is worth a read if you care about Western Europe and its future.

The Constitution of Nine Lives

The BBC reports what many of us already knew, that the vote against the European constitution by the electorates of Holland and France is seen as a snag, not a verdict:

The corpse of the European Constitution is coming back to life and staggering around the EU's corridors of power.

Buried by voters in France and the Netherlands in 2005, it has been resurrected by the EU's German presidency and put on the table of a summit in June.

Germany aims to produce a "roadmap" pointing the way to ratification by 2009, and has the full support of another 17 of the EU's 27 member states, which have also completed or all but completed ratification.

Meanwhile, both leading candidates for the French presidency have been laying out their plans to turn France's No into a Yes, once they have been elected.

Economists often like to invoke the notion of "revealed preference," through which we reason backwards from choices to preferences. It is also sometimes useful to reason backwards from choices to philosophy. Two electorates of EU nations decisively rejected the constitution last year. The reasons why Europeans oppose it vary – some thing it portends a future that is too liberal, some worry about a Europe that is too socialist. In both cases the root cause is the same – an unwillingness to surrender to unaccountable Eurocrats the basic decisions over how distinct societies are to be governed.

That this verdict will in the short term be ignored, and the contemptuous language with which it is dismissed - Valéry Giscard d'Estaing, the lead drafter of it, dismissed the French population as not "rational" – suggests that the EU is simply not a project based on a belief in consensual government. If it were, the constitution would be dead. It is rather nothing more complicated than a power grab, an effort to put people who went to the right schools and climbed the right routes to power in charge of more and more of the lives of almost a half-billion people. Ultimately this effort, I predict, will be futile. The U.K. in particular will never consent to the kind of planner’s-dream contraption that the constitution promises. But the process by which it goes down to defeat, an optimist can hope, will be a useful lesson to Europeans in the dangers of leaving governing to the experts.

The Pencil-Pushers' Revolution

The Financial Times has an article discussing a 2005 ruling by the European Court of Justice, the high court of the European Union, that opens the door for further transfers of power from the national to the transnational level in the EU. The decision gives the EU the power to regulate "environmental crimes" when remedies assessed at the national level are judged by the EU to be inadequate. The article expresses the concern that the European Commission and Parliament will interpret this decision as expansively as possible, opening the door for European-level steamrolling of local laws.

As No Pasaran notes, the danger is that a decision like this is a vehicle to give unaccountable civil servants even more power to regulate the lives of once-free people, a way of “compelling states to dispose of a millennium of common law or centuries of Civil Code.”

Several principles that seem based on historical experience painfully true to me are useful here:

1. Government, while sometimes indispensable, is dangerous. Government uniquely possesses the power to legitimately raise armies and employ police forces to enforce its will. That power, needless to say, must be applied with restraint.

2. Local government is less dangerous than central government. Citizens whose freedoms are limited by local government can more easily leave for a freer jurisdiction; a local government possesses less power than a national one. Thus, power should be devolved to the lowest feasible level.

3. Local traditions deserve respect. As thinkers from Burke to Hayek have famously noted, traditions contain encoded wisdom within them, even if that wisdom is not immediately apparent. Trying to redesign society in defiance of those traditions means that knowledge is wasted, and horrendous errors can be expected. When things don't go as planned, the planners blame society rather than their own limited knowledge. Unless great care is taken, what starts on the tennis court can end in the Terror.

The European Union is a highly centralized organization, increasingly being erected not just with no mandate from but actually in spite of popular will. Its high-and-mighties famously bemoaned the ignorance of the European proles over whom they rule when France and the Netherlands rejected the centrally planned European constitution. It is a quiet revolution of pencil-pushers, not the sweeping transformation of demagogues; it is hard to imagine Jose Manuel Barroso firing up the masses from the balcony. But it is dangerous, just the same. (Mr. Barroso himself backed approving the constitution by referendum when he was prime minister, but now opposes it when he is in charge of the EU bureaucracy and those inconvenient elections keep snarling his plans.) Sweeping power can certainly be acquired one obscure resolution or court decision at a time. The European Commission has itself over the years somehow found the authority to decide whether Danish farmers are free to grow wine grapes, and that English merchants are forbidden from selling merchandise in English units. If you think these are trivial matters, recall that the freedom to buy and sell is a way to control your own life; once it is gone, yielded to economic planners, loss of most individual autonomy easily follows.

As the recent turmoil over the constitution demonstrates, Europe is still sufficiently democratically vital to forestall overreaching by the distant czars who run the EU. But the battle is not won, and as free people, cognizant of history know, never truly is. An anonymous European official assures Europeans that they needn’t worry, because "[W]e don't see this as the beginning of a European criminal law or as a mandate to start writing a European criminal code."

Sorry, not good enough.