From: Ellen K. 

About 30 years ago on visiting England there were folks in that big park in
London I can't remember the name of where people make speeches, chanting
"We don't want the Common Market, we just want the supermarket!"

On Mon, 5 Dec 2005 08:41:46 -0500, "Gary Britt"
 wrote in message :

>
>Well here's one guy who gets what's happening in the EU.
>
>Gary
>
>
>http://www.latimes.com/news/opinion/commentary/la-oe-ferguson5dec05,0,6671238.
column?coll=la-news-comment-opinions
>
>Yet perhaps, on reflection, it is not quite right to ascribe Blair's
>difficulties to the persistence of the Bonapartist tradition on the
>Continent.
>
>For one thing, I am no longer sure how committed the English really are to
>either their own legal tradition or their own economic tradition. At the
>same time, on closer inspection, the EU, as presently constituted, looks
>less like the rationalized Europe of Napoleon's dreams and more like the
>ancien rŽCgime Europe he tried to get rid of.
>
>Voltaire famously said of the Holy Roman Empire that it was neither holy,
>nor Roman, nor an empire. Perhaps something similar could be said of the EU,
>which seems less European and less united with every passing year. For how
>much longer will the EU really be European, given the profound demographic
>changes that are inexorably increasing the Muslim share of its population
> ƒ ” to say nothing of Turkey, negotiating to become its newest and, before
>long, biggest member?
>
>And is the enlarged European Union really a union, in the sense that the
>United States or the United Kingdom are, or something more like a Eurabian
>Disunion? At best it is a confederation. At worst it's a mess of overlapping
>treaties and jurisdictions.
>
>In our age of attention deficit disorders, 200 years can seem an impossibly
>long time ago. Yet the bicentenary of Austerlitz is more than a matter of
>antiquarian curiosity. For remembering how Napoleon killed off the Holy
>Roman Empire not only helps to illuminate the subsequent divergence of
>Britain from the European continent, it also may give us an inkling of the
>future.
>
>Who, I wonder, will be the next Napoleon ƒ ” the one who rides into Brussels
>to sweep away the Holy Roman Empire of our time?
>

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