PLUCKY?….Andrew Sullivan today:
The plucky Spanish and Poles stick to their guns and help derail a new constitution for the EU. Good news for the U.S….the chances of a real unraveling are not as low as they once were. Here’s hoping.
Why is this good news for the U.S.? Has it gotten to the point where anything that causes pain for Europe is good news for us?
I’m a moderate skeptic of the euro and the expanded EU myself, but this very real sense of treating Europe as a flat-out enemy ? complete with undisguised eagerness for their unraveling ? is simply juvenile. Disagreeing about the invasion of Iraq does not make them terrorist sympathizers and it does not make them enemies. It just means they disagreed with us about invading Iraq, as did most of the rest of the world and a pretty sizable portion of the American population as well.
And is Spain no longer part of Old Europe? When did that happen?
UPDATE: By the way, although it’s not obvious from either Sullivan or the New York Times article ? unless you keep reading ? what’s really surprising is that the EU states actually agreed on nearly everything in the proposed constitution, something I wouldn’t have put money on a few months ago. The only issue left on the table is voting shares, and while that’s a pretty important point of disagreement I still suspect that everyone will settle down and find a compromise next year. Andy will be crushed, I suppose.
