What next, Europe?

 

A recent Economist cover story read:

Eight wasted years, Two useless treaties. Three No votes. Ignored by China and America. But still the world’s biggest economy. Will somebody please…

Wake Europe up!

It was the usual dose of honest evaluation from those guys. Strikingly, they say “very few of the answers” to where Europe’s headed “can be found in the moderately useless Lisbon treaty.”

It is a deliberately obscure reworking of the draft EU constitutional treaty rejected by French and Dutch voters in 2005…That the Lisbon treaty is being driven through despite having been rejected by three out of a total of six referendums, and with ten governments reneging on promises to hold votes of their own, is deeply shabby.

The challenge to ‘make Europe work’, they say, requires tasks like raising productivity to be competitive with China and America, and preserving the single market. It requires growing the Union with more members, and choosing someone of stature on the world stage to head the EU.

But preceding all that is the more fundamental task Pope Benedict laid out in his book Europe: Today and Tomorrow. The “values that had built Europe are completely overturned”, he states.

Even worse, there is a rupture here with the complex moral tradition of mankind: there are no longer any values apart from the goals of progress…Even man can become an instrument; the individual does not matter. The future alone becomes the terrible deity that rules over everyone and everything.

Communist systems failed, Benedict states, in fact ‘shipwrecked’, because of “their contempt for human rights, their subjection of morality to the demands of the system and to their promises for the future.”

The real catastrophe they left behind is not of an economic sort; it consists, rather, in the drying up of souls, in the destruction of moral conscience…

The loss of man’s primordial certainties about God, about himself, and about the universe–the loss of an awareness of intangible moral values-is still our problem, especially today, and it can lead to the self-destruction of the European consciousness, which we must begin to consider…as a real danger.

So….”Where do we go from here?” Benedict asks. His vision is that the European Constitution, for starters, has to be based on “foundational moral elements.”

The first element is the “unconditional character” of human dignity and human rights, which must be presented as values that are prior to any governmental jurisdiction. These fundamental rights are not created by the legislator or conferred upon the citizens…

He says the horrors of Nazism and its racist theory are still too recent for anyone to deny “the precedence of human dignity and fundamental human rights over any political decision.” However….modern pragmatism and “so-called progress”  have posed threats to these values, whether cloning or preserving fetuses for research and organ harvesting and genetic manipulation. Add to that “a burgeoning traffic in human persons, new forms of slavery, and trfficking in human organs for transplantation. Good ends are always adduced to justify the unjustifiable.”

And then there’s the issue of marriage and family.

Monogamous marriage, as a fundamental structure of the relation between man and woman and at the same time as the basic cell in the formation of the larger community, was modeled on the basis of biblical faith. This gave Europe, both in the West and in the East, its particular face and particular humanity…

Europe would no longer be Europe if this fundamental cell of its social edifice were to disappear or if its nature were to be changed.

And there’s much, much more in this little book.

So….instead of Tony Blair popping through that curtain on the Economist cover, ready to stir a languishing Europe, maybe they could at least give Pope Benedict an audience. He understands the people better than most Eurocrats understand themselves.