I fear the progress of making the European Union a true government, of making Europe a state instead of a collection of states. But quite eventually fear it for reasons quite different from Mr. George Will. He fears because "The deeply retrograde constitution would reverse five centuries of struggle to give representative national parliaments control over public finance and governance generally."[1] And he is absolutely right: it would. We are seeing that ever more clearly as software patents are slowly but surely pushed through the European Union's legislative process. Disliked by a majority in many of Europe's countries, and, from what I gather, unpopular in the European Parliament, it never the less seems very likely to happen. There is, from what I gather, significantly less representation of the common person in the continental government.
But that is only a concern to the extent that you believe that a near-democracy is the only legitimate form of government. It is not a "retrograde" movement to fix the mistakes of the past. Is democracy a mistake? Perhaps, I am tempted to think so. I think our republic could have done well, but the democracy was last tried in Athens Greece, a much smaller world, and by any measure, a society at least as flawed as our own, though perhaps in different ways. When I look around and see people caught up in the web of materialism, and the choices it leads to, when I see families caught "needing" two incomes because the houses are going for nearly a million dollars each, and more so because the culture so highly encourages a two income lifestyle, I am oh so tempted to agree with Mr. G. K. Chesterton that our capitalist society has degenerated into a more insidious form of slavery. We are a slave to the almighty dollar if nothing else.
Perhaps no form of government is inherently more legitimate than any other. Our founding fathers quite evidently feared democracy nearly as much as they feared monarchy. You read in their writing a fear of the "mob," of the hysteria to which man can be whipped into by the skilled orator. Of the well known phenomena by which a group will do things that no one of them individually would countenance. That is "democracy" in its purest form. That is why public speaking was a required art to be studied in the ancient world, and communications is something to learn even today.
Yet I started this saying that I feared the European Union, and it is true, I do. Not for the model of government it endorses, and not because it seems sure to introduce software patents, which I think are an abuse. Not because its constitution includes socialism, nor because it has some decidedly odd clauses such as one protecting "the physical and moral integrity of sportsmen and sportswomen."[1] I fear it because it is inherently created and explicitly ignoring the Christian foundation of Europe as it is. Because it is explicitly ignoring and refuting the Faith that has made Europe great, that preserved Europe, beyond all expectation, from the collapse of the unchristian Rome. A preservation so inexplicable, so unexpected, that though we speak and think of Rome falling, yet a close look shows how much of the culture of the people, how even much of the knowledge of the people, was preserved. How in less time than it took to build the Roman world, we come to the glories of the middle ages, able to throw back the Muslim invaders that threatened to destroy it more completely than the barbarians ever could have.
Nor is the European Union simply ignoring this heritage, as bad as that is. We see, as they refuse to allow a devote Italian Catholic a role in government, that it is actively hostile to the Faith. We see, as it champion's "tolerance" of the brutal regimes in the middle east, that it is not committed to the good of the people. For while I do not think we went to war with Iraq for good reasons, I do not think either that there could have been no good reasons. It is something we should have done back when we were first there, it was a government we should not have set up at all. But that is a tangent, and one that I really know so little about and have so much uncertainty in.
The European Union is scary not because it is less democratic, it is scary because it is explicitly and intentionally unchristian. It is designed by and to promote the ideas and ideals of those who have given us the "sexual revolution," socialism, and who have made "tolerance" their highest value. It is sad that it is less democratic only because the people are better than their leaders, though their leaders are exactly what they deserve, for allowing the light that was Europe, bringing true civilization and, more importantly, true Faith, to the world, to flicker and fade.
[1] http://www.townhall.com/columnists/georgewill/gw20050529.shtml