There was something so beguiling about Jean-Noel Jeanneney's plaint in this newspaper last week over the electoral rejections of the hapless EU Constitution. Yet even as he wallowed in his self-pity, J-N J revealed the arrogance towards popular opinion which lies at the heart of the euro-project, writes Kevin Myers.
Moreover, he showed how europhiles have revelled in complexity and intellectualising where simplicity was needed. Thus: "So we should resign ourselves and hark back to this saying by Nietsche that de Gaulle recalled one weary day in Dublin in 1969 in the wake of his defeat in the referendum of April 27th 1969? In the French ambassador's copy of his Memoires de guerre he wrote: 'Nothing is worth anything. Nothing comes to pass. And yet everything happens. But it doesn't matter. . .'"
Now, J-N J could just have quoted Nietsche (at his most fatuous, mind you, and believe me, that is pretty bloody fatuous), but no: he has to quote him in a series of flashbacks, being quoted by de Gaulle, after a referm defeat, scribbling in his memoirs in the French embassy in Dublin in 1969. So whereas it's just possible the mad German's words might have made sense by themselves (as it happens, they didn't), they certainly didn't after they'd gone through the usual eurobabble.
And that's another thing about the Eurines: they are shameless and incorrigible. They never learn their lesson, they don't listen to the arguments of others, and they certainly pay no attention to the opinions of electorates. They even, God help us, quote de Gaulle as if he were in favour of an enlarged Europe, when he actually vetoed our membership of it.
They think Eurine when alone, they talk Eurine when in company, and they write Eurine when they address the rest of us; and of course, at best, we can understand only bits of it.
Bits such as J-N J's explanation for the French no vote, which was as follows. Chirac was unpopular, and that was an accident. The French voters wanted to show their "disapprobation" of him, and that was an accident. The absence of strong leadership from the French socialist party, that was another accident. The advocacy of a "No" vote by Laurent Fabius, well, bless my soul, if that wasn't an accident as well. All these accidents, explaining the "No" vote. What if there had been a "yes" vote? Would that have been an accident? Listen to him next: "Inveterate adversaries of European construction on right and left, those who refuse the lightest sacrifice of sovereignty, those who want to shoot everything down, would have voted No in any case. But they are in a minority. So we must believe that in other circumstances, a march forward could be approved by the French people. . ."
Do you know what I hear there? I hear the sound of the steady tramp of referendums across our political landscape until, finally exhausted, we inadvertently say yes to one, and then by God, there'll be no accidents then to explain what happened; no, we'll be in the Eurine bag for good and all. As Mr Junckers of Luxembourg once so memorably said of referendums about the Eurine project: "If we have a yes vote we carry on, and if we have a no vote, we continue." Indeed, the truth is that the last ideological totalitarians in Europe are Eurines. In common with fascists and communists, they believe in the ineluctable tide of history, managed by non-elected elites. The people are there only to endorse the decisions of the elites, and governments to enforce their will.
Listen to J-N J on the role of European media: "We need publicly owned media that help us know one another, cinema and television production that public authorities do not abandon to the sole interest of private sector profit: an organisation of knowledge that would belong to Europe. This is the battle I've been fighting since last January, to create a European virtual library. It's about standing up to the Google research engine that is so powerful across the Atlantic."
In other words, government-owned newspapers, television stations, film companies and so on to brainwash us poor EU subjects with the Great Eurine Idea, while meanwhile J-N J leads his attack on Google. But Google is not some imperial concept devised by the US government, but a worldwide system of knowledge wholly dependent upon free enterprise and free thinkers for its success. It is no more "American" than the troposphere.
But what is American is the military system that has guarded Europe for the past 60 years, in whose protection the deformed Eurine plant has taken shape. Which is what makes the description of the alternative to Google even more fatuous. "It is about offering the world millions of books on the Web, chosen and organised according to principles and rules of our own civilisation."
"Chosen and organised according to the principles and rules of our own civilisation": his words. You could have heard the same in Franco's Spain or Mussolini's Italy. Moreover, we know about the rules of this European civilisation of ours. They are the rules of the self-regarding elites, for whom J-N J was certainly speaking when he described the popular rejection of an EU constitution as "sinister".
This is the truly European culture of Robespierre, Pearse, Lenin and Hitler, where the masses repeatedly and sinisterly let down their leaders; and instead of the leaders stepping down or changing policies, they change the rules. Thus today's Eurine at its most rank: we should be grateful to J-N J for reminding us of it.