PrintJune 4, 2010
Churchill's Bad Idea
"We must recreate the European family ... a United States of Europe." That's the way former Prime Minister Winston Churchill put it in September 1946, at the University of Zurich. He had just recently been ousted by an election in Britain. War-weary and broke, the English people -- including millions of British "Tommies," voting from their far-flung battlefields -- had trounced Churchill's Conservative Party.
In on a flood tide came Labour -- then unapologetically socialist. (In recent weeks, we saw the defeat in Britain of Tony Blair's thirteen-year misguided experiment known as "New Labour," essentially a socialist wolf in democratic sheep's clothing.)
Churchill in late 1946 was still wincing from the bad press he had received for his "Iron Curtain" March speech at Westminster College in Fulton, Missouri. He was desperate to shed the "warmonger" label that the left was forever throwing at him.
So he gave a "Big Idea" speech on the Continent. It's by no means likely that Churchill intended Britain's identity to be swallowed up in an amorphous thing called Europe.
American policy has tended to pay lip service to European unity for sixty years. But our clear preference was unity within NATO, unity in an anti-Communist, anti-Soviet alliance led by the United States.
Since the fall of the Iron Curtain and the rise of a reunified Germany, the European Union has moved more and more aggressively to extinguish the national identities of its member states. Unknown and unelected Eurocrats headquartered in Brussels have made policy for hundreds of millions of people.
Why should social conservatives in the U.S. care about any of this? Because the European Union has been an engine of destruction for all that mattered to us in Europe.
The policies of the EU have been anti-family and anti-marriage. Countries like Poland and Ireland have been pressured to liberalize their laws on abortion. Sincere Christians -- like Italy's distinguished jurist, Rocco Buttliglione -- have been blackballed as judges on the European Court. They've been rejected specifically because they are practicing Catholics.
The European Union weighs in at the U.N. and in other international forums -- nearly always against the family. EU funds the international killing efforts of Planned Parenthood.
Today, there are great cries going up in the left-wing press about the breaking up of the EU. "Europe needs a Churchill...Fast," reads one panicked headline. The crisis in Greece has Germans grouchy. Why should they have to pay in higher taxes for Greece's failed socialist policies, German voters want to know. They recently spanked Chancellor Angela Merkel's center-right coalition for its willingness to give even more help to Athens' hopelessly debt-ridden schemes.
Against all of this background, we have the rising specter of Eurabia. Europeans fund their statist welfare systems by gutting their national defense budgets and letting the Americans do the hard work of fighting terrorists. They've imported millions of guest workers -- most of them Muslims -- to do fill the jobs Europeans will not do. Most of the states of Europe are below replacement level in fertility.
Unless Europe changes direction, this ancient civilization will enter a death spiral. But God, who Scripture tells us can raise up children of Israel from the very stones, may not be finished with Europe yet.
There are possibilities for Europe's future. Charles de Gaulle envisioned a "Europe from the Atlantic to the Urals." That would leave Britain out, and maybe Russia, too. He wanted a Europe des Pays -- a Europe of sovereign states, proud of their ancient heritage and unwilling to trade their birthright for a mess of Euro pottage.
As Americans, we have no stake at all in the kind of European unity that has been fostered since the fall of Communism. Socialism is just as tyrannical and just as deadly as Communism. It just takes a little longer.
American social conservatives need to be more outspoken. American policy should not favor the Eurocrats' dead-end policies. Let the Europeans revive their ancient civilization. Let the very stones cry out. Europe has plenty of stones.
Ken Blackwell is a senior fellow at the Family Research Council. He serves on the board of directors of the Club for Growth, National Taxpayers Union, and National Rifle Association and is co-author of The Blueprint: Obama's Plan to Subvert the Constitution and Build an Imperial Presidency.
