SPIEGEL: Do you want to destroy Europe?
Le Pen: I want to destroy the EU, not Europe! I believe in a Europe of nation-states. I believe in Airbus and Ariane, in a Europe based on cooperation. But I don't want this European Soviet Union.
SPIEGEL: The EU is a vast project for peace. It has helped ensure 70 years without war on the Continent.
Le Pen: No. Europe is war. Economic war. It is the increase of hostilities between the countries. Germans are denigrated as being cruel, the Greeks as fraudsters, the French as lazy. Ms. Merkel can't travel to any European country without being protected by hundreds of police. That is not brotherhood.
SPIEGEL: You now intend to head to Brussels only to fight the system.
Le Pen: And why not?
She is
the daughter of the more famous (at least in America) Jean-Marie Le Pen.
Wipe them all out when you get to Brussels. Some Americans will be grateful.
ReplyDeleteIf US Civil War II goes on longer than predicted, Islamic nuclear warheads from Europe will spell doom for both US alliances.
"And why not?" I like that. I wonder if she'd have had an easier time getting through to the interviewer if she'd said, "No justice, no peace."
ReplyDeleteShe started down the right path, but she took a wrong turn. Shameless plug from a couple years ago: http://aplebessite.com/2011/11/18/the-european-union-and-the-articles-of-confederation/
ReplyDeleteEric Hines
I'm not sure I see where you disagree with her. You write, "This leaves France, also, on the outside—looking in, but also looking outward, and this does no harm to France or to Europe, even though some of the less imaginative think Europe without France to be inconceivable."
ReplyDeleteThat sounds like her position to me. Dissolving the EU need not mean that every single member country leaves it, or that other unions aren't created by those who think it's advantageous. She just wants (a) France out, and (b) the EU as it currently exists dissolved.
She just wants (a) France out, and (b) the EU as it currently exists dissolved.
ReplyDeleteThat's the crux of my disagreement. She has no What Next; she's willing to let the chaos ensue. My chaos would be briefer because I offer a viable What Next.
I also disagree with her that Europe is economic war. Hence my alternative.
Of course, Le Pen is speaking only for France, while I, from the outside looking in, presume to speak for Europe.
Eric Hines
To some degree, that's the issue: where should her loyalty, or the loyalty of anyone in the EU, lie? Why not with France, which means she has every right to put France first (as we might put our own country and its interests first in a treaty with China, or anyone).
ReplyDeleteIndeed, insofar as her loyalty is to France, it would be improper for her to plan for (say) Poland: the Poles might rightly object that they'll plan for their own interests, thank you.
So it's not that there isn't an idea about what comes next; the idea is a reversion to nation states as the centers of loyalty.
I thought you were going to object to the soft fascism of 'believing in Airbus,' i.e., the alignment of national and corporate interests such that a few favored corporations become national symbols and objects of public trust (and bailouts). It's roughly Biden's position: "Bin Laden is dead and GM is alive."
There's much with Le Pen's politics with which I disagree, but to the extent those are internal matters of sovereign France, my disagreements tend toward unimportance (until they begin to impact the US...).
ReplyDeleteShe should, though, consider a pan-Europe What Next, even as she--quite properly--puts France first (before it's completely subsumed into an EU nation-state) in her concerns. Even with France on the outside, it cannot depart from Europe, only from the polity of the EU. What those other nations do, what befalls those other nations, as the EU disintegrates most assuredly will impact the welfare of the French people.
The Poles--and the Germans, and the Greeks, and--may well object to her proposals. That, too, is as it should be. But she might also consider that, as her plan for removing France from the EU moves to fruition, conversations with the Poles, Germans, Greeks, et al., regarding a no-France EU might benefit France.
Eric Hines
Good old socialist, democratic, communist Spiegel.
ReplyDeleteEven Germans that left for the US, due to German's monolithic nature, still believe in Der Spiegel.
People's weaknesses to propaganda knows no bounds.