The Eurovision Song Contest is not always a reliable guide to the broader political currents coursing through the Continent. One recalls the 1990 finals in Zagreb, when the charming hostess, Helga Vlahovic, presented her own fair country as the perfect Eurometaphor: "Yugoslavia is very much like an orchestra," she cooed. "The string section and the wood section all sit together." Alas, barely were the words out of her mouth before the wood section was torching the string section's dressing rooms, and the hills were alive only with the ancient siren songs of ethnic cleansing and genital severing. Lurching into its final movement, Yugoslavia was no longer the orchestra, only the pits.Hmm, I've heard that somewhere before. Yeah, it was from the German tykes visiting France. And the Dutch MEPs and their scary TV commercials:
But this year's winner, Miss Helena Paparizou of Greece, was a shrewder analyst of the geopolitical scene. Her triumphant My Number One is an eerily perceptive summation of the EU establishment's view of its ingrate electorates this pre-referendum week: "You're delicious So capricious If I find out you don't want me I'll be vicious."
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With the new constitution flailing in most polls, the Dutch government is being rather vicious already. Bernard Bot, the foreign minister, dismisses the electorate's objections as "a lot of irrational reaction". Piet-Hein Donner, the justice minister, warns that Europe will go the way of Helga's orchestra if the constitution is rejected. "Yugoslavia was more integrated than the Union is now," he points out, "but bad will and the inability to stifle hidden irritations and rivalry led in a short time to war."
Scornful of such piffling analogies, the prime minister, Jan-Peter Balkenende, thinks a Balkan end is the least of their worries. "I've been in Auschwitz and Yad Vashem," he says. "The images haunt me every day. It is supremely important for us to avoid such things in Europe."
At the Theresienstadt (or Terezin) concentration camp in the Czech Republic, Sweden's European Commissioner, Margot Wallstrom, declared: "There are those who want to scrap the supranational idea. They want the European Union to go back to the old purely inter-governmental way of doing things. I say those people should come to Terezin and see where that old road leads."
Golly. So the choice for voters on the Euro-ballot is apparently: yes to the European Constitution, or yes to a new Holocaust. If there's a neither-of-the-above box, the EU's rulers are keeping quiet about it. The notion that the Continent's peoples are basically a bunch of genocidal whackoes champing at the bit for a new bloodbath is one I'm not unsympathetic to. But it's a curious rationale to pitch to one's electorate: vote for us; we're the straitjacket on your own worst instincts.
It is difficult to tell what is fuelling the growing Dutch opposition to the Constitution: it could be a general discontent with the way Dutch and European politics are going; it could be the now officially acknowledged miscalculation over the euro; it could be the shambles of the Eurovision song contest (is that not a perennial problem?).No word on body odor and herpes and the socks that go missing in the dryer.
It would be very good to think that it is, in fact, the outrageous pro-Constitution video, fronted by four MEPs that convinced a number of those who had not intended to vote, to go out on June 1 and say no to the whole caboodle.
The pictures and words are clearly comprehensible even if one’s knowledge of Dutch is limited. In effect, they are saying that without the Constitution there will be more Holocausts, more Srebrenices, more Madrid bombs.
Finally, a word of caution from the Steyn article:
However the French and Dutch votes go, it seems unlikely that the EU's rulers will allow anything as footling as the will of the people to derail the project at this late stage. In Euro-referendums, there's only one correct answer; it's just that sometimes you have to have two votes before the people figure out which one it is.Sometimes the pesky little people just don't know what's good for them.
