Building Up a Nation

As I’m some sort of Euro-Nationalist – I don’t care much for nations or states as we know them, but I do care a great deal for the European Union and see that as my country rather than Belgium (which is where I live) or the Netherlands (which is where I was born) – I’m coming across loads of interesting reads lately.

Obviously back when the French and the Dutch killed off the Constitution the Union had a great setback. All the critics got louder all of a sudden, and what most people see as Brussels’ dictatorship was even more to blame for everything going wrong than ever before. But then, we had seen that evolution going on for many, many years before and thus such a thing was quite likely to happen.

After this great defeat for the Union, most ‘leaders’ sat back and relaxed, but quite recently new dynamics took off. People are thinking about going forward again together instead of with their own little countries.

Not only our very own Prime Minister Guy Verhofstadt is taking part in this (actually I feel he’s quite in the lead of this all), but also philosophers do and today the newspapers reported ex-US representative to the European Union Rockwell Schnabel reckons Europe’s future is big, as long as it’s not just anti but reaches out to the world instead – America’s influence should not be neglected either though, they could block the entire process. After all, the US currently invests more in e.g. the Netherlands than China.

Europe, according to Schnabel, is gaining much soft power whereas America is losing its own soft power. Soft power matters a great deal for your own industry as this is how Europe imposed its GSM standards on Asia, rather than that they adapted American mobile phone standards. Consequence being many Third World countries won’t grow modified crops, fearing they wouldn’t be able to export to the EU anymore.

Nevertheless, Europe shouldn’t be blind for its weaknesses. There is still a huge brain drain going on, many graduated Europeans move to the USA to try their luck, whereas you need those yourself as a state when you want to move on. Some industries should be liberalised, without taking the social standards down. Nationalistic protectionism is endangering European economies too, as you need to think global nowadays in order to grow.

I think Schnabel very much proves to focus on the right things here. We shouldn’t be blind, we shouldn’t stand still, though sadly that’s what way too many conservative politicians want. We shouldn’t use Europe to keep a status quo in our own nations, we should use it to get further as a whole, and to a certain extent, to get the whole world to live on higher standards. Nor should we want to copy Americas – sometimes rather cruel – Anglo-Saxon system. We’ve been showing our system works over decades, and I’m sure we are able to keep it running for many more ages if rightly tweaked.

Every system needs to be adapted to current reality every now and then, we shouldn’t be blind for that either. The world changes constantly and our systems equally need to be changed regularly. As a town in which nothing is rebuilt, built, … is a dead town, so is a system which is never adapted to current reality. Current reality is that everything is going global, and in this world Europe is a great partner in most trades, but this is something that took ages to built up but can be tore down in a matter of months. Together we are stronger and we can keep Europe as big as it always was, and so we need to do.