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The Honolulu Advertiser

Posted on: Monday, July 4, 2005

COMMENTARY
Here's a toast to 229 years of our marriage

By Peter Brown

As Americans celebrate our nation's 229th birthday, Europeans are showing us how lucky we are to have tied the national knot when we did.

Had we tried to unite in today's global economy, where no one does anyone else favors for fear of hurting competitive positions, it might be a much different story.

The United States was a marriage of love. The colonialists had common values and an emotional attachment to forge a future. It didn't hurt that a common enemy made their regional disputes worth resolving.

But those regional disputes were not the product of centuries of cultural, religious and political differences, as is the case today in Europe. The colonialists were relative newcomers who had made their journey for similar reasons:

They had shown a willingness to risk what they had by taking an often-torturous voyage to the New World because of the promise of a new life, not just an incrementally better one.

The recent collapse of efforts to create a United States of Europe from 25 already-existing countries shows how difficult it is to have a successful arranged marriage these days.

Simply put, no one can afford the dowry, and few want others telling them how to live.

The 25 nation-members of the European Union were at the altar when the French and Dutch rejected a proposed constitution.

That ended talk of a confederation with a common foreign policy and a central bureaucracy that could overrule the laws of sovereign nations.

Sounds like the U.S. system of individual states with a centralized federal government empowered to override regional differences.

In addition, the subsequent European Summit ended in acrimony and without agreement on key budgetary questions that strike at the heart of the notion of a unified continent.

That makes it even less likely that anyone can get the wedding back on schedule.

Of course, the EU will continue to be an economic force with its own money — the euro — but without a central government behind it.

That might have been the case here had the colonies won the Revolutionary War and thrown off the British but not signed the Constitution and instead existed as separate nations, as Vermont did for several years before joining the Union.

A United States of America in which various ethnic and regional rivalries are put aside for the greater good is a reality today because the hard work was done in an earlier, simpler time.

We certainly have our differences. All I have to do is talk with my relatives in New York to see how large some of the cultural and political chasms are that separate my part of the country from theirs.

Yet even though we often disagree, we all see ourselves first as Americans because we have been reared that way and understand the benefits that come with the deal.

It is not hard to see why Europe, to which a majority of our citizens owe their ancestry, is so different today.

Yes, we fought a War Between the States to settle regional disputes, but that was 140 years ago. In the interim, Europeans have fought two world wars and more minor, but very bloody, clashes.

Despite our blue-state/red-state divide in the United States, there is a fundamental agreement on the major questions in this society relating to democracy and capitalism.

If leaders of the various states today were writing a U.S. Constitution, they, too, might face the same impossible task as their European colleagues in getting people with their own customs and cultures to agree to centralized control.

It is not hard to see enormous, perhaps insurmountable, disputes between representatives from Michigan and Mississippi because of the widely different structures of their economies and population.

The European Constitution has become a pipe dream because various nations on the Continent have very different visions of what they want and how they see the proposed confederation functioning.

One group — England and many of the former Soviet-bloc nations — is committed to free-market policies. Others — the Germans and French most prominently — want to keep generous social-welfare systems and economic subsidies that are incompatible with free-market capitalism.

Can you imagine the folks in Detroit, where manufacturing is king and jobs are being lost to cheaper foreign factories, agreeing to a 40 percent subsidy for growing cotton?

That is the type of problem preventing the EU from becoming the United States of Europe.

Be happy our Founding Fathers took care of such things before cable television could make us, as a nation, behave like the runaway bride.

Peter A. Brown is an editorial page columnist for the Orlando Sentinel.