The people of the United Kingdom recently voted to leave the coalition of European countries known as the European Union. Journalist and Historian Dr. David Aikman discusses what the European Union is and why it was founded.
“The European Union was started basically as an economic experiment of cooperation after WWII to bring the French and the Germans and the Belgians together so that there could never be another war in Europe again.”
While the objective of the EU was admirable, it was flawed. According to Dr. Aikman, the EU also had visions of political unity.
“The European Union was assuming that eventually all of the European members of it could comprise a supranational state.”
Essentially, the EU hoped to be unified economically, politically and philosophically. The EU hoped to centralize the power of the entirety of Europe. However, if that power well into the wrong hands, there could be trouble.
“That was based on a complete philosophical misunderstanding of reality, indeed human nature.”
That’s why when the United States of America was founded, the Founding Fathers sought a system of government that could not lead to tyranny, self-government.
“What you find in the Constitution of the United States of America is a profound awareness of the innate evil in human beings and the need to protect society from too much power falling in the hands of any one person or one group.”
However, the EU does not recognize this same perspective on humankind.
“The protections of the American constitution are based on a completely realistic assessment of the fallibility of human beings. The European project by contrast was based on a secular Utopian understanding of what human organizations could accomplish if they simply got the right ideas together. The ‘Brexit’ vote is as much a philosophical rejection of European Utopianism as it is the need to express political independence.”
