Les Jones

European Union > Mark Steyn on Europe's Attempts to Linger Awhile

It's behind the subscription wall now, but this Mark Steyn essay is fanstastic. You can read a copyright-infringing version here.

When to the moment I shall say
‘Linger awhile! so fair thou art!’
Then mayst thou fetter me straightway
Then to the abyss will I depart!

Most of us bandy the term ‘Faustian’ fairly loosely — I do myself in this week’s Star Wars review. But Goethe’s version of the actual bet is much more particular than it’s generally summarised as: when Mephistopheles shows up, he promises he’ll do anything Faust wants of him. But if Faust ever becomes so content, so happy with ‘the moment’ that he wants time to linger awhile — that he wants to live in that moment for ever — then he will depart to the abyss and the devil will have his soul for all eternity. [...]

So ‘Europhiles’ say to the moment, ‘Linger awhile! so fair thou art!’ That’s what the European constitution boils down to — an attempt to freeze the moment, to make time stand still in a permanent EUtopia so fair it should be constitutionally required to linger eternally.

This next paragraph from Steyn dovetails with these comments regarding Jeremy Rifkin's The European Dream. Europeans and Americans have very different ideas about the relationship of the individual to society.

But, having brandished his credentials, Hutton says that it’s his ‘affection for the best of America that makes me so angry that it has fallen so far from the standards it expects of itself’. Many Americans of Left and Right could write a book like that but, as things transpire, the great Euro-thinker is not arguing that America is betraying the Founding Fathers, but that the Founding Fathers themselves got it hopelessly wrong. This becomes explicit when he compares the American and French Revolutions, and decides the latter was better because instead of the radical individualism of the 13 colonies the French promoted ‘a new social contract’.