EU Council President Van Rompuy: The Time of the Nation-State is Over

Yoram Hazony
Jerusalem Letters
14 November '10

A reader from India who read my last two letters about the ideas driving European Union (“Israel Through European Eyes,” July 14, 2010; and “More on Kuhn, Kant, and the Nation-State,” August 26, 2010) has drawn my attention to a speech last week by the President of the European Council, Herman van Rompuy. If you thought my description of the worldview militating toward European Union was too philosophical to correspond to what actual European political leaders are saying and thinking, it’s worth taking a look at his remarks, which reflect the trends I described quite well.

Van Rompuy, who is Belgian, made his comments at an assembly of European leaders marking the 21st anniversary of the fall of the Berlin wall on November 9. The text of the speech is quite an achievement — a truly extraordinary display of ingratitude, which fails even once, even in passing, to mention that it was the American nation-state that brought down the Berlin Wall, making possible the present era of peace and prosperity in Europe. For van Rompuy, there is only one cause of peace in Europe, namely, what he calls “the European idea”:

The European idea has been the most successful and most generous project in the world since 1945. It has united the whole continent and brought us peace and prosperity.

Indeed, van Rompuy says he sees the ongoing project of absorbing more and more countries into the EU as the engine that is bringing about the end of the era of “barbarism and violence” in European history. He explicitly says the EU is the “guarantee of peace” in Europe:

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