The EU and General Electric

The Preamble is undoubtedly the finest writing in the U.S. Constitution, but it is also the most necessary.  Only constitutional lawyers can quote easily from Section I or 2, but just about all Americans can quote large portions of the Preamble, beginning of course with “We, the People…”, for that states the goals and purposes we all share. Political arguments in the U.S. are really about the priorities and nuances of those purposes, and never about their validity, for the first of them, “to form a more perfect union”, i.e., a political union of the separate states, has long since been achieved.

That’s quite different from another admirable kind of document – a good business plan.  I used really to admire the strategic planning operation at General Electric, for the way they started from scratch with their planning by first determining that GE’s fundamental business revolved around the exploitation of carbon-related technologies.  They knew that understanding purposes from the beginning was vital to a good enterprise in keeping it from going astray.

A solid understanding and statement of purposes is the common thread between the two kinds of documents.  Among other things, it helps to distinguish between them.  A political union and an economic joint venture are just not the same thing, and failure to realize that can cause the downfall of either.  The founding fathers had failed miserably at trying to operate the united colonies as an essentially economic venture, and not a very good one  – no foreign policy, a miserable domestic policy, a failed currency, famine everywhere and the Great Powers of Europe waiting hungrily in the wings to pick up the pieces of the surely doomed confederation.  It was their genius and their desperation that drove them to the Constitution, and they started it right.

That’s why I appreciate David Cameron for shaking up the EU by calling for a referendum on Britain’s membership in it.  I don’t agree with his politics, and he is in large measure fighting the wave of the future, but he is right in his strong statement of the need for clarification of the EU’s purposes.  Is it essentially a joint marketing venture, out to enable easy commerce between European nations and to provide a common front for promoting trade elsewhere (Cameron seems to think so), or is it a nascent stage of political union, aimed eventually to tie together Europe into one sovereign state, with common laws, policies, currency, etc., that form a true, and singular, nation?   Being unable to distinguish between the two is the real basis for the EU debt crisis.  Members of a political union do not treat each other the way Germany and Greece have in the debt crisis, but each member of a purely economic joint venture also has far more latitude for action than EU nations have had.  The EU needs to make up its collective mind.

If the EU founding fathers do, out of desperation, decide to “form a more perfect union”, I hope they too have the genius to begin with “We, the People.”  For that is the starting point for any nation that hopes to endure, a common identification among people, not just governments, and the wisdom to recognize it.  That is their great issue.  The American colonies did not have multiple languages and cultures and histories to separate them.  Europe began as its own world; not much outside it was recognized or reachable for almost two millennia.  But it is no longer a solitary world of squabbling states; it must stand or fall united.  It may do so as a new kind of “mega-nation”, or achieve at least some success as an economic joint venture, though the experience of Greece has already shown that small, solitary nations in the 21^st century do not fare well when pitted against the new breeds of corporate giants.  Europe is now surrounded by great powers from China to the New World to the emerging nations of Africa to Goldman-Sachs, and they too are willing to pick up the pieces.