British Foreign Secretary Jack Straw is saying that EU enlargement is the only way to combat the "far right". Straw clearly doesn’t understand that it’s the EU itself that’s causing the surge in the "far right". He honestly believes that expanding the bureaucratic EU is going to somehow make the fears about immigration and crime go away.
The fact is, nothing could be further from the truth. The surge in such "far right" candidates are a backlash against the EU, not a demand to have the EU expand into the Eastern Bloc states. If anything, such an expansion would be like putting gasoline on a fire. The Eastern Bloc states do not have the requisite political and economic development to be a member of the European Union. Even the Czech Republic, the most advanced and Westernized country under consideration for membership in 2004 is not yet quite ready to meet the demands of the EU in terms of economic and tax policy. In fact, the kind of tax harmonization needed to enter the EU would likely lead to a massive economic downturn in the Czech economy. This would lead to an influx of immigration from Eastern countries to Western Europe, which would only fuel the fires of anti-immigration groups such as the Front National or the Northern League.
Straw apparently lives in the Eurocrat’s idealized world where the EU is the knight in shining armor that will liberate Europe from all its troubles and once again make Europe a global superpower. Unfortunately, this vision couldn’t be further from the truth. What the Brussels bureaucrats don’t realize is that not everyone wants to be in the EU, the EU’s insistance on making each member nation into a high-tax welfare state, and the constant bureaucratic red tape being pushed by the EU all completely obliterate any advantages to EU membership. It’s a one-size-fits-all strategy for a much more complex situation. To borrow a phrase from one Eurocrat, it’s simplisme to assume that expanding the EU would do anything to stem the tide of anti-immigrant sentiment. In fact, the EU’s attempts to demonize and marginalize anyone who opposes the dictates of Brussels only shows how poor the support for the EU really is.
