IN 1865, Viscount Palmerston, prime minister of England, lay dying. As is only too human, the great man desperately rejected the diagnosis. When Palmerston's physician broke the news to the elderly statesman that he was about to expire, he replied defiantly, "Die, my dear doctor? That's the last thing I shall do!"
This mixture of hubris and denial signaling the end is often as true of institutions and dreams as it is of men. And there is little doubt, following the twin "no" votes in France and the Netherlands, that the European Union, long proudly proclaimed as the future model of international relations, is dead. Throughout our travels this year in a Europe in crisis--to the European Parliament, the German Council on Foreign Relations, the French Army War College, the British Defense Academy and the Harvard University Seminar in Talloires, France--we have heard the same generic rebuttals from Europhiles everywhere: "The EU always manages to muddle through; the process of ever closer union has gone too far to be reversed; in a few years the EU will regroup and be stronger than ever."
Nonsense. It has long been our view that the EU, or rather the notion of ever-closer political union that has been at its heart, is the primary faith-based project in the Western world. Predicting the slow demise of the European constitution was not that difficult: A dreadful document, an economic malaise discrediting the entire European elite, political aloofness that wholly disconnected Europe's rulers from the ruled, and a willful ignorance of the Continent's amazing diversity assumed in an effort to force an artificial one-size-fits-all approach were there for all to see.
