Our Libertarian Age: Dogma of Democracy is a Dogma of Decline | New Republic

Our Libertarian Age: Dogma of Democracy is a Dogma of Decline | New Republic: From the start there never was any consensus about just what sort of trick the EU was supposed to be, apart from a machine to keep the peace and generate prosperity. All agreed that this would require a diminution of national sovereignty. But at the beginning very little thinking went into establishing democratic procedures within it, in part because after the experience with fascism the Founding Fathers did not fully trust le peuple. Even less thinking went into how to build public identification with the project—how to turn Scots and Sicilians into compatriots who feel they share a destiny and recognize the same institutions. The result is that ordinary Europeans today do not know what to make of the “European project.”