Eurostar rant

It is interesting that, in British pub talk, European Union is often presented as wanting to impose a false, inhuman, inorganic technocrat's idea of the world on England. Just the opposite is happening, say many Europeans: Anglo saxon culture is imposing itself on Europe, with the most market-oriented European commission in history making Europe more homogenous than ever.

Plenty of (continental) European discourse has wished for Europe to build a defence of humanism against "American civilisation" , especially the French, who considered the words an oxymoron, an absolute negation of all the values humanity were founded on. This is a running thread through French intellectual debate from the Goncourts who condemned washbasins fastened to the walls to left-bank Cpmmunists who thought labour saving devices deprived man from absolution through toil.

Bertrand de Jouvenel's Crise de capitalisme merged the "organisation of production", "the shaping of consumption through advertising", the "methodical selection of personnel", the permanent recourse to statistical methods and finally, the tyranny of the "service" ideology.

As for American individualism, it was but an illusion: "Though an American always pictures himself as being a free and unbridled as a prairie pony, in reality he is the most docile of men,"moulded as easily as clay". Hundreds of millions of Americans let themselves be sanded down by scientists, economists and psychologists in the service of consumption.

Socialist Francois Drujon noted that indoctrination of human life was greater than what Soviet collectivism would bring. The eating factories, standardised stores, standardised meals, standardised frozen meat, standardised bars and bartenders. American small towns seemed like "so many branches of a parent company". Another thinker compared the USSR with the USA: neither was much better than thei other, and the fact that their names were an inorganic set of initials were a refection of their values, which were the same as those of a corporation or a trust, like IBM.

Given all this, one could argue that the European community was founded in 1957 to keep the Germans down - but also American values out. The Common Agricultural Policy, which still takes half of EU spending, was meant to keep rural France's humanistic qualities, to allow France's inefficient small holders to be custodians of a civilization that nurtured and fed into the culture of the provincial towns and ultimately of Paris; a bulwark against the kind of civilization America and its parent culture across the Atlantic, the "nation of shopkeepers", stood for. A civilisation based on inividualism, small-holding and diversity: the French boulangerie compared to the Walmart hypermarket.

The French were not rejecting Europe when they said no the European constitution in June 2005; they just wanted a different one, and when the east Europeans joined and allied themselves to the Anglo-Saxon vision of a common market, the French saw the realisation of their ideal slip away. The flagship policies of the Barroso commission are all about making Europe more efficient, by creating a single market in labour, healthcare, services, education and science: beating the opponent across the Atlantic in economic and technological achievement by becoming more like it.
Many British vaguely think of Europe as being "socialist", "conformist" and "all the same", to which any Frenchman could reply: "All the same. Of course. Unlike your High Streets." Tthe French argument is that the British criticism that Europe is "all the same" and "technocratic" is indeed coming true - but because Europe is becoming more Anglo-American, and more capitalist, and that capitalism breeds conformity.