> If there was an EU military there may well have been EU troops in Iraq
> and that would be completely unacceptable to a lot of the European
> population.
Most EU citizens and governments -- and I think the European Parliament, too -- were solidly against the war.
> Qualified Majority Voting diminishes national sovereignty
How sovereign can any nation be these days, given the complexity of the multinational economy? While I have my problems with Hardt and Negri, they get one thing right: we shouldn't be nostalgic for the nation-state. Rather, we should be creating multinational forms of solidarity.
I sense that much of the anti-EU feeling these days has the same ambiguities as anti-globalization sentiment -- driven more about nostalgia for an imagined past, rather than the excitement of creating a better future. The Eurostate isn't just the executive committee of the Eurobourgeoisie; it performs lots of admirable functions -- setting health codes, investing in renewable energy, creating open source standards, cleaning up the environment, etc.
-- DRR