BRAUCHEN WIR DOCH "A BOSTON TEA PARTY"

Over at Oxblog, Josh "the animal" Chafetz takes Joschka Fischer's humorous reference to the Boston tea party (as reported second hand by Timothy Garten Ash) as an incoherent attack on American cultural hegemony, where it seems that Fischer was probably talking about political hegemony, to the extent that there was a deeper meaning in whatever it was that he reallly said. As the NYT reports, there is widespread speculation that Fischer would like to have the post of Foreign Minister for ____________ (insert eventual name of unified Europe); the article mentions this point in the context of an overview of the new European constitution.

The irony is probably unintentional, but it was precisely the unwillingness of the states under the Articles of Confederation to cede power to a centralized government that prevented an effective unified foreign policy, until the Constitution -- not without controversy!! -- granted such powers to the new national government. Europe is facing the same problem, as the strong veto power of single states under the proposed new constitution shows. And the ability of foreign powers to play states off against each other in commercial relations under the Articles should also stand as a warning to the Europeans (need I mention "old" and "new" Europe?). Indeed, the recent commentary by Habermas and Derrida (et al.) can be read as an attempt to lay the groundwork for common approaches to foreign policy, something that the convention failed to do. But it is a failure that the U.S.'s first exercise in national constitution-making also had -- something that is strikingly absent in, for example, the NYT article linked above.

But if the new european constitution is analogous to the Articles of Confederation, then Europe should have already had its "Boston Tea Party." Hmmm. I suppose jokes are rarely all that funny when you think about them too much.