HofT wrote:P.S. Anybody knows how to say "Vive la Hollande" in Dutch? I need it for tomorrow evening <G>
"Lang Leve Nederland", or more colloquially, "Hup Holland Hup!" And then there's the more royalist "Oranje Boven", also much appreciated by Ukrainians and Protestant Northern Irish I'm sure.
But it's heartwarming to see conservatives around the world rally to the commie cause ... ;-)
QED, Walter! You read the German text and still you have no idea what was in it; neither did your legislators who voted on it, as they freely admitted themselves.
HofT wrote:QED, Walter! You read the German text and still you have no idea what was in it; neither did your legislators who voted on it, as they freely admitted themselves.
(I do hope, the weather will change soon to the better - or whatever the reason is.)
Thanks, NIMH, got that. Yes, 2/3 of conservatives voted "non", that was our count also.
Walter has some other classification system - perhaps he'll tell us about it at some point
For decades, some of us have argued that "Europe" is too diverse to form a single polity, that the British and French are in fact foreign to each other. Sir Edward Heath and his ilk scoff at such crude language: why, today's young cosmopolitan Britons are perfectly comfortable drinking Beaujolais and eating croissants and flaunting their wedding tackle on the Côte d'Azur. True, and irrelevant. What Sunday's vote underlined is profound differences in political culture. Britain's anti-Europeans and France's lunatic fringe are united only in their reluctance to be bossed around by a regulatory regime that insists a one-size-fits-all rulebook can be applied from Ballymena to the Baltics. It can't. The alleged incompatibility of our dissatisfactions makes the point: all politics is local; despite the assiduous promotion of the term, electorally speaking there is no such thing as a "European".
Incidentally, that "lunatic fringe" in France now accounts for about 60 per cent of the electorate. That's another lesson for the decayed Euro-elite. One of the most unattractive features of European politics is the way it insists certain subjects are out of bounds, and beyond politics. That's the most obvious flaw in Giscard's flaccid treaty: it's not a constitution, it's a perfectly fine party platform for a rather stodgy semi-obsolescent social democratic party. Its constitutional "rights" - the right to housing assistance, the right to preventive action on the environment - are not constitutional at all, but the sort of things parties ought to be arguing about at election time.
Instead, Europe's "consensus" politics has ruled more and more topics unfit for discussion, leaving voters with a choice between Eurodee and Eurodum, a left-of-right-of-left-of-centre party and a right-of-left-of-right-of-left-of-centre party.
Source
Despite what d'Estaing said a week or so ago about there being "no chance of re-negotiation", there is indeed a "Plan B".