Heh!

Our moral and political betters in Europe have just colossally failed to solve a problem we solved in 1789.

EU Talks on New Constitution Collapse

BRUSSELS, Dec. 13 — Talks over a new European constitution collapsed in acrimony Saturday, with the 25 current and future European Union members failing to find a formula to satisfy medium-sized countries worried that their voices and votes would be swamped by larger countries in an expanded union.

In an article that appeared in early editions, before the collapse, Washington Post correspondent Keith Richburg noted that France and Germany were unwilling to abide by a vote of the majority of countries in the EU, and although they are the two most populous countries they were also unwilling to accept a straight majority votes of citizens of all the countries.

Germany, the union’s most populous country, and France insist that future EU decisions be passed by a majority of countries that also represent at least 60 percent of the EU population. But Spain and Poland are resisting any change in the current, weighted voting system that gives them clout that far exceeds their population size.

The issue is much the same that faced the United States’ Founding Fathers meeting in Philadelphia in 1787, when small states feared being dominated by the larger ones — and the result was a bicameral legislature with every state having equal power in the Senate, but power being apportioned according to population in the House.

Attentive readers will note that Richburg neglected to mention that the Electoral College, the subject of so much scorn and derision from Europe (and European fellow travelers at home) recently, was also an essential ingredient in our compromise between large and small states. It would be snide to comment at this point that people who live in glass houses … so I won’t.

“In many ways,” Richburg recognizes, “the splits mirror those exposed this year by the debate over the Iraq war; then, France and Germany formed the core of the anti-war alliance, with Britain, Spain, Poland and most of the future Eastern European members in the pro-war camp.”

Perhaps future maps of Europe will appear with countries in Red or Blue.