Until about 15 years ago Euro-summits were held without
special security measures. With the exception of farmers,
there were no demonstrators. They were simply boring events,
most people never noticed them. The idea that a European
summit would attract violence was generally unthinkable in
the early years of the EEC, as it was then known.

Researchers have generally failed to realise the depth of
the anti-European reaction in the last 20 years. A huge
group, possibly the majority of the EU population, sees the
EU as intrinsically wrong. At best it is something which
must be contained: they see it as the task of their national
government to defend them from the EU.

The EU has also become a focus for a broad category of
anti-systemic protest, in a pattern typical for declining
colonial governments. The colonised population saw the
colonial administration as the 'source of all evil' - and
saw its removal as the precondition for all social change.
Issues such as land reform or housing all became part of the
indepemdence campaign. In a similar way, the anti-EU
movement is slowly becoming a catalyst and focus for
opposition to very diverse issues.

The EU will no doubt introduce more repressive measures for
future summits: a special summit to discuss this is already
planned. Now, security measures are not in themselves
unusual, nor is hatred and aggression. The Israeli
governmnet would not expect to hold a cabinet meeting in
Gaza without police protection, not the Palestine Authority
in a West-Bank Jewish settlement. The Real IRA would not
expect to openly hold a meeting in a London hotel. But
everyone knows why this is, everyone knows of the wars,
hatreds and deaths. None of that is present in the evolution
of the EU.

In historical perspective it is extraordinary that the EU -
neither a state nor a people, and largely a bureacracy -
attracts the responses normally associated with hostile
peoples or states, or with colonisation. Again I think it is
a failure of academic research to consider this: instead
there is an evasion of the issue.

Sooner or later, someone will be killed protesting against
the EU. That was absolutely not predictable at the
foundation of the EEC in Rome in 1957. What is happening and
why?


--
Paul Treanor

http://web.inter.nl.net/users/Paul.Treanor/which.europe.html