On Sunday Stephan Pollard wrote a lot of good sense about the Buttiglione affair and its implications for the EU. He focussed partly on the fissures in "acceptable belief" in the EU and the way that the EU thought police attempt to remove those who hold alternate views.
To me the key issue is what he has as his conclusion:
Even under existing arrangements, the demand within the EU is that sovereign nations submit themselves to intellectual and political uniformity. The Buttiglione affair shows that the drive within the EU is indeed towards ever closer union.
A union, that is, which is not merely political and economic but something far more fundamental: intellectual, religious and moral. On Thursday's Question Time on BBC1, Peter Tatchell said that a man with Mr Buttiglione's beliefs could not, "by any reasonable democratic standards", be a Commissioner. A more inverted statement of the truth would be hard to imagine. Neither I nor Mr Tatchell might care for Mr Buttiglione's views but public opinion in many parts of the EU back them fully. It is the attempt to exclude such views from acceptable public discourse that is anti-democratic.
The EU is anti-democratic in so many ways and this affair is demonstrating both this and the way that the "liberal" tendencies are so unliberal when it comes to alternative views. If the EU constitution is adopted the "liberal" position will be the only position that anyone who hopes to wield power can ever publically admit to. This sounds remarkably similar to the world of Orwell's 1984 and to the world of the comunist dictatorships where deviation from the party line or criticism of the holy saints Marx and Lenin was heretical and liable to result in the heretic recanting his views under extreme duress.
I work in high tech product management/marketing. I have witnessed hubris on a level of the EU elite not infrequently in business. In all cases such hubris has been rewarded by ungrateful customers failing to do as they are told and buy the product. Despite attempts by the EU elite to force us by law to buy their EUrocrap willy nilly they will eventually discover that people cannot be coerced for ever. The problem is that if they legislate to force it the consequences of the eventual failure could be not just rejection of the EU ideal but rejection of the rule of law. Does this worry you? ceterum censeo Unionem Europaeam esse delendam