Can You Have A Democratic Empire?

The Germans want to unify Europe into one economic “super state” controlled from Brussels. The officials who make the decisions would not be elected. The British cry foul. They think the Greeks should be able to vote for their leaders as well as the Portuguese, the Italians, and the Spanish. They shouldn’t just have to take orders from the Germans.

But the continental Europeans don’t find this emphasis on democracy native. All the empires of the past were not from the Roman Empire to the Holy Roman Empire to the Napoleonic Empire to the Third Reich. There are too many differences within the countries in the Euro Zone to permit votes on all issues, according to their way of thinking.

It’s only the Anglo-American tradition that emphasizes voting on everything. But even the British Empire wasn’t totally democratic. Even the United States, if you think of it as an empire, wasn’t very democratic with “Manifest Destiny” and their treatment of Native Americans, or Indians.