Geneva ? This is a great place to observe the workings – and unworkings – of the European Union, because the Swiss were never dumb enough to get caught up in the politico-bureaucratic trap of the EU.

The failure of the European Union to become a “United States of Europe” provides a cautionary lesson to all those – on the right as well as the left – who think national borders and cultural traditions are just so many scraps of paper to be trampled upon in the name of some abstract global good.

The Swiss are nobody’s enemy. They haven’t fought a foreign war since 1815. Indeed, they are eager to trade with anyone, as well as offer foreigners those famously secretive Swiss bank accounts.

But precisely because Switzerland became a rich country by doing its own thing, the Swiss never wanted to join the EU, the 25-member-state conglomeration that stretches from Portugal to Finland to Greece.

The EU has been in the news lately because voters in two linchpin countries, France and Holland, voted down the proposed EU constitution that would have cemented the Union. That constitution was a 474-page brick of a document, written by pan-European elites who wanted to flatten the continent, politically, so that decisions about the fate of 450 million people would be made in Brussels, Belgium, far beyond the reach of any mere individual nation.

Americans, who prize state and local control of their government, would immediately reject any similar attempt to move political authority to Washington, let alone move it to a coalition of foreigners with headquarters in a foreign country. But most observers thought that the Europeans were different and that people there would vote for the new EU constitution, thus forever mixing the Irish and the Spanish and the Maltese into the same Brussels blender for the benefit of multicultural business, as well as multicultural politics. But, of course, because true democracy is impossible when the voters speak 100 different languages, the EU constitution would have ushered in a perpetual Eurocratic reign.

Well, now we know the stubborn truth about Europe. In voting down the constitution, Europeans demonstrated that they, too, have a pride of place and reverence for their unique traditions. They don’t want to see their flags, anthems and everything else buried by red tape from a centralized Eurocracy.

Indeed, not only has ratification of the constitution been put on hold, but efforts to enact a new EU budget are deadlocked as well. And now the euro currency is under siege. “People will tell you Europe is not in a crisis – it is in a profound crisis,” Luxembourg Prime Minister Jean-Claude Juncker told Reuters after he chaired the latest failed summit of EU chieftains.

Of course, what Juncker, a prototypical Euro-litist, regards as a “crisis” would be regarded by others as a somewhat belated outbreak of common sense. That’s because the EU elites weren’t eager to create just a hulking European superstate. They wanted to create an even bigger Eurasian superstate, by including Turkey and possibly other Muslim and Arab countries.

Turkey, population 70 million, is a relatively modern and democratic Muslim country, even if it has yet to properly account for, or apologize for, its massacre of more than a million Armenians during World War I. But Turkey has only the barest toehold in Europe, physically, ethnically and religiously. Its capital and most of its population are in what the Romans were the first to call Asia Minor, and most of its people bow down to pray toward Mecca. And so for the EU elites to seek to bring Turkey into their union was proof those elites were dismissive of “Europe” all along.

Most people want peaceful trade and travel. The Swiss had it right all along. And so, like an earlier polyglot project dreamed up by the powerful, the Tower of Babel, the EU is now falling.