Because the EU is an illiberal project: the imperialist ambitions of the Euro-competent with spiked helmets
The European Union is far from being a creature of economic liberalism, as an over-represented Italian Euro-liberal minority claims to convince us, and far from being an engine of “Smithian growth”. The EU, on the other hand, is a Franco-German geopolitical weapon, the product of a profoundly illiberal and paranoid worldview, and governed by a nomenklatura too devoted to its own centuries-old ideology to have the time to accept the requests of others, if not opportunistically, to its own goals, since with its cultural hegemony it has elevated Europeanism to a moral value shared more or less unconsciously even by "national-populists"
"Europe strengthen external borders with a border police at the height", declared French President Macron on 5 November. Four days later, in the company of the Austrian Federal Chancellor Kurz, he circulates a text among his European counterparts in which he hopes to integrate immigrants "the teaching" of unspecified "European values", and sanctions for organizations that "support content hostile to integration ". On November 10, the European Commission attacks Amazon on multiple fronts, citing various pretexts ; already in the summer, the Financial Times reported rumors that the European Commission had used art. 116 of the TFEU to attack member countries with competitive tax systems, as guilty of "distortion of the single market".
Can it be deduced from this series of events that the "centrists" have received the demands of "national-populisms"? The answer is no, unless the pro-European doctrine has been internalized to the point of not realizing the common character of these proposals, that is, how they tend to make use of a perceived instability in various areas to achieve new irreversible transfers of sovereignty to a European superstate (in accordance with “la methòde Monnet” ), or to consolidate old ones.
In the first and second cases, only a blind person can innocently escape that the constitution of a European border police implies a wicked transfer of national sovereignty, dramatically symbolized by the armed power of another state guarding the Italian borders. Strictly determined borders, it should be remembered, are the very existence condition of a national state, and the reason why in the rest of the still rational world they are defended with so much determination and promptness. The sacredness of national borders, an ideological translation of this well-founded reality, cannot be protected through Europe: you will have noticed in recent weeks how the island of Kastellorizo, sacred to Greece, is perfectly expendable for several of its European "partners", happy to satisfy Turkish appetites with other people's food.
Moreover, one cannot but feel uneasiness in the face of the formula "European values" – not Western, not Judeo-Christian, not liberal-democrats, but "European". A formula that almost literally lends itself to the criminalization of anyone who calls himself anti-European. It should be noted that fundamentalism – not Islamist, in this case, but pro-European – has always been deeply aware of how the perception of an external threat such as terrorism represents a useful pretext for advancing the Eurofederalist cause. It is sufficient to take even a superficial glance at this 2003 paper , published by the Delors Institute (now chaired by Enrico Letta) and funded by the European Commission, whose chapters I and II are entitled “Framing terrorism as a common and current threat to EU member states ” and “ Terrorism as a political window of opportunity within the EU ” .
In the third and fourth cases, one is surprised only if one truly believed the narrative of an over-represented Italian Euro-liberal minority that the European Union was a creature of economic liberalism (it is, yes, an instrument of internal devaluation sheltered from the electoral process, but I hope no one identifies similar classist policies with economic liberalism, if not its detractors), or even just the engine of what historian Joel Mokyr, in the masterpiece "A culture of growth" , defines " Smithian growth" – growth as a positive-sum game, which requires a legal, political and institutional framework for trade and division of labor, both national and international, and for the functioning of comparative advantages. It can be rightly argued that the Common Market has partially performed this function in the last century, but this is certainly not the function that the European Union identifies for itself in our time: as they have figuratively demonstrated during the Brexit negotiations the obstinacy of European negotiators in denying the United Kingdom agreements of mutual recognition of standards (which are the practice in international relations between advanced countries), and the claim of clauses of presumed equality, non-regression and even dynamic alignment on future regulations, European institutions are now understood as geopolitical weapons in a hopelessly zero-sum world.
“The European Parliament will never accept that the UK can enjoy the benefits of free trade without conforming to our ecological, health and social standards. We are not stupid! We will not kill our companies, our economy, the single market. We will never accept a Singapore on the North Sea! "
Thus thundered on Twitter the “liberal” turbo-Europeanist Guy Verhofstadt, apparently convinced that there is a European right to sabotage the economies of the countries with which one trades, and that it is economically beneficial to adopt protectionist measures if they oppose it. "Our priority is to protect the single market and reaffirm the political power of the European continent," French finance minister Le Maire said just as openly in 2019 at the presentation of his book, with a rather eloquent title, "The New Empire: the Europe in the twenty-first century ” . "Peaceful empire", he assures us, necessary to resist the "vassalization attempts" of China and the United States. And not only does this authoritative exponent of French Europeanism treat China and the United States in the same way, but also includes, among the alleged instruments of vassalization that terrify him, "self-driving vehicles with American navigation systems and Asian batteries". Similar fears were expressed in Germany .
Not only do such statements reveal a visceral rejection of the idea that international competition brings mutual benefits, and is therefore the highest form of cooperation; but, above all, the emphasis on the "political power of the European continent" is a vindication of the power that the EU can exercise in the economic sphere, which makes it formally (that it was in practice was already clear to anyone who had not intentionally turned the look so as not to see) the EU hostile not only to free trade, but to the free market itself.
To have a vague idea of the instincts from which the Euro-fundamentalist class is moved, it is necessary "un peu d'histoire" , as the Michelin Guides would say, a brief historical digression. Without history, we could be told that every conveniently conceived economic fallacy is “Science”, revealed truth detached from any context; that in the EU this science is applied in a neutral way to remove structural rigidities, because the EU would have as its objective the pursuit of economic efficiency; and, finally, that when a pro-European strays from the "straight" path of economic rationality, he does so to chase Salvini or the 5 Star Movement, and tease those incompetent filthy voters. Storielle. History, on the other hand, is what allows us to understand how the EU is a (geo-) political project particularly uninhibited in ignoring economic rationality (but also democracy, political legitimacy, security of the Atlantic bloc, international harmony … we will talk about it elsewhere) in order to perpetuate itself.
The pro-European doctrine stems from a fallacy shared by Karl Marx and Mario Draghi, among others: economism, the idea that the legitimacy of a nation state does not depend on its cultural homogeneity, on shared values, on the mutual loyalty of its citizens. citizens, but from the ability to be able to interfere in the economic sphere, what we could define its "power". The Banker-Hero observed in 2019 :
“True sovereignty is reflected not in the power to make laws, as a legal definition of it requires, but in better control of events in order to respond to the basic needs of citizens. […] The ability to act independently does not guarantee this control: in other words, independence does not guarantee sovereignty. "
The premise is that globalization (here understood as the internationalization of economic activity) and the mobility of production factors have reduced the importance of the national state as an economic entity. This is certainly true, and any liberalist will be happy that globalization and technology have reduced the effectiveness of the regulatory, industrial and technocratic apparatus of the state, without however damaging its legal legitimacy: not surprisingly, Switzerland still jealously guards its sovereignty , and no one thinks China would do Hong Kong and Taiwan a favor by annexing them.
The pro-Europeans, here are those who disagree at all. National sovereignty must be ceded to a European superstate, the "Peaceful Empire" of Le Maire, in order to find themselves with greater power to interfere in the global capitalist system, forcing companies all over the world to adapt to AML / KYC / GDPR / MIFID I and II etc., and frustrate sovereign nations such as the United States, Brazil or Israel, until, humiliated, they agree to sit at the proverbial table and transpose the Brussels directives on fracking in Pennsylvania, the Amazon or settlements in the West Bank. We have previously laughed at Verhofstadt's comments on the reports
Anglo-European trade, but think for a moment on what global trade implies for your vision: the horror of a single world government, so the same rules apply all over the world, or another nightmare, a world of mutually hostile autarchic blocs.
We should not be surprised, because, historically, the infatuation with economism among academics, bureaucrats and politicians (particularly Germans: read the superlative "A German Identity 1770-1990" , by Harold James) has already been the main threat to peace and to the freedom of European nations in the past two centuries. In Wilhelminian Germany, the bureaucratic state par excellence, economism was already associated with mercantilism (which culminated in September 1914 in the notorious secret memorandum of Bethmann Hollweg, which listed the war objectives by picking up the idea so dear to the German industry of all times of a
“Mitteleuropa” under German political and economic hegemony), in an openly illiberal and Anglophobic philosophy of state that drew inspiration from Friedrich List in terms of economic philosophy, and Friedrich Hegel in terms of political philosophy. List, the anti-Adam Smith par excellence, writing in 1844 had theorized the need for a European customs union, obviously German-led, to better oppose British commercial competition, first, and American in the distant future. Hegel, state philosopher for King Frederick William III, had conceived the notion of "cosmostorical state" (the dominant state in a particular epoch, with the absolute right to take charge of the development of the Spirit of the World, and before which all the others states were deprived of rights) having Prussia as an obvious reference, and considering them Britain in particular inferior: its freedoms were purely formal, not real – a phraseology very similar to that used in Bologna by the Banker-Hero with the Prussian spiked helmet. But if a state is a superior state, a "cosmhistoric state", isn't it destined to triumph over the dirty states? Isn't it, indeed, his duty to extend his dominion over the peoples of those filthy states? Doesn't it have a duty to become an Empire? For Hegel and for totalitarian regimes, the answer is obvious. We have noted in these paragraphs how it tends to be ever more openly so also for the priests of the pro-European religion.
The post Why the EU is an illiberal project: the imperialist ambitions of the euro-competent with spiked helmets appeared first on Atlantico Quotidiano .
This is a machine translation from Italian language of a post published on Atlantico Quotidiano at the URL http://www.atlanticoquotidiano.it/quotidiano/perche-lue-e-un-progetto-illiberale-le-velleita-imperialistiche-degli-euro-competenti-dallelmo-chiodato/ on Tue, 01 Dec 2020 05:05:00 +0000.