Take it from an American. The EU has been a disastrous mistake
"Twenty years ago in 2005, majorities of voters in France and the Netherlands rejected the “Treaty Establishing a Constitution for Europe” in national referenda. But that didn’t stop the Machiavellian European elites. They repackaged the new European federal constitution as an amendment to existing European treaties and passed the nearly-identical Treaty of Lisbon, which was ratified by all EU member states and came into force in 2009. The government of the Netherlands circumvented democracy by approving the constitution-disguised-as-a-treaty by a parliamentary procedure, instead of a second referendum.
The French and Dutch voters who rejected Eurofederalism in 2005 were right – and so were the British voters who voted for Brexit in 2016. The European Union in its present form was a mistake from its origins in the Maastricht Treaty in 1993. The so-called “European project” – a project to create a colossal European federal state, comparable to the United States – was doomed from the beginning and has been a miserable failure.
There is nothing wrong with international cooperation among sovereign countries in matters ranging from defence and trade to mundane issues like pollution control and the regulation of international waterways and air traffic. And transnational agencies with limited powers can play useful roles, as long as they are subordinate to nation states...
But European integration should have stopped there, give or take some minor tweaks. Unfortunately, elite Eurofederalists proceeded to carry out a half-century programme of turning a loose collection of independent European nation-states into a fake country, with its own parliament, the European Parliament, its own supreme court, the Court of Justice of the European Union, and its own government, the European Commission.
Democracy is impossible without a demos, and there is no European people, only separate nations with different histories and cultures and languages. There are a few successful multinational states, like Switzerland and Belgium, but they are the exception, not the rule.
If people cannot speak to each other and be understood, they cannot form a genuine political community with genuine public opinion. In this sense, the Anglosphere is more real than Europe, and so is the Hispanosphere. In contrast, Dutch and French citizens cannot understand each other, unless they are multilingual or speak a second language, like English, which is the de facto lingua franca of modern Europe, to the distress of the French elite.
Real countries have landscapes imbued with local cultural associations and historic memories. But when the European Union issued its first bank notes following the adoption of the euro, instead of showing actual landmarks, they depicted fictitious bridges appropriate only as symbols of a fake country. A Dutch artist, Robert Stam, subsequently built humorous toy versions of these fake bridges in a Rotterdam suburb, Spijkenisse.
Everything about the post-Maastricht European Union has been similarly fake. The promise of common European defence, distinct from Nato, has never materialised, because Europe’s constituent nations have different interests and values.
The project of creating a single market with a single currency that would enable post-national Europe to rival the giant economies of the US and China has been a failure as well. In tech and other areas, Europe has failed to create firms that can exploit scale and battle American and Chinese firms for global markets.
Eurofederalists claim that the problem is too little pan-European economic integration, not too much. But Japan, South Korea and Taiwan have globally-competitive firms, even though they are medium-sized countries, comparable to Germany, France, and Britain, not titans with huge internal markets like China and the US.
The present-day European Single Market is based on the Four Freedoms: unobstructed flows of goods, services, capital, and people across national borders. The fourth of these, the unhindered flow of migrants, has been a political disaster. Cross-border migrant flows provoked the public backlash that led to Brexit, and non-European migration is now fuelling the rise of populist parties opposed to mass immigration everywhere in Europe.
For decades, Eurofederalists have pointed to the gradual economic integration of the United States as a model for ever-increasing European integration. But this has always been nonsense. The British colonies that seceded from the British empire in 1776 had Anglo-Protestant majorities, along with other European ethnic groups, native Americans, and black Americans, enslaved and free. Most Americans always shared a common language and culture.
Moreover, the political and military unity of the US preceded its economic integration. The US military, dating back to the Continental Line in 1776, is older than the present US federal constitution of 1787. In 1865, the federal government crushed the attempt of the South to secede, well before the creation of a true national economy from separate state economies, a process which occurred only in the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries and is still not complete in some areas.
Another misleading model cited by some advocates of a European superstate has been the unification of Germany in 1871. While it was preceded by the Zollverein (customs union) that originated in the 1830s, intra-German trade by itself would not have consolidated the independent states of Germany outside of Austria, without Prussia’s wars with Austria in 1866 and France in 1870-71.
Speaking of misleading historical parallels, European superstate is based on a historical lie – the lie that the two world wars were caused by nationalism in the abstract, rather than German nationalism in particular.
The world wars were caused by the determination of the elites of Imperial Germany and Nazi Germany to use aggressive warfare to turn Germany from a medium-sized power into a “world power” on the scale of the US, the British empire, and the Russian empire. Berlin’s ambitions under the Kaiser and Hitler could be achieved only if Germany crushed its European neighbours and created a European empire run from Berlin.
If Germany’s leaders had been content for their country to be the largest of a group of sovereign European states, the world wars never would have taken place. Neither Tsarist Russia nor France nor Britain – notwithstanding their imperialism outside of Europe – would have sought to turn their European neighbours into “vassal states,” to use German Chancellor Bethmann Hollweg’s term for Belgium in his September Programme of 1914.
As an American, I have always been amazed at the willingness of non-German Europeans to tolerate the insulting myth that the nationalism of all countries – including their own – caused the world wars. Unless the British and French and Italians and others suppress their own national sentiments, it seems to have been assumed, German nationalists might come to power and run amok again.
Nobody wants a neo-Prussian or neo-Nazi Germany, though that is not a serious threat, given today’s ageing, prosperous, bourgeois federal republic, however obnoxious some on the German far-Right may be. Paradoxically, the revival of a healthy, constructive, democratic German nationalism could put an end to the myth of common European guilt, which leads Euro-elites in Paris, London, and elsewhere to smear the legitimate patriotism of their own fellow nationals as anachronistic or inherently aggressive or fascistic.
In 1876, German Chancellor Otto von Bismarck is alleged to have written in the margin of a letter from Russian Chancellor Gorchakov, “Whoever speaks of Europe is wrong”. In 1863, when Sir Andrew Buchanan, the British ambassador, appealed to the supposed interest of Europe, Bismarck is famously said to have replied, “Who is Europe?”
The true Europe is not a phoney country with a comic-opera legislature and imaginary landmarks, but a collection of diverse, proud and independent nations. They can and should cooperate to pursue shared interests through common military alliances like Nato and via a degree of integration in trade. But in this American’s perspective, European integration since 1993 has gone too far, depriving member states of control over their own borders, their own immigration policies, and their own currencies.
Battered from below by populist revolts and bombarded from outside by both the subsidised dumping of goods by China and American tariffs, the European Union looks less like a model for a post-national future and more like a costly mistake. European countries like the Netherlands, Switzerland, and Belgium have led the world in legalising euthanasia. The euthanasia of the European Union as an institution is overdue."
