“A Europe of Nations”: Marine Le Pen’s Plan for the Old Continent

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Marine Le Pen addresses FN rally, May, 2014 | AFP

Like the mass-rape gangs of Rotherham, the recent slaughter of 130 people by Muslim terrorists in the streets of Paris has again given us a quick glimpse, the briefest foretaste, of our coming multicultural future as indigenous Europeans are reduced to a minority. Europe once birthed the most dynamic and luminous of all human civilizations. But as her demographics progressively come to resemble those of the Levant and the Congo, so she will be cursed with the lifestyles and violence characteristic of those regions. No one has a right to be surprised at this development.[1]

We then need more than ever to have concrete and constructive thinking on how to build a new Europe in which our nations will survive and thrive. In this article, I will present Front National leader Marine Le Pen’s European policy: First to abolish the European Union and then to establish new forms of European cooperation to better fight immigration and globalism. I will also critically discuss the issue of “European solidarity” in the framework of the FN’s official civic nationalism which, while robustly opposed to immigration and perhaps necessary electorally, is not unproblematic.

Postwar French nationalism has actually not always been opposed to EU-style integration. As a young MP seeking reelection in 1962, Marine’s father Jean-Marie Le Pen actually campaigned on the ticket of the “Independents Against De Gaulle and For European Integration.”[2] In the 1980s, the FN abstained in the vote on the Single European Act which aimed to strengthen the European Common Market.[3] Bruno Gollnisch, Jean-Marie’s unfailing friend and a representative of the FN’s paleoconservative and more “ethnic” wing, has said that at the time he was a priori favorable to European unity. Nonetheless, by 1992 the FN was one of the few parties (along with the Communists . . .) campaigning against the Maastricht Treaty, which would create the euro common currency, supposedly as a prelude to creating some kind of European superstate.[4]

The FN’s anti-EU reasoning and position has been relatively consistent since 1992. The party opposes the EU on democratic grounds, deeming the organization to be elitist and unresponsive in its day-to-day existence (the so-called “democratic deficit”) and to have been constructed in violation of the French referendum of 2005 rejecting the so-called “Constitutional Treaty.” More seriously still, the FN considers the EU to be a “Trojan horse of globalization”[5] which, through liberal-egalitarian norms and economic/migratory borderlessness, is destroying both French sovereignty and ultimately the French nation itself.

Marine Le Pen then demands a series of measures to restore French sovereignty:

  • The superiority of French law over EU law.
  • The organized dissolution of the Eurozone and the return of the French franc.
  • The abolition of the Schengen Area of free movement of people and the restoration of French border controls.
  • A nil net contribution to the EU budget (France currently pays in about 7 billion euros per year more than she receives back) and the replacement of the Common Agricultural Policy with a purely French one.
  • A few symbolic measures, such as the removal of EU flags from all public buildings.

Florian Philippot, Le Pen’s media-savvy spin doctor and right-hand man, has said an FN government would explicitly emulate British Prime Minister David Cameron in demanding renegotiation of EU membership terms and then allowing the French people to decide whether to stay in via referendum. In the unlikely event that the EU would accept the above terms, the FN would actually campaign to stay in the Union. In practice, the FN’s terms are such that these measures could only mean the de facto abolition of the EU anyway and its reduction from an already weak confederation to an empty shell.[6]

The FN program however is not silent on the kind of “Europe of Nations”[7] it would like to see emerge. On the contrary, it proposes:

  • strengthened European multilateral cooperation on aerospace and military-industrial “great projects” (some of which already exist: Airbus, Ariane, Galileo . . .), with expanded participation to include Russia;
  • the creation of “a free association of European States who have the same vision and the same interests in areas such as immigration or the rules on external trade and capital flows,” again including Russia, but explicitly rejecting Turkey;[8]
  • the reorientation of French foreign policy in general away from the United States of America and towards a non-aligned approach based on “a trilateral Paris-Berlin Moscow alliance.”[9]

Le Pen then proposes a simple program for European cooperation: No more dismal Brussels bureaucrats and Afro-Muslim colonizers, and more border fences and rocket ships. Europe’s future would then be one of continuing European Man’s long march towards the Space Age rather than regressing back to the Sub-Saharan Age[10] . . .

The FN’s proposed European policy strikes me as eminently realistic.[11] EU-style cooperation would likely be extremely difficult if and when nationalist parties come to power, as each will be even more demanding in Brussels’ infamous horse-trading talks than our current governments. As a result, European-level cooperation could be limited to ad hoc and voluntary programs to promote industrial projects or to shut down immigration.[12]

Le Pen’s program recognizes that her project would require alliances with other Europeans, namely Germany and Russia. Indeed, there is a long pedigree of anti-globalist thought placing Russia necessarily at the center of any geopolitical realignment away from the United States of America — the latter having since the 1920s been increasingly dominated by an anti-European cultural elite. Moscow has long supported Western European nationalists, partly for ideological reasons, but mostly to undermine its rival the American Empire.

Russian support will almost certainly be critical for new European nationalist regimes to withstand the inevitable pressure from the United States, liberal neighboring Western European regimes, and liberal-plutocratic media hate campaigns. Insufficient caution and Russian support may well explain the fall of Serbian President Slobodan Milošević as against the ongoing success of Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orbán. The latter’s pro-European advocacy is exceptional for any political leader currently in office and is arguably close to what is needed for a renewal of the continent.[13]

Personally, I believe the nation-state has a viable and potentially valuable future in Europe as an entity capable of defending our ethnic genetic interests[14] and as the fundamental building block for whatever wider pan-European cooperation one might imagine.

I would however criticize Le Pen’s nationalism insofar as there is virtually no pro-European element at all. In her speeches, “Europe” is always a term of abuse equated with the failures of the European Union, even as she speaks very poetically on the French nation.[16] But if a nation is a family of families, what is Europe but a family of nations?

This problem pervades much, but not all, of French nationalism to this day. The version of French nationalism characteristic of Marine Le Pen, Florian Philippot, Alain Soral, and Éric Zemmour is at best “Europe-indifferent” and state-centric. Other French writers, such as Dominique Venner, Guillaume Faye, and Alain de Benoist, have in contrast emphasized the unity of European identity.

Indeed, Le Pen and Philippot both claim to be disciples of Charles de Gaulle and the expression “a European of Nations” is associated with him. Here is what the General said in his memoirs on the racial-cultural basis for European cooperation and unity:

For my part, I have, always, but today more than ever, felt that which is common to the nations which inhabit [Europe]. All being of the same white race, of the same Christian origin, of the same way of life, bound together since always by countless relations of thought, art, science, politics, commerce, it is in accord with their nature that they come to form a whole, having in the world its character and its organization.[17]

The FN then would in my view do well to go further in presenting a positive vision for European brotherhood and not forget that French identity — that medley of Celtic, Latin, and Germanic influences — is ultimately inseparably intertwined with that of the wider European family.

These criticisms aside, the FN’s proposed European policy would halt any further demographic damage and thus provide almost indefinite time for us to win the necessary cultural struggle. This struggle would furthermore be pursued in infinitely better circumstances, with European nations regaining their psychological sovereignty vis-à-vis the United States. In such a context, FN cadres — whom I am quite certain are largely untutored in evolutionary realities — would with any luck have the insights of scholars such as Dominique Venner and Thilo Sarrazin brought to their attention.


[1]Guillaume Durocher, One Funeral at a Time,” Radix Journal, November 25, 2015.

[2]Jean-Marie Le Pen was motivated by hostility to President Charles de Gaulle’s policy of abandoning French Algeria, which meant the ethnic cleansing of 1 million European settlers in that country. These so-called pieds-noirs overwhelmingly chose to flee to France. Paul-Éric Blanrue, Jean-Marie, Marine et les Juifs (Embourg, Belgium: Éditions Oser Dire, 2014), 37.

[3]The FN then was marginally pro-European and supported pro-market measures as France then suffered under a stifling Socialist regime which had instituted permanent mass unemployment in the double digits.

[4]On the rationale behind the European Union and the euro, see Guillaume Durocher, “François Mitterrand: European statesman, anti-American, & Judeophobe,” North American New Right, August 18, 2015.

[5]Front National, Notre Projet: Programme Politique du Front National (undated, probably first published November 19, 2011), 5.

[6]The EU would then have: no currency, no budget, no unity of law, and no areas of free movement. It would really be a non-thing in addition to the de facto non-sovereign it is today.

[7]Front National, Notre Projet, 47. A minority in the identitarian camp would probably lament the collapse of the EU as an implicitly White example of racial solidarity and perhaps an embryonic European superpower. On the EU’s curious status as an implicitly-White U.S.-molded soft power, see Guillaume Durocher, “American Influence Over the European Union,” North American New Right, October 12, 2015, and Guillaume Durocher, “Is the EU ‘Racist’?: Implicitly White Themes in EU Ideology & Propaganda,” North American New Right, July 2, 2015.

[8]Front National, Notre Projet, 49.

[9]Ibid, 51.

[10]To speak of a possible Africanization of Europe this century is no hyperbole. The United Nations projects that Europe’s population will decline from 738 million today to 646 million in 2100 (and this is including an ever-growing non-native share of the population), while Africa’s will quadruple to 4.4 billion. Needless to say, what with Sub-Saharan Africans’ catastrophic record of governance and nation-building, many tens or even hundreds of millions will likely want to find themselves a far more comfortable home, especially in Europe. See United Nations Population Division, World Population Prospects: The 2015 Revision (New York: 2015), and Steve Sailer, “The World’s Most Important Graph,” iSteve, April 23, 2015.

[11]Some areas in contrast, such as proposals for “a great maritime policy,” “a great policy to develop Africa” (to stem the causes of immigration at the source), and “a voluntarist Asian policy,” seem to reflect a view of France as a kind of global great power felt across all continents which strikes me as exaggerated, given the nation’s staggering relative demographic decline (what do 65 million Frenchmen, less than 1 percent of the world population, weigh in the face of 1.5 billion Chinese or 330 million Americans?) and the partial economic convergence of the so-called emerging nations (China, India, East Asian tigers, Brazil, Turkey . . .). The FN’s criticism of the EU, for all its faults, and the alleged benefits of secession, both strike me as somewhat exaggerated.

All that said, I do believe France is perfectly viable as a sovereign nation-state, with the French people being “master in their own home,” as the FN program puts it (p. 102), but the age of truly being a global great power are long over (that is, until the French number, say, 150 million, but then we will need a lot of French babies, ideally of the highest quality . . .).

[12]Indeed, such cooperation against the migrant invasion is already being implemented by the Visegrád countries – Poland, Hungary, the Czech Republic, and Slovakia – with the planned joint deployment of 300 police to Greece’s border with Turkey. This is a rare constructive and sensible example of European solidarity in our politics. “Visegrad Countries to Deploy 300-Strong Police Force to Patrol Greece’s Border with Turkey,” Hungary Today, November 12, 2015.

[13]On Orbán, see my articles for The Occidental Observer: Viktor Orbán on Multiculturalism, Immigration, and National Sovereignty, March 8, 2015, “Orbán: ‘The Real Threat is from the Heart of Africa,’” August 4, 2015, “Orbán: Europeans Should ‘Throw Away Political Correctness’ and Shut Down Migrant Invasion,” October 31, 2015, “Orbán vs. Merkel: Can Europe’s Conservative Populists End the Migrant Crisis?,” November 1, 2015, and “Orbán: Europeans Should Have Babies, Not Immigrants!,” November 22, 2015.

[14]For example, an EU-style superstate is by no means necessary to halting illegal immigration, but illegal immigration could be easily accomplished by cooperating nation-states if there were actually the will to do so. The Franco-German consortium Airbus is currently building a remarkable 900-kilometer high-tech fence to protect the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia:

The [Northern Border Security] project, enabled by Airbus Defence and Space and its civil works partner, is a fully-integrated technological security-solution encompassing 900 kms of the border with Iraq. It consists of 1 sand berm, 3 fences, 7 Command & Control (C2) Centres, 32 Response Stations, 240 Response Vehicles and 10 Surveillance Reconnaissance Vehicles. Security is enforced through 40 surveillance towers, equipped with Airbus DS TRGS-SEC radars and day/night cameras, and 38 communication towers, all of which are connected to the C2 centres, the National HQ and the Ministry of Interior over 1,45 million km of fibre-optic cables. These assets, combined, provide superior operational awareness and means to mitigate and monitor threats of all nature.

One can easily imagine this kind of know-how being used for cooperative projects launched by a President Le Pen, Prime Minister Orbán, and other patriotic European leaders. See Airbus press release, Culmination of Saudi Border Security project,” September 19, 2014 and Steve Sailer, “Germans Build Anti-Arab Fence for Arabs,” iSteve, September 3, 2015.

[16]See for instance her major May Day speech of this year, Marine Le Pen, Speech, May 1, 2015.

[17]Charles de Gaulle, Mémoires d’espoir, volume I, 181.

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