The Rise and Demise of the EU: A Short History of A Big Failure

Several costly mistakes were made by the founding fathers of the European Union:

• economics, and not politics, was thought to be the best tool to bring about the unification of Europe;
• unclear plans about the limits of the enlargement of the European Union;
• the unexpected and ongoing floods of non-European immigration as a result of the iron law of capitalism, combined with starry-eyed, guilt-feeling Christian inspired “love thy colored neighbor” ecumenism.

The first signs of the decline did not wait to occur.  The Amsterdam Treaty of 1997, the Nice Treaty of 2001, and the Lisbon Treaty of 2007 became face-saving attempts at rectifying the failures already embedded in the founding myth of the Maastricht Treaty of 1992.

Quite revealing is the fact that the predecessor of the European Union, the European Economic Community (EEC), following the Treaty of Rome in 1957, had adopted the “economic” name and not the name of “political community.” The underlying belief, inherent to liberalism, was that only thorough economic benefits — only through the removal of trade barriers and state borders, and with the free flux of people, goods and capital — would age-old interethnic hatreds among Europeans disappear. The results of such delusions are becoming visible every day.

Nor has the EU been very democratically minded toward its member states.  In 1992 Denmark voted in a referendum against the Maastricht Treaty; in 2001 Ireland voted against the Nice Treat, and then Ireland again voted in 2008 against the Lisbon Treaty. The popular outcome of those national referendums was each time shrugged off by the EU leaders with the words: “try again next time.” Concerning the main EU mover and shaker, Germany, all referenda on any subject are forbidden by law, due to Germany’s post-WWII legal status. To put it in a less politically correct language and in plain English, Germany is an occupied country with 50.000 US troops still stationed on its soil.

Transfer Union: Austerity Union

The centralized bureaucracy in Brussels regulates every aspect of life among European member states. When a country faces default, the EU is slated to become a “transfer union,” with rich countries, like Germany, setting the rules for defaulting countries. Subsequently, based on the latter’s financial (in)discipline, hand- out money is to be delivered to insolvent banks of a state facing default. This practice is in contradiction with Article 125 of the Maastricht Treaty forbidding any EU member state to bail out another member state. But who cares. The mystique of the market needs to prevail in the EU — in this regard, it is quite similar to the enforcement of the former Marxist mystique in the former Soviet Union. For instance, given the disparity in economic performance between Romania and Germany and their divergent taxation systems, blind faith that the market can smooth out all difficulties appears to be another illusion.

The Euro, introduced as the single currency in the economies of the 17 member states in the early 2000’s with the hope of accelerating the convergence of national economies, has instead worsened the living standards of EU citizens. The EU removal of all obstacles to free trade has resulted in the influx of cheap non-European goods produced in emerging economies of the Far East, engaged in dumping in all forms (social, fiscal, environmental, etc.). The labor market in Pacific Rim countries, including India and China, with the population of well over 3.5 billion people, has a huge comparative advantage in supplying cheap labor and inexpensive goods to Europe. This inevitably results in the sharp decline of wages of Europeans, followed by incessant outsourcing of local labor-intensive manufacturing industry.

The Euro could make sense if two conditions had been met: the existence of the strong custom union with protective tariffs and the awareness that economic disparities between the rich and the poor member European states would not go away with a stroke of a pen. This, however, was not the case. The single European currency imposed a single interest rate on the 17 member states and the remaining 11 states which do not use the Euro, but whose own local currency is pegged to the Euro. The European Central Bank in Frankfurt, similar to the Federal Reserve in the U.S., is a true political sovereign in Europe; it has more clout in foreign and domestic policy than any member state or any local government in the EU.

Another worrisome project is the soon-to-be launched Euro-American “New Transatlantic Economic Partnership” (TTIP), created in 1998. This joint body, consisting of the European Commission and US government officials, is scheduled to create a transatlantic market in all aspects of trade and investment. In June 2013, the European Commission negotiated with the U.S. government a large transatlantic common market designated to eliminate trade barriers between the EU and USA and allegedly bring more prosperity to the citizens of the EU and the U.S. Similar rhetoric about “prosperity for all European citizens” could be heard in Europe on the eve of the Maastricht Treaty when the European Commission pontificated about the implementation of the single European market, scheduled for 1992 and thought to be able to generate between 2 and 5 million new jobs. Where are those jobs? Instead, as of June 2014, there were well over 25 million unemployed in the EU, part-timers not included.

The Wall Street Journal of February 2, 2014 quotes the European Commission saying that the “TTIP is the cheapest stimulus package imaginable.” The WSJ author of the article continues in an upbeat vein, adding that “the EU and the U.S. can expect more than $250 billion in additional GDP and hundreds of thousands of jobs from a successful partnership, according to the Center for European Policy Analysis.” Such ecstatic rhetoric is worthy of former Soviet fable tellers.

What the TTIP does not mention is securing of rights of the labor; nor does it mention the vanishing role of trade unions in Europe, which have, over the last century, even more than in the USA, been the only safety net for European workers. However, in a global world today, in order to stay competitive, a firm or an enterprise must lower the costs of production. Obviously, this must entail the constant reduction in workers’ wages, benefits, and, generally speaking, the reduction of budgetary allocations for the welfare state in Europe.

Another factor affecting meager growth in Europe, as Alain de Benoist writes in his new book dealing with the coming European apocalypse, is the huge pressure of big shareholders. In the modern capitalist system, both in the US and EU, companies finance shareholders and not the other way around. Modern shareholders always assume that a company or an enterprise must be in their service — starting with investment funds. Predictably, shareholders want to maximize the value of their capital gains even if that means for a national company or a firm to cut wages, carry out mass layoffs and relocate domestic citizens to faraway countries.

Capitalism and Christianity Breeding Interbreeding 

A third and the most serious problem the EU Commission is aware of, but does not want to tackle in public, is social and racial costs of non- European immigration to Europe. Immigration has always been a phenomenon linked to big business. As of now, according to official statistics, the European Union, with its 500 million people, has over 71 million immigrants, as reported by the very politically correct, French mainstream daily, Le Monde.According to recent statistics Spain, Germany and UK have more than half of all immigrants in the EU, that is, 6.5% of the EU population. There were 47.3 million foreign-born residents in the EU in 2010, corresponding to 9.4% of the total population. Of these, 31.4 million were born outside the EU with 16 million born in another EU member state. In 2007, out of 82.3 million inhabitants in Germany, 15.4 million had — what the German authorities and media euphemistically and in a politically correct German vernacular call — “migrant background” (Migrationshintergrund), meaning in plain English, non-White immigrants.

One must be careful though with the statistical body counts of immigrants, a procedure often falsely viewed in academia as the most reliable empirical basis for the study of immigration. The figure of 71 million immigrants in the EU does not specify whether this figure includes the number of illegal immigrants, or the number of White European immigrants relocating to other EU member states, or immigrants of color. In France, for instance, millions of Moroccan or Algerian residents and/or their descendants are not counted as immigrants, many being already naturalized and many holding two citizenships. The French law prohibits making statistics on the basis of racial affiliation; therefore, one cannot tell by official statistics the exact number of the non-Whites in France.

Acquisition of citizenship is also on the rise in the EU. In 2009, 776.000 persons obtained citizenship in 28 states comprising the European Union. However, millions of Africans and Asians, already naturalized in the UK and France, are not included in this figure. They are already considered “Europeans.”  Also, by U.S. Department of State estimates, as of 2011, there were 1.6 million Americans in Europe, the US military and diplomatic personnel not included. One could cautiously put the overall numbers of naturalized citizens of color, along with non-naturalized legal and illegal immigrants of color residing in the EU at 10 percent, i.e. roughly 50 million non- Whites in Europe.

Contrary to a widespread belief among many European and American Whites, not only the leftists or the antifas and other non-White ethnic activist organizations are advocates of non-European immigration. Big companies, big business and the Church bear the lion’s share of the responsibility for bringing in non-European immigrants. The merchant, just like his counterpart, the Communist commissar or the Christian prelate, does not like borders. In particular the Catholic Church in Europe has been over the last several decades the most outspoken champion of multiracial society. Theologically speaking, any state border is in contradiction with the spirit of Christian ecumenism, and its end result resulting in race mixing. In historical perspective, one only needs to briefly look at the open advocacy of race mixing by the Church in Latin America from the 17th to the 20th century.  From the perspective of capitalist free trade, however, immigration is in full accordance with the spirit of capitalism aiming at the erasure of all ethnicities and of all national borders (“laissez faire, laissez passer”).

Most non-European immigrants, both legal and illegal, owe their mass arrival to Europe to guilt-ridden, Christian-inspired, Good Samaritan humanitarianism professed by the Church combined with the so-called outsourcing brought about by the very logic of capitalism. Ever since the Industrial Revolution, at the beginning of the 19th century, capitalists have dreamed of the increased mobility of labor as well as continuous migration of people and races across the earth. This time around, big business has finally reached its hand to the Marxist inspired far-left and to modern Christian disciples of various stripes, the former aiming at dismantling the welfare state, considered too costly, the latter killing off the nation-state viewed  as an unchristian entity or considered a legacy of fascism.

One should examine first the Christian belief in egalitarianism and universalism and its secular economic and ideological derivatives, such as communism and capitalism, before criticizing non-European immigrants storming into Europe and the USA.

Dr. Tom Sunic is a former political science professor and a member of the Board of Directors of the American Freedom Party. His new book is Chroniques des temps postmodernes (Avatar, 2014).