Learning from the EU Experiment (I): The anti/pro-EU question should be tactical

 Official EU propaganda: Uniting Europeans in the face of Asian, Muslim and African power?
If only. The video was later retracted as “racist.”

The European Union is one of the great political experiments of recent decades. The EU’s official motivation — founded in the hope of ending Europeans’ fratricidal wars and to unite them as a power in the face of the rising non-European world — is likely to resonate with White Nationalists. In fact, as the above video suggests, I would argue pro-EU activists often appeal to an unconscious White identity. Mainstream Europeanism appears to me in many respects to be a sort of degenerate and incoherent parody of White Nationalism.

Of course, in practice the EU today is in many respects an anti-European, ethnocidal entity. But I believe European ethno-nationalists have much to learn from its experience, both successes and failures, in fostering cooperation among different European Nations and States in our little corner of the world, despite the national veto.

European nationalist parties overwhelmingly oppose the EU, but sometimes this seems to be for the wrong reasons. The United Kingdom Independence Party (UKIP), for example, appears to be promoted precisely because it can channel ethnocentric British sentiment into a non-racialist, pro-business direction. Nigel Farage seems to consider Polish or Romanian immigration to be a greater threat than Pakistani or African immigration, whereas it is obvious the latter is unassimilable in the long-term. Thus, ethnocentric energies in Britain are harmlessly channeled against the EU rather than constructively used to oppose non-European immigration. UKIP is useless except insofar as Britain’s leaving the EU promotes a wider shake-up and inspires nationalist parties on the Continent.

I believe this kind of unhelpful misdirection is possible because few things attract as much confusion and projection as the EU. What kind of entity is it? An incipient State or confederation? Or merely an international organization? Mainstream academics will often punt the issue by referring to it as a sui generis régime, which of course explains nothing. Europeans will sometimes patronizingly explain to Americans that the EU’s apparent contradictions and waffling verbosity are, of course, simply too subtle for Americans to understand (amusingly lampooned by Paul Krugman). The EU’s critics are often not much help either as it has been attacked both for being a vehicle of neoliberal laissez-faire in destroying all borders and for being a crypto-communist Superstate regulating all aspects of life. Advocates of the EU are often split, French President François Mitterrand apparently trying to save Europe by uniting its peoples in the face of global competitors, while “Founding Father” Jean Monnet seemed to think the entity was a mere pit stop to global governance and universal miscegenation, the destruction of Europe and its Nations as distinct entities.

Evidence can be found for all of these interpretations, although personally I would say the emphasis is more deserved on the neoliberal, globalist and nation-wrecking aspects, rather than the regulative and “Euro-Statist” ones. The matter is not helped by the fact that the EU is genuinely a rather complicated thing, with 28 different countries and national political scenes, an à la carte variation of levels of integration (e.g. eurozone, Schengen Area), and a complex set of Treaties with often very different rules for various policy areas.

A broader point should be made: those who are involved with the EU — including both professional eurocrats/europhiles and europhobes like UKIP and the French National Front (FN) — have strong incentives to massively overstate its importance. In fact, with the notable exception of the eurozone currency union, I would argue the EU does not really matter as such.

The EU certainly has some real State-like powers in some areas, and in this respect the vocabulary of American government is useful. Core EU policymaking is made up:

• “Pork”: The EU budget (1% of GDP) including funds for regional and local government (aimed at poorer areas, politically useful in getting buy-in from regional/local officials), agricultural subsidies and infrastructure.
• Unfunded mandates: The EU “process” comes up with binding or non-binding targets for the economy, social well-being or the environment, ultimately with little-or-no bearing on reality (a mostly harmless parody of the Soviet Gosplan‘s 5-year plans).
• Regulation of the EU common market: An area that I think has broadly been quite positive, with regulation by majority of technical, environmental, financial, consumer and other issues. Inevitably this has proven an ever-expanding area as, similar to the Commerce Clause of the U.S. Constitution, eurocrats-cum-social engineers use the market as a pretext to regulate welfare, labor or even gender issues. Thus far this seems fairly limited though.
• Quasi-federal powers: Monetary policy within the eurozone, competition policy (including antitrust fines and merger approvals) and trade policy are managed by EU institutions directly.

At its best, the EU works as normal, democratic quasi-government, with the European Commission as government, the European Parliament as lower house, and the 28 national governments in the Council of Ministers working as a kind of senate.

Implementation of most of these policies and EU laws remains national. As such, the Union’s power is so weak and consensual that either it has no real independent agency or it is doing things national governments would have done anyway (particularly in the area of trade, where policy is highly consensual). In this sense, the EU is in many respects a mere codification of neoliberal globalist practices of financial liberalization, privatization, transnationalization and so on, a crude attempt at legally formalizing a complex reality which is independently occurring in the United States (in the form of lost jobs to China, financial chaos, Mexican immigration, NAFTA and so on).

Of course, a case can be made that EU laws and agreements lock in undesirable policies, notably the free movement of capital (which incredibly, both within the EU and between it and outside world, is prescribed by the Treaties as mandatory) and the Schengen Area of the free movement of people (which makes it harder to police illegal immigration). But a disobedient national government, especially if a reclaimed a national currency, could not really be prevented by the EU from instituting nationalist policies such as border checks and a halt to immigration. At most, EU institutions could impose a fine but this is quite tricky when imposed on net contributors to the European budget. These governments could, as Margaret Thatcher did in the 1980s, simply threaten to stop paying.

(UKIP will point out that, under European rules, one cannot limit EU immigration [which is overwhelmingly White, easily assimilable and, unlike non-EU migration, a net contributor to public coffers]. However, as it is not a member of the Schengen Area of free movement, the UK can have systematic border checks. In addition, there is nothing in EU rules requiring national governments to allow settlement by non-EU nationals. Visas and naturalizations for non-EU nationals is entirely a national affair. Thus UKIP’s gloating that EU migration cannot be stopped if one stays within the Union is irrelevant from an ethno-nationalist point of view: it is non-EU migration, particularly from Africa and the Islamic World, which poses a long term threat to Britain.)

That the EU’s importance is overstated both by its supporters and detractors is shown by the visible impact of its most important, and real, policy areas. A few examples:

• The EU budget amounts to €142 billion annually or around 1% of GDP. I am quite sure, given the mess of the legislative process and of the chaotic implementation by EU/national/regional authorities, that much of this is wasteful. (For example, no one seems to be able to give a coherent account of how EU money is spent in a given country or how it differs across countries.) But in any case, one hundredth of national wealth, when government spending in Europe often amounts to 40% of GDP is not a huge deal.
• The European Commission’s much-vaunted negotiations for a free trade agreement with the United States (the so-called Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership, TTIP, previously known as TAFTA), would by its own estimates have a marginal economic impact, perhaps increasing GDP by 0.5%. Personally, I am enormously skeptical that lack of even more further transnationalization of finance, services and industry is what is keeping “growth” back, so I suspect the positive economic impact will be even less.
• The eurozone’s ongoing attempt to regulate the financial sector includes a Single Resolution Fund, a common pot a money which will gradually be built up to €55 billion over 8 years, with the purpose of bailing out a failing financial sector. The mechanism is woefully complex and it is unknown whether it will even be relevant by the time it is put in place. But ultimately the sum, which may seem like a lot, will at best be sufficient to save one small country (perhaps Greece or Ireland) and will do nothing to protect a large one like Spain or Italy.

All these issues are intensely controversial, minutely negotiated and ultimately do not really matter in the grand scheme of things. The hordes of Brussels policymakers have a relevance akin to that of city mayors, but without the local contact with real people. As German Chancellor Willy Brandt once aptly remarked: “Europe can be likened to two elephants making love: it stirs up a lot of dust and takes a long time until results are achieved.”

Of course, over many decades all this does add up to something. However, we have to consider that even the EU’s limited powers of today have only been achieved over about 60 years of integration. By the time the supposed European Superstate emerges, indigenous Europeans will no longer be the primary inhabitants of Western Europe (already one third of births in France today appears to be African/Muslim and native Britons are forecast to become a minority in their own country by the 2060s). Eurocrats will at best have created an intricate framework to the benefit of our African and Muslim successors (a continental-scale example of what manosphere writer Heartiste calls “race-cuckoldry”). However, given the recent history of Africa and the Islamic World, it seems fair to say that our heirs will not care or not be able to maintain our delicate EU structures for very long.

Ultimately, the EU/euro question is secondary to the demographic/cultural one. I believe Europe could have a bright future with or without the EU/euro. What really matters:

1) Stopping (or reversing) displacement-level immigration.

2) The propagation of an adaptive European culture (stressing fertility, ethno-national/European identity, eugenics and rejection of relativistic, normless individualism/egalitarianism [e.g. the apology of individual selfishness and narcissism to the detriment of the whole]).

I believe the usefulness of anti-EU groups like the FN or UKIP should be measured according to these benchmarks. Too often, the System displaces ethnocentric sentiment into anti-EU sentiment, where it can be politically neutralized or ignored, instead of channeled into opposition to non-European immigration.

The question of being pro/anti-EU/euro should be completely tactical: whatever allows us to reverse the demographic tide and reclaim our culture.

In this respect, there is a national way that I think is by far the most plausible, at least in the short-term. It is far more likely that one of the EU’s 28 nations, by the vagaries of national politics, undergo a nationalist revolution than Brussels itself be hijacked. (Indeed, insofar as the EU has no army, sovereignty is ultimately national anyway and therefore national politics should be the locus of activism.) The dysfunctional overreach of the euro could be enough to tip France into the hands of the FN. I would personally consider destruction of the EU/euro a completely acceptable side-effect of ending immigration and usury, and reclaiming national sovereignty in France. Greece is also a highly-plausible candidate, politics there — with imprisoned Golden Dawn nationalists and dire economic straits — having a decidedly Weimar-like feel.

Another possibility would be the collapse of the euro — leading to financial chaos, loss of savings and inflation in the short-term, but also probably an improved economic outlook and reduction of financial malfeasance in the medium-term — which would discredit old political elites and lead to an unpredictable situation which could give nationalists a strong chance of rising to power in various countries. (This is what happened in Hungary, where the Socialists were discredited by a welfare/pensions scam and the center-right Fidesz radicalized into a moderately conservative-nationalist party.) The piecemeal emergence of nationalist governments in different countries would not preclude desirable European cooperation or even the founding of a nationalist version of the EU (although it is fair to surmise it would be even weaker than the current Union).

There may also however be a pan-European way. More speculatively, one can imagine, slowly over the decades, the EU coalescing into a “something” vaguely like a country with a proper government. Already in the economic realm, the European Central Bank is a quasi-sovereign actor with powers to punish and coerce national governments, so long as those governments refuse to issue their own currency. One can imagine a scenario (perhaps unlikely) in which nationalist parties — officially Judeophile nationalist parties (like the Swedish Democrats and the Dutch Party for Freedom) or Judeo-agnostic ones (like the FN) — come to power or form coalition governments which would halt immigration but not break with the EU and/or euro. I think it is reasonable to believe that, if the culture became a nationalist one and if the EU had to answer to nationalist governments, aspiring Eurocrats would not be decrying a “Fortress Europe,” but pledging to do all they can to make this dream a reality.

For European ethno-nationalists, the debate for and against the EU should be a tactical one, ultimately secondary to and deriving from the foundational question: the continued existence, sovereignty and flourishing of our peoples.