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Europe is not a state, and that is a problem — mainly an economic problem. The strength of the euro is compromised by this. It is far easier to imagine Europe breaking apart than to imagine the United States doing so — and today, that disintegration feels like a messy but genuine possibility.
The modern state — that is, the nation-state — is a specific historical product. As Martin van Creveld argues in The Rise and Decline of the State, the modern state represents a process of becoming: the unfolding of a novel and particular political and sociocultural arrangement that is distinctly European in origin. Euro-America remains, to this day, the paradigmatic home of the nation-state.
The United States embodies a further evolution of this political form: it possesses a supra-state federal structure layered over individual states. In a world where progress is measured by GDP growth, this could be read as the logical development of the entity that claims sovereignty and a monopoly over legislation and legitimate violence.
This concept of sovereignty rests on the idea that a nation, embodied by the state, is the only author and agent of its own will and destiny. It derives from what Eckard Bolsinger, in The Autonomy of the Political, calls the will to representation — a useful abstraction. This will to representation, both popular and collective, does not require active participation; rather, it draws its power precisely from being an abstraction.
As Bolsinger argues, for this will to representation — the foundation of state sovereignty — to come into being, to become ontologically conceivable, it must presuppose a break from an enslaving agency, a tyranny, or a similarly dominating evil. Historically and paradigmatically, the American and French revolutions exemplify such a break. They made the state, as the embodiment of popular will, the master of its own collective destiny.
This would imply that violence is the direct route to state sovereignty. Yet this violence must not be arbitrary or illegitimate; it must be sanctioned. Only when violence is constituted through a politico-juridical order can it be accepted as legitimate by the international community.
These were some of the principles derived from the Peace of Westphalia. Within a nation’s borders, there is no higher order than that of the state. It is the law of the land; it cannot be countermanded, and no one can appeal to a higher law. As Gianfranco Poggi observes in The Development of the Modern State, only a successful act of violence against an oppressing agent — declared the “will of the people” through a constitution — can overthrow that law.
The act of violence that frees the nation from the tyrant becomes the nation’s birth — its foundational myth. In Spain, it was the so-called Reconquista; in France, the French Revolution; in Italy, the Risorgimento. This act legitimizes the ensuing state, which, once constituted, claims the entirety of the political space — nay, the entirety of the existential space — for we assume that no one can live outside citizenship, and to be a citizen is to identify the self with the state as the sovereign representation of one’s own nation.
The European Union would like Europe to become a state. That was the essence of the Pleven Plan, which proposed both political union and a defense pact. This proved too ambitious, so early architects such as Jean Monnet and Robert Schuman charted a gradual path — from economic to political integration.
They were the public, acknowledged faces promoting the idea of a European Union as a safeguard against another European civil war. What they did not foresee was that, for Europe to become a nation-state, violence would again be required. Today it is widely acknowledged that other powerful forces pushed toward the same goal, albeit for different reasons.
The United States, through the CIA, was one of them. The American Committee on United Europe (ACUE) was founded in 1948 as a privately run, covertly funded organization to promote European federalism and counter Communism. Declassified records show that between 1949 and 1960, U.S. intelligence provided roughly $4 million to the European Movement. Some claim that, in 1958, over half (53.5%) of its funding came from ACUE. For Washington, the primary objective was to unify Europe against the Soviet Union — and, secondarily, to answer Kissinger’s famous question: “Who do I call in Europe?”
Another powerful influence behind the EU’s creation was the Bilderberg Group. Founded in 1955 to foster transatlantic dialogue, the now not-so-secretive organization is a household name among global elites. Minutes from its early meetings confirm that plans for a European monetary union were on its agenda from the start. Étienne Davignon, former EU commissioner, later acknowledged in an interview with EUobserver that the group played a pivotal role in creating a unified currency — the euro.
But the euro suffers from an ontological problem — one that all the above actors have sought, and failed, to resolve: it represents a sovereignty that constitutionally does not exist. After the Treaties of Rome in 1957 (establishing the European Economic Community) and Maastricht in 1992 (creating the European Union), the next logical step should have been a European constitution to provide political legitimacy. Europeans, however, rejected it — twice. European elites tried to bypass the rejection through the Treaty of Lisbon (2009), but the constitutional void remains.
Because the European Union is not a state, it cannot claim to be the supreme law of the land — nor can it demand the ultimate civic sacrifice. It also lacks the authority to levy taxes, since fiscal sovereignty remains with national governments — the only entities that can claim to embody the popular will constituted in the state. This is dangerous. Without the ability to tax or to enforce its law as ultimate, the EU remains vulnerable.
The project of the European Union — and, above all, the euro — can only be completed once Europe becomes a single state. The collapse of the Union would mean the collapse of the currency. And the disappearance of the euro would pose serious challenges; it would shake the global financial system. Would the euro retain value without a sovereign European Central Bank? Certainly not. What of nations holding reserves in euros — about 20% of global totals — or the interlinked European banking system, denominated in euros? The scale of the disruption defies easy calculation.
The threat to the EU project, however, comes as much from within as from without. In order to maintain the economic project that is the European Union, and with the ultimate goal of creating a single state, the EU has introduced policies that erode the foundations of its member nations.
Influenced by postmodern theories of the “liquid individual,” European elites underestimated the power of the nation-state to fashion the subjectivity of its citizens. For an individual to be invested in the nation and accept the state as the embodiment of its own sovereignty, they must think of the nation as an extended family. An attack on the nation thus feels like an attack on the self.
The European Union attacks the nation because, in order to become a state, it must eliminate the legitimacy of other, smaller states. Citizens, sensing this, have grown alienated from the EU project — as evidenced by persistently low turnout in European elections. They fail to see how “what is good for Europe” benefits them personally. And they correctly perceive that those wielding real power — the European Commission and the European Central Bank — are unelected and unaccountable. Opportunistic politicians exploit this resentment through nationalistic narratives.
To confront this, Europe’s elites can only move forward toward the European state. There can be no looking back, as the logic of state formation acquires its own inertia. In this case, the logic of the state is the logic of the euro. The European Union is an economic project that needs a state, and it will do anything to achieve one — because otherwise, it will vanish.
To reach that end, it has two instruments: war and the ECB’s Central Bank Digital Currency (CBDC). A full war against Russia is unnecessary; the appearance of one suffices. But if war does occur, it will forge a “European will” stronger than any treaty. The outcome of the conflict is almost irrelevant — the key is that an idea of Europe emerges from it with a sense of having been liberated from a tyrant. That moment would justify a constitution, which would in turn empower a parliament to tax, transcending national governments.
Creating the conditions for that event seems to be the only rationale that explains the current war narrative pushed by European elites. The crisis born of war, real or imagined, would also be the perfect opportunity to introduce the ECB’s digital currency, for which the stage is set with the digital IDs. At that point, the European state would have fully emerged — and the euro, finally, would be safe.
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Was Nazi Germany a state, and was it sovereign?
Looks like a yes on both counts to me.
Why did to go to war with Russia then?
The post argues that (not_a_state => goes_to_war).
From that, (goes_to_war => not_a_state) does not follow, and the post does not claim that.
Basic propositional logic.
> Creating the conditions for that event seems to be the only rationale that explains the current war narrative pushed by European elites.
That’s a reasonable conjecture. A misreading of Turchin could get them there. Not enough neurone variance amongst them betters.
Ima say the inability to communicate is a major factor when different language groups try to coordinate military operations. Counter-examples welcome. Europe has two, wait three, no four, wait how many? language families. And there are distinct Euro power differences associated with each.
This point got me wondering what the analogous event in United States was, and given the event, what was that “law,” or the “tyrant” that the event sought to overthrow. What that event is obvious: the Civil War. But what was the tyrant? The answer seems to be that it was the Constitution itself, or, at least, the compromise that brought about the Constitution. I suppose I’m not departing from the well-traveled ground so far: about a billion people have made this point. But I think I’ll depart from the conventional wisdom a bit from this point on.
The nature of the Constitutional compromise was that it imposed restrictions on BOTH sides of the North-South divide, especially on slavery. Every contemporary knew that the slavery question was the fatal dividing question and New Englanders, especially, had serious moral qualms about it. The South had to compromise, too–and this compromise is often omitted in favor of argument about how the Constitution protected and prolonged slavery. First, the Constitution put a time limit to slave trade. Second, while not embodied in the Constitution, the way the Senate was organized create the path to the balancing act between slave and free states that kept peace for decades until 1850s. In this sense, the slavery politics of 1850s, which included, among others the Dred Scott decision and the Fugitive Slave Act of 1850, among other things, can be correctly construed as a Southern “rebelion” against the “tyranny” of the original compromise: if X is a fundamental right (in this case, X is the right to property, in the form of slaves), why should we submit to restrictions on it by human made compromise from decades ago?
The repugnant nature of the practice of slavery, especially to the modern eyes, makes it difficult for us to reach even the premise of the argument. Let’s skipt that part, however difficult it is: once we skip that part, it’s the classic formula for revolutions against existing order: first, assert that a given “right” (or cause, or whatever) is fundamental and its rightness is beyond question unquestionably; second, the existing political order offends the free exercise of this right; third, the existing political order has to be destroyed and a new order constructed on the premise that this “right” is supreme and unquestionable.
This makes paramount the question of what exactly it is that the “cause” (right or whatever) needs to be in order to build a revolution around–what requierments does it need to meet? Why should people buy into this? I think it is fairly clear that, in the end, the South lost hte Civil War because the idea of “sacred property” (especially the property in forms of humans) didn’t command that kind of respect. It seems that the idea of a “Europe” that the current version of EU is selling is not enough–hostility to Russia might have enough historical baggage to enough to re-create a Polish Empire as imagined by the Vasas, comprising Poland, the Baltics, maybe Sweden-Finland, but it won’t be a “Europe” on the whole.
This brings us back to the original question, though: what kind of myth is good enough to qualify as the “will of the people” that stays in place even after the oppressor is gone?
(A side note: I have this theory that the coupling of slavery and race was the peculiar product of “democracy” in the South: the fear of every low class freeborn person in a slaveholding society is that, with some bad luck, they might be reduced to that of a slave. One guarantee that poor whites could be given was that they would never be reduced to slavery because of the color of their skin. In practice, this was not guaranteed by laws: the laws governing slavery in the South, in theory, derived from the Roman principle that the child of a slave mother shall be a slave. Most slaves in mid-19th century US, especially after the end of Atlantic slave trade (at least the legal variety) as provided for in the Constitution) were basically American and were moreover largely of mixed ancestry: enough that there were more slaves than one would expect who were, visually, not at all black–the presumed children of Thomas Jefferson via Sally Hemmings (herself only 1/4 or 1/8 black) were described by contemporaries as having freckles, red hair, and blue eyes like Jefferson himself, features inherited by a presumed grandson, John Wayles Hemmings (who later changed his name to Jefferson) who achieved some notability in Michigan and his portraits, including those in his capacity as a Union officer during the Civil War, are around. That these people were being held as slaves on Monticello did not strike the contemporaries as particularly strange (which indicates that such slaves were not that uncommon, even at the end of 18th century), although the more abolitionist-oriented among the visitors decried the immorality of slavery that allowed fathers to “own” their own children as “property” (although variations of this idea existed in many parts of the world–even in places where “slavery” was not institutionally established.) The presence of these “white” slaves was an important element of abolitionist literature and were bases of “freedom suits” brought by white-looking (presumed) slaves who claimed that they were white people without slave ancestry held illegally in bondage. Interestingly, Ariella Grosse, in her book What Blood Won’t Tell, noted that these freedom suits depended centrally on the appearance and mannerism–no Southern white jury ever returned an alleged slave who acted sufficiently white and looked the part to slavery, regardless of what documentary evidence their (presumed) owners could marshal. If so, the operative logic had to be that the black and the slave had to be the same–that’d have run into issues with the free blacks, who did form large commmunities in certain parts of the country, but they were not part of the social compact that governed even the South.)
Perhaps the reason for the successful creation of the United States was its component states being constantly under threat of invasion and dismembership by the Europeans especially the British until after the War of 1812. This put a lot of pressure on the country to find ways to not be invaded.
When the Constitution was adopted in 1789, the expectation was that slavery would slowly become less of a problem, but Eli Whitney’s 1793(?) invention of the cotton gin made cotton growing too profitable, and the better treatment of the now extremely expensive slaves (along with the growth of slave breeding plantations in the worn out farms in the Southern Atlantic coast) created a population boom. Owning a human being was the financial equivalent of owning an expensive car, which created a lot of very wealthy Americans. It also incentivized the violent abuse by the proslavery movement on everyone else. I could equate it to the current abusive treatment of many pro Zionists excepting the murders, beatings, duels, kidnappings, and destruction of newspapers and the occasional farm or small town by the proslavery movement. What made the slavers so upset was that it wasn’t openly and completely accepted by the entire nation including the South. The Southern abolitionists were dealt with by Fire and lead, but the North was too big and the abolitionists too entrenched to be extirpated.
The tactics successfully used in the South which included kidnappings of blacks on the assumption, not evidence, of being slaves along with threats and violence on the general public, the police, and judges, not to mention the destruction of newspapers, censorship, and the occasional violence and murder used by Southerners to protect and even expand slavery merely strengthen the then radical Abolitionist Movement. Books like Uncle Tom’s Cabin also helped the antislavery efforts. The abolitionists gained recruits and the rest of the population including people who did not care about slavery wanted to tell off the South.
What the Slavocracy wanted was supine acceptance and treated even mild verbal criticism as full blown support of “servile rebellion” or “insurrection.” There efforts did the opposite by creating pushback even from Northerners who were not antislavery, but were angry at the overreaction of Southerners. It also put the issue of slavery including all of its horrors into constant debate, which worked against the Slavocracy. Add the then soon to be lost Southern political dominance of the Federal government because of the increasing population along with the increasing economic and political power of the North, the Southern elites were very worried about losing their wealth, power, and status. This made them succeed from the Union even though it was likely decades before slavery was to be ended by peaceful means. It is hard to say, but war likely pushed the abolition of slavery forward by several generations at least.
So, you might say that fear of invasion, not to mention the working together of the various states, insured the successful creation of the United States while greed threatened its survival. Are there any similar issues in the European Union besides those that are being created by the elites?
The United States was created, survived, and changed because the American nation as a whole was willingly to do the effort including dying for ultimately what the elites wanted. But the elites were merely in charge, they did not have the ability to do the work necessary for success. I think that the European Union’s leadership is more likely to destroy their union if they remain focused on controlling their population instead of governing, much like the British or the South were. They were too busy being in charge and fearful of losing their power that they ignored the need for their authority’s acceptance by the people for that power to remain.
It wasn’t just the Northerners, 2/3 of the Scots-Irish of Appalachia fought for the Union and in large part because of the hubris and arrogance of the slave lords who started openly musing that they should extend the peculiar institution to their benighted cousins in the hills.
The Anglo-Normans might have conquered England, but they never conquered Scotland, and they forgot who they were fucking with when they invaded Kentucky and West Virginia.
“The Anglo-Normans might have conquered England, but they never conquered Scotland”
Edward the first certainly did a job in Wales, leaving us with some very fine castles as 21stC tourist attractions, (well, the ones that mark Cromwellian failures) but he also had the epithet “Hammer of the Scots” and engaged in serious attempts at err… “ethnic cleansing” .. north of the border.
Yet it is the history that prefaced and then led to the Act of Union (hardly voluntary); the events that followed up to the Jacobite rebellion; and the subsequent total oppression of the Scottish Highlands well into the mid and even late 19thC that really provides a different perspective.
That many absentee clan leaders colluded with that oppression and not all the UK elite were Anglo-Normans may complicate the picture, but does not alter the timeline of the Highland Clearances – which commenced in 1750 not 1815.
American immigration – both to USA and Canada – was prefaced by the push factor of the Clearances.
There was nothing much that inspired migration more than having your home burnt down, your farmland trashed, and your language and clothing banned.
A bit like the American experience with its first nation occupants, and colonial Antipodean settlement in Australia and New Zealand.
Such is colonialism that some Scottish emigrants certainly did as they were done by.
The incredibly beautiful Calgary beach in the NW of the Isle of Mull provided one of hundreds of loading points for that 150 year long forced migration. and then hundreds of North American placenames that are Scottish in origin.
Whether you’d class that as being conquered, or how far responsiblity can be blamed on the English, is a moot point.
Pretty much accurate.
The Scotch-Irish called it “A rich man’s was, but a poor man’s fight.”
The fact that the Confederacy made it easy for rich men to avoid the draft, but made it hard for poor men to not serve, created social problems not repeated until the Vietnam War.
There is a reason why West Virginia seceded from the coastal parts of Virginia. The mountain folk did not like slavery very much, and certainly did not want to fight and die for it.
(Look up the State Motto of W VA.)
I think this is precisely the lacuna that I was referring to parenthetically.
We find the idea of slavery so repugnant that we have trouble thinking about the logical extreme of thinking of the slave as property and of the right to property as a fundamental right, and what people might do to defend what they consider to be a fundamental right and keep it out of the realm of political compromise–i.e. “oppression.” Yet, the “unfought” Civil War of 1850s was over precisely this: Southerners would insist on their “rights” as sacrosanct and not compromise. As, I think, Dostoevsky observed, the most dangerous people are those who think they are “right” and insist on doing the “right thing.” One could always make deals with or bribe those who are merely greedy. Not the self-righteous fanatics.
I don’t think something like the American Civil War without large numbers of self-righteous fanatics on both sides. This begs the question, what drove the Southerners to such righteous fanaticism?Since we “won” and we were obviously right, we’d have trouble imagining that.
“This begs the question, what drove the Southerners to such righteous fanaticism?”
Look up one of the photographs or paintings of James C. Calhoun arch defender of the “peculiar institution.” If that isn’t a face of a fanatic or a madman, I don’t know what is.
The Antebellum South was the richest region of the United States with the plantation class having most of its wealth, which included their human property, but the postwar South was the poorest region. This, I think, is the real cause of the Slavocracy’s defense of slavery.
With regards photos of early 19th century fanaticism, the same can be said for John Brown (daguerreotypes also have a way of making everyone look a bit fanatical.) You get wars when you have righteous fanatics on both sides. Without understanding why the other side felt righteously fanatical–even if we don’t accept their idea of right and wrong, we are reduced to W-esque “they hate our freedom” “explanation.”
The analogous event was revolutionary war that overthrew the British (tyrant) and gave birth to the USA and its Constitution. The Civil war resulted in revision of constitution via amendments. Wars start for several reasons. Robbery is one of them. European elites may sell creation of European state for betterment of its citizenry, but the real prize is Russia’s vast natural recourses that Europe simply does not have hence is inherently vulnerable. So there logic for the EU to present Russia as the ultimate Bogeyman.
re: “Europe is not a state, and that is a problem — mainly an economic problem. The strength of the euro is compromised by this. It is far easier to imagine Europe breaking apart than to imagine the United States doing so — and today, that disintegration feels like a messy but genuine possibility.”
Yes. Exactly. And the reason, imo, is because when the EU and Euro were created the various countries’ debts were not consolidated. (See Martin Armstrong). In the US you buy US debt, and the states’ debts are consolidated into US debt. In the EU, one still buys individual country’s debts. And how do you assess that debt burden per country? Do you check how much French debt Germany holds? etc. The EU and the creation of the Euro missed or skipped a crucial step, imo. And here we are, or they are. Sprinkling magic fairy dust and wishful thinking over the problem will not solve the problem. See also Greece, for example. Saying ‘oh, we’ll solve that problem later” never works. / my 2 cents
This is a very good post, Curro!
To develop it further, where does Britain fit? Our national myth is singularly devoted to continuity, to the extent it is always a surprise we don’t claim to be the Neanderthals but starting from the ancient Britons:
– Romans: an invasion but we ignored them and their Latin ways and both went away
– Anglo-saxons: reader, we married them!
– Vikings: reader, we married them too!
– Normans: not really an invasion, more a tempestuous reading of the will between those aforementioned in-laws
– Tudors: some oscillation with Rome and then a break but affairs of the soul are not affairs of the state
– Glorious Revolution: Lol, Dutch reverse takeover but we don’t focus on the continuity of branding
– Hanoverians: what Germans?
The only rupture we admit to is Henry VIII and the break with Rome and that is critical to English state because it took it out of the Catholic church and the authority of a supranational body, the Papacy. But not one of these ruptures ever relies on popular acclaim for their legitimacy (maybe just possibly the Glorious Revolution, at least in the victors’ branding).
Is it any wonder we refused the Eurostate fence and left?
Also, history is littered with unloved Empires that fell apart when threatened rather than binding together. The Roman Empire. The Holy Roman Empire. The Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth. The Ottoman Empire. Will war with Russia “bring about the fall of a Great Empire”…? ;-)
The catch with that story is thst Croesus did not even realize Lydia was an empire, too, and here we are…
And the Normans were recycled Vikings ;-)
Fantastic article that sadly has drawn no comments so far.
It provides very interesting bites about the plumbing of the early European Community as an American-backed project in the context of the Cold War.
The big lie about the EU, the one that seems to always go unchallenged, is that “it brought Peace to Europe”. When EU neoliberal flunkies —particularly of the fake-left variety, but also the more conservative ones— have their backs against the wall, their ultimate line of defense is “but the EU brought Peace to Europe”, as if the post-1945 peace in Europe was an EU product, and not the mere consequence of Pax Americana in the continent. See East Asia for a counter-example, where despite the lack of political integration between American allies, there has been no sign of war between countries that have, however, some pending issues from WWII.
The EU was, is and will be the American project for Europe. It is the expression of American hegemony in that region, and we will see whether it survives de demise of that dominance. I am not holding my breath that America will leave Europe any time soon, but one day it will and, once it does, the question will be whether the Europeans have built the capacity to go solo.
So far, the EU leadership is scared shitless of the possibility of the Americans leaving and it seems to me that it is because they know that, if the Americans go, they go too.
I think there are more replies in heaven and earth here on this comment than are dreamt of in your philosophy, Horatio,.. er…viscaelpaviscaelvi. / ;)
Aye, Flora…im late to this party…and will hafta consider all of this.
unmentioned, but implied, is things like Gladio.
that whole mess is still totally unknown among the commoners around here…when i have the opportunity to hold forth about it, they dont believe me.
(similarly with the long history of USA “interventions”, from Guatemala to Iran to, welp, on and on and on)
amurkins dont like to learn about the dastardly deeds that have been done in their name.
and i imagine that europeans, of the various constituent nations, dont…similarly…like to think about how they’ve been had, either.
a defacto, and grass roots, general amnesty for past advocacy might be in order…on both sides of the Pond….at every level below say the top 10%.
make them into fertilizer, or pig food, or something else useful.
There weren’t any when I started writing that blurb. The fact that it took me about four hours to do it would explain my remark :-)
It very well explains why EU is for incorporating R of Moldova but there is no wisper about the re-unification of Moldova with Romania, while the Romanian elites are forbidden to raise the nationalist idea. Romanian elites, so easy to buy, so spinless. The present period in Romanians’ history will be called in the future, the neo-phanariot period (the phanariot period lasted between cca 1730 to 1849 and was characterized by the Ottomans naming “voievods” on the throne of Moldavia and Wallachia among the Ottoman Greeks from the Phanar area of Istanbul – in the end 25% of Romanians’ land ended donated to the monasteries of Mount Athos; nowadays, hydroelectric power plants are sold to the west for pennies after dammed lakes are emptied on the argument that are loosing money…)
Europe union will never break up from simple reason all government in Europe are neoliberal, they love the way Europe union work. UK don’t count because the only reason that vote happen is because the elites thought the population would vote against the bill. Hungary is good example in the end they will kneel to EU, they started buy LNG from France.
I don’t think anyone involved in the EU negotiations (I was there) thought that they were creating a state: rather the reverse in fact. States were the problem because states meant wars, and the way to bring stability to Europe was to take away the capability of individual states to make war. Precisely because it had not been constructed by war, the EU was given a higher moral status than states. Rather, the argument was that the (then) European Community had the size and the wealth of a great power, but had no “political personality” as the phrase went, and could not play a collective role in the world. Some, notably the French, argued that an international political personality meant also having a capacity for autonomous military action, but they were in a minority.
The author might read up a bit on the foundations of the European idea, and try to understand the exhaustion and fear that characterised Europe after WW2, when the preservation of traditional nations-states was increasingly seen as the problem, not the answer. The US attitude seems to have been one of broad encouragement, since the last thing the US wanted to happen was for Europe to fall apart again, and for the US to need to send troops once more. But the US influence was marginal and often unsuccessful: they lobbied furiously for the proposed European Defence Community, only to see it go down in flames in 1954.
Europe is not of course “at war” with Russia, and indeed as I have pointed out many times, that concept and vocabulary is not used any more. Even in the days when wars were still declared, only states could do that. Europe is in the position of supplying arms and training to one side in a conflict, something that has happened throughout history, and indeed happens widely today. This does not have any particular legal implications for relations with the other side of the conflict, although it might of course have political ones.
Europe may be not at war with Russia but they sure act like it. They are trying to work out how to close the Baltic to Russian ships which is as illegal as it is idiotic, threatening to shoot down Russian warplanes which is simply suicidal and trying to work out how to seize tankers carrying Russian oil in international waters which is getting solid push-back from countries like China. And should we mention the frozen Russian assets which may not even be there any more? Well, maybe a bunch of IOUs instead. European leadership from Ursula right down to the members of the European Parliament have lost their minds and at this point, Putin has a summer dacha in their heads. Europe should have stuck with being an economic union like they were up to the early 1990s.
More important, Europeans sure talk about it. I do agree with Aurelien that they really are not “acting” like they mean it: provocations and dirty tricks are one thing, but serious preparations for an actual war they are not making. This is, in some sense, a problem: a real state would prepare for a real war. A phoney state talks a lot, makes a lot noise, and even indulges in performative nonsense, but not something that “counts.”
But is it unique to just wars? Aurelien’s recent essay pointed to how almost nobody does anything that’s got substance beyond symbolism any more.
Absolutely… the term “supra-national” ought to have been a giveaway in researching this post in defining the EU.
As well as the six state European Economic Community we had/have EFTA – the European Free Trade Area/Association. The intent of both was/is that economic and trade ties would prevent future wars between Western European nation states by tying Germany and France together in mutual economic dependence.
That much of the recent energy inputs that have produced the arms manufactures that then supplied Ukraine’s military first came from Russian gas exports demonstrates the continuing complexity in relations between Russia, its former satellites, and Northern and Western Europe.
War it ain’t, at least by the conventional definition of direct military confrontation and competition for territory and resources.
Ukraine’s surrogacy is another issue entirely, as that is predicated on the principles of territorial integrity within the Westphalian concept of nation states that still informs the political elites, and evident worries of European countries.
That national geographical boundaries on the steppes and in taigan forests are so indeterminate, and difficult to define and demarcate makes the boundaries of ‘what is yours and what is mine’ (as Henley and Frey put it) vulnerable to dispute. There is no grand design.
As for the Euro, its institutional position, and weakness according to many economists, is that it depends on monetary, but has no corresponding and balancing fiscal, powers.
Thankfully, attempts to square that monetary/fiscal circle have failed dismally so far.
Nor are Eurozone nations (let alone those outside) going to transfer their somewhat straitjacketed* fiscal powers to the ECB.
There can be no United States of Europe as a single national entity.
*the straitjacket is the unfortunate rigidity of neoliberalism that utterly dominates the Euro and its administration.
That’s a selective reading of history regarding both the EU and its predecessors.
Quite a lot of European politicians and Eurocrats are on record about creating a state, federal or otherwise, over the course of the 1970’s to 2000’s. They learned to shut up about it because of the British and German tabloids but they still said it sotto voce. Some of them were even explicit about how they would use each crisis of the pre-State structure to bring about further integration. The “More Europe” party has had that ready answer for decades.
Their common ancestor, Jean Monnet, was an internationalist statesman in WW1 and the League of Nations period and then a banker from 1925 operating from New York in Asia and Europe and a friend of the Wallenberg and Bosch families etc. He was a Bilderberg / Davis globalist avant la lettre. He is also widely regarded as a CIA fellow traveller (he was an adviser to Roosevelt during WW2…).
The EU is the political realisation of the US military settlement in Europe. It possesses no popular legitimacy or strategic autonomy. Previously, it also had no meaningful power because the nation states held vetos. Since the EU began running on majority voting, the US has focused on subverting Brussels instead.
As for Europe not being “at war”, this is sophistry. You know perfectly well what is meant. And, on top, I don’t believe the concept of co-belligerency has lost any of its currency in international law. Play stupid games, Europe, win stupid prizes….
I think Curro has a strong point here. The history of EU integration and the power of the Eurocrat class (which in a federal Europe the national politicians still are, just not playing in the first division) is further consolidation of power in Brussels in response to contingent or manufactured crises. They are attempting to use exactly the same playbook here but in the geopolitical sphere because neoliberal economic integration has (a) run its course and (b) led to stagnation and immigration and strong popular resistance.
All models are wrong but some models are useful and this is a useful model to explain why the EU is risking everything on ” war” with Russia.
That is a practical outline of how and why the EEC came into being in the 1950s, not the 1970s, (and EFTA started in 1960 as a parallel)
The EEC’s initial birth is as outlined and for the strategic reason of gluing the nation states together through supposedly mutual trade agreements – especially France and Germany.
That this had US support postwar is neither here nor there. The US wanted a future trade market in Europe, and as usual, that self interest dominated, as well as seeing Europe as a military buffer.
Anyone with direct experience would be aware of the huge arguments over the Common Agricultural Policy from the late 60s onwards (and which totally dominated EEC expenditures) and then with the various 70s over-production crises and especially in the 1980s quota systems. The CAP was basically developed to support the rural French, as a counterbalance to EEC industrial policy benefiting Germany, and certainly heavily influenced the internal process of French ‘remembrement’ as it did other European countries agricultural policies to industrialise farming.
Its marine equivalent – the Common Fisheries Policy – has always been cited by the pro Brexit lobby in the UK as a reason why the EU is fundamentally a bad thing and why the UK has always been ripped off by other European nations, despite the facts that international fishing agreements long predated UK EEC membership.
All these day to day economic influences and impacts of the EU (rather than the political) dominated how they affected the member states, and certainly had a direct impact in my own life history.
Political movements towards European unity have always been subsumed in these economic issues and did not practically surface until the late 80s/early 90s, though there were undercurrents.
However, yes, there has long been a movement, often US thinking inspired, to convert the EEC into a single federal nation state, in its own image.
“Quite a lot” of advocates has always been a long, long way from being from becoming an identifiable majority even though Churchill himself kickstarted the “United States of Europe” debate immediately post war.
That movement has never gathered sufficient traction to become a considered option, let alone achievable. The Maastricht and subsequent Lisbon Treaty arguments within the various nation states exemplified that as a pipe dream well over 30 years ago.
That various EU bureaucrats (and especially in the ECB) have always tried to extend their own orbit and power does not now, and never has, translated into a political pro USE movement. It is what bureaucrats do.
There are actually more corporate lobbyists in Brussels than politicians and bureacrats, and it is certainly true that global corporatism, formerly mostly US dominated, has a stranglehold on EU economic policies.
But it already exists so why would those corporate interests need further political expansion ?
The current US techbros antipathy to European regulation does not extend to political union.
Anyway, observing the various and continuing US political crises and democratic deficits makes European federalism even less likely.
Any notion that Europe is “at war” with Russia, as opposed to “in competition with,” or “wary of”, is simply ridiculous, outside arcane social media discussions. I asked a few friends of different opinions, but usually politically savvy, whether we are at war with Russia, and they just laughed.
Yet it is true that there is a permanent state of wariness, rather than war, as pretty much the default in European politics in attitudes to Russia, since the rise of Putin. This is notable within the eastern nation states and is particularly high in the Baltics, and Poland, whose economic progress since 1989 has owed much to its EU membership. Many of our Polish immigrants here in Scotland of a decade ago have returned since Brexit, also because Polish GDP growth means they don’t have to be guest workers sending money home anymore.
But they clearly feel safe enough to return to their homeland.
We also have a number of lifelong Polish friends, who settled post WW2, and some still despise Russia and remember NKVD assassinations of their grandparents and other relations.
Even that permanent hostility does not translate into the sense that we are now all at war with Russia.
I agree with you that on paper “no war” is why the European Coal and Steel Community was founded. But we have come a long way from there via the European Economic Community, the European Community and the European Union and we have always had a battle between the European Commission (now headed by von der Leyen), the Council (the Member States’ forum) and the European Parliament. I think we have seen an increasing tendency for the Commission to grab power since Covid at the latest and Russia, Russia, Russia! is another convenient vehicle for grabbing power and moving toward EU statehood if the Member States don’t resist too much. I have to say it makes it much more believe why von der Leyen is constantly banging the war drums, something which I personally regard as the ultimate betrayal of the “European idea” – ah, yes, so naive!
I suspect vdL is mostly out for self advancement and aggrandisement rather than having any special vision. Isn’t that her track record ?
Nor is she anywhere NATO and the EU has no defence oriented bureaucracy or powers. She might just be trying to leverage German manufacturing recovery though, and their current national leadership is pretty suspect qualitatively.
The old saying had “patriotism is the last resort of scoundrels” or something like that. It’s less a knock on patriotism, I think, than an observation that how the “righteous” causes are peddled by swindlers–because people don’t dare question them, certainly not the believers and not the people who want to be on the nice side of the believers either. But this means that the “righteous” causes came before the swindlers–swindlers can’t create believers out of thin air.