THE EU’s DEMISE: Why today’s megalomania means mass mayhem tomorrow

By John Ward: Lots of politicians today talk about their ‘legacy’ as if they had something positive by which we should remember them. This is rarely the case, but it’s notable how easily electorates become nostalgic for people people like Blair, Bush, Sarkozy, Reagan, Thatcher and all the others who got it so wrong for so long. This may of course have a great deal to do with the minnows who came after them – the Hollandes, Camerons and Obamas – but none of even these latter under-achievers doubts that they will have a legacy and people will buy their memoirs. Sadly, they’re probably right.
When it comes to the European Union, however, the legacy (albeit eclectic) is going to be all bad. Although often compared by europhobes to the USSR, it is in fact far worse: at least the Soviet Union made life safe on the streets, defeated the Nazis, turned a peasant nation into a world power, built people houses and, during peacetime, ensured that nobody starved. If one simply goes back to the intent of the Treaty of Rome – or the detail of Lisbon – the EU has broken its ‘word’ on just about every count: improving economic efficiency, promoting democracy, making its citizens better off, and ensuring that decency would triumph over anarchic greed.

Observed from the vantage point of today, I suppose most people would focus on the failure of the euro – and its catastrophic knock-on effects for the fiscal economics of the Union – as the biggest own-goal the EU has to its name. My own view is that this is a gnat’s bite on the bum compared to the broader ramifications of Brussels-am-Berlin hubris. What the EC’s ‘leaders’ have done is make people so desperate to get their identity back, they’re prepared to go with anyone who will oppose the foreign masters.
Partly this is a function of supra-national insanity, which for me is well up there with feminism as an inhuman idea. By that I mean it is antithetical to human wiring and consequent behaviour. It is therefore natural sooner or later that human nature will win out in the end: even the US will reach that stage at some point. Supra-national empires break out for many reasons, but the biggest single one is pride in one’s own tribe. Ultimately there is not much to love about the US any more, but the British, Soviet, and the Roman versions went that way.
The EU itself began life as a reaction to American commercial imperialism, but it too will collapse; the temptation for self-appointed leaders to treat the whole thing as a fiefdom grows over time, and then the edifice falls down under the weight of bureaucracy. Telling people you know better than they do is an expensive and futile operation. Only the Chinese so far seem smart enough to realise this – but they also have myriad cultures within their borders, and a corrupt, top-heavy superstructure. In private, they accept this as a key problem they have to solve; I doubt if they will.
The legacy of all these products of the human ego is to leave a dangerous vacuum behind, as they crash into the pit yelling “It’s all going rather well, considering”. This is not surprisingly a break-up into national entities, and then further break-ups within those: one thinks of India and Pakistan, Nigeria and Biafra, and the Czechs and Slovaks. Once the dominance of local heroes and Moscow had gone, the Balkans reverted to their natural state of squabbling. Africa following the British exit is a classic example: tribalism rules, and remains the dominant feature…because we are pack-animals, and must stop denying it.
The European Union, however, is unique in its combination of disguised brutalism and mind-boggling stupidity. And because of this there has been – already – a reaction not just to unelected rule from Brussels, but also to the naive way in which social democrats have tried to banish tribalism’s more unpleasant aspects while asking them the love The Big Tribe. Nobody has any affection for the EU to the extent of considering it worth dying for. They lust for it in many cases, and are happy for lots of other people to die in the process:but the EU is not a tribe – more often than not it consists of a diatribe from Berlin.
What we are seeing today is an accelerating process of rejecting not just bureaucratic rule, but the previously dominant political correctness of the Left. The reality is that Catalans loathe Madrid, most northern Europeans retain a disdain for Clubmedians, the Greeks don’t trust Romanians, the British think all foreigners are funny, nobody trusts the Turks, and everyone hates the Germans. But nobody is allowed to say this openly any more. And when things at a material level aren’t going well, that becomes irksome.
When a few brave souls and/or swivel-eyed rentagobs at last do say it, millions flock to the cause. But one very odd thing is that when real fascists appear, the Hard Left that had been seeing them under every bed for forty years suddenly has nothing to say for itself. David Cameron would rather call the relatively benign UKip “BNP lite” than face the reality of Golden Dawn in Greece. Peter Hain seems determined to deny freedom of speech to the largely irrelevant BNP, but is not exactly vocal on the issue of neo-nazism growing like topsy across the EU he always supported. I’m afraid the more controlling elements on the ‘progressive’ side of politics love the easy, unarmed target, but are inclined to run from the sound of big guns….as the British McAlpine episode proved earlier this year. There are nowhere near enough Tom Watsons to go round.
Let me give you some hard facts. Last Spring, Geert Wilders’ PW Party was polling at Number One in Holland. A recent poll in Greece put Golden Dawn Number Two – ahead of ruling Party New Democracy, despite ND’s overt attempt to frame them two weeks ago. Marine Le Pen swept away all opposition in the recent French regional elections. The Far Right continues to grow steadily in Hungary. In Italy, respect for the Far Right and its emphasis on La famiglia never really went away: Berlusconi has always been on the cusp of it, and recently made a glowing speech in favour of Mussolini. In fact, the Far Right has steadily made gains across the EU since 2009.
UKip in Britain has seen rapid growth in recent years, but much of this depends on how one defines ‘Far Right’. Its leader Nigel Farage is without question a right-wing Conservative at heart. It remains very likely that a good performance by his team in 2015 would split the Right’s vote and see Labour in power via the back door. If and when that happens (quite possibly before) Camerlot would be ditched and some form of semi-formal electoral arrangement made between UKip and the Tories. That grouping – including Fallon, Hunt, Johnson and other tyrants – would share ideas and views no different to those of the Ultra-Right wing Monday Club forty years ago. As most Britons who’ve ever heard of it would regard that organisation as Far Right, it’s hard to suggest that Farage’s Army is not an agent of the neo-dictatorial ‘Business Fascism’.
Two EU member States in particular give me cause for concern.
Spain’s history makes it prone to internal instability anyway, but the upheaval of recent years is now making itself felt in the tendency of Right Wing Popular Party Government MPs and mayors to openly declare that dumping Franco was a mistake. Some elected Popular Party officials and party militants are publicly giving falangist salutes, proudly displaying fascist flags and other memorabilia, and posting pro-Franco messages on social media sites. I choose Spain as a key example of coming chaos because it is (a) prone to mutual dislike between Catalans, Galations and central government, but (b) in an especially parlous fiscal/financial state. These conditions are not dissimilar to those that led to Civil War in the 1930s.
Civil War is also on the agenda now here in Greece – which, like Spain, has multidimensional extremes built into its political tradition. The Communist KKE, Golden Dawn neo-nazis, the military, the complicit corruption of the upper middle and Establishment classes, and the fear of Alexis Tsipras’s popularity are all swimming around in a pool that is far too small for all of them. Listen to the daily arguments in Greece’s Cafenions these days, and you will hear every possibility discussed, vilified or vehemently supported.
What are we to do about it? The answer in this particular instance is nothing, because I’m afraid it has now gone too far. The bankers and bureaucrats involved are all deranged, and the politicians their neutered bumboys. This issue is barely on their radar, because power, money, legacies and survival are all they care about. Once the influence of the extremists reaches a certain point, it will be regretted as an unforeseen consequence of something or other – up to but not including their actions.
Once the internecine strife and reassertions of nationalism are over, there is every chance that the simmering squabbles will at some point morph into communities quietly going about their business and trading with others: not pulling oxen across the land or dressed like mediaeval serfs. For the internet, the media, the spies and their control  can hardly moan nowwill remain. But as in the USSR, they will be largely ignored, and made the butt of privately repeated jokes between friends.
That new media will rule has been on the cards ever since Washington buckled under commercial pressure, and backed away from the idea of so-called ‘net neutrality’. The simple premise of this idea was global equality across the internet, rather than one very high speed for the spook/financier/media/multinational axis, and another for the rest of us involving a man walking in front with a red flag. Those people across Europe still wondering why their net speeds are miles below those promised (and future installations miles behind schedule) can hardly moan now: we told you so, you just thought we were blogosphere conspiracistas.
That process of downscaling towards post gloabl anarchy might be over by 2020, or 3084. Things may move far more quickly these days, but progress is as slow and erratic as ever. The search for Utopia having once again produced Dystopia, Big and Global will be out of fashion…until the next time, when the tedious process of Man’s inability to learn starts all over again. There’s a fair chance that scientific breakthroughs here and there might give our species a better chance next time – or entirely the other way round. But I’ll be long-gone by then.
This is my optimism, although it may not read that way: it will always, only be the mad minority screwing everything up. Mass, individual ingenuity is always going to be our trump card as a species. Over the next fifty years at least, such personal inventiveness will come into its own. At that point – minus any bureaucratic naysayers in the way – we might at long last reach some form of real life-quality.

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