Vladimir Moss – Orthodox Christianity Author

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GLOBALIZATION AND THE EUROPEAN UNION

Written by Vladimir Moss

GLOBALIZATION AND THE EUROPEAN UNION

 

     During the Cold War, there had been two very different worlds, Capitalism and Communism, and a third world that swayed from one side to the other. By the end of millennium there was essentially only one world, the world of globalization. Even Russia and China became partially globalized: only North Korea and to some extent Iran remained outside the new global empire. While periods of globalization had existed before in human history – we think of the Roman empire, and of the world before 1914 – they had not truly included the whole world. Only now was there a single world – and therefore the real possibility of a single world ruler. 

     “I believe,” wrote Thomas L. Friedman, “that if you want to understand the post-Cold War world you have to start by understanding that a new international system has succeeded it – globalization. This is ‘The One Big Thing’ people should focus on. Globalization is not the only thing influencing events in the world today, but to the extent that there is a North Star and a worldwide shaping force, it is this system. What is new is the system. What is old is power politics, chaos, clashing civilizations and liberalism. And what is the drama of the post-Cold War world is the interaction between this new system and these old passions.”

     But what is globalization?

     Investopedia defines globalization as “the tendency of investment funds and businesses to move beyond domestic and national markets to other markets around the globe, thereby increasing the interconnection of the world. Globalization has had the effect of markedly increasing international trade and cultural exchange.” But it has eroded the power of national governments and increased those of multi-national corporations (150 MNCs now control two-thirds of the world economy). If national governments do not cooperate with the MNCs and the globalization process, they risk seeing factories and jobs removed to other, lower-wage-paying countries. This causes unemployment in some industries and therefore social unrest.

     Moreover, while trade liberalization may provide comparative advantage, especially in a period when tariffs are initially high (as in the post-war period), it is quite another matter with financial liberalization. Dani Rodrik writes: “Perhaps the hyper-globalisers’ most egregious mistake after the 1990s was to promote financial globalization. They took the textbook argument and ran amok with it. Free flow of finance across the world would, it was confidently predicted, set money to work where it could do most good. With free-flowing capital, savings would be automatically channeled to countries with higher returns; with access to the world markets, economies and entrepreneurs would have access to more dependable finance; and, ordinary individual savers would benefit, too, as they’d no longer be compelled to put all their nest eggs in one national basket.

     “These gains, by and large, simply never materialized; sometimes, the effect was the opposite of what was promised. China became an exporter of capital, rather than an importer of it, which is what the theory implied young and poor countries should be. Loosening the chains of finance produced a string of extremely costly financial crises, including that in East Asia in 1997. There is, at best, a weak correlation between opening up to foreign finance and economic growth. But there is a strong empirical association between financial globalization and financial crises over time, as there has been since the 19^th century, when freely moving international capital would flow with gusto into the Argentinian railways or some far-flung corner of the British Empire one minute, only to flee away from it the next.

     “Modern financial globalization went furthest in the Eurozone. Monetary unification aimed at complete financial integration, by removing all transaction costs associated with national borders. The introduction of the euro in 1999 did indeed drive down risk premiums in countries such as Greece, Spain, and Portugal, as borrowing costs converged. But what was the effect? To enable borrowers to run large current account deficits, and accumulate problematic amounts of external debt. Money flowed into those parts of the debtor economies that couldn’t be traded across borders – above all, construction – at the expense of tradable activities. Credit booms eventually turned into the inevitable busts, and sustained slumps in Greece, Spain, Portugal and Ireland followed amid the global credit crunch. 

     “Today, the economics profession’s views on financial globalization is ambivalent at best. It is well understood that market and government failures – asymmetric information, bank runs, excess volatility, inadequate regulation – are endemic to the financial markets. Globalisation often accentuates these failure. Indeed, in the 1997 East Asian crisis those economies that kept more control of foreign capital survived with less damage. In sum, unconditional openness to foreign finance is hardly ever a good idea…”

     Globalization is both a potential blessing and an actual curse… Samuel Huntingdon made an important distinction between two different things that were becoming global: modernization and westernization. Globalization in the sense of the modernization of the whole world is not evil in itself. It could even work to the furtherance of the good - and not only economic good - in certain circumstances. If, for example, the True Faith could be preached globally, using global means of communication, as it was in the time of the apostles. What is evil is the globalization of westernization, the spreading of the apostate culture of the western world. And so if it is westernization that is being globalized - that is, the process leading to a single world civilization and a single world government under the banner of democracy and federalism in politics, free trade in economics, ecumenism in religion and human rights in morality, - there is no doubt about it: this is a great evil. 

     It is easy to see that the world republic (or kingdom?) would have no place in it for Orthodoxy except as a kind of cultural museum, an exhibition of East European folklore, and could very quickly turn the propaganda of freedom into the reality of a tyranny worse than any that has gone before it. We have already seen such a transformation from democracy to potentially global totalitarianism in communist Russia and Nazi Germany in the first half of the twentieth century; and in the second half of the century the despotic power exerted by supra-national organizations such as the IMF, the World Bank, the United Nations, the European Union and the World Council of Churches was clearly mapping a more subtle path to the same goal… 

     The two most important political events in the western world in the 1990s were the continuing spread of globalization, and its terribly destructive effects on some major countries such as Russia, on the one hand, and the expansion of the European Union, on the other. We shall see that they are closely linked…

     Opinions on globalization are sharply divided. Indeed, the debate between the globalists and anti-globalists is probably the sharpest debate in the contemporary world. Christians tend to believe that since the Tower of Babel, different languages and nations have been created by God to slow down the spread of evil, and as refuges against it; but for atheist globalists individual, sovereign nations are the evil. 

     Certain facts are indisputable, according to Yuval Noah Harari: “Since around 200 BC, most humans have lived in empires. It seems likely that in the future, too, most humans will live in one. But this time the empire will be truly global. The imperial vision of dominion over the entire world could be imminent. 

     “As the twenty-first century unfolds, nationalism is fast losing ground. More and more people believe that all of humankind is the legitimate source of political authority, rather than the members of a particular nationality, and that safeguarding human rights and protecting the interests of the entire human species should be the guiding light of politics. If so, having close to 200 independent states is a hindrance rather than a help. Since Swedes, Indonesians and Nigerians deserve the same human rights, wouldn’t it be simpler for a single global government to safeguard them?

     “The appearance of essentially global problems, such as melting ice caps, nibbles away at whatever legitimacy remains to the independent nation states. No sovereign state will be able to overcome global warming on its own. The Chinese Mandate of Heaven was given by Heaven to solve the problems of mankind. The modern Mandate of Heaven will be given to humankind to solve the problems of heaven, such as the hole in the ozone layer and the accumulation of greenhouse gases. The colour of the global empire may well be green.

     “As of 2014, the world is still politically fragmented, but states are fast losing their independence. Not one of them is really able to execute independent economic policies, to declare and wage wars as it pleases, or even to run its own internal affairs as it sees fit. States are increasingly open to the machinations of global markets, to the interference of global companies and NGOs, and to the supervision of global public opinion and the international judicial system. States are obliged to conform to global standards of financial behavior, environmental policy and justice. Immensely powerful currents of capital, labour and information turn and shape the world, with a growing disregard for the borders and opinions of states.

     “The global empire being forged before our eyes is not governed by any particular state or ethnic group. Much like the Late Roman Empire, it is ruled by a multi-ethnic elite, and is held together by a common culture and common interests. Throughout the world, more and more entrepreneurs, engineers, experts, scholars, lawyers and managers are called to join the empire. They must ponder whether to answer the imperial call or to remain loyal to their state and people. More and more choose the empire…”

     This is certainly the trend. Whether it is truly irresistible – and irresistibly desirable, as Harari thinks, - is another matter…

*

     Nowhere are the processes of globalization more clearly seen than in the “empire within the Empire”, Europe… After the events of 1989-91, both positive ones like the reunification of Germany and the Fall of the Soviet Union, but also negative ones like the outbreak of the Yugoslav wars, the European Economic Community felt that the time had come to go beyond their economic union – essentially the single market (or cartel) with its attendant regulatory institutions – and embark on the “ever-increasing unity”, that is, political integration, that had been envisaged in the original Treaty of Rome in 1957. 

     This was, of course, America’s hour; but the Europeans were determined not to be placed in the shade by their mighty rival across the ocean. They thought they were superior to the Americans in some spheres – for example, in economic philosophy, where the destructiveness of the Anglo-Saxon model (i.e. the Chicago School’s shock therapy) was widely (and rightly) derided. In others, however, - for example, in democracy – they were (again rightly) felt to be inferior. A great prize was set before the two western superpowers: the primary participation in reshaping the vast territory stretching from Berlin to Vladivostok as it struggled to get out from under the rubble of communism and the nationalist wars that in some areas were only just beginning. The Europeans would need to reorganize themselves if they were to help reorganize and rebuild the former communist bloc and bring it into their own sphere of influence…

     Let us briefly recap the stages whereby the European project reached this stage in its development, as outlined by Roger Bootle: “In 1957, the Treaty of Rome established the EEC.

     “In 1965, the Brussels Treaty streamlined European institutions, laid down the composition of the Council and set out which institutions would be located in the three Community centres – Brussels, Strasbourg and Luxembourg.

     “In 1986, the Single European Act marked the watershed, since it extended qualified majority voting in council, making it harder for a single country to veto proposed legislation.”

     And this is precisely why it is at this time that we see the first determined effort by “eurosceptics” to reverse the surging tide crashing against the nation-state. Their leader was the British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher, who in her famous Bruges speech of September, 1988 declared: “We have not successfully rolled back the frontiers of the state in Britain only to see them re-imposed at a European level, with a European super-state exercising a new dominance from Brussels.” As Norman Stone writes, “she said, about the tired metaphor of not taking the European train as it was leaving the station, that ‘people who get on a train like that deserve to be taken for a ride’.” 

     Moreover, she was inclined to believe the undiplomatic remark of her minister Nicholas Ridley that the ERM, the proposed first step to European monetary union, was “a German racket designed to take over the whole of Europe”. Such a rebellion against the supra-nationalist ethos of the Europeans could not be tolerated, and Thatcher was duly ousted by her own party supported by the European leaders, whose hatred of her was proverbial.… 

     The critical point came in 1992, with the signing of the Maastricht Treaty, more precisely “The Treaty on the European Union”, by the member-states of the EEC (now EU) on February 7, 1992. As the Europeans themselves summarized it, this Treaty “represents a new stage in European integration since it opens the way to political integration. It creates a European Union consisting of three pillars: the European Communities, Common Foreign and Security Policy (CFSP), and police and judicial cooperation in criminal matters (JHA). The Treaty introduces the concept of European citizenship, reinforces the powers of the European Parliament and launches economic and monetary union (EMU). Besides, the EEC becomes the European Community (EC)…

     “The Maastricht Treaty represents a key stage in European construction. By establishing the European Union, by creating an economic and monetary union and by extending European integration to new areas, the Community has acquired a political dimension…”

     But it was precisely this political dimension, this openly declared drive to abolish the European nation-states and unite them into a single super-state, that caused the trouble. A referendum in Denmark refused to ratify the Treaty. However, alterations were made to the Treaty that enabled a second referendum to come to a more positive verdict. So the Treaty came into legal effect in Denmark after the royal assent was granted in June, 1993. A referendum in France in September, 1992 supported ratification of the Treaty - but only just (50.8% in favour). Although the United Kingdom did not hold a referendum on the Treaty, its passage through the House of Commons was very rough – in spite of the fact that the country had obtained several opt-outs from the Treaty, including acceptance of the euro. This was important because, in the opinion of experts such as the American Fed’s Greenspan, a common currency can be effectively managed only by a single political government. It showed that the British eurosceptics – correctly - saw the Treaty as a threat to British sovereignty.

     In order to pacify so-called “nationalists” like the British, the Treaty contained a “principle of subsidiarity”, which “specifies that in areas that are not within its exclusive powers the Community shall only take action where objectives can best be attained by action at Community rather than at national level.” However, to this day this principle has proved to be a dead letter: the movement towards ever-greater centralization of powers in the EU has continued unabated. And in view of the weakness of the democratic principle in the Union – the Treaty’s provisions to strengthen the power of the European parliament have proved as ineffective as the subsidiarity principle – fears were heightened that the European Union was gradually turning into a more sophisticated, less violent version of the Soviet Union than a democratic federation of states. For instead of the Soviet Politburo there was the unelected European Commission; instead of unfree Soviet republics – increasingly powerless European member-states; instead of the corrupt Soviet bureaucracy – the no less corrupt European bureaucracy. And the black cloud of atheism over both…

     Indeed, by a profound irony the price of the liberation of Eastern Europe from the yoke of the Soviet Union turned out to be the strengthening of the yoke of the European Union over Western Europe and beyond; one supra-nationalist socialist dream was replaced by another. For for the sake of dispelling the spectre of the resurrection of German national power, French President Mitterand returned to his socialist, supra-national principles, tying the whole of Germany ever more tightly into the (as he hoped) French-controlled Union. At the same time, – that is, just when the socialist world revolution of the Soviets had fallen apart, and the peoples of Eastern Europe were celebrating their liberation from it, - socialist thinking on a global scale, the creation of a single world government, became very much the talk of “the global village”.

     Thus in June, 1991, at the Bilderberger meeting in Baden-Baden, Germany, David Rockefeller said: "We are grateful to the Washington Post, the New York Times, Time Magazine and other great publications whose directors have attended our meetings and respected their promises of discretion for almost forty years. It would have been impossible for us to develop our plan for the world if we had been subjected to the lights of publicity during those years. But, the world is [now] more sophisticated and prepared to march towards a world government. The supranational sovereignty of an intellectual elite and world bankers is surely preferable to the national autodetermination practiced in past centuries."

     This was proof – by a man who should have known - that there did indeed exist a powerful plutocracy, “an intellectual elite and world bankers” striving to create a world government that would be at the expense of “national autodetermination”, that is, the sovereignty of individual national states. From Rockefeller’s remarks, we can see that this plan for a world government had been in the making for nearly sixty-five years, that is, since the early 1950s. We also see from his remarks that the promise of secrecy which the Bilderbergers had felt to be necessary in the early 1950s was now no longer believed to be so pressing at the time of Rockefeller’s speech – presumably because that year, 1991, the year of the West’s seemingly final victory in the Cold War, seemed to betoken “the End of History” and the final triumph of that system of political and economic governance – liberal democracy and the free market – which the Bilderbergers knew well, and knew well how to manipulate and destroy. Again, at the Bildeberger meeting at Evian, France in May, 1992 Henry Kissinger said: "Today Americans would be outraged if U.N. troops entered Los Angeles to restore order; tomorrow they will be grateful! This is especially true if they were told there was an outside threat from beyond, whether real or promulgated, that threatened our very existence. It is then that all peoples of the world will pledge with world leaders to deliver them from this evil. The one thing every man fears is the unknown. When presented with this scenario, individual rights will be willingly relinquished for the guarantee of their well being granted to them by their world government."

     In 1992 it was reported: "In 1959 the organization of the World Constitution and Parliament Association (WCPA) was founded. Its members in their turn are representatives of such organizations as, for example: the United Nations, the World Council of Churches, Green Peace, the World Muslim Congress, the Council on Foreign Relations, the World Court, and the ambassadors and ministers of many countries. This organization has already arranged several meetings of a Provisional World Parliament and passed eleven laws of a World Codex of laws. It is interesting that the WCPA has divided the whole world into ten kingdoms, employing precisely that term in English: 'kingdoms'. It is proposed that a new world financial system will be introduced immediately the first ten countries confirm a World Constitution, since the remaining countries will then be forced to accept this constitution for economic reasons. At the present time the WCPA is trying to convene a Constitutional Assembly so as to substitute the constitution of the USA for the World Constitution. In 1990 the WCPA sent a letter to all heads of government in which it declared the formation of a World Government, and after this many leaders of states openly began to speak about the New World Order."

*

     The turn of the millennium marked the high-water mark of globalization and democratization. In 2001, the EU felt confident enough to declare at Laaken that “the only boundary that the European Union draws is defined by democracy and human rights”. This unheard-of definition of territorial (or rather, extra-territorial) state boundaries implied that the European Union was not so much a confederation of states as a global civilization that had the right to intervene anywhere in the world that democracy and human rights were under threat. 

     The definition suggested that the universalist and expansionist nature of western civilization was not only striving defensively to “make the world safe for democracy”, as President Woodrow Wilson put it in 1918, but was also trying offensively to make sure that nowhere on earth was safe from democracy and pseudo-democratic despotism of the global government. Thus in 2006 it was proposed that NATO be globalized in both scope and membership. In 2008 the proposal to extend NATO membership to the Georgia gave Russia the excuse it was looking for to invade Georgia. In 2014 the proposal to make Ukraine an associate member of the EU gave it the excuse to invade Ukraine… Of course, Russia is no less of an evil despotism than the EU. Moreover, since it pretends to be Orthodox, it is a still greater, because subtler, threat to True Orthodoxy. The point is that globalism and “Eurosodom” are potent symbols against which other despotisms such as Russia and Islamism can rally support.

      The expansionist, globalist project of which the European project is a part recalls the very first such project in history, the Tower of Babel. Moreover, the Europeans seem willingly to accept this parallel. Thus Andrew Drapper writes: “The EU Parliament building is pretty obviously intended to look like or is modelled after the biblical tower of babel. Or perhaps more accurately it is modelled after Pieter Brueghel the Elder’s painting ‘The Tower of Babel’ (1563).

     “Though modernist in style, the parliament building is recognisably intended to represent the unfinished Tower of Babel. This is further supported by things like the famous Council of Europe poster depicting the EU Parliament building in the process of being finished by the people of Europe. The test on the poster, ‘Europe: Many Tongues, One Voice.’ Here a very strong connection is made not only to the image of the Tower of Babel in Brueghel’s painting, but also to the record of the Tower of Babel as recorded in the Bible.”

     And so history comes round full circle: contemporary globalization returns to history’s (or rather, prehistory’s) first globalization project, Nimrod’s attempt to unite the people in building a tower to reach from earth to heaven to make a name for himself and to make himself equal to the gods. We know how that attempt ended: it remain to be seen how the contemporary effort will conclude…

     At the beginning of the millennium two events served to increase the EU’s pan-European reach: the introduction of the euro, and the entry of several Central and East European countries into the EU.  Thus already in 2001 Ramon Duran wrote: “In the countries of the East, the enthusiasm for incorporation into the EU has dramatically fallen in recnet years. This is undoubtedly related to the repeated delays in the proposed calendar, which originally proposed integration by the year 2000. The structural adjustment policies of the IMF, to enable payment of the debt and the transition to the free market, and the hard conditions which the countries had to fulfill so as to adapt their economies to joining the Union are all pressure which operate in the same direction. They are beginning to cause people to lose their faith in ‘Europe’ and the market economy. Before joining the EU the aspiring countries must incorporate more than 20,000 directives and regulations, unmodified, into their legal frameworks. Additionally, they will have to accept what was already decided in Nice, as well as all the future agreements of the Treaty of 2004. This clearly reduces them to having the role of peripheral countries, without any leverage in shaping the future of the EU. They will also have to abolish their currencies and bow down to the monetary dictatorship of the ECB, whose policies will serve the interests of Germany (and the old area of the mark), and to a lesser extent, those of France. In fact, they are becoming ‘colonies’ of western European interests, having to open up land tenure and natural and productive resources to market dynamics. And they will also have to co-operate in establishing impermeable borders with Russia, Bielorussia and the Ukraine, countries they have been interrelated with for centuries. A new Iron Curtain, in this case erected by Western Europe, in the name of the free market...

     “Much is being done to try and give an appearance of democratic normality to the process of broadening he current European parliament to more than seven hundred members. However, this institution lacks political weight and has little social support. The representatives of the countries which join will be marginalized (both as a bloc, and much more so as individual countries) with respect to the countries currently in the EU.” 

     In 2008 came the global financial crisis. In November, 2008 in Washington, and again in April, 2009 at the G-20 meeting in London, it was agreed to pursue four principles in the resolution of the economic crisis: (i) the need for intensive co-ordination collaboration; (ii) the rejection of protectionism; (iii) the reinforcement of systems of regulation in the economic markets; and (iv) a new world government.” In other words, the only answer global leaders could see to the profound crisis in globalization was: more globalization! Similarly, the only answer European leaders could see to the increasing strains in the EU was: more Europe! By which they meant, of course, more power to the centralizing bureaucracy in Brussels…

     For the relationship between the globalists’ dreams of a single world government and the European Union was seen as that of a part to the whole. That is why the unification of Europe – beginning with the integration of East Germany into Federal West Germany, and continuing with the integration of several other Central and Eastern European countries – was such a crucial test for the globalists. 

     President George H.W. Bush saw European unity as the model for world unity, while the core of that unity would be the United Nations: "I see a world of open borders, open trade and, most importantly, open minds; a world that celebrates the common heritage that belongs to all the world's people.... I see a world building on the emerging new model of European unity. ... The United Nations is the place to build international support and consensus for meeting the other challenges we face.... the threats to the environment, terrorism... international drug trafficking... refugees.... We must join together in a new compact -- all of us -- to bring the United Nations into the 21st century."

     The unification of Germany had been a victory for the globalists.  But the hope now was that the European Union project would step into an altogether higher gear, both increasing the depth of political (and not merely economic) union among existing members, but also widening it to include the countries of Eastern Europe. This was a crucial test for the globalists because Europe represented an exceptionally “hard nut” to crack: many old, proud nation-states with many different cultures and languages, and a history of violent conflicts, including recent and bloody conflicts. So if this “hard nut” could be cracked, if Europe could be united, then it boded well for the overall global project. Conversely, if it failed, it might undermine it irreparably. Therefore it could not be allowed to fail; the stages of “ever-increasing unity” stipulated in the Treaty of Rome had to be completed… 

     Let us remind ourselves of the stages that have been completed up to the present day, as summarized by Bootle: “In 1992, the famous Maastricht Treaty prepared for European Monetary Union and introduced elements of a political union (citizenship, common foreign and internal affairs policies). This is when the EEC dropped one of its Es in its abbreviated name and became simply the European Community (EC). This clearly marked the transition from a largely economic association to one with an obvious political dimension.

     “In 1995, the Schengen Agreement came into effect, allowing travel without passport control between seven countries (later joined by others): Belgium, France, Germany, Luxembourg, the Netherlands, Portugal and Spain.

• -In 1997, the Treaty of Amsterdam saw the UK agreeing to the ‘Social Chapter’ of the Maastricht Treaty. Moreover, the treaty created a new senior post, a sort of Foreign Minister for the EU, known as the High Representative for Common Foreign and Security Policy.
• -In 2001, the Treaty of Nice replaced the need for unanimous voting with a qualified majority system in 27 different areas – again diluting the power of a nation state to block measures that it did not like.
• -In 2007, the Treaty of Lisbon extended qualified majority voting to more areas, established a legal personality for the EU and created a new post: President of the European Council. For the first time in the history of the EU, included in the Lisbon Treaty was a clause making it clear how a state could exit from the Union.”

     It is not that the EU has not accomplished good things. In its early years, as we have seen, the Common Market gave an important impulse to the economic recovery of Western Europe and strengthened its unity and self-confidence in the face of the still-real threat from the Communist East. Moreover, as we have seen, when Communism eventually collapsed, membership of the European Union provided a vital “safe haven”, as it were, a reassuring political and economic anchor for the former Communist countries of Central and Eastern Europe that were fleeing the Soviet bear and still had reason to fear its resurgence. In those days, the “one European home” from the Atlantic to the Urals that De Gaulle and then Gorbachev used to talk about seemed to be present in the EU.

     However, there can be no doubt now that the EU is an empire that has over-reached itself, both externally, in that it is trying to take in such countries as Ukraine and Turkey, and internally, in that it is trying to control more and more of the internal life of its member-states Indeed, as time has passed a totalitarian spirit hidden beneath the EU’s democratic front as begun to make itself felt. Thus in March, 2012 the economic crisis led European politicians to sign a “European Fiscal Compact” (or “Treaty on Stability, Coordination and Governance in the Economic and Monetary Union”) that threatened the submergence of what remained of national sovereignty into a truly totalitarian state. As regulations and directives poured out of Brussels that none of the members states’ parliaments had been given a chance to vote on; as the extreme corruption and unaccountability of the central bureaucratic apparatus continued unchecked (and whistleblower accountants were sacked); as referendums on the European Constitution were lost, but then simply ignored - it began to dawn on many, especially in Britain (which voted to leave the European Union in June, 2016), that this benign colossus might one day turn nasty, as previous hegemons on the European continent had turned nasty… 

     It is not simply the democratic deficit that recalls other totalitarian colossi: there is also the historicist spirit that seems to prevail among Europe’s rulers. What they are doing has to be right because it is the inevitable result of the march of history. And, as Marx and Lenin said, there is no arguing with History – if you do not want to be crushed by it… For, as Bootle writes: “European integration has had an air of inevitability about it. It seemed to be the summation and healing of the past and the way of the future. Nation states were on the way out, passé. A united Europe would embody the best of European traditions while securing Europe’s future in the modern world.” 

     The worm in the apple lay in the phrase: “ever-increasing unity”. The question was: what did it really mean in the long term? Many, especially in Britain, had been in favour of joining the EU for economic reasons, and had not really tried to answer this political question. But increasingly it has been necessary to answer it. And the possible answers are alarming indeed…

     Bootle again: “What is the point of the EU? Is it to link together countries and peoples that are ‘European’? Is it to link together countries and peoples that are geographically close together? Is it to link together countries that conduct themselves in a certain way and are prepared and able to obey EU law? Or is it simply to carry on expanding as far as it can, because bigger is better, so that the EU can be regarded as an early progenitor of global government?

     “Without a clear answer to these questions, it is difficult to see why the EU should not contemplate expansion to nations that are geographically close, such as Israel or the countries of North Africa, even though they are not strictly European. (Interestingly, the remit of the European Bank for Reconstruction and Development (EBRD) does extend into the Middle East and North Africa.) Or if the key concept is cultural, what about countries that are European in character and history but are far distant, such as Canada, Australia or New Zealand?

     “This question is of exceptional importance. For if there is no clear answer to the question of how far EU membership should spread, perhaps it should be restricted to a smaller territory – or indeed, perhaps the EU should not exist at all…”

     The globalists desperately want the European Union to exist - because regional unities of this kind are essential stepping-stones or stages on the road to full globalization and the single world government. At the time of writing (2017), however, there have been some serious hitches in the progress of the globalization project, notably the financial crisis of 2008, Putin’s invasion of the Ukraine in 2014, Brexit in 2016, and the coming to power of Donald Trump in 2017. Britain’s decision to leave the European Union is a serious blow to European integration, not so much economically as politically; for other dissatisfied countries may wish to follow her example. 

     Ironically, Britain’s Prime Minister Theresa May sees Brexit as fully within the process of globalization; she emphasizes the greater opportunities for global trade that it will give her country. But her vision is of a global community of independent nation-states, not of regional blocs that suppress national sovereignties – the exact opposite of the European project. Trump, meanwhile, while strongly supporting Brexit and criticizing the European Union, has already proclaimed his hostility both to North American and to Transatlantic economic treaties, and threatens to derail the whole project. Nevertheless, the globalists remain very powerful and will certain strive to overcome these obstacles and fire up “the crucible of globalization” again. 

*

     In 2015, Germany’s Angela Merkel unilaterally opened the doors of the EU to a vast flood of migrants from the Middle East, 80% of them young men of Muslim faith and fiercely anti-western attitudes who have spread a trail of rape and destruction. The Central and East European states known as the Višegrad bloc (or V4) refused to let them in, earning a rebuke from the European Commmission, the guardian of the EU’s dogma of unlimited freedom of movement in European. Since then the V4 have been warning, not only against Germany’s “moral imperialism”, but also against the over-bureaucratic, undemocratic approach of the Brussels Commission that so meekly rubber-stamped Germany’s initiative. They have been forming new parties and alliances that directly threaten the leftist, proto-totalitarian ethos of the European Union. As Britain’s arch-Brexiteer, Nigel Farage has pointed out, the leaders of these states have issued a much more fundamental challenge to the European Union even that Britain’s bid to leave it. 

     John O’Sullivan writes: “By boldly making the case for national conservatism, especially on immigration, [Hungary’s Prime Minister, Viktor] Orban has become a trendsetter for the centre-right throughout much of the continent. He is a firm favourite to win again in April this year [1918].

     “Dig a little deeper into the ideas and arguments that are driving these new parties and arguments that are driving these new parties and new alliances, and we discover an interesting mix of political ideas and cultural attitudes. One is that the four Visegrad countries have finally become angry with being dictated to and pontificated by western Europe – and Brussels, which is considering censuring the Polish government. At a Polish-German basketball match after [the New Year sexual assaults of white women by Muslims in] Cologne, fans unfurled a banner saying ‘Protect your Women, not our Democracy’.

     “Secondly, members of the former Communist bloc have overcome the sentimental-cum-ideological gratitude of being in Europe, the West, modernity, and are now prepared to pursue their economic interests (in, for instance, Polish coal mining) less respectfully in EU discussion. Thirdly, having only recently regained their independence from the Soviets, they self-consciously value both national sovereignty and identity and want to defend them.”  

     As Alan Posener of Die Welt says, the East Europeans were under the yoke of the Soviets and do not ever want to go under a similar yoke again. For if “nationalism” and “national sovereignty” are bogey words for the West Europeans, “socialism” is the bogey-word for the East Europeans; the dominant attitudes of each half of the continent reflect their different historical experiences. In particular, the resurrection of the Soviet empire under Putin has made the East Europeans very nervous. They naturally look to the EU – and in particular NATO – for protection; but at the same time they observe that the West Europeans are quite happy to make deals with the old enemy over the East Europeans’ heads…

     In this context, the vigorously Eurosceptic views of the former Czech President, Vaclav Klaus, remain extremely relevant. In 2005 Klaus called for the EU to be "scrapped" and replaced by a free trade area to be called the "Organisation of European States." He attacked the EU as an institution that undermines freedom, calling it "as big a threat to freedom as the Soviet Union was". Also in 2005 he remarked that the EU was a "failed and bankrupt entity”. He was the only European leader to refuse to sign the Lisbon Treaty in 2007…

     In 2016 he expanded on the EU’s incipient totalitarianism: “The fall of communism opened the door for freedom and democracy in our countries. We enjoyed it tremendously and erroneously supposed that freedom is here, and is here to stay. We were wrong. During the 27 years after the fall of communism, we have slowly begun discovering that we live in a world which is different than the one we dreamt of. It became evident that the lack of freedom is not inevitably connected with only one – however evil – form of totalitarian and authoritarian regime, with communism. There are other non-democratic isms and institutional arrangements which lead to similar results and consequences.

     “Due to them we live in a far more socialist and etatist, controlled and regulated society now than we could have imagined 27 years ago. We feel that we are in number of respects returning back to the arrangements we used to live in the past and which we had considered gone once and for all. I do not have in mind specifically my country but Europe and the Western world as a whole.

     “After the fall of communism, my optimism was based on a strong belief in the power of principles of free society, of free markets, of the ideas of freedom, as well as on a belief in our ability to promote and safeguard these ideas. Today, coming slowly to the end of the second decade of the 21^st century, my feeling is different. Did we have wrong expectations? Were we naive? I don´t think so.

     “1. We knew that socialism, or social democratism, or ‘soziale Marktwirtschaft’ is here, is here to stay and – due to its internal dynamics – would expand;

     “2. We were always afraid of the green ideology, in which we saw a  dangerous alternative to the traditional socialist doctrine;

    “3. We were aware of the built-in leftism of intellectuals. We followed with great concern the ‘excessive production of under-educated intellectuals’ that emerged in the West as a result of the expansion of university education for all;

     “4. Communism had been based on an apotheosis of science and on a firmly rooted hope that science would solve all existing human and social problems. To our great regret, the West believed in the same fallacy.

     “I can assure you that we were aware of all that in the moment of the fall of communism. We – perhaps – underestimated some other crucial issues:

     “- We probably did not fully appreciate the far-reaching implications of the 1960s, the fact that this ‘romantic’ era was a period of the radical and destructive denial of the authority, of traditional values and social institutions;           

     “- We underestimated that the growing apotheosis of human rights was in fact a revolutionary denial of civic rights and of many liberties and behavioral patterns connected with them. Human rights do not need any citizenship. That is why human-rightism calls for the destruction of the sovereignty of individual countries, particularly in today’s Europe…”

     Still more recently, Victor Orban, the Prime Minister of Hungary, has attacked what he has called “Homo Brusselicus”, European man deprived of national, gender and religious identity. More particularly, he has attacked his fellow Hungarian George Soros’ plan, supported by the EU, of compulsory distribution of Muslim immigrants around Europe: “Over the next few decades the main question in Europe will be this: will Europe remain the continent of the Europeans?... Who will live in Europe? This is a historical question which we must face up to today. As regards the specific situation – and this is quite telling about the world that we live in today – there’s no concrete, reliable information on the percentages of traditional indigenous Christians and the incoming Muslim communities living in Europe’s individual countries. In practice it is forbidden to gather information like this. And the data which is gathered is not adequate for us to predict what the future holds for us, as migrants, immigrants, are not evenly distributed throughout the different age groups. So the general figures say little about what awaits us. We should focus most on people under the age of 15, and also those between 15 and 45. From those figures we can project, we can calculate, what the situation will be like in each country in, say, 2050.

     “Sparing no money and effort, every year the Hungarian government commissions an extensive international survey in order to find out what the European people think about these issues. This is not about what their leaders think, because we know that. The suspicion is that the opinions of the people don’t coincide with those of their leaders. This year’s survey showed that, across the 28 European Union countries, 81% of EU nationals thought immigration to be a serious or very serious issue. At a pan-European level, 64% believe that immigration leads to increased crime, and 59% believe that immigration changes the culture we live in. As regards the performance of Brussels, 76% of European nationals say that Brussels’ performance on immigration is poor. When asked whether more power should be given to Brussels to resolve this situation, or if nation states’ powers should be strengthened instead, we find that 36% of European citizens expect a solution from Brussels and would give it more power, while 51% expect nation states to provide solutions. In Hungary, 25% of our fellow citizens – and this is not an insignificant number, as we’re talking about every fourth Hungarian – believe that more power should be given to Brussels. But luckily 61% of our fellow citizens think that Brussels should have less power, and we should even take back those powers that we previously transferred to it – or at least some of them.

     “Naturally, when considering the whole issue of who will live in Europe, one could argue that this problem will be solved by successful integration. The reality, however, is that we’re not aware of any examples of successful integration. It’s obvious that migration is not the answer to economic problems and labour shortages. Interestingly, people in Europe are least concerned about migrants taking their jobs. This probably reflects some form of personal experience. I can believe there are desperate situations, just like a castaway on the ocean finally giving in to the urge to drink seawater: it’s water, but it doesn’t quench one’s thirst, and only adds to the problem. This is more or less the situation in which those who want to cure their economic ills with immigrants will find themselves. In countering arguments for successful integration, we must also point out that if people with diverging goals find themselves in the same system or country, it won’t lead to integration, but to chaos. It’s obvious that the culture of migrants contrasts dramatically with European culture. Opposing ideologies and values cannot be simultaneously upheld, as they are mutually exclusive. To give you the most obvious example, the European people think it desirable for men and women to be equal, while for the Muslim community this idea is unacceptable, as in their culture the relationship between men and women is seen in terms of a hierarchical order. These two concepts cannot be upheld at the same time. It’s only a question of time before one or the other prevails.

     Of course one could also argue that communities coming to us from different cultures can be re-educated. But we must see – and Bishop Tőkés also spoke about this – that now the Muslim communities coming to Europe see their own culture, their own faith, their own lifestyles and their own principles as stronger and more valuable than ours. So, whether we like it or not, in terms of respect for life, optimism, commitment, the subordination of individual interests and ideals, today Muslim communities are stronger than Christian communities. Why would anyone want to adopt a culture that appears to be weaker than their own strong culture? They won’t, and they never will! Therefore re-education and integration based on re-education cannot succeed…

     “My summary conclusions are as follows. Christian democratic parties in Europe have become un-Christian: we are trying to satisfy the values and cultural expectations of the liberal media and intelligentsia. The second important aspect is that left-wing politics has lost ground, and the social democratic parties are themselves no longer social democratic. They have lost the proletariat, if I can put it that way. The numbers and power of organised labour have fallen, mostly because many industrial jobs have been relocated outside the European Union, and therefore not even social democratic parties are what they once used to be. They’ve married themselves to global business interests representing neoliberal economic policy, and now they have a single policy area, they’re concentrating on a single area: preservation of their influence over culture. This is the second important element in Europe today. And the third important thing is that Europe is currently being prepared to hand its territory over to a new mixed, Islamised Europe. We are observing the conscious step-by-step implementation of this policy. In order for this to happen, for the territory to be ready to be handed over, it is necessary to continue the de-Christianisation of Europe – and we can see these attempts. Priority must be given to group identities rather than national identities, and political governance must be replaced with the rule of bureaucracy. This is the aim of Brussels’ continuous and stealthy withdrawal of powers from the nation states. This is the situation in Europe today, Ladies and Gentlemen. This is the battlefield on which Central European countries are fighting today.”

*

     So the battle intensifies between the globalisers and the anti-globalisers (called “nationalists” or “populists” by their opponents. Nor is this a struggle only between politicians and economists or businessmen. The religious leaders are also involved. 

     Most recently, during a visit to Ecuador Pope Francis called for a world government to deal with problems such as climate change. Again, Baxter Dmitry writes: “world leaders from a diverse collection of religious communities called for world unity in a video message released last week.

     “The call for a world government, led by Pope Francis, Ayatollah Al-Milani, the Dalai Lama and Rabbi Abraham Skorka, is seen as a major step on the road to the New World Order that was prophesied over 2,000 years ago.

     “The world religious leaders came together on June 14 to make a joint statement through a video calling on people to embrace ideas of friendship and unity, and to overcome negativity and division in society.

     “In reality, the call for global government by Pope Francis and other wealthy elitists has nothing to do with lifting up impoverished nations or ‘saving humanity.’ Such a government would instead guarantee global surveillance, global wealth inequality and a world run by the exact corrupt interests currently consolidating wealth and power worldwide.” 

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