The end of the European dream

More precisely, the end of the European dream about unity. What does the current sobering war shed light on? According to the wise, the security of Europe, especially its unity, is just an illusion, or rather just wishful thinking, as even the Balkan wars in the 1990s showed. I think the answer is both more complex and simpler than that at the same time.

It is simpler, because what is happening in Ukraine now is nothing but the clash of American and Russian hegemonies in an artificially created dysfunctional country. I was convinced that the era of classical wars had ended with the end of the last conventional war, the Iraq-Iran war. We are now living in the age of civil wars. The Ukrainian-Russian conflict seems to contradict this, but it doesn’t.

Because what is happening in Ukraine now is more like a civil war with external participants. Let’s not forget that half of Ukraine is ethnically Russian.

The protection of Western Europe has been guaranteed by the USA since the Second World War, and also that of Central and Eastern Europe from the late 90s. Europe is up to its neck in American economic and military hegemony, and this is the only reason of that there has not yet been a war in the territory of the EU.

NATO member states are not at war with each other, just as the Warsaw Pact member states were not at war with each other. It’s just that simple.

Because Europe has almost no defense expenses, so the European democracies can spend on welfare expenses, that is, on buying votes. Why didn’t we include Russia in NATO? Then the war could have been avoided. It seems logical. But it isn’t.

The Balkan wars took place in a completely different world political environment, that is, in a great power vacuum. The Eastern hegemony in the region has ended, but the Western hegemony has not yet consolidated. And the Daytoni Bosnia is such an artificially created dysfunctional country like Ukraine. But it’s a frozen conflict. As soon as the Western hegemony would cease in the region, the war would break out again. Because the reasons have not disappeared.

The answer, on the other hand, is more complex, because there are deep and unbridgeable cultural fault lines on the European continent, which are only worsened by the unification mania, whether domestically or internationally. Unfortunately, political decision-makers are not willing to take note of this.

Of course, it is already obvious to them that the majority of the member states of the former Soviet Union cannot be integrated into the West. The integration of Turkey also lacks any realisation. However the problem is much bigger than that.

There are the problems of the already ‘integrated’ EU members. It is absolutely true that so far all EU expansions have been exclusively based on politics, in which the political and economic interests of the USA played no small role.

The second fault line is between the former socialist countries of Central and Eastern Europe and the West. This roughly coincides with the line of the former infamous Iron Curtain. So this fault line is between the old and new members of the EU. For centuries, this region played the role of a bridge or ferry countries between East and West. Sometimes they came under the influence of the West, sometimes the East.

To this day, many accuse America of breaking its promise to the Russians that NATO would not expand to the East, and leaves the region as buffer zone of Russia indefinitely (the leftist Oliver Stone among others). They take the sovereignty of these countries not into account with this accusation. Unlike the Russian hegemony NATO never expanded violently. All of its member states joined it voluntarily, including the former socialist countries. Moreover they asked to join. These accusers also forget that promise was made in a completely different world political environment, to a country that does not even exist today. No one is obliged to keep a promise made to a non-existent country. If I for instance promise my neighbor not to plant a tree next to his fence, the promise ends with his death. And let’s not forget that the Russian Federation is not officially the successor of the USSR. Not coincidentally.

In the Protestant North, civil self-organizations, entrepreneurial culture, and the free market have greater traditions, while in the Catholic South a huge bureaucracy and the mothering of the state have greater traditions. Germany takes advantage of this with its cohesion subsidies, which it can be said have never worked, and no supported country has ever been able to catch up to the living standards of its supporters.

Anyone who thinks that Germans economically support poorer countries because it is good for their economy is deceived. What would you say if you were the shop assistant and I was the buyer, and I said that, hey pal, if you give me five thousand Euros, I promise to spend it in your shop? German companies only get back what their government took from German taxpayers to support Portuguese or Greek civil servants, who purchase German products and service.

The irony is that the third fault line lies between not only North and South, but West and East as well. In this regard, there are two separate fault lines between the East and the West, the second and the third.

The fourth fault line is between the Anglo-Saxon world and continental Europe, or mainland Europe. I have already hinted that the bipolar or multipolar system doesn’t work, and this led to Brexit as well. Within the European Union, there were two rich and large countries with two separate interests, the already mentioned Germany and the UK. One had to dominate. That one is Germany for obvious reasons. The UK had a choice, they either accept the supremacy of Germany, or they leave. The Britons have voted for the later one.

Of course, there are rich countries within the EU that are not in the same burden group with the German economy, because they are small, such as Austria, Luxembourg, Denmark, Netherlands ect. On the other hand within the EU, there are countries with large areas that do not belong to the same burden group with the German economy, because they are poor, such as France, Spain, Italy, ect.. Only Germany and the United Kingdom were more or less equally strong in the field of political and economic advocacy. Thus the break up was inevitable.

Of course, the fault line even in this case means a difference in culture and mentality at the same time as well. The Anglo-Saxon world is traditionally more individualistic, less-bureaucratic than the countries of mainland Europe. They require more liberty and less regulations which were ignored by the EU so long. Of course it alone wouldn’t have been sufficient for the Brexit. But the Britain got enough with uncontrolled flood of Eastern and Southern workers, from poorer EU member states that shaped the ethnicity of isles radically.

I admit, I was wrong about the Brexit. I was thinking that the EU is like Hotel California, means, you can check out whenever you want, but you can’t really leave it, and the UK can’t afford to quit. I was a hundred percent sure about that the Brexit will never happen. And for a while it looked like I was going to be right. But turned out there is in United Kingdom much more potential than I assumed.

And I have one more conclusion. Not exclusively Britain is to blame for leaving. If the EU would work as it should, the Britons would have never left. The EU should have remained a lax economic and customs union without any central regulation and obligation. This was the original idea of the European Community. The idea of European unity has been conceived in this spirit. Because it was unity only in spiritual senses, as the medieval Europe. The rise of the over-bureaucratized monstrosity, and of influence of ultra leftist cult is as far from this idea as it’s possible. And this ‘one official currency’ should have been forgotten a long time ago. It doesn’t work, and didn’t even for a minute.

It is possible that exits similar to Brexit will not be rare in the future, if the string is overstretched with more overregulation and forced unification. I don’t know if anyone has noticed, but only poor countries have joined the EU for a quarter of a century. EU membership will become less and less attractive for a rich countries and more and more attractive for poor countries until the balance falls towards poor countries. Poor countries remain poor, but the rich risk impoverishment by staying inside. Twenty-one years ago, in 2001, the EU was planned to become the most competitive economy in the world within a decade, pypassing even the USA. Instead of this well-planned future, the EU has become one of the world’s crisis zones. It wasn’t a plan, as it turned out, just wishful thinking. Now the EU is not strong enough to sanction Russia either. As result, it ends up with sanctioning itself technically. That’s all about it.

The fifth fault line is the most painful because it is within countries, and not only in the case of countries such as Ukraine, Moldova, and Bosnia-Herzegovina, but also in the case of old EU members such as Belgium, Germany, and Italy. In addition, even the migration coming mainly from Muslim countries further increases the cultural, ethnic, religious, political, linguistic and ideological dividity between the indigenous Europeans.

How to resolve these deep fault lines? Simple, with ignoring them, with imposing further enforced unifications, standardizations, over-regulations, as they say ‘more Europe’ as answer to problems they create with enforcing the idea of utopian ‘European superstate’, and building the tower of Babel as high as it collapses under its own weight as the only logical end result that it can cause. This is what will happen. Because all realized utopia is dystopia in practice. That’s the inflation of society as price for challenging the nature. And instead of lax economic and customs union they dream about the Fourth Reich or new USSR. The time for daydreams is over about the fallen continent. It’s time to wake up!

Thanks for reading me!