Author: Dr. ILIAS ILIOPOULOS
The so called European Union is not a major geostrategic actor or a Power in strategic terms – nor shall it ever become one, at foreseeable future. Quite the contrary, if truth be told the EU has entered a process of disintegration. The EU will break apart on a combination of reasons, but most significantly on the question of the ongoing Islamic invasion of Europe. Historians of the future will remember that the EU, which had somehow survived a hasty enlargement dictated by Germany and the Democrat administration of the United States, a permanent deficit of democracy and a Euro crisis, eventually collapsed due to the ongoing Islamic colonization of Europe and due to the EU’s lack of any political will to effectively resist invasion.
The EU is a residue of the previous historical era, in fact already obsolete and passé. It is an entirely imaginary “super power”, which is not “just” facing (so to speak) a chronic economic crisis, or a “democracy deficit”; instead, the EU is undergoing an endemic, continuing “Legitimationskrise” (crisis of legitimacy), mainly due to the question of mass, illegal migration, and a historically unique era of demographic, ethical and spiritual decline as well – with a rapidly aging population, an oligarchic, profoundly undemocratic and almost pathologically demo-phobic ruling bureaucratic elite, and several cohorts of zombie banks ready to collapse at any given time.
To begin with, the EU has been an ongoing, a posteriori institutionalized “coup d’état” from above ever since. The cardinal contradiction between the supra-national and the inter-governmental element, between [never ending] “integration” and National, or State Sovereignty, undermines the (mistakenly called) “European project” from its foundations.
It has been said that relations between the EU and the United States of America have taken a steep downward trend during Donald Trump’s (first) Presidency. The truth is though that relations between the EU Member States themselves have been taking a steeper downward trend. The EU is losing its coherence because EU countries are losing the sense of common interest – and because of the dramatically increasing frustration of common ordinary people (the deplorable ones, according to Hillary Clinton) with Brussel’s nomenclature.
The European Economic Community (not the “European Union”) emerged from the ashes of the Second World War for two reasons: to avoid new bloodshed (or, to put it in terms of Political Realism and Geopolitics, to deal with the German Question) and to face the threat to its common democratic values from Soviet Communism (or, to put it again in terms of Political Realism and Geopolitics, to contain any further expansion of the Eurasian Land Power at cost of the Rimland).
The EU (or the European Economic Community, in historically accurate terms) grew and thrived, protected from external threats, in the glasshouse created by the American Common Defence System and particularly NATO. Up until the collapse of the USSR in December 1991, the American Defence umbrella protected the EU (EEC).
The demise of the Soviet empire of the Eurasian Heartland eliminated the threat to Western Europe. Germany was reunited. The course of events would prove that this was the seed of disruption to the European Community.
In the key summit of Maastricht in February 1992, the Treaty on European Union marked the beginning of “a new stage in the process of creating an ever closer union among the peoples of Europe”. Thus, the European Union was formally established by twelve Member-States – in point of fact though, it was dictated by the so called Franco-German axis. The newly founded EU took a number of decisions, many of them tacit, that drastically changed the geostrategic balance in the Old Continent. One key decision that affected international politics was and is that the EU Member-States considered that they were not threatened anymore by any external enemy and therefore they could greatly economize on defence spending.
The second decision, that shaped EU’s economy and created today’s mess, was to accept, together with a common currency, the Euro (in fact, a new edition of the Deutsche Mark), the German monetary principles (the so called [Theo] Waigel’s standards). It should be clear though that acceptance did not also mean the full adoption of German Economic rules, for most EU countries, including notably France and Italy. This was made easier as the first country to break those rules was Germany under Gerhard Schroeder.
The enlargement of the EU in Eastern Europe, imposed on France and the rest by Germany, was commercially a profitable move but brought additional disruption to the EU integration.
All of the above led first to the economic collapse of the European Union. “Southern” countries overspent; Berlin, Frankfurt (i.e., the European Central Bank) and Brussels’ Polite-Bureau turned a blind eye for as long as the “Southern” countries used the credit to buy mainly “Northern” (read German) goods. As it should have been expected by any independent researcher possessing common sense plus an elementary knowledge of, and a modest respect towards history, the Southern European countries would not and could not transform their economies to the “Northern”, essentially German Model. Their economies collapsed, only to be supported artificially by the “Northern” economies, mainly by Germany, and as a natural consequence, to be politically dominated by the same.
German growth and dominance over Europe led to the political disruption of the EU. The only other nation with which Germany designed to discuss matters was France and that to a limited extent. Germany’s new Drang nach Osten (Drive towards East) and its increasing commercial and – to a certain degree – political rapprochement with post-Soviet Russia, should have alarmed the United States. Apart from any other strategic considerations – such as making common front in the war on Islamic terror, or containing China – President Trump’s sincere wish to reach a modus vivendi with Russia may also be seen in the light of the above.
Poland, historically torn between Russia and Germany, chose one more time a distant ally, this time the USA. It actually became the first to disengage politically and emotionally from the EU, followed by other Eastern and Central European countries, notably Hungary.
Italy, pressed by poor economic performance, since its economy is unable to compete under the Euro rules, turned its enormous accumulation of public debt of 2,5 trillion USD into a black-mail weapon, threatening to exit from the Euro leading to its collapse unless further credits became available.
Italy and Germany – the two economic extremes of the EU – are in trouble, with the former now officially in recession and the latter close to one.
The myth of French and Spanish economies growing, is exactly that, a myth. In Spain, the debt is 100% of the GDP and the primary budget balance is still negative. In France, even if the annual economic targets are achieved, which is unlikely, there will still be more budget deficit than GDP growth, with the debt touching also 100% of GDP. Greece is not even worth mentioning here, since it has long ceased to exist as a sovereign state.
The unusually violent reaction of Chancellor Merkel to President Trump’s policies highlighted more the present status of European affairs than a position towards the U.S.
Britain, displeased by German dominance and its own growing insignificance in the EU, chose to leave the EU.
The whole European Banking System is rotten. Many banks are only nominally solvent and some not even that, like recently the cash-strapped Banca Carige S.p.A. and also Germany’s Nord/LB (Norddeutsche Landesbank). They will be, or have already been bailed out by public-sector money, which Berlin and Frankfurt previously insisted that it would never be allowed under EU, and Euro rules. The economies of the EU cannot continue functioning for long under Euro rules in spite of all efforts made by Mario Draghi in previous years. ECB’s chief economist, Peter Praet, is reported to have said that “the economy is close to a vicious circle.”
Still, while on the surface the EU crisis seems economic – or at least, it seemed so until a few years ago –, it actually is profoundly political – and ultimately civilizational and moral. The Member Nations do not share, not all of them at least, the same deterministic (read: totalitarian) vision of a presumably irreversible and inevitable finality of the European integration, with a supra-national federal state as end-station, as propagated by former German Foreign Minister, and also former Head of the German Green Party Joschka Fischer, and other representatives of the ideas of Post-national Progressivism, or Cultural Marxism.
Even more importantly though, their citizens are disenchanted with and alienated from the EU.
Let us be under no illusions on this point! The doctrine of the so called European unification or integration has always been an elite’s project – since the late 1940s, when the Democrat administrations of the United States rediscovered a notorious NS-German geopolitical concept that had previously been denounced by the Anglo-Saxon maritime nations – and they went on to make clever exploitation of this within the framework of their Containment Strategy which should be applied towards the Soviet Union. Huge amounts of money have flown, ever since, in order for the ruling bureaucratic elite to gain popular support – however astonishingly limited – for the project.
To only give an example, when foreign armies attacked Greece in 1940, or Israel in 1948, 1956 and 1973, hundreds of thousands of men were determined to die to defend and save their holy fatherland. Seriously speaking, is out there anyone who would give his life to preserve or defend the so called European Union? Most probably, not even the ruling bureaucratic elite of this oddly post-democratic hybrid regime would go so far.
Like Immanuel Kant’s notion of “Perpetual Peace”, the EU promised eternal peace – and eternal prosperity. As stated previously, the first part of that promise had been fullfiled thank the U.S. Defence umbrella – contrary to a quite popular propaganda–leitmotiv that has routinely been used by the EU’s nomenclature and its acolytes in the academia, media and politics, since decades.
Coming to talk about the second part of the promise, there was no solid foundation beyond this. There was not a “European Demos”, let alone a “European Nation”, nor has it ever emerged – albeit all the persistent and consistent efforts made by Brussels’ bureaucratic elite and despite a formidable propaganda machine which had been put at work from the beginning, targeting the center of gravity of modern Western European “mass-democratic” societies, i.e. that critical mass consisting of intellectuals, opinion leaders and academics, particularly the young ones.
Consequently, failure to deliver on the promised prosperity undermines the legitimacy of the so called “European project”.
Worse, anger increasingly has been directed at the EU’s ruling bureaucratic elite, and the local (“national”) elites because of Brussel’s radical ideological agenda, that is Post-national Totalitarian Progressivism and Cultural Marxism, a.k.a. Liberal Fascism, as particularly manifested in issues such as:
- the illegal migration of colossal scale – if truth be told, an Islamic conquest of the Old Continent and its gradual mutation into “Eurabia” (Bat Ye’or);
- the redefinition of meaning of fundamental terms and axioms and systematic destruction of common shared values, memories, and institutions of the Western, Graeco-Roman, Judaeo-Christian, Jeffersonian heritage;
- The social stigmatization and ostracism of patriotism and the Bible, etc.
Evidently, if the price of the so called European integration is a massive decline in the standards of living of common ordinary people in the EU-Member States, then the argument for retaining the EU is weakened. Even if we would assume for a moment that losing National Sovereignty for greater prosperity would work in Europe, in theory at least, it remains a plain fact that, for common ordinary people, so persistently assaulted and humiliated by the ruling elite for years, losing Sovereignty to pay back the debts of the EU’s zombie banks – while simultaneously living both in poverty and at a state of siege and fear, in the middle of millions of alien (=Moslem) colonists – is a much harder sell.
Contrary to the general must-be euphoria of the 1990s and the 2000s, I have been making the assumption since 1993 that a decisive moment would arrive in Europe. Of course, I have expected that Brussels’ Leviathan would survive a while, for two or three decades; this is “the mother of all battles” for an entire mandarin caste, after all, a supra-national oligarchy, which is desperately seeking to preserve all the scandalous privileges it enjoys within one of the most sophisticated liberal fascist regimes in European, and human history.
Until a few years ago, independent researchers were wondering about the next disaster to befall the EU on economic terms. Italy? Spain? France? Belgium? Austria? Or Germany with its zombie banks that are essentially as insolvent as all other banks in the “EU”?
I nonetheless insisted on my assumption that the next big crisis would be a profoundly political one, and that it would be about national sovereignty and identity. Then came BREXIT.
This is a historic turning point indeed. When the anti-“migration” revolt only concerned presumably “minor” and “distant” Member-States, such as Poland or Hungary, the extremely arrogant nomenclature of Brussels could still do so as if nothing happened – and go on demonstrating this bizarre combination of ignorance and arrogance similar to that once demonstrated by the Polite-Bureau of the Communist Party of the former USSR, the German People’s Republic, and so on. But when Britain decided to regain her full independence from the supra-national hybrid regime, and she eventually achieved to do so against all odds, would not the affair take another turn?
Italy will come next! For Italy is the weakest link in the German-dominated “Festung Europa” – as it always had been; and it will be the first to leave the continental fortress – as it always did.
A banking crisis – in 60-million population Italy, not in 5-million population Ireland or in 10-million population Greece – could cause an EU-wide breakdown. Italy’s banks had shed some of their debt under the previous left-wing/center-left government, which more or less faithfully conformed to an imposed regime of austerity. But this was not enough. Were a banking crisis to develop, Italy would require urgent support from other EU Member-States to avoid serious economic turmoil, but that support may be hard to come by: taxpayers in Germany and other Northern countries, and their political leaders, would not want to stump up additional support to help resolve and recapitalize Italian banks. The Italian state would therefore be the only back-stop, and could only assist by taking on even more debt, adding to its enormous GDP-to-debt ratio of 130 percent, and raising the spectre of a default.
The winner of the domestic political game would be Matteo Salvini, the most powerful figure in today’s Italian politics and Minister of the Interior until he and his Lega had been kicked out of the last government, following what should fairly be named another post-modern coup initiated by Brussels’ Polite-Bureau and its Roman branch.
Salvini is skeptical about Italy’s EU membership and has long predicted the collapse of the euro. Even more significantly though, Salvini has repeatedly and persistently attacked Brussels’ presumed inability – in fact, complete lack of will – to deal with the most visible cause of anger in Italy as in so many other European countries: mass, uncontrolled migration from Maghreb, Africa, and the broader Middle East.
Established politicians, mainstream media, and EU-subsidized academics like to see and describe what happens in purely and simply economic terms. Time and again, they say a word about the notorious “democracy deficit” (of the EU) – and they do so only to draw the (mistaken) conclusion that “more Europe is needed.” But they are completely unable to face the question of illegal migration.
Yet, polls show that this very question has been at the top of the pre-occupations of European people for a long time, and that European citizens’ hostility to mass, uncontrolled, and notably Islamic migration is only increasing. The logical question therefore is: Why do elected governments ignore their own peoples, while that is likely to cost them very dearly politically?
Firstly because they are paralyzed by the forces of Post-national Progressivism/Cultural Marxism, who exercise full scale control over mainstream media and academia and repeat the mantras of political correctness and liberal fascism round the clock. Mainstream politicians don’t want to confront them at any price. But the deepest reason is that they themselves are beholden to the dominant ideology. And from the point of the dominant ideology, mass or illegal immigration is not a problem and cannot be one, because identities, cultures and peoples count for practically nothing. Only individuals count.
Nowadays’ Post-national Progressivism addresses the question in a purely economic perspective (and a quite narrow one, by the way): immigration comes down to an augmentation of the size of the labour force and the potential mass of consumers. A million, or one hundred million non-Europeans (Arabs or else) coming to settle in Europe is thus only a million, or one hundred million individuals coming to add themselves to millions of other individuals. This is not an issue in the eyes of the EU nomenclature and the left-liberal intelligentsia; the inhabitants of the “host” countries don’t see “individuals” arriving instead, but contingents of Maghrebis, Pakistanis, Afghans, Senegalese, etc.
Political phenomena of great magnitude and historical significance rarely export themselves identically from one country to another, but rather they take different forms there. Nevertheless they have one essential trait in common.
Ethno-political, geo-cultural tensions combined with economic austerity and a sense of betrayal toward the elite creates an explosive mixture. Disappointment in one’s personal and family life combined with a feeling of cultural disenfranchisement by foreign invaders and the sense that the elite is neither honest, nor competent nor committed to the well-being of its own public tends to generate major political reactions; history provides strong evidence for this.
BREXIT has been the last such reaction, so far. ITEXIT will follow soon – with Italy being both a country on the first line facing Islamic invasion but which has also been very seriously affected by the financial crisis of 2008.
Unlike Britain, Italy is a core country of the European Economic Community since the very first day. Its leave will therefore be of huge symbolic significance and will most certainly exercise a profound impact on the entire construct of the EU.
This is why, from now on, all efforts to be made by the forces defending the core values of the Western civilization against the Unholy Alliance of liberal fascism and Islamo-fascism must be concentrated on Italy.
A few researchers, including myself, have considered BREXIT to be the beginning of the end of the hybrid regime dictated by Berlin, Frankfurt and the odious Polite-Bureau of Brussels – similar to the battle of El-Alamein; Italy’s exit will historically be the analogue to the Sicily landing.
Author: Dr. ILIAS ILIOPOULOS
Assistant Professor for History and International Relations, Department
of Turkish and Asian Studies, National University of Athens
ex Prof. of Maritime History, History of Western Civilization, and
Middle East Geopolitics, DEREE–The American College of Greece (2015-
2019)