Where Is Europe Headed?

Archonix, one of our regular readers and commenters from the UK, explains in the comment thread from one of yesterday’s posts why the EU will not work in the long run.

He is addressing his words to another commenter who ends his thoughts with this:

The Fjordmans and DeWinters of Europe must divorce nationalism and embrace a new Europe, with a new federal EU structure, with representatives from the individual European states that support both European integration and a European cultural and civilizational identity against assaults from the Islamic world.

Archonix replies (edited slightly for clarity):

Gordon, you make sense in general but you’ve contradicted yourself:

The will of the European political elites can be overborne without resort to Kalashnikovs. It can be overborne through elections held in individual European nations

and:

the key problem with the anti-Muslim political faction in Europe, as epitomized by Fjordman in his columns here, is that the cause of protecting Western and European civilization is terminally polluted with individual nationalisms…

If voting in the national elections to reduce or abolish the power held by the EU isn’t “nationalism” then I don’t know what is.

We do not need a “federal” Europe, or any sort of political union, to deal with this problem. We need strong borders. We need nationalism, patriotism, individualism and the right to defend our nations.

You federalists don’t understand the history of Europe, the reason why it’s a stupid idea to try and squish us into any sort of union, federal or not. Europe doesn’t have a single culture, or even the metaculture that the US has. I travel through the United States and I know I’ll find differences but there’s an overarching culture to it, which doesn’t exist over here. A German is not a Spaniard is not an Italian is not a Bulgarian. They’re as different from each other as you are from the Chinese.

That situation cannot support a political union of any sort for long because it will force compromise, not in detail but in fundamental issues that are brought about by cultural differences. Integration would be the death of those cultures and what would it achieve in return? Nothing!

Those individual cultures are what we fight for — look at the countries that are fighting back the most. They’re the ones that haven’t sacrificed their culture on the altar of political correctness. Look at Sweden, where the very idea of a Swedish culture is considered racist, or here in the UK, where even our nominally conservative politicians talk about the threat from the natives to foreign cultures.

Your plan for the EU would cement that attitude across the entire continent by forcing those disparate individual cultures into a political straightjacket. I don’t care how “federal” it might be. There are compromises that have to be made in any political union that ultimately alter the cultural balance of the nations making up that union.

What we need is strong national identities and an alliance based on one thing: the right for a nation to choose its own path. We don’t need an overarching government or any federal structures for that, we don’t need a currency or a flag or a bloody parliament, or a senate, or a president or any of that. We need our individual cultures to be strong, to unite the people they encompass.

No “federal Europe” will ever have that power.

You’re American. Your experience is with the United States, and long may it remain a positive one, but your experience is limited to a relative monoculture. You apparently don’t understand that part of the problem is the very idea that disparate, opposing cultures can somehow function within a single society. They can’t.

That’s what borders are for. That’s what the fence around our garden is for, to keep out the neighbour’s dog and stop him sh*tting in the pansies. I don’t set up a sharing agreement or some sort of “union” with the neighbour and his dog…

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…pulling down the fence between us so we can collectively defend against the dog across the road. I put up a bigger fence, I advise him to do the same. Why should I let his dog crap on my lawn just because we’re both defending ourselves against the dog across the road? I can lend him my hose to squirt at it, sure, but that’s a trade agreement, an alliance, not a garden “union” because it’s still my garden. If I tear down that fence, how long before we start arguing about where the dog is allowed to take a crap? He doesn’t understand why I get so worked up about a dog taking a crap on my nice lawn because he’s always lived with dogs, he’s used to it. That’s his culture. My culture is to squirt water at them.

Then, of course, he might start to argue that perhaps letting the dog across the road enter our collective garden isn’t such a bad idea after all. After all, it’s just a dog like his. So he lets it in through his gate and then I suddenly have two dogs crapping on my lawn. Up goes the fence, but now we’re arguing about whether I have the right to do that in our collective space…

See the point? A national border is just a bigger fence and an invasive culture is just a bigger dog. We can let that dog keep crapping on our lawn or we can send [the dog] back and close the gate.

As a nation we can do that, but as part of a federal European union there are suddenly 26 points of failure to consider, because that dog can enter any one of those 26 other nations, some one of whom might think it is to their advantage to let this invasive culture enter so they can knock back their competitors.

You see that’s the thing you’re ultimately dealing with here, Gordon. Nations, individual nations, with a history that goes back to the time of Christ in some instances, and certainly back to the early fifth century in most. These are cultures that are in some cases entirely incompatible with each other; the only difference is that they don’t resort to exploding in market places.

All those wiggly lines you see on a map of Europe represent the gradual establishment of those cultural boundaries though — yes — wars, trade, population movements and treaties. World War Two could have been the last solidification of that.

If only the people behind the EU — and behind the more general malaise affecting our nations — hadn’t come along and knocked all the fences down and let in a new and invasive culture. Now we’re facing probably another thousand years of upheaval and war because of people like that blathering on about unions and federal structures.

They ignore the fact that it is nationalism, an alliance of strong, unified cultures, that would defend us against the Islamic invasion. All the talk about “unions” and federations and so on weakens those cultures, just as much as mixing slag into iron weakens it.

Needless to say, I agree with Archonix. The citizens in the nations of Europe were slowly set up by their elites to take this fatal fall. The average person paid little attention because it started out innocently enough on an economic path — what was the Common Market but a European version of NAFTA? And what could be the harm in that?

But the elites, starting wtih Charles de Gaulle, knew they weren’t ending it there, as Bat Ye’or has demonstrated beyond any reasonable doubt.

I wish Fjordman were wrong, but he’s not. The Dark Prophet of Norway has been only too accurate in his descriptions and predictions of what has happened to Europe and what is to come.

In a final betrayal, the citizens of Europe were not even allowed a say in their destiny. A creature called “The Treaty of Lisbon” was whelped in Portugal and will now proceed to swallow the countries of Europe and digest them. What this metabolic process produces no one can really know, though we can see through the mists something de Gaulle lusted for: a united Europe and Arabia. This mess will be ugly, producing no end of wars and conflicts.

The Treaty of Lisbon will go down in history as a betrayal leading to war and destruction, much as the punitive Treaty of Versailles led with inevitable steps to World War Two.