Introduction
The origins of the European Union (EU) can be found in the post-World War II aftermath and destruction of Europe. It was the quest to prevent another epic war on the Continent that led to the creation of a “superstate” that might contain future wars. This desire for lasting peace was understandable for a generation that had witnessed two devastating world wars in Europe.
While the architects of the EU succeeded in making the continent peaceful and prosperous in the decades following 1945, they failed in preserving and defending the unique identities of their component nation-states. The EU backers have always viewed European nationalism as suspect and capable of leading the Continent back into war, so they had no incentive to defend nationhood.
If the EU and the elites who helped shape it had accomplished the goals their own people wanted, the EU would have preserved the best of the European nations while establishing peace among them. Instead, the elites have turned it into another globalist multicultural organization intent on smothering the historic nation states of Europe.
As columnist Steve Sailer cogently observed, “the problem with European unification today is that Euro elites see it as desirable not for Europeans but for non-European immigrants.”
The EU now seeks “diversity,” “tolerance,” and mass immigration, especially Muslim and African immigration. As a result, Europe is wracked with demographic upheaval and Islamic-inspired terrorist attacks that occur almost weekly. In response, a new nationalist movement is sweeping Europe to counter the policies of the EU globalist elites. Only time will tell if these new nationalists will be successful.
Origins
After World War II, there was a strong sense among the elites in Europe that nationalism, combined with the many smaller nation-states that existed, was a volatile mix. European leaders like Jean Monnet, Robert Schuman, and Alcide De Gaspari believed a more economically and politically integrated Europe would prevent the outbreak of another war across the continent.
As the UK Daily Mail noted on January 31, 2016, about the EU:
The real story, surprisingly, goes back to the 1920s, when a senior League of Nations official, Frenchman Jean Monnet, first began to dream of building a ‘United States of Europe,’ very much on the lines that decades later would shape the European Union as it is today. (…) Treaty by treaty, it would take over more powers from national governments, based on the sacred principle that once power to make laws was handed over to Brussels it could never be given back.
The European Coal and Steel Community (ECSC) of 1952 was the nucleus of the EU of today, integrating French and German industrial areas together. In 1957, a customs union of six countries (Belgium, France, Italy, Luxembourg, the Netherlands, and West Germany) was formed. This customs union was called the European Economic Community (EEC). From the 1970s until 1992, the EEC expanded to include more and more countries in Western Europe.
The Maastricht Treaty of 1993 turned the EEC into the “European Union” and provided for greater integration between the transnational European bureaucracies centered in Brussels. The EU now includes nearly every country of the former Warsaw Pact, as well as most of the smaller countries that were in the former Soviet Union. These former communist European countries welcomed their access to the wealthier Western European economies; however they are largely opposed to the multiculturalist agenda of the Brussels bureaucrats.
Poland and Hungary, for example, are particularly outspoken against accepting Muslim refugees. Ironically, these former communist countries were sheltered and spared from some of the worst excesses of 1960’s American and European radicalism that led to today’s politically correct multiculturalism and mass Third World immigration. Now that these former communist European countries are inside the EU tent, the globalists who run Brussels are trying to force their multiculturalism upon them.
The EU Today and the Immigration Crisis
Today, the EU consists of 28 nations, 19 of which are part of the Eurozone currency system. In 2017, its Gross Domestic Product (GDP) is estimated at of $20,745 trillion with an estimated 510 million people. The U.S., by contrast, has an estimated $18,558 trillion GDP with approximately 324 million people. There are 24 official languages in the EU that are provided for; however French, German, and English are the dominant languages.
It is estimated that the EU employs 170,000 people who work for its various institutions. The people who work for the EU are almost entirely globalist and multicultural in their outlook. As of 2015, the EU has 40,000 legal acts, 15,000 Court verdicts, and 62,000 standards. These include numerous ridiculous regulations such as one that says bananas must be “free of abnormal curvature” or that prunes cannot be sold as a natural laxative (UK Express, July 6, 2016).
And yet, even with this enormous army of bureaucrats and regulations, the EU has deliberately and blithely failed to protect the “Europa-sphere” from Third World immigration. Indeed, they have enacted some of the most pernicious laws against any criticism of this transformation by labeling it “hate speech.”
Commentator Mark Steyn notes this demographic transformation in his book America Alone (2008 paperback edition):
What’s the Muslim population of Rotterdam? Forty percent. What’s the most popular baby boy’s name in Belgium? Mohammed. In Amsterdam? Mohammed. In Malmo, Sweden? Mohammed. In 2005, it was the fifth most popular baby boy’s name in the United Kingdom.
Needless to say, recent events prove that the Muslim immigrant community is not assimilating easily, e.g., the bombing in Madrid in 2004 which killed 201 people; the bombing in London in 2005 which killed 52 people; the Bataclan nightclub bombing in Paris in 2015 which killed 89 people; the 2016 truck driver rampage in Nice which killed 86 people; and the 2017 bombing in Manchester which killed 22 people and injured 119. These are just a few of the most notable Islamic-inspired attacks in the EU.
Nor should we expect the Muslim immigrants to become the Enlightened multiculturalists the EU elite bureaucrats believe they will any time soon. Steyn again: “The famous United Nations statistic from a 2002 report — more books are translated into Spanish in a single year than have been translated into Arabic in the last thousand — suggests at the very minimum an extraordinarily closed world.”
As columnist Patrick Buchanan noted in his bestselling book, The Death of the West (2002):
Unlike America, Europe’s nations are homogeneous. They have no history of welcoming strangers or assimilating immigrants. These people of different colors, creeds, and cultures will also be arriving in Europe as its nation-states are crumbling.
Indeed, Pope Benedict XVI urged the European Union to acknowledge Europe’s Christian heritage in the European Constitution. In 2006, he stated, “by valuing its Christian roots, Europe will be able to give a secure direction to the choices of its citizens and peoples, it will strengthen their awareness of belonging to a common civilization…” The multiculturalist EU bureaucrats rejected this request by the Pope. Pope Benedict strongly criticized this, saying that Europe was committing a form of “apostasy of itself.”
Regardless of one’s position on Christianity, if the EU acknowledged its own Christian past in its constitution, it might have created an additional bulwark against the drive to make the Islamic country Turkey an EU member nation. Likewise, it would have raised questions on the continual push for more Muslim immigration into Europe. Needless to say, it was precisely for such reasons that the globalist EU elites rejected this acknowledgement of a common European Christian heritage.
By contrast, the “extraordinarily closed world” of Islam that Steyn described stepped up its invasion of the EU. The Syrian Civil War, which started in 2011, created 4,800,000 refugees by one count. According to the BBC, the EU’s external border force, Frontex, estimated that more than 1,800,000 of immigrants (primarily from Syria, Iraq, and Afghanistan) illegally crossed into Europe in 2015 alone.
Germany’s Chancellor Angela Merkel decided to hasten the demographic replacement of her own people by agreeing to welcome 800,000 Syrian refugees in 2015, with a commitment to accept another 500,000. Chancellor Merkel was ostensibly elected as a “conservative,” yet shows little desire to conserve her own nation.
This Muslim refugee flow into the EU caused consternation and outrage among many Europeans. Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orban, who was elected on the conservative Fidesz Party, urged the refugees not to come, stating “I think we have a right to decide we do not want a large number of Muslim people in our country.”
This Muslim refugee crisis
helped trigger the “Brexit” (or British exit from the EU by voter
referendum). Under the Schengen treaty
in the EU, many of these refugees are potentially able to cross over into many
other European countries because of border-free agreements. Many British voters correctly viewed the
arrival of so many Muslims into Europe at once as yet another large immigration
problem for them as well.
Brexit as Breakthrough
The example of Brexit offers a glimmer of hope for the future of Europe. The Brexit campaign was ably lead by Nigel Farage and his nationalist UKIP party. The successful vote on June 23, 2016, to leave the EU stunned the world. It may well lead to what the late Sir James Goldsmith suggested in his book The Trap. He urged Europe to decentralize into its smallest nation-state components in order to resist anti-Western globalism. We may see this to some degree. Scottish Nationalists are already calling for another vote for their own independence. If Scotland left the U.K., it would likely strengthen immigration enforcement for the remaining U.K. members. (This is because the Scottish Nationalist Party, although strongly for independence, also strongly and paradoxically favors multiculturalism and open immigration.)
The Brexit vote also gave encouragement to Donald Trump supporters in America. Indeed, Mr. Trump ran on a very similar populist and nationalistic message, and it is no coincidence that Trump and Farage enjoy a strong friendship. President Trump even cheekily encouraged British Prime Minister Theresa May to appoint Nigel Farage as her ambassador to the United States (she declined).
President Trump’s first visit to Europe in May horrified the EU globalists and encouraged the European nationalist parties. Unlike the old nationalist parties of the 1930s, which fought amongst each other, the new nationalist parties are largely in agreement with one another. They are against the EU and mass Third World immigration while sharing respect for each other’s national heritage. Marine Le Pen’s National Front in France, the Freedom Party in Austria, Geert Wilders’ Party for Freedom in the Netherlands, and the Swiss People’s Party in Switzerland, are among the many that are growing in Europe.
In 2016, the Austrian Freedom Party came in second in the presidential election, making it their best election performance to date. Geert Wilders’ Party for Freedom picked up 5 seats in the 2017 Dutch general election, for a total of 20 seats in the Dutch Parliament, making it the second largest party.
In France, the much hoped for “Frexit” by nationalists stumbled with the election of a liberal “centrist” candidate, Emmanuel Macron. Macron is a former investment banker who worked in Socialist President Francois Hollande’s government. He was a member of the Socialist Party from 2006 to 2009. His defeat of Marine Le Pen, a staunch French nationalist and leader of the National Front Party, was seen as a setback against stopping the EU globalists.
Nevertheless, there are some encouraging signs for those who oppose the EU multicultural project. For starters, Mr. Macron had to run on an entirely new political party of his own creation, named “En Marche!” (or “Let’s Go!”). So loathed were the French Socialists for their support of open borders (among other policies) that Mr. Macron felt the need to create this new party to distance himself from his former Socialist colleagues. Next, the fact that a bold nationalist like Marine Le Pen received enough French votes to face off against Mr. Macron was a remarkable achievement for a candidate seen as too “extreme” not very long ago.
Mrs. Le Pen received over a third of the vote, and won a significant 44 percent of young voters ages 18-24. By contrast, Mr. Macron received over 80 percent of the voters over the age of 65. A growing number of the young in France are receptive to the National Front message, whereas the globalist EU message is largely favored by an older generation of French voters.
Mr. Macron lost the working class vote in France (receiving 47 percent of that vote). This was best illustrated by his being booed by the workers at a Whirlpool factory in France that he attempted to visit. By contrast, those very same workers cheered Marine Le Pen.
The large number of African and Muslim voters that have been allowed in over the past few decades boosted Macron’s winning margin (and indeed they have this effect for most of the politicians of the EU who support open borders). These voters tend to vote as a bloc for the most open-borders candidates available.
Le Pen’s National Front party is likely to gain seats during the June elections. The great question for French nationalists, and indeed for all the European nationalist parties, is whether they will have enough time to wake up their own people and make the necessary course corrections after years of EU globalist policies. ■