President Donald J. Trump and Secretary General Jens Stoltenberg during a NATO family photo | July 11, 2018 (Official White House Photo by Shealah Craighead)
Sumantra Maitra explains to readers of The Federalist that EU leaders, mostly Germans, are determined to further centralize the bloc in an effort to compete with what they call the empires of the United States, China, India and Russia. Meanwhile, within the bloc, ancient nation states such as the U.K., Poland, Hungary, and others, aren’t interested in surrendering their sovereignty to achieve what are mainly German goals. Given the history of the continent, that is entirely understandable. Maitra writes (abridged):
Britain should have been out of the EU imperium by now. But as the latest BBC documentary shows, British Prime Minister Theresa May destroyed the negotiation from within.
The European Union, meanwhile, is not even pretending anymore, with Orwellian tweets that demonstrate how cultist the organization has become since it was formed to increase free trade and institutionalize peace within the continent. Meanwhile, a section of delusional American liberals, and even some conservatives still mentally living in the early 1990s, think the EU is a benevolent ally, despite all evidence to the contrary, from trade fines to military buck-passing. Yet the EU leaders are not even hiding their imperial ambitions.
“The world is developing into one not of nation-states, but of empires. China is an empire. India is an empire. The U.S. is an empire. We need to create a European Union that is capable of defending our interests,” said Guy Verhofstadt, the cantankerous leader of the liberal group of the EU Parliament. He supports further centralization.
The same sentiment is prevalent in Germany, the EU’s driving power. “Europe must reposition itself to stand up to the challenges posed by its three big global rivals, China, Russia and the U.S.,” The Guardian reported Angela Merkel saying before the elections.
At the end of the day, the United States is, like the United Kingdom, a maritime, free-trading great power and nation-state, and will inevitably come into conflict with an imperial entity trying to set rules. But even when there’s acceptance between Euro-conservatives about the EU’s imperial designs, there’s no uniformity.
The Poles and Hungarians want to change the EU from within, towards a more federal direction with more national sovereign rights.
The British want to break the EU and quit.
“It turns out that President Trump is more reliable for conservatives than the Bushes or John Major,” Hazony ( Dr. Yoram) said. (to Maitra) “You don’t have to agree with everything he says. But on the big things, we’ve learned that Trump is willing to stand up to China and the European Union, which is much more than can be said of previous conservative leaders. And he’s willing to aggressively safeguard the religious traditions of his nation in the face of a no-holds-barred onslaught by progressives. These are things we haven’t seen before.”
“There will obviously be a liberal backlash,” Hazony said. “The control of the political culture by the liberal establishment is deeply entrenched, and it will take time to restore a real two-party democracy in which conservatives have legitimate place in the public sphere.”
Nowhere will it be more visible than the capitals of conservative countries, with heavily funded liberal groups and losing electorates engaging in “resistance,” whether in Europe or the United States. But the institutional and financial support for conservative rethinking and revival is coming, even when the movement in this direction is still terribly slow.
it will lead to a clash of ideas between one side that believes in borders and nation-states (which doesn’t prevent cooperation between different nations), and the other side believes in an ever-consolidating, borderless liberal march, destroying every single nation and its individual character.
“Independent nations cannot co-exist with a liberal imperialism that is unwilling to recognize the legitimacy of national independence and national borders,” Hazony noted.
Read more here.
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