The very thing that the EU rejects is the key to its survival
No one has ever said ‘I have a very particular idea of Europe’, and it is exactly this that dooms the European project to failure.
No one has ever said ‘I have a very particular idea of Europe’, and it is exactly this that dooms the European project to failure.
Nations are not built on abstracts, on rational enlightenment values, nor on imposed governmental structures; nation-states are built always on a shared sense of identity, an idea of belonging to a certain place, a certain nation, a certain home. The EU rejects ideas of national identity, of belonging to here or there; it instead sets out a utopian vision of an enlightened people; home-less, root-less intellectuals ‘freed’ from the constraints of belonging arbitrarily to this or that group.
You cannot build a nation on enlightenment principles; a belief in equality distinguishes you from no one and groups you with nothing. Humans have an inbuilt need to be part of a group, to belong to someone and have them belong to you. We are social creatures, and spending time with other members of our tribe – those we identify with – fulfils us more than anything else.
Usually, groups are centred around shared blood or kinship, or membership to a tribe; but in the West recently, a most extraordinary thing has occurred. No longer is membership determined by blood relation, but by a shared home, the belonging to a specific place, a tie to the area that we are in and that we own. Why else do we idealise the English countryside, and why else do we feel such stirrings of patriotism about our green and pleasant land?
It’s strange to think that a species that was for so long, and until so recently purely nomadic, would long as we do for home, and home is the fundamental difference between the American experiment and that of the EU; Americans are united by their shared home, by their collective belonging, and they recite daily their shared myth of origin. Us Europeans have no such myth; nothing to bridge the differences in language, culture and custom to get us to live under one identity such as the Americans have largely succeeded in doing.
The EU will never create a shared European myth; it will not even try. It is an institution which fundamentally disregards and misunderstands identity and its effects, and outright rejects the concept of the Nation-state.
The EU can only bring together the states of Europe through a mistrustful greed and recognition that
EU investments are good for the economy. The EU will be ditched as soon as it is expedient; it commands no loyalty, it marshals no belonging, and its citizens will not defend it. And why should they? The EU is not theirs, the EU is no ones – it doesn’t answer to us and it doesn’t reflect what we are; it neither expresses what is common about ourselves or binds us together in any meaningful emotional way. It is simply an ugly bureaucracy that squats overhead.
The EU has no response to nationalism and no weapons with which to defeat populism. It lost the EU referendum because it doesn’t have a powerful counter-narrative to the British origin myth; it has no claim on our hearts and on our loyalties. It seeks to abolish our identities and to replace them with nothing so as to leave us as atoms whirling around in a tight container of its own porous borders.
The EU’s response to the innate human longing for home, for friends and for family is weaponized nihilism; a nothing, a no one and nowhere. This image of humanity is one that tears out our hearts and leaves us as nothing but drones; to provide GDP for the superstate and to listen unquestioningly to the EU commission.
The EU is dismissive of democracy because it is dismissive of those who take part in that process; it does not recognise them as neighbours, as a brother or a sister, but only as vague and annoying beings who are separate from itself, and don’t know what’s good for them.
As aforementioned, the only Nation-state that has successfully established itself out of such a mix of cultures, languages and beliefs similar to modern Europe has been the United States of America. The
USA formed itself out of a melting pot of cultures and peoples, out of criminals, a ‘huddled masses’ of peasants. The EU doesn’t quite have that level of challenge with the relatively peaceful and law-abiding citizens that inhabit Europe outside of France. The Eurocrats could learn valuable lessons from the American experience of Nation-building; lessons they will, of course, refuse to learn due to their ideology, and lessons that the EU needs in order to survive long term.
If the EU is to survive, it must build – in spite of itself – not just a federal Europe but a new Nation-state complete with a national identity, a myth of origin and a powerful justification of its own existence similar to the American cries of liberty that interweave themselves among the creation myth of the USA.
For a long-lasting and stable union, for a truly European state, it must create a European high culture, a shared language, and a shared identity. I have heard it said that Europe can only be united through the Vatican; and with that I am inclined to agree, since religion is the only thing that can transcend national identity with its emotional and conceptual power, and even then it is a close-run thing.
It is a lovely irony that the things Eurocrats most despise are the very enablers of their own ambition, and I am glad that they will never write the European myth, forge the European identity or invoke the overarching power of God to unite the disparate peoples of this continent.
