Europe, Quo Vadis?

1. While national parliaments everywhere in Europe are losing their essence of popular representation and democratic control over government action, the worst fate, however, is reserved for the European Parliament (EP), which has never fulfilled the function of a parliamentary assembly worthy of the name.

For both structural and fortuitous reasons, the results of the European elections that will be known in June will leave the political scene unchanged in Europe, where the ruling classes have disappeared into submission and abdication, creating the appearance of a democratic entity incapable of defending its existential interests, and at a dramatic moment for the fates of the planet.

Articles 223-234 and 314 of the Treaty on the Functioning of the European Union (TFEU) establish that the right of legislative initiative, the constitutional essence of any parliament, does not belong to the EP, except for completely marginal matters.

Of course, goodness gracious, the EP is allowed to participate in the legislative process, but the driving force of lawmaking is vested in the Commission, an unelected body removed from the assessment of citizens and answerable solely to the oligarchs who appointed it. The European Parliament can also require the Commission to submit a legislative proposal, but it does so if it considers it appropriate, and in any case, laws only come into force if they are approved by the Council, i.e., by governments, on the basis of a balance of power. Translating all of this into political language, European legislation serves the interests of the dominant countries – Germany and France, while the rest are limited to some choreographed finesse, always eventually buckling even against their own structural interests.

According to the TFEU, accession of a new member state, economic and trade agreements, revision of treaties, choice of foreign and security policy, electoral procedures, and other minor issues require the opinion of Parliament. However, an opinion, positive or negative, remains an opinion, and so the Commission and Council always make a decision, and only if Germany and France – the notorious Directory – agree.

Moreover, the deception becomes sophisticated, as the European Parliament can instead legislate entirely on its own composition, the functions of deputies, commissions of inquiry, the appointment of an unknown mediator (that’s right!), and other non-essential matters.

On paper, the European Parliament can approve a vote of no confidence in the Commission, but in reality, a complex procedural process and political expediency prevent this. Finally, the political parties of dominant countries vote together when national interests are at stake, making no distinction between right and left, while this is not the case for the parties of gregarious, naive, or scattered countries.

As for the European Central Bank (ECB, a private bank), the most important body of the European structure, its charter defines it as independent, although, as it is trivial to note, it serves the interests of the markets (certainly not the citizens) and the Bundesbank, that is, the German oligarchy and, secondarily, the French oligarchy. Moreover, unlike other central banks and the Federal Reserve itself, the ECB does not set among its goals economic growth and full employment, but solely inflation control, in order to permanently protect private finance, an expression of which it actually is.

Form, as is often the case, is also content, and so it is no coincidence that the founding treaties (the aforementioned TFEU and TEU, the Treaty on European Union) are unintelligible. They can only be understood by the connoisseur and experienced lawyer: hundreds of articles, abstruse and full of references to other texts, deliberately created to prevent the average citizen from understanding their meaning. Goal accomplished, no one reads them.

2. A specter is indeed haunting Europe (in fact, the entire West), but it is not the communism of Marx’s and Engels’s 1848 Manifesto, even in its unorthodox versions or softened by social democratic economism (Keynesianism or neo-Keynesianism). Today, this specter is called confusion, the very one that stirs up the nihilism of the subordinate ruling classes who, in exchange for careers and privileges, have bowed to the ideology of permanence, while the dominant oligarchies shape mass consciousness by maneuvering politics, media and academia, service class strata insensitive to injustice, exploitation, and alienation.

On a political and increasingly on an economic level, the European Union is now nothing more than a tacit appendage of the American Empire.

Through military occupation, the US controls the continent and sterilizes any hypothetical path to sovereignty if any internal conditions ever existed, which in turn, it must be said, is not the case. A single currency without a real government is insufficient to create a state. The chimerical European Federation is a myth born from the pen of science fiction writers, which survives only thanks to the ideological corruption and self-serving naivety of experts and professional politicians from the South, periodically absorbed by careless people: the myth has never been codified in any document or mentioned by any authoritative leader of the continent since the Messina conference.

In an abstract hypothesis, the existence of an international entity combining economic power (which Europe still partially possesses) with effective political sovereignty could enhance the multipolar dimension of the planet. However, this entity does not exist in nature, is not envisioned in the Treaties, and will in any case oppose the European-Atlantic financial oligarchies. Its unfeasibility is based on exogenous, US subjugation, and endogenous causes, an enslaved technocracy-generating institutional hybridism (neither Federation nor Confederation), and a deliberate teleological void.

The latter, in turn, is a consequence of the mythological invention of the European people, whose existence is a prerequisite for the origin of a sense of belonging to the same community. Countries are not built around a table. They are the result of complex historical evolution, language, customs, blood spilled, wars won or lost, economic and social development, and much more – all essential and fundamental factors of a nation. And Europe is a continent rich in values, history, and diversity, but it is certainly not a nation.

The daily disagreements and contradictory economic policies that reduce the well-being of European citizens confirm the emptiness of their identity. Not a single real Union will ever materialize. The hypothetical governments of the leading countries (Germany and France), illuminated on the “road to Damascus,” wanted to overcome the shadow line by proposing a truly pro-European path – that is, a Federation operating on the fundamental principle of solidarity, which in turn implies the transfer of resources from the rich countries to the lagging ones, and would be swept away popularly.

Berlin, in particular, is working on a strategy alien to any community viewpoint, subordinating the entire Union to its nationalist interests. If the success of German industry is the result of ingenuity and organization, individual European choices based on Germany’s mercantilist characteristics are, however, an important component (too weak a currency, senseless austerity policies, and so on).

Germany oversees decisions made in Brussels and Strasbourg through a dense network of connections and influence with the European Commission, top Eurozone officials, MEPs from satellite countries (Austria, Holland, Scandinavia, and Eastern Europe), indirect threats to highly indebted countries, and much more.

Joseph Stiglitz (1) and Ashoka Modi (2) note in two explanatory books that since the introduction of the single currency and despite (timid) corrective measures taken after 2008, European incomes remain well below what they would have achieved under the previous system, before the euro. In Germany’s view, the Nobel Prize winner notes, all countries should accumulate trade surpluses and savings as if it were an ethical value. But beyond the instrumentality of values, it is arithmetic that refutes the fact that everyone can record surpluses. In this unhealthy scheme, deficit countries are destined to be at the mercy of structural crises, falling demand, social deflation, and unemployment. The cause of the so-called century-long stagnation is indeed weak demand, which in the European debate – along with Germany’s anomalous trade surplus – persists implicitly compared to the supposed burden of public debt, which outside the euro would find a smooth path to recovery, while the cage of the single currency prevents structurally different economies from resorting to the fluctuations in parities and inflation that have always been the physiological cure for economies with different levels of productivity.

The eurozone, however, is not just a sterile territory of fixed exchange rates between different economic systems; it is a method of economic, social, and political management functional to extractive and repressive capitalism in a world of labor. Even professional illusionists recognize these anomalies, but in their view, therapy would be to strengthen the system, as if the addict could be cured by administering increasing doses of the drug.

3. In conclusion, the European project is the result of French suffering (Mitterrand) faced with the inevitability of revitalizing Germany that has grown to its limits since its reunification after the fall of the Wall. First through the Community and then through the Union, Paris deluded itself that it could use German might in a network of perpetual political and economic negotiations, while the dominant oligarchies, despite Parisian paranoia, sought the main thing. The EU has thus become a powerful instrument of neoliberal consolidation. Without the Union ‘s tax restrictions, no European country would have digested such deeply anti-social policies so easily.

Surprisingly, it is no accident that the intangible European leadership, oppressed by regressive narcissism and immeasurable blindness, has minimal awareness of this decline, while the EU – whose population will shrink from 7 to 5 percent of the global population in 12 to 15 years – is relegated to the periphery of the world with American (falling), Chinese or other (growing) characteristics, but in any case, no longer European.

It is also easy to predict that the EU officials who will replace the exhausted von der Leyen and her colleagues in the summer, if their attempts to hold onto those seats fail, will be chosen for their penchant for obedience rather than their competence. In their case, it will also be a matter of blind obedience, even at the cost of contributing to the destruction of Europe’s values and prosperity.

Moreover, weeks before the vote, the debate lacks thoroughness. Key issues are ignored, no one thinks about the masochistic reasons that drive the ruling classes to obey imperial directives that are looting whatever remains of European assets (in favor of US corporations ), erecting a self-destructive wall on relations between countries, which until yesterday were mutually beneficial with China, accepting anti-Russian belligerent expansionism with self-inflicted results, in order to hide the responsibility of insensitive diplomacy in the face of Israel’s inhumane slaughter in Gaza. Sooner or later, as history teaches, another ruling class will appear on the European stage, but not this time.

Finally, at the global level, the minority status imposed by the Atlantic bloc prevents Europe from projecting itself into the Euro-Asian dimension (in a complementary and not alternative form to Euro-Atlanticism), in a perspective that should be considered natural in the continental mass of non-continuity between Asia and Europe. It is a horizon full of exceptional opportunities, a generator of peace, stability, and development for many countries, which Europe could look upon with enthusiasm at the moment of the Soviet Union collapse. Unfortunately, this was prevented by its axiological weakness, the inconsistency of its ruling classes, and the impressive power of its ally host. In light of all this, the European elections are not a political event, but rather a fragment of news.

(1) J. Stiglitz, The Euro: How a Common Currency Threatens the Future of Europe, Einaudi, 2017.

(2) Ashoka Modi, EuroTragedy: A Drama in Nine Acts, Ed. Castelvecchi, 2020.