Champions of this wicked contrivance like to trace its origin back to the Holy Roman Empire or, further back, imperial Rome. Such retrospective claims don’t hold up to scrutiny.
It’s counterproductive to look for any ancient precursors to today’s political Leviathans. American democracy shares nothing but the name with the Athenian kind. The French Republic doesn’t even remotely resemble the Roman one. And the adhesive of Charlemagne’s empire was Christianity, which in the EU is at best marginalised.
EU antecedents are much more recent than that. Here are a few quotations, and if I told you they came from Juncker, Delors or Barroso, you’d probably believe me.
“It is only on the basis of a republican federation of the leading countries that Europe will be able to fulfil itself completely… The economy will be organised in the broad arena of a European United States as the core of a worldwide organisation. The political form can only be a republican federation…”
Therefore, “recognition of every nation’s right to self-determination must be supplemented by the slogan of a democratic federation of all the leading nations, by the slogan of a United States of Europe.”
And “The peoples of Europe must regard Europe as a field for a unified and increasingly planned economic life…Without this supplementary slogan the fundamental problems of Europe must remain suspended in mid-air.”
Neither Juncker nor Delors nor Barroso said that but, if one of them was your guess, you were warm. For this lucid exegesis of European federalism came from their fellow socialist, Leon Trotsky.
You know, the chap who argued that his socialist colleague Joseph Stalin was too soft, an argument that Uncle Joe refuted with an ice axe. Unlike Stalin, who preferred deed to word, Trotsky had the gift of the gab and put it to good use on many subjects, including European federalism.
But he can’t claim all the credit for his deep grasp of the idea. For his socialist precursors Giuseppe Mazzini and Karl Kautsky (“… universal trade policy, a federal Parliament, a federal Government and a federal army – … the United States of Europe would possess… overwhelming power”) said all the same things long before Trotsky, and his socialist contemporary Adolf Hitler said similar things too.
Yet even they can’t claim to be pioneers. “I owe everything to Marx,” Hitler once said, and the notion of a single European state was one of the things he owed.
Both Marx and Engels detested a Europe of sovereign states. On the contrary, they saw a United States of Europe as a shining ideal for which to strive.
In the 1848 Communist Manifesto, they anticipated that “in place of the old local and national seclusion and self-sufficiency,” capitalism would lead to “intercourse in every direction, universal interdependence of nations.”
When in 1893 Engels was asked whether he envisaged a United States of Europe, he replied: “Certainly. Everything is moving in that direction. Our ideas are spreading in every European country.” He was half a century before his time, but the prescience is undeniable.
Why did the original socialists, along with their internationalist, nationalist and ‘democratic’ followers, favour a single European state? That question can be asked only by someone who finds it hard to strip socialism of its carefully cultivated virtual image.
Socialists like to portray their creed as a secular answer to Christianity, whereas in fact it’s its ghastly caricature. Those who insist on drawing parallels between Christianity and socialism always hate the former and love the latter.
Socialism’s kingdom begins and ends in this world. Politically, divested of its meaningless waffle about sharing and caring, socialism is all about transferring power from the periphery to the centre, from the individual to the omnipotent central state.
This is the diametrical opposite of the Catholic concept of subsidiarity, devolving power to the lowest sensible level. Socialism’s raison d’être is to concentrate all power at the highest possible level, the central state.
Whether it was called national, international or democratic, this is the only aim any kind of socialism has ever achieved everywhere it was tried in earnest. This is the only aim it has ever really wanted to achieve.
It stands to reason that socialists would loathe any traditional nation state, whatever method of government it uses. Whether it’s a republic like France, a republican federation like Switzerland or a constitutional monarchy like Britain, a nation state would have excreted and wrapped itself in an elaborate cocoon of custom, legality, culture, political ethos and whatnot.
Since in the West these derive from Christian antecedents, they are fundamentally at odds with socialism, which can only triumph by riding roughshod over such irritating obstacles. Hence its inherent urge to expand has to make it overstep national borders sooner or later.
The EU has much more in common with, say, Nazi Germany or Soviet Russia than with any organic Western nation state. The ineluctable logic of supranational universalism is coded into socialism’s DNA, and it’s those genes that gave birth to the EU monster.
“Workers,” wrote Marx and Engels in their Manifesto, “have no motherland”. One could replace ‘workers’ with ‘socialists’ or ‘Eurocrats’ with no detriment to the meaning.