Nationalism and Trans-Nationalism
This week’s collapse of the Dutch government and the electoral setback for the current President of France have highlighted the advance of right-wing nationalism in Western Europe. Both right-wing nationalist parties in the Netherlands and France have increased their share of the vote. Other similar parties have become more popular in other European countries. Why?
Some have suggested that nationalism is coming to the fore as a result of the collapsing euro. Violent riots and mass demonstrations in Greece, Italy and Spain, not to mention the economic and social difficulties in Ireland, Portugal and other much-neglected European countries like Croatia, Hungary and Latvia have taken place. Unemployment rates of 20-25% are not uncommon in such countries, as are youth unemployment rates of 50% +. All of this is occurring at a time of austerity, made necessary by the indebtedness that has come from the pillaging of such countries by political and financial elites, whose activities, especially in Greece and Italy, would appear to be criminal. Mass unemployment, austerity and outright poverty are, it is said, breeding grounds for right-wing nationalism.
However, beyond these symptoms, there are the real causes of extreme nationalism in the trans-national EU.
Firstly, there is the general dramatic lack of democracy in the EU. The example of this is the euro currency. This was imposed by a political elite, despite dire warnings from economists and bankers, on several EU countries. This was despite the obvious fact that the ‘one size fits all’ euro was quite unsuitable for the radically diverse economies of so many countries. Without fiscal and indeed political union, monetary union makes no sense. Only politicians with their top-down ideology, trampling on national sovereignty, could not see this, or rather could refuse to admit to their electorates that their trans-national ‘dream’ could only work by destroying national sovereignty.
The second cause is the fact that for years, in some cases for decades, the political elites of EU countries deregulated their banking and service sectors, in the style of Wild West American capitalism. In this way, trans-national banking barons were free to behave with reckless irresponsibility and indebt tens of millions of citizens, to them serfs, who would never be able to pay off their debts. The result of this feudalism was the debt crisis which led to the banking crash of 2008, the current financial crisis and recession all over and beyond Europe. Similarly, in the UK, as in several other EU countries, many services, such as water, electricity, gas and transport companies, often trans-national, were and are also largely unregulated monopolies, whose main aim is to provide shareholders with generous dividends, instead of providing customers with up to standard services.
Thirdly, there is the vast Muslim immigration into Europe of the last fifty years, under the mythical pretext of ‘multiculturalism’. Most of this immigration was allowed by European governments without ever consulting their peoples as to whether they desired to see large numbers of immigrants who would never integrate into European culture coming to their countries. Again, there has been a democratic deficit. Unfortunately, this democratic deficit has ended up producing a fanatical and evil mass murderer in Non-EU Norway, who has actually claimed that in wiping out what he saw as members of the future political elite, he was rendering his country a service.
At every step over the last fifty years European political elites have, either by stupidity or else by design, failed to consult their peoples on issues of vital importance. They have failed to ask the peoples they are supposed to represent whether they wished to see their native countries turned into the homogenous and impersonal cog-wheels of their trans-national European Union Empire. However, if you take away democracy (i.e. sovereignty), because you want to create an empire, then you create nationalism as a reaction. Extremes breed extremes. The political elites of Europe sowed the wind of trans-nationalism. They may now be reaping the whirlwind of nationalism. It is their own fault.
