Alain de Benoist on the European Union and the future of Europe

from an interview with the Italian site Girodivite:

Europe isn't doing too well … How to heal it?

Let's stop speaking of “Europe” when we want to speak about the European Union already! Europe is a bimillennial civilizational, historic, and geographic reality. The European Union is a recent institutional creation, which is entirely different. Moreover one of the criticisms that one can make about the European Union could be having discredited Europe in a way. “Europe” appeared as a solution to nearly all problems a few decades ago. Today, it has become a problem that adds itself to the others.

That said, it's true that the European Union isn't doing well. It's the least one can say. I'm not a doctor and I don't have the solution to “heal” it. If the remedy existed, it would have been discovered a long time ago. But at least one can seek to establish a diagnosis. The European Union constructed itself in spite of common sense from the beginning. It privileged commerce and finance in relation to politics and culture, while it should have done the opposite. It constructed itself starting from the top, while it should have constructed itself from the bottom, with respect to the principle of subsidiarity. It established itself without consulting the peoples (and the rare times where it did so, they didn't take their opinions into account). It enlarged itself too rapidly, at the risk of becoming ungovernable. It was incapable of fixing its own geopolitical limits and even of determining its reason to exist. Instead of desiring to create a power, it desired to create a zone of free exchange and a market. It endowed itself with a single currency by willingly ignoring the structural differences existing in the different member states. Finally, it proved itself to be incapable of facing the migratory challenge. The result is that it is powerless today, almost bankrupt and nearly totally paralyzed.

Facing this situation, there are two possible solution: retreat to the scale of nations or the creation of “another Europe.” The second is my pious wish today. The first has the advantage of preserving at a lesser level things that cannot exist on a greater level, but it doesn't resolve another problem, namely the need to have a power on a continental level allowing us to exist in a multipolar world.

Today the new element is that the European Union is in the process of breaking up. The establishment of the Euro already created a North – South disconnection, between the “rich” countries of the northern part and the “poor” southern countries, who have suffered the full force of the dramatic consequences of liberal austerity programs. The migratory crisis now reveals a second disconnection, no longer between North and South, but between East and West, because the partisans of a return to borders rally around the countries of the Visegrád group today. I have a hard time seeing the European Union survive this double rupture. Likewise, “Euroscepticism” is rising everywhere, to such a point that one asks oneself if it won't be in the majority following the next European elections. So things are in the process of moving substantially. We are only at the start of a process.