carpoftruth

The disconnect between “peoples” and borders, inherent in the practice of self-determination, haunted Europe for the best part of a century. It was less the wars, cataclysmic as they were, than then fact that the wars themselves arose because there was no solution to the problem of many nations and “peoples” in the same relatively small space, with borders that did not reflect the distribution of populations. Thus, the wars of the twentieth century could not by definition “solve anything,” because the factors that had produced them still largely existed.

The atmosphere of exhaustion, fear and uncertainty that hung over Europe in the late 1940s, and led ultimately to the Washington Treaty, is often believed to be based on fear of the Soviet Union and its military power, but this is, at best, an oversimplification. Western leaders saw their countries and indeed their civilisations as desperately fragile, likely to fall into chaos at the first shock.

The Cold War, for all its occasional panics and the lunatic artificiality of its frontiers, was nonetheless a period of general stability. Decades of military integration, endless meetings and committees, joint exercises and personal contacts between leaders made the whole idea that these countries had ever fought each other seem bizarre. And for many smaller European countries, the presence of US troops was a guarantee less against the Soviet Union than troubles with their neighbours. .... In effect, a significant part of the European elite had decided that the nation-state, for all its theoretical attractions and its romantic image of self-determination, was simply too dangerous a construct to leave in place. One more nation-state war, and that would be the end of Europe. If certain things had to be sacrificed, so be it. Since it was scarcely possible to go back to the era of transnational Empires, it was necessary to go forward to some kind of supranational Europe (the details were hazy for a long time), where the differences among national groups could be contained, and further wars averted.

From this mistake followed another: that “divisive” factors such as history, language, currency, religion, national culture and so forth should be progressively downgraded and eventually done away with. The rich and colourful history of Europe needed to be sanitised because its events could be “instrumentalised” by “extremists” to deceive the common herd into wanting war again. “Mutual understanding” was to be encouraged by cultural and educational exchanges, although such exchanges had notably failed to prevent earlier wars, and anyway were mostly for the benefit of the middle classes: how an industrial worker in Stockport or Nancy was expected to benefit was never clear. The infamous Euro banknotes, totally anonymous as through dropped from Martian drones, are the most obvious example of this sanitising tendency.

The result, of course, was precisely to abandon large areas of culture and even everyday life to the control of the very forces elites were so frightened of. If an interest in history was to be encoded as a marker of the “extreme Right,” then very well, history would be recuperated by these very forces.

And this is where we are now. Of course this agenda can be and has been hijacked by those with cruder interests in profits and in a disposable and easily-moved workforce, but that kind of reductive thinking simply isn’t adequate to explain the excessive, and often pointlessly counter-productive, nature of so many initiatives from Brussels.

I expect the meme slogan of the campaign to be 'send a Carney to deal with a clown'