Gigantism and Europe's far-right transformation
Writing for The Guardian, Jon Henley notes that Europe’s centre fears nationalist wave after AfD victory but only has itself to blame. Jon explains how AfD’s win in Saxony-Anhalt should not be overstated yet it still is a telltale sign of things to come. The trends are there and they are painting a clear picture.
Already in 2019, I wrote that the extreme right is the new right. Yes, I see the future in its essential form because by thinking things through I understand the internal structure of phenomena, the “physics” if you will, beyond the day-to-day particularities. When I say something, I have considered it carefully. I do not do tricks and gimmicks.
My argument then, as it is now, is that liberalism, expressed by this political centre, effectively is a luxury that society entertains under conditions of abundance. It stops being appealing when the constraints appear to be tighter, at which point some form of intolerance takes centre stage.
Liberalism in day-to-day politics has a strong correlation with political correctness and tokenistic virtue. It is performative because it sounds smart and caring. The European Union, in particular, has a clear rhetoric of moral superiority in its touting of the so-called “European values”, which are enshrined in Article 2 of the Treaty on European Union and then elaborated in Article 3, as well as all sorts of everyday self-righteous talk.
Virtue signalling, however, does not have strong principles as its actors are principally concerned with staying in power. My follow-up argument, then, which I shall elaborate at length herein, is that those who today shed crocodile tears over the drift towards the far-right will blithely be implementing far-right policies tomorrow, having performed the requisite mental gymnastics.
Short-term thinking and disconcerted action
The radicalisation we are experiencing now is the natural evolution of the 2008+ financial crisis. We have been moving from a crisis of money to a crisis of values. This is because the financial crisis is the cumulative result of many smaller frailties of ethical character, which revolve around short-term thinking with its attendant greed.
From the perspective of decision-making, short-term thinking necessarily engenders disconcerted action. The consequences of prior actions must be undone or otherwise revised by posterior actions. It is the “debt” they create, which may be measured in monetary terms though can also be understood as legacy software that was never refactored, as policies with perverse incentives that were never thought through, as wants that were decoupled from one’s capacity to fully realise them. This is true for individuals who act in a haphazard fashion and are thus not in control of their workflow, as it is for groups of people and official entities.
Concerted action consists in logically coherent and pragmatic longer-term sequencing. One action flows from the other, creating the benign conditions for the next, such that the flow is uninterrupted and the ulterior end, as originally envisaged, is met.
Disconcerted action, by contrast, is reduced to opportunism. It is about kicking the can down the road and rolling the problem over to somebody else. This “somebody else” may be a future version of the same agent of action or another agent of action altogether. In dithering, the problems accumulate and the solutions to them are no longer easy to implement without incurring painful losses. Again, true for individuals and for groups.
Concretely, disconcerted action on the political front creates legal-institutional arrangements that amplify tensions, turning power impulses into systemic pressures and thus local shocks into global failures. Put differently, there is a transmission mechanism from elementary patterns of behaviour to broader phenomena.
Money fits into this scheme as a figment of a culture’s disposition. It is an instituted representation of its aspirations. Through the processes of money creation, money distribution, and money accumulation, we discern the underlying beliefs of the given society. In light of short-term thinking, money-seeking takes the form of individualistic profiteering, of making as much as possible right now at the expense of others, especially “others” in the future sense. The logic is the same for the distribution and accumulation of money, which favours present gains no matter their potential pernicious costs.
Against this backdrop, we can understand the overarching market incentive of short-term conduct as “you want to jump off the train which is on a coalition course as late as possible”. The reason is that there is profit to be made in the meantime and there is no interest in preventing the crash altogether by toning down or otherwise redoing individual patterns of behaviour: those are not profitable in the immediate time frame.
The European Union’s sovereignty mismatch
Which brings me to the European Union’s disconcerted action in the post-2008 world. What happened in the EU since then is a series of half-baked reforms that did not address the design flaws of the Union in terms of economic governance.
To this day, we have a monetary function, conferred to the European Central Bank, without a counterparty fiscal function, which would be given to a European Treasury under the authority of a fully fledged ministry of finance.
By extension, we do not have a European government, but a bureaucratic body, the European Commission, which fleshes out and implements the guidelines that an intergovernmental institution, the European Council, prescribes. The European Parliament is secondary in significance and in no way capable of escaping the architectural constraints it exists in.
These halfhearted reforms were conceived and implemented in accordance with the historical incrementalism of the European integration process. This is the mode of conduct whereby one problem is fixed by creating two new ones, so that those can be addressed in turn, always with the intent of shifting the locus of power towards the notional European centre. The post-2008 reforms compounded what already was a labyrinthine organisation.
In effect, the European Union is a monster of complexity. Its processes are hard to understand and harder to follow. Through its very constitution as a political order it obfuscates whatever answer to the questions of “who governs?” and “where is the locus of power?”.
Its decision-making effectively denies the sovereignty of peoples because of the inherent mismatch between the scopes of application of the Union as a whole and of national interests in isolation.
There are rules for the system as a whole without the commensurate accountability structures. Accountability, in its expression as representative democracy, only exists in full and in direct form along national lines. There is no equivalent to it for the European Commission or indeed the European Council when it is acting as a whole.
The sovereignty mismatch means that we have governance at the EU level without government, state sovereignty without popular sovereignty. To have democracy, we need both. The EU as such is not a democracy, but a technocracy with severally contributed albeit never jointly established national democratic inputs.
Unaccountability and the gigantism of “more Europe”
This very structure gives rise to an intellectual elite. It comprises the diplomats and apparatchiks who understand the inner workings of the Union and who operate behind its closed doors. The policies they set in place function as quasi-permanent directives that no national government can effectively deviate from and, by extension, no singular sovereign people may contest in full.
The elites occupy specific milieux, such as Brussels’ European quarter. Because of the social bubbles they live in, they make for natural allies of big interests, in what effectively is expressed as an ideology of gigantism. This is summed up in the motto “more Europe”. Whatever challenge we are facing, “more Europe” is the solution, which is about another transfer of power from the national level to the hands of the Europeanists.
The rationale of gigantism is that bigger is always better. By handling things directly at the European level, the thinking goes, we avoid all the inefficiencies of having many governments do what they are there for, namely, to decide on behalf of their people. National will formation is thus construed in functional terms as a matter of impracticality, decoupled from its normative components of legitimacy and accountability.
Gigantism has its own all-consuming logic, once thought through in full. For whatever we may now think of as a national particularity such as, say, schooling, we can always come up with a Europeanist interpretation of it by which the European centre is the template-maker and enforcer of uniformity, all in the name of “efficiency”.
This is, indeed, anticipated in the ancient myth of Procrustes. The man wants to eliminate the “inefficiency” of diversity among people. If we are all different, then one size cannot fit all. This applies to the clothes we wear, but is figuratively true about the activities we do, the preferences we have, and so on. But if, Procrustes thinks, everybody can be made the exact same size then we are working towards “efficiency” as then one size will fit all. The myth has it that Procrustes places each person on a bed, which serves as the frame of reference for the target size. Those who are smaller than the bed are stretched to fit it. And those who are bigger are mutilated accordingly.
The myth of Procrustes is an ancient insight into a perennial mistake of the governors who think that they can control everything centrally. It also is a story of cruelty and abuse, as that is what happens when you dismiss normativity in pursuit of “efficiency”.
The jingoism in Eastern Europe and the militarist rhetoric
The European Union is an underachiever on the global stage relative to its economic weight. It cannot, for example, control a small country like Israel, to make it do what it purports to believe (because what they claim is not what they actually want, given that actions speak louder than “strong condemnations”). Similarly, it has no leverage in the Middle East more broadly, so it is subject to the energy shocks coming out of Iran and the Arab world, as well as the capricious power plays of the American administration, owning to their strong dependency on US energy.
Muslim sovereignty is emerging stronger than ever. Iran has demonstrated that it can hold its own against the Western empire. The Mecca agreement reflects the culmination of a longer process towards self-governance of the region by the countries that compromise it. Not only are the Americans losing their grip on power, but the Westerners in general are adapting to the rapidly developing multipolar world.
What the EU has been trying to do in recent years is to find a niche by positioning itself as a counterweight to Russia and then to China. Towards the latter, it implements all sorts of impediments to trade. As for the former, it has since Euromaidan been cultivating Russophobia which culminates in lucrative contracts for the makers of weapons.
The jingoism in Eastern Europe draws from the historical memory of nations bordering Russia, though uses them as a pretext to give a new power impulse to the otherwise underperforming European industry. Industrialists know they cannot compete in market terms, so they decide via the aforementioned gigantism to set up trade barriers and then to shift business to the war machine.
Ursula von der Leyen and Kaja Kalas, among others, are gung-ho about the war in Eastern Europe, claiming that Ukraine is winning. This is the narrative that justifies the continued transfer of treasure to the coffers of the industrialists. Money is nominally sent to Ukraine when in reality it is cycled back into European industry. The argument is that “helping Ukraine” is how we let it win decisively the war it is supposed to be winning already. How exactly a country is winning when it is losing territory and is now set for an extremely harsh winter is the kind of knowingly false talk that future historian will have to reconcile with the facts.
What matters is that the EU is fully committed to the grift of militarism which is, once again, a short-term measure to cover its structural weaknesses.
Preparing the far-right transformation
Due to its already turbocharged militarist movements, the gradual transformation of EU gigantism from nominally liberal to effectively far-right is all but inevitable.
Parties like the AfD are purportedly pro-Russian. This I consider a tactical trick, akin to that of Georgia Meloni’s, or even the Molotov-Ribbentrop pact for an older example. The moment they are in a position of power they will understand that their interests are those of the industrialists and financiers which, in turn, run counter to the agenda of the Russian elite as well as the interests of other rising regional powers.
In light of the reemergence of Muslim sovereignty as well as Russian, Chinese, and Indian strength, the European gigantists, now invigorated by the far-right to drop their performative tolerance, will seek to redraw the map.
In phase one, they will continue antagonising Russia and China, ramping up the pressure however they can. In phase two, they shall collaborate closely with Israel in the Middle East, as it is the protectorate of the Western empire in the region, to provide a counter-balance to the alliance of Muslim nations.
The historical disputes between the Greeks and the Turks on the Aegean and the Eastern Mediterranean will be exploited in an attempt to (i) extend the already developing influence of Israel in Cyprus and the Balkans and (ii) draw a wedge between Northern Africa and the Middle East, effectively bringing the Mediterranean under tighter Western control.
Their goal is to change the momentum that is building up in the Middle East and the Muslim world more broadly, ranging from Morocco to South Asia. Currently the Mecca agreement covers Saudi Arabia, Pakistan, and Turkey, but there is no principal reason why it does not incorporate other countries such as Egypt and maybe even Iran, given the requisite political realignments. The trend is in that direction.
This is all happening because the European Union started out as a half-done political project. It tried to introduce political union through the back door, by instituting a purposefully incomplete monetary union (the euro) to then create the instability that would make “more Europe” a necessary step towards immediate relief. It now continues as what effectively is a colonialist gambit.
The dynamic is the same. The EU is playing the militarist game to ultimately shift even more power to the centre. A small group gains a lot in the process, but there is no public good involved. In turn, national sovereignty will be reduced to a shadow play of elections that change nothing, of governments that have no power, of citizens who are brainwashed to believe that they actually control the apparatus that determines their collective life.
Western interests are currently using the Eastern and Southern European periphery as colonies that provide a buffer zone as well as the potential of becoming battering rams. The far-right in the Western countries will only intensify this dynamic.
Anyone who paid attention to the whole PIGS fiasco of the 2010s (Portugal, Italy, Greece, and Spain, plus the obvious Nazi-style dehumanisation) knows that if even the so-called moderates were outright racist against Southern Europeans you have to be naive to think that the far-right will be any better. Additionally, you have to be clueless about how ruthless big interests are.
They will happily bring pain to the Greeks, for example, by involving them in some conflict on the side of Israel if that serves their Middle Eastern ambitions. Not because they care about the Greek national interest or, indeed, the Israeli people, but simply due to how they can service their goals by throwing nations to the fire.
The EU has the potential to become a monster of totalitarianism, all while paying lip service to the vaunted “European values”. This is what happens when disconcerted action becomes the norm: moral decay follows.
The elements are there and the far-right transition is going to become the organising principle that puts everything in place. If there is no staunch resistance against “more Europe” from the national governments, of which there are no signs right now, then the EU is destined to become a beast of epic proportions and thus to usher anew into the mainstream the brutality that characterised Western power politics in centuries past. “More Europe” will simply develop far-right characteristics and those who today pretend to worry about this turn will be its infamous apologists when the time comes.