The EU Elections Highlights The Lack Of Meaning

Thomas Fazi has weighed in on the EU electoral “surge” of the “Right”—on X twitter and at UnHerd. These two versions of his views are largely complementary. He spends most of his time explaining why EU elections won’t make much difference—with some exceptions. In the end, he rightly concludes that the whole point of this process is precisely to prevent elections from making much of a difference. Fazi makes this explicit in the closing paragraph to his article:

Europe’s insurgent Right won’t change anything

Their elections were little more than a charade

All this means that, while we may expect a change of direction on some issues, these elections are unlikely to solve the pressing economic, political and geopolitical problems afflicting the EU: stagnation, poverty, internal divergences, democratic disenfranchisement and, perhaps most crucially for the continent’s future, the bloc’s aggressive Nato-isation and militarisation in the context of escalating tensions with Russia. In this sense, it’s hardly surprising that around half of Europeans didn’t even bother to vote. Ultimately, the EU was built precisely to resist populist insurgencies such as this one. The sooner populists come to terms with it, the better.

Now, importantly, Fazi does also mention in the course of his reflections social and cultural problems behind the entire European project—but without any indication of how he understands those problems. His focus is largely on the fact that the EU is not a democratic institution but rather one that is intended precisely to resist the idea of popular sovereignty that is the basis for liberal democracy as we typically conceive of it. In that sense the EU provides an institutional cover for what in America is accomplished by subterfuge through the Deep State. Not that there isn’t a European Deep State, simply that the EU provides an institutional cover that is lacking in the US.

Let’s turn to a truncated version of Fazi’s twitter piece:

Thomas Fazi @battleforeurope

The results of the European elections are likely to have a much more limited impact than people fear — or hope for. Here’s why (for dummies):

* The most obvious fact: the liberal-centrist bloc — i.e., the von der Leyen “super grand coalition” comprising the centre-right EPP, centre-left SD&D and liberal ER — has retained a majority, pointing to the likelihood of a second term for the incumbent president of the European Commission. Brace yourself.

* The bigger presence of right-populist parties … will struggle to turn their electoral success into political influence; on Europe’s most important challenges, it seems unlikely they will vote as a bloc.

* ...

* ...

* On an even more fundamental level, none of this will ever change, even if the European Parliament is granted full legislative powers; for the simple reason that there is no European demos for the Parliament to represent. Such a demos — a political community generally defined by a shared and relatively homogenous language, culture, history, normative system, etc. — still only exists at the national level. Indeed, the EU remains deeply fractured along national economic, geopolitical and cultural fault lines — and this looks unlikely to change.

* For all these reasons, these elections are unlikely to solve the pressing economic, political and geopolitical problems afflicting the EU: stagnation, poverty, internal divergences, democratic disenfranchisement and, perhaps most crucially for the continent’s future, the bloc’s aggressive NATO-isation and militarisation in the context of escalating tensions with Russia.

* The biggest impact of these election is likely to be the national fallout in certain countries — especially France, ...

* Ultimately, populists should never forget that constraining popular sovereignty and democracy — and resisting populist insurgencies such as the one we are currently witnessing across Europe — is in many ways the reason the EU was created in the first place. Those who believe in democracy and popular sovereignty should aim at tearing the EU down — not at reforming it.

Last edited7:54 AM · Jun 10, 2024

Now, Fazi appears to view the fundamental problem with the EU as its “constraining popular sovereignty and democracy”—an offense to those who “believe” in such concepts. This fundamental problem arises, he says, from the fact that there is no demos for the EU to represent. Such a demos, he says, is defined by, among other more or less important things, by a shared “culture” and “normative system”.

In a sense he’s right about the lack of a shared culture in modern Europe—and America, as an extension of the Europe that came into being following the great cultural upheavals following the Middle Ages. But the historical fact is that there used to be a shared culture in Western and most of Central Europe. It was known as Christendom—or Latin Christendom, if you will—and it provided a cultural and “normative” unity for Europe, for all the warlike travails of its tribal members.

European culture continues to live off the remains of that Christian cultural unity, despite the explicit rejection of such a cultural unity by the EU. What’s important to understand, from a political perspective, is that Christendom was not based on any notion of popular sovereignty. Instead, it was based on the understanding that God, as revealed in Jesus, is the sovereign. In this understanding, God’s sovereignty establishes, limits, and judges human sovereignty—whatever the institutions of each particular political entity may be.

Now, bear with me. There was a flaw at the heart of Latin Christendom, and that was the predominant influence of the Augustinian tradition of thought, which was based in fundamental respects on Neoplatonic philosophy (search the archives for plenty about that). The significance of this fact is that Platonic based philosophies have a built in bias toward a radical skepticism. You can read about all about how that developed in Latin Christendom in Etienne Gilson’s magisterial (and highly readable) The Unity of Philosophical Experience. Gilson, a devout Catholic, coyly avoids using the term “Augustinian tradition”, but that’s exactly what he traces, beginning in the Middle Ages and proceeding to the Englightenment and denouement in Kant’s agnosticism—a typically Augustinian non-solution to fundamental philosophical problems.

However, the roots of the modern dissolution had manifested themselves already by the fourteenth century with the rise of nominalism—a radical skepticism, although its adherents retained a “fideistic” attachment to Christianity that separated Christian faith from reason. It was precisely this form of thought that undergirded the Protestant Revolt, which insisted on individual judgment untethered from authority. It was precisely this breakdown in the unity of Latin Christendom that led to the rise of skeptical forms of political thought, especially the liberal form of thinking (classical, and later libertarian, in varoius forms) that led to the American and French Revolutions and the spread of Liberal Democracy as the dominant form of Western governance.

Note that the untethering of “faith”—now defined as a subjective certainty, rather than a reasonable belief—from reason led to the dissolution of the entire system of Western political thought based on God’s sovereignty. A “faith” that is not based in reason cannot support the concept of Divine sovereignty, and so in the system of Liberal Democracy we find that Man is sovereign. The tension here is how much weight to give to Man as a collective and how much to the Rulers. We see this tension in acute form everywhere in the West.

A further consequence of this dissolution of the bonds of faith and reason—brought about, ultimately, by the contradictions inherent in Platonic thought as mediated through the Augustinian tradition—is that all questions of good and evil are, ultimately, left to individual judgment, just like scriptural interpretation. Popular sovereignty and democracy, in such a climate of fundamental skepticism, can only in the end lead to social dissolution and one or another form of tyranny. In a real sense we can see this working out in the societal response to the Covid Hoax and in the many manifestations of Prog and Woke ideology.

Naturally, all this has played out at different rates in different locales, mostly depending on the continuing hold over traditional Western cultures excercised by the ideal of Christendom and Divine sovereignty. But the dissolution of culture and society continues apace, along with most human bonds of fellowship. There is no solution except in a return from the Man Made Order—now achieving its most radical expression so far in Transhumanism—to human existence under Divine sovereignty. Notably, Putin and Xi appear to understand this, within their own civilizational settings (cf. Samuel Huntington’s works on The Clash of Civilizations).

In America, the existence of a written Declaration of principles rooted, at least in a general way, in traditional concepts, along with a written Constitution that also—through the Amendments that were demanded—at least nods to limitations on the notion of human sovereignty, has served as a brake on the progress of the Man Made Order. But we are reaching a crisis point. That crisis point is manifested in the imperial ambitions to global rule of our Anglo-Zionist empire, which recognizes no laws except for those it makes for itself—our might is right. The rest of the West is tagging along on this careen into anti-human disaster.