Comments on Europe

[F2d5thCav]

In a previous comment, I mentioned:

One of the dirty secrets of the EU is that it is not a trade "union" at all.  It is an economic empire, a sort of successor to Napoleon's Continental System.  And, in this empire, not all of the animals are equal.  A handful of privileged countries are the economic engines (although one, Germany, is strongly dominant), and the rest are providers of labor and raw materials.

So I found comments in this 12 May 2020 Telegraph article of interest:

Central Europe needed to be [in the EU] for geostrategic reasons (to be in the Transatlantic sphere of influence and also serve as a cordon sanitaire for any eventuality), for geopolitical reasons (to avoid a resurgence of “nationalism”, a real anathema to globalist ears), and for economic reasons (not to become competitors but a source of cheap labour and mass market).  The past 30 years have indeed brought a type of capitalism, the kind that globalism brings to an impoverished colony which has had no chance to build the foundations of its own sustainable economy. The result is a vulnerable and imbalanced economic structure that the literature calls dependent market economies, stuck as low-level links in what is elegantly called ”international division of labour”, producing hundreds of thousands of emigrants and huge domestic inequality.

Thus, the EU manages cynical games.  On the one hand, countries east of Germany are robbed for their less well-paid skilled labor while on the other hand, EU countries in the west complain bitterly about Poles and others competing for jobs.  Countries east of Germany offer very attractive tax relief to firms from western EU countries (primarily Germany and France), with the result that their own firms cannot compete, even on their home turf.  And while this odious form of economic colonialism is going on,

These countries are regularly harangued by an EU ruling class, as self-righteous as it is undemocratic. How dare they refuse to accept migrant quotas dreamt up by the masters of the EU? Their internal affairs are constantly questioned and criticised with the EU Parliament sitting in judgement over them like a school board deciding on disciplinary action against naughty schoolchildren. Every step they take to act in their own interest is greeted with the sanctimonious indignation of the “international community”.

Mainstream media foments the outrage presenting them in a boringly uniform script as rogue countries in need of some great moral authority, such as the EU, to put them in their place. They also have their homegrown comprador class, which cares not who the foreign ruler is as long as there is one protecting their vested interests and privileges. The constant pressure creates internal problems impossible to solve in an atmosphere of besiegement.

Clearly, this "Union" is not an association of peers.  The oddities of a year of COVID contagion have only piled pressure onto this creaking structure.  While the UK has approved a vaccine for use, Germans wonder why they have not yet been allowed to get the vaccine, especially as German firms were involved in the research for its creation.  But this is no surprise.  In a trade union with (supposedly) open borders, most European produced goods never leave their country of origin, and even when they do, only certain classes of those goods are exported.  Shopping at a store in any EU nation, one gets the impression that in terms of available products ... not much has changed.

The rich elites of the continent are getting much wealthier.  The ordinary people ... not so much.  And even the benefits that once applied to all -- easy transit of national borders between certain countries -- have withered under the controls imposed to combat COVID.

Cheers