How the European Union is caught in a trap of its own making

Widespread workers’ strikes and farmers’ protests across Europe point to the growing rift between the economic interests of ordinary people and the Eurocracy’s supranational agendas.

The policy of decarbonising the European economy and moving it onto renewable energy sources is a noble goal, but it will require financial support from whole economic sectors to make this transition.

The green agenda could work, combined with subsidies, but bankrolling Ukraine has created an enormous financial and macroeconomic obstacle to decarbonisation.

Instead of solving this dilemma through democratic consensus, the EU leadership in Brussels is choosing bureaucratic fiat and weaponising finances against resistant members, such as Hungary.

And the post-Cold War history of EU expansion contains the answer to why corporatist interests are currently prevailing over national-democratic ones.

Rumblings from the past

The dismantlement of the Soviet bloc and the USSR in 1991 radically transformed the political and geographic coordinates of Eurasia and raised an existential question: was Western European unity in the shadow of the Soviet Empire a provisional achievement, or could it extend to the rest of the continent?

Since 1975, the Conference for Security and Cooperation in Europe (upgraded to ‘Organization’ in 1995) operated by consensus and did not defer to US preferences. So, during the 1990s, NATO emerged as the preferred venue for manufacturing trans-Atlantic consent.

Meanwhile, the EU expanded in a prefab fashion without reconceptualising new accords and institutions.

On the one hand, this conferred predictability on post-Soviet domestic and international order. Germany’s successful unilateral reunification became a template—joining the winners’ club meant conforming with Western rules and institutions.

On the other hand, as generally happens with multinational organisations, Europe was good only at dealing with limited and well-defined problems. And the larger the EU became, the more complex and time-consuming the process of consensus formation became.

The concept of “victory” in the Cold War emerged as a tool of consensus enforcement—our way was the right way. But this came at a price.

Communism was seen as an existential threat, and capitalism was touted as more intellectually original, socially innovative, and politically accommodating. However, this flexibility quickly evaporated during the 1990s.

For the EU and the broader West, “victory” in the Cold War signified not so much the end of history as the end of historical awareness.

And yet, the sequence of EU-NATO accession for post-Soviet states granted the best of both worlds—the US paid for the EU’s security while cheap and reliable Russian oil and gas supplies subsidised the post-Communist transitions and rapid economic growth. What could possibly go wrong?

After a decade of expanding and developing centralised and non-elected institutions in Brussels, the EU entered the 2000s as a powerful trading bloc that could dictate oil and gas prices to the Russian Federation, which grudgingly adapted.

But since 2008, plans for NATO expansion into former Soviet republics – Georgia and Ukraine – began pitting security and economic prosperity against each other.

As the EU leadership began using economic and financial levers to bring member countries into compliance with geopolitics and forced them to sacrifice their domestic economic interests to those of NATO, a predictable populist counter-reaction began.

The latest EU summits demonstrate the deepening rifts between the globalist Eurocracy and the people it governs.

How the cookie crumbled

In its support for NATO expansion into Ukraine, the EU thought to punish Russia by cutting itself off from its carbon resources, but it now buys the same Russian gas in liquified form and imports the rest from the US at much higher prices that are devastating the European economies.

Germany has suffered the most, but multiple European officials are now speaking of the entire bloc’s “de-industrialisation”. With Germany’s ability to settle the bulk of the EU’s bills evaporating, this trend bodes ill for the whole bloc’s long-term economic growth.

The simultaneous commitment to bankrolling the Ukrainian government puts added stress on shrinking European economies. This works directly against the green agenda, which follows the time-tested pattern of all major reforms—they always cost money before they produce benefits.

Cheap Russian gas was intended to act as the clean carbon link during the painful but necessary green transition, which is why the Germans asked the Russians to build the Nordstream 2 pipeline.

But with its sabotage in the midst of the Russia-Ukraine conflict, the green transition and support for Kiev promise to be much costlier than they would otherwise have been.

The IMF recorded a drop in the economic growth of European countries for 2023, while Russia emerged as the best-performing economy in Europe for that year.

There are elections to the European Parliament in June and pollsters expect a sharp voter shift to far-right parties, which have also been gathering popularity in local elections across Europe, and especially in Germany.

The end of the Cold War amalgamated all European political parties into a hyper-centralised, pro-globalisation mainstream that has taken increasing amounts of decisions out of the hands of elected national leaders.

Now, the EU is planning on creating a Defense Commissar and even floating Eurobonds to raise money. To cover the interest payments on these bonds, the EU will then move to impose a new European-wide taxation scheme, which will make the Eurocracy financially independent of its member states.

If the people of Europe fail to curb this process, they may begin to see the EU as a parasite feeding upon Europe as its host.

If the EU does not find a diplomatic solution to the war in Ukraine, restore its relationship with Russia, and reconceptualise its security in Eurasian terms, not only will the green transition miss all the climate change thresholds, but the EU may self-destruct by catalysing extreme political alternatives that will undermine it.