What’s an empire without an army? It’s just a thought, an ambition, a dream. This reality explains the proposal for a European Union army. So says an author and social commentator who writes that we should not just be incredulous and ridicule the proposal — we should be alarmed. For he believes the EU military would ultimately have a dark purpose: to, if necessary, kill other Europeans.
Writing at American Thinker, David Archibald finds it odd that the army was proposed by French president Emmanuel Macron and quickly supported by German chancellor Angela Merkel. After all, Merkel has allowed her nation’s military to remain in a degraded state during her 13-year tenure; in fact, all Germany’s submarines and most of its fighter force are nonoperational, “with similar stories in its helicopters and other systems,” Archibald writes. As for Macron, “the head of the French military quit last year after the president made a surprise €850-million cut to the country’s defense budget,” the commentator also informs.
So why are these military-busting tightwads suddenly willing to lavish money on an EU army?
Some may note that President Trump has often demanded Europe pony up more for its own defense, as the United States cannot continue footing the entire bill. Yet all Trump is asking is that the Europeans contribute more to support an already existing defense structure: NATO.
Of course, it could be that Macron and Merkel (M&M) have inferred from Trump’s rhetoric, correctly or not, that they can’t forever rely on American protection. It could also be that since they’re internationalist statists and find the nationalist Trump anathema, it’s emotionally appealing to begin to reject U.S. ties. Yet they certainly know Trump won’t be in office forever.
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But then there is another nationalist phenomenon, one far more troubling to M&M: the rejection of the EU as reflected in Brexit (whether it’s realized or not) and the defiance of its “authority,” particularly in the area of migration, by Hungary, Poland, Italy, and Austria. This doesn’t mean a newly constituted EU army would mount punitive expeditions to cow those nations, but something else. More on that later.
It’s wholly unsurprising that M&M would propose an EU military after neglecting their own. After all, you spend money on what you consider important. M&M would be reluctant to devote much to national defense because they don’t believe in nations. But they might spend heavily on what’s essentially imperial defense because they do believe in the empire.
Archibald makes this case by asking: Whom would the EU army fight? He suggests that it isn’t Russia because, with an economy smaller than Texas’s, the bear couldn’t mount a large-scale attack. (Although Russia may not in fact be the motivator, I’m not so sure about this. Had Texas the desire and need to develop a military, it might do very well invading Western Europe!)
Saying another clue is the EU’s clampdown on private gun ownership, Archibald then writes:
The E.U. is afraid of an armed citizenry, which might rebel against the self-perpetuating regime in Brussells [sic]. E.U. bureaucrats know that their diktats with respect to immigration and other matters are deeply unpopular and that an insurrection might break up their empire. Their model in coping with that is the Austro-Hungarian empire [sic], which was made up of a multitude of ethnicities that didn’t have a common language or heritage. That empire kept order by raising military units in one ethnicity and stationing them in a province that didn’t speak the language of the soldiers. This meant that orders to shoot civilians were more likely to be carried out.
Archibald then concludes, “The new E.U. army will be Europeans killing their fellow Europeans so that Brussells [sic] remains in charge.”
This perhaps could transpire in a dystopian future Europe, especially since 30 years hence it may not be all that European. Note here that Macron has endorsed the idea of creating “Eurafrica,” a scheme requiring the flooding of his continent with 150 to 200 million Africans during the next few decades.
Yet I suspect that M&M’s real motivations are somewhat more bureaucratic and banal. First, with the EU showing the aforementioned signs of dissolution, the leaders want to shore it up. To this end, creating an EU army could change the momentum; it could have a psychological effect, saying, in essence, “We’re here to stay. This project is not regressing, but progressing.”
Even more significantly, building an empire — an extensive group of countries or peoples under a single supreme authority that possesses the military might to impose its will — requires assembling all its elements. The EU has part of the equation: an extensive group of countries under its partial authority.
Now it wants to create, incrementally, the rest of the model. An army would be a huge further step that, along with other steps, would help forge a future of supreme authority.
Archibald believes it’s significant that M&M are talking only about an army, not a navy or air force, but it’s likely they’d be created during future empire-building steps. I also don’t think shooting Europeans is in any current plans because the change intended and experienced so far is not revolutionary, but evolutionary. Boiling the frog slowly has worked like a charm, too. Why change the formula?
The imperial plan appears to prescribe the gradual breakdown of sovereignty via incremental EU regulation and national capitulation, and the elimination of the desire for sovereignty by destroying cultural cohesiveness through massive Third World immigration and attacks on Western tradition.
It’s not an exciting story — unlike warnings of imperial battalions and battleships breaking and bombarding borders. But to paraphrase entrepreneur John Rohn, success (including the wrong kind) doesn’t require doing extraordinary things, just “ordinary things extraordinarily well.”
It’s a good bet the Eurocrats intend for national sovereignty to, and believe that it will, disappear in a very ordinary way: with a whimper, not a bang.
