The Soviet and European Unions: same lies, same destiny

The parallels between the European Union of 2017 and the Soviet Union of 1989 are troubling. Didn’t these two systems pride themselves on being “apolitical”, meaning that they were led by a technocratic elite that was detached from real life and “real people”? Faced with economic stagnation, didn’t these two systems react by calling on incoherent measures that further aggravated their doldrums? In 1997, didn’t Milton Friedman foresee the end of the current Union coming as a result of its first recession?

The fact remains that to their political failings and economic deficiencies, both the European Union and the Soviet Union can add a hereditary institutional defect. Just like the Soviet Union which Gorbachev had tried in vain to breathe new life into with his “perestroika” and “glasnost”, our European Union is rotting from the inside out because it is unreformable. In Europe, the democratic deficit is now effectively being pushed so far to its extreme that it’s no longer even worth beginning to try to restructure the Brussels bureaucracy. The highest European authorities’ loss of legitimacy has, as expected, ravaged a now weary and fed up European population which will be happy to, with a zoological curiosity, watch the continent’s implosion, just like the Soviets who were so glad to see their Union breathe its last.

However, the inherent contradiction in the European system surpasses that of the Soviet Union. The European Union is being eaten away by a destructive intransigence which demands its member-states to abandon ever more of their sovereignty and their peoples’ autonomy, held hostage to incomprehensible decisions that are detached from reality. In the end, these ethereal reforms, decreed in closed, tightly sealed offices by decision-makers who have as much contact with the people as Louis XIV did at Versailles, are landing one knockout blow after another to the very spirit of democracy, which is, in theory, meant to include each and every citizen in the decision-making process. It is true that the fathers of Europe knowingly focused all their efforts on the monetary union to the detriment of all political consideration. It was a bit like they were scared of it and as if European happiness would somehow miraculously ooze from the currency and the economy.

In fact, just like the Soviet Union of the time, the European Union was conceived and modeled like a steamroller to crush the people. Just like the Revolution of 1917 – meant to be the last of all -, the European Union is presented on a daily basis as the ultimate system, almost like a supreme, unquestionable messianic theology. According to the Soviet model which was meant – by the grace of the abolition of property and the free market – to give birth to the Perfect Man, the European Union was built on a radioactive lie demanding day after day – like a gluttonous ogre – its piece of the States’ sovereignty, at the price of a proclaimed collective happiness. Just like Brezhnev, Chernenko and Andropov who were perfectly aware of this hypocrisy, our elites in Brussels are basking in their bureaucratic rigidity and rejoicing in the economic stagnation dealt by foolish European demands, because they realise – just like Gorbachev’s Soviet Union – that their Union is unreformable. Worse still is that any attempt to breathe life and democracy back into it would be actively participating in its implosion. And for good reason, because what can one do with a rotten apple?

Just like Gorbachev’s desperate efforts which hastened the collapse of a dying elite, Europe’s only response following the crisis of 2008 was to preserve its institutional routine at the expense of the safety and well-being of its peoples. Now, the Eurocrats are our new nomenklatura, jealously clinging onto their sinecures and blocking – as they logically would – any attempt to give back a voice and autonomy to the wounded peoples who have simply been forgotten, and to whom they have constantly repeated that their safety will come only from supranationality, their prosperity only from globalisation, and their peace only from the Union.