Alberto Bradanini – The useless European elections, the constraints of war and more

The EU parliamentary election began. But do Europeans even know what they are voting for?

Alberto Bradanini is a former diplomat. Among the positions he held, he was Ambassador of Italy in Tehran (2008-2012) and Beijing (2013-2015). He is currently President of the Center for Contemporary Chinese Studies. He is the author of books and essays. He has published “Beyond the Great Wall” Ed. Bocconi 2018; “China, the irresistible rise”, Ed. Sandro Teti, 2022, and “China, from Nenni’s humanism to the challenges of a multipolar world”, Ed. Anteo, 2023

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“Because it is our Europe”

 

1. The dominant narrative proposes the iconic myth of a European Union (EU) that borders on the field of religiosity, a myth destined to crumble if only the courage to delve below the surface could be found. Few do it, most prefer to keep the right distance, happy to digest the daily lies out of laziness, disinterest or fear of discovering that this premeditated cheating deserves the rubbish bin!

The gaze of a normal adult (in the etymological sense, i.e. one who respects the norm, as well the logic) is enough for the lie to fall apart, bringing out the fatal reality of a gigantic mystification.

The European technocratic machine, with its cumbersome democratic deficits, is being administered to a population devoid of awareness (as well as of means of access) by despicable individuals, who – no matter if conscious or not – have been prostrating themselves for decades to a devastating design in exchange for honors, careers and prebends.

The pervasiveness of this devastating framework has a scope that in some countries even surpasses the juridical and ethical dimension of their respective constitutions (in Italy, for example, where the Basic Charter was generated from the victory over fascism after the WWII, with the aim to build a nation of peace and social progress).

But let’s get to the point. For a decent decipherment of events, overcoming the practice of clichés far more harmful than total illiteracy, it is necessary to overcome the distorting barrier that prevents us from walking on the path of understanding. A clear example of terminological deception is the term Union. It is likely to be believed that most European citizens use it without much thinking, in the unconscious belief that, maybe in an indistinct or ideal way, the expression reflects a process characterized by positive values such as democracy, progress, and social equality, or in any case a project of strategic importance.

The daily use of terminology, probably constructed by perverse minds, aims to capture the good faith of politically illiterate citizens, when it is clear as day that in Europe there are seas and mountains, rich and poor, rivers, lakes and so on, but there is certainly no Union, either in law or in fact, and there never will be: being unable to have reality we at least have the name. And this absence, it should be pointed out, must be considered a blessing, as we will see later.

The project has been an anti-democratic deception since its inception, deliberately excluding any possible involvement of citizens: no European people has ever participated in any of the crucial steps. When some peoples were consulted (the Dutch and the French, in 2005, on the so-called European Constitution), they soundly rejected it. But the founding fathers didn’t care, they changed the name (no longer European Constitution, but Treaty of Lisbon) and everything went on as planned: a technocratic dictatorship is the paradoxical negation of those principles of democracy that are in force in the national constitutions of member states.

A number of European citizens assume (in a confused way) that the term Union reflects the existence of a Confederation of States (a blatant deception, since in this case the member countries would not have lost their institutional and monetary sovereignty). A second group believes that the EU, although not yet a Federation of States, will soon be so, after these or the next elections. And to this end it has already forged the main corresponding bodies: a government, a parliament, a central bank, one day even a common army, and so on. If the EU has not yet completed its trajectory, this will in any case be perfected in the near future, thus giving rise to a model of democracy that will be even superior to that existing within the member countries.

The majority, then, although aware that in today‘s EU there are no federal or confederal features, nevertheless believe that in Brussels or elsewhere in Europe (in Berlin and Paris, in the minds of the most cunning) someone is laudably working on the laborious project of building the United States of Europe, or something similar.

None of these fantasies, alas, are true. The hypothesis of building a European Federal State similar to the United States of America is not contemplated in any of the founding Treaties or legal texts that have marked the path of this construction. That hypothesis has never been mentioned in any political declaration since 1955 (Messina Conference) to the present day. The European Duopoly that drives the locomotive (i.e. Germany and France) has always openly rejected it, evidence that is singularly ignored by the narrative spread in the gregarious countries, where the political class (with no difference among right, center or left) spreads the humiliating ideology that the pursuit of national sovereignty (constitutional, moreover) would condemn them to drift.

The left, in particular, which with the fall of the Berlin Wall had been orphaned by the Soviet religion, has embraced the childish charm of the chimerical pro-European perspective, bowing to the nihilism of the Great Transnational Capital, in the inability to draw an autonomous, political and social path, through the formulation of a different ideological synthesis, centered on the perennial needs of the human beings (and national interests). At the end of the Cold War, in the absence of a courageous reworking of the collapse of twentieth-century communism (there is no room here for further elaboration), the intellectual ineptitude of those leaderships decreed the substantial disappearance of the anti-capitalist socialist perspective.

Since then, the left has been talking about rights and not needs, citizens and not workers, voters and not people. Social services, wage earners, and the middle class still pay a highest price on the altar of the false pro-European myth, that through the external constraint rhetoric is destroying the foundations of the state, misleadingly accused of endemic corruption, and vile dissipation of resources. Today, voters and left-wing elites live in affluent neighborhoods, while wage earners and the unemployed are relegated to the distant suburbs, where (it is no coincidence) they make reactionary choices.

In those crucial years, 1989-1992, there was an acceleration of the process of economic and institutional de-structuring of Europe. Democracy is gradually being taken away from the state level and entrusted to a class of unelected officials, with enormous privileges and at the service of the Euro-transnational financial oligarchy.

The primary reason for the mystification of the European federal design is of a structural nature, in the absence of the underlying indispensable factor, that is the European people, whose absence impedes the implementation of the principle of solidarity. In Italy, for instance, wealth is produced in the Centre-North but also distributed in the South, since everyone is part of the same nation and people. One can imagine the success of a hypothetical party in a Northern European nation proposing to transfer part of the wealth produced there to the less well-off Southern European countries, that are notoriously corrupt and unwilling to work!

The Union today is an oxymoronic non-democratic mixture of illogical rigour and profound confusion, administered by fonctionnaires, whose careers and sky-high salaries are based on rules that are indecipherable to an average European citizen. Very few in Europe have the time and courage to read the European constitutional norms, namely the Treaty on European Union (TEU, the Maastricht Treaty), the Treaty amending the Treaty on European Union (TFEU, Treaty of Lisbon) on the Functioning of the European Union or the TEC (the Treaty establishing the European Economic Community). The refusal of such a reading is even understandable, since those texts are illegible: referring from one norm to another, they are full of addendums, deliberately convoluted and conceptually grim, an incomprehensible labyrinth, fabricated to hide, not to explain, which calls citizens to obey without understanding.

The main EU bodies deserve a brief mention. They are, as we know, the European Central Bank, a private vehicle for the transfer of public wealth to private banks and whose independence the media and subservient governments continue to irresponsibly defend (it should be reporting to a democratically elected institution not to the markets or the Bundesbank!), the unelected European Commission, composed of diligent butlers of the oligarchy that appointed it; a fake Parliament devoid of that power which everywhere characterizes its essence, that of making laws: to vote or not to vote, the dilemma that grips many European citizens (certainly many Italians), will not in any way affect the uselessness of such an Assembly!

It is worth reporting as evidence of the shameless subordination to the EU that the most important act the Italian Parliament is to approve every year, the Finance Law, must be submitted to the Commission’s green light before being discussed and possibly approved at national level.

On paper, European laws, which prevail over internal ones, are prepared by the Commissioners, although in reality it is the fonctionnaires who do so (often influenced by the industrial lobbies, whose offices crown the sumptuous buildings of Brussels). Those laws then, after a formal passage to the European Parliament, are definitively approved by the Council, always and only – of course – if Germany and France agree. Basically, a heap of outrages.

The illegitimacy of this preter-constitutional authoritarianism, which we could call technocratic neo-constitutionalism, has allowed the neo-capitalist elites to impose on the European peoples (especially on some, such as Italy) anti-social policies that would otherwise have been very difficult to pass within individual countries, where resistance would have been fierce.

Together with the theft of political sovereignty, the European democratic deficit has oppressed the workers, degraded social services, led to the massacre of the economies of the Southern countries and criminalized the role of the state in the economy, for the benefit of the globalist oligarchies, in complicity with that of the plundered countries, since the joint interests of the ruling classes always prevail.

In Italy, the deconstruction of democratic statehood accelerated dramatically with the Maastricht Treaty, adopted in 1992 without any popular consultation. A crucial instrument of this imposture was the common currency, too weak for Germany and too strong for Italy (and other countries of the South). Without a redistributive government, the euro continues to enrich the North, plundering Italy and other pigs. With the single currency, F. Mitterrand intended to harness the inevitable resurgence of the German economy and nationalism in the European groove. However, history teaches us that intentional actions sometimes lead to unintended consequences. Therefore, contrary to the naïve purposes of the French President, the euro has not made Germany more European, but Europe more German.

Since Maastricht, European countries have lost the power to mint their own currency, to impose limits on the movement of capital, to legislate on economic and financial issues without the green light of Brussels-Berlin, to conclude trade treaties with third countries, to protect borders according to democratically approved laws, under the banner of the cosmopolitanism of the elites (not to be confused with internationalism, which is the alliance between the lower classes of different nations).

In the complicity of improvised media and intellectuals, the hegemony of subordination to globalism is imposed. Populism (a term used with derogatory intent that describes the poor, the unemployed, the underemployed, the unemployed and a decimated middle class) and sovereignism become the new etymological enemies. The latter, in particular, has a double meaning, the first with capitalist and reactionary characteristics, the second with a social-democratic stamp and partisan of the awakening of the State, a crucial bulwark against the invisible hand of the markets, perpetually hungry for profit. From the very beginning, multinational capital had assigned to the European Union the task of demolishing the independence of the state, the only institutional device that under certain conditions allows the subaltern classes to oppose the domination of neoliberal and corporatist bulimia.

It is hardly necessary to point out that the stigmatization of the neoliberal-Euro-globalist technocracy does not imply the denial of the historical, cultural and economic ties between European nations. In a hypothetical, virtuous alternative path, the recovered constitutional sovereignty (an intrinsic essence of any state entity, which has nothing to do, it is hardly necessary to point out, with twentieth-century fascist-nationalism) would allow to open a new season of cooperation, progress and justice, where also smaller countries could better protect their legitimate interests.

In the present gloomy times, the deficit of popular indignation can be partly justified by the strength of the media blackout and the propaganda machine. On the other hand, the blindness and inertia of the political and social representatives of the oppressed classes is more disconcerting than ever.

2. Finally, from a different standpoint, another disturbing aspect is to be overlooked, which feeds the conviction of an unprecedented, dangerous militarization of the European distorted machine. The norm that deserves prominence is the one that obliges member states to collective defense, the adoption of which, as usual, has never democratically involved the citizens.

Article 42(7) of the Lisbon Treaty, although the EU is not an alliance of a military nature, but only a political-economic-monetary one, states that: “If a Member State suffers armed aggression on its territory, the other Member States shall be obliged to render aid and assistance to it by all the means in their power, in accordance with Article 51 of the Charter of the United Nations. This is without prejudice to the specific character of the security and defense policy of certain Member States.”

The art. 5 of the Atlantic Alliance Treaty is of simple meaning and establishes the principle of collective defense among NATO countries (attacking one state means attacking them all), the aforementioned equivalent article for the European Union is more convoluted but affirms the same concept: if one country is attacked, the others are required to intervene. Therefore, if for instance Ukraine were to join the EU, but not NATO, the result would not change, especially since in the latter circumstance it is very unlikely that the United States would not find a way to involve NATO, which it leads. A mess remains a mess, and it is usually used by the ruling oligarchies to pursue their intentions, rarely in line with the people’s needs.

When the term European Union is used, it is therefore not superfluous to reflect on the difference in meaning that human beings reserve for the words they use: a rectification of names, as Confucius already proposed in China in the fifth century B.C., would also be of great use in the twenty-first century’s Europe.