Why the Dream of a United Europe Ends in Nightmare

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Talk of integration, human rights, and lasting peace once had me a supporter of the European Union project. Better relations between countries, and all of those nation states working together for the common good and the good of the world and everyone in it once sounded so sweet to my ears. Out of the ashes of two global wars that levelled Europe and the mass murder of the Nazi genocides the idea of Europe coming together brought an air of hope to a continent under the shadow of nuclear war. Europe promised to be so much, and indeed it could have become so much, but it didn’t.

Europe was never about unity and peace. It was never about ending war and the causes of war. From the very beginning, and without us really knowing it, the European Union was about building a whole new kind of violence. Europe’s only true desire in ending war was to end those wars that threatened its ability to prosper at the cost of others; where possible it instigated strife elsewhere in the world in order to make money, and wars which profited it little it simply ignored. All that Europe turned out to be was yet another wolf in sheep’s clothing.

We have lived through the language of inclusion and the execution of expansion. Following the collapse of the Soviet Union the lies were about bringing in more people. Yet these people were never people in the eyes of the masters of finance and industry (the masters of the European project), they were only ever a cheaper source of labour and skills to enrich its growing market. People were to be stripped down of all the authentic and meaningful rights they once had. Once they were swallowed up by the bankers they had the right to work and the right to die – nothing more.

Like every other empire it pillaged the resources of its neighbours and colonised the most useful. Like the United States and Britain it worked tirelessly to fragment and destabilise the Middle East to the point at which we now find ourselves. Europe has declared war, a brutal economic war, on the poorest people in the world, and when they strike back the European media propaganda machine brands them “terrorists.” If there are terrorists in the Middle East they are there because they learned their terrible art from the powers of Europe who have now come together to be a more terrible beast.

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