Have we already forgotten that a fair few countries rejected the EU constitution by referendum, only to have it shoved down their throats? Have we forgotten that Europe managed to produce some of the most brutal totalitarian states, and this within living memory? Are we really going to write this off as mere "maladministration"? Have we learned nothing?
I can already hear the objections. "But omginternets, this time the government is enforcing the right ideas!"
We're going to end up proving the Americans right. Let that sink in.
I think many Americans don't realize what the EU's history actually is. Juncker's honoring of Marx wasn't unexpected. The original proposal for the EU was made by communists imprisoned on an island during WW2. The Ventotene Manifesto specifically called for a socialist federation [2]. Spinelli devoted his life to the construction of the EU and spent 6 years as a member of the Commission, during which time he was actually a member of the Italian Communist Party! There is a major building in Brussels named after him, in his honor.
This attitude can be seen in the many disturbing quotes from major EU figures, like these from [3].
Juncker:
- "When it becomes serious, you have to lie"
- "We decide on something, leave it lying around and wait and see what happens. If no one kicks up a fuss, because most people don't understand what has been decided we continue step by step until there is no turning back."
- "Britain is different. Of course there will be transfers of sovereignty. But would I be intelligent to draw the attention of public opinion to this fact?"
Vivian Reding (a VP of the Commission)
- "We must now embark on the road to a United States of Europe."
- "When people ask politicians today “What will become of Europe?” or “Where is European integration heading?”, we usually give an evasive answer. “We don’t want a super state” that is generally the first thing we say. I must admit that I have in the past often resorted to this kind of thing myself.
Helmut Kohl, former German Chancellor
- “The process of Union is like the Rhine flowing into the sea. Anyone who stands in its way is crushed”
Guy Verhofstadt, MEP chosen to represent the EP in Brexit negotiations
- “The world order of tomorrow is not a world order based on nation states or countries. It’s a world order that is based on empires.”
Jean-Luc Dehaene, former Belgian PM and VP of the EU Convention
- "More than that, if the answer is No, the vote will probably have to be done again, because it absolutely has to be Yes."
Raymond Barre, former French PM
- "I have never understood why public opinion about European ideas should be taken into account."
etc etc.
[1] https://finance.yahoo.com/news/eu-chief-defends-marx-controv...
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ventotene_Manifesto
[3] https://www.reddit.com/r/OutCampaign/comments/36ofm0/quotes_...
Please do not see "Marxists" everywhere, where it's not solely about unregulated capitalism. In actuality, the EU has been criticised quite a bit in the past for being the very spearhead of deregulation and denationalisation in Europe (compare the Maastricht agreement), which is probably not that Marxist, at all.
You may also check your "Marxists":
- Jean-Claude Junckers: Christian Social People's Party
- Vivian Reding: Christian Social People's Party
- Helmut Kohl: Christian Social People's Party (CDU)
- Guy Verhofstadt: Liberal Democrat (moved from neoliberalism more closely to centrisism)
- Jean-Luc Dehaene: Christian Social People's Party
- Raymond Barre: UDF (center right policies)
These are all conservatives, mostly Christian conservatives!
PS, regarding Spinelli: The PCI was actually a mix of communists and social-democrats, was a prominent proponent of Eurocommunism, which opposed the USSR, and Italy's second strongest party after WWII. Arguably, they were the only ones not in bed with mafiotic structures and/or Gladio-style stay-behind organisations. Not every person adhering to Marxist theory is automatically bad and evil. Most are actually idealists (somewhat at odds with their materialist viewpoints).
https://www.eeas.europa.eu/eeas/ventotene-manifesto-and-futu...
The Manifesto spread like wildfire through all the circles of the European resistance. This resulted in the founding of the movements for a European federation in several countries, the decisive Hague Congress of 1948. It resulted ultimately in the Schuman Declaration of 1950, which proposed the European Coal and Steel Community, the first step on our integration process, based on the supranational principle. Later on, in a career that included being Commissioner and Member of the European Parliament, Spinelli promoted the Treaty of the European Union of 1984, which was approved by the European Parliament. Originally rejected by the Council, it became a major influence in the writing of the Maastricht Treaty of 1992 that launched the monetary union and created the foreign and security pillar, of intergovernmental nature.
The EU was founded by communists, there's no real way around it.
Still, you are totally right that the EU is not specifically Marxist today, even though it has its origins in that world. But that doesn't mean there's no problem. Marxism is just one turn of the wheel, an iteration of the same underlying ideology that constantly shapeshifts whilst retaining its basic idealistic core. By the end of the 20th century Marxist economics was discredited. The working classes failed to rise up and revolt against their capitalist masters, turning out to be actually quite conservative and OK with capitalism. The places where "professional revolutionaries" did it for them trashed their economies and wrecked their societies.
So no longer would people who shared Marx's basic intuitions focus their energies on organizing the working classes. They adopted standard capitalist orthodoxy instead, which is why the old left tend to describe the EU as "neoliberal". And they are indeed to some extent New Liberals economically, albeit their love for capitalism is half-hearted at best. They are reluctant converts. But the same underlying intuitions about human nature didn't go away. The principles that there are big gaps between the best and worst people, that society should be united under a dictatorship of the best people, and that it's OK to bend or break the rules to get that outcome, well, unfortunately these ideas somehow did not get discredited.
And so the people who would once have been Marxists shed the idea of fully planned economies and violent revolution, replacing it with a new form of subtle diplomatic revolution. The outcomes would be the same: people are still forced into a trans-national dictatorship of "professional revolutionaries" against their will, but now the mechanisms have altered. The mechanism would be a steady accumulation of international treaties erasing differences between nations, exploiting a loophole in many countries constitutions that allows governments to sign treaties without needing the consent of representatives, and by linking all those apparently separate treaties via carefully disguised "guillotine clauses" in which an attempt to back out of one causes the immediate revocation of all of them.
This focus on subterfuge is why so many quotes from EU elites are on the theme of backroom dealings, misleading the public about what they're doing, hiding things from the public, ensuring countries can't back out when it's too late and so on. It's why the EU has a culture of intense secrecy about everything, reflected in the article this thread is about, but it's not unique to CSAM expert lists. The way von der Leyen was selected is a secret, even the way EU law is made is itself a secret:
https://euobserver.com/eu-political/136630
And often even things that are stated publicly are manipulative propaganda, which is why HN has so many posters convinced of things that aren't true, like the supposedly democratic nature of how the Commission is appointed (not true, Juncker has said in the past he vetoed any Commissioner he didn't like, which is not how it's supposed to work and not how people usually claim it works).
So the EU is fundamentally still engaged in the same old tricks. It is in some sense progress that they do it via the pen now and not the sword, but that's relatively small consolation given that the desired end state is so similar.
Moreover, while John Stuart Mill described some kind of a market place inside factories, the advent of management soon brought the concentration of all manufacturing knowledge in a central representation, where it was dismantled, reassembled and redistributed to the various work stations. As compared to Mill's description, a Fordist factory already represents a planned production process. The idea of extending this beyond individual factories (and at the same time gaining some control over the antagonistic forces that dominated the economy) was somewhat natural and not that revolutionary as we may think. Another root may be the central planning and commissioning of roads, bridges and railways – and thus of economic development along those routes. It is not a coincidence that Charles Joseph Minard (who was quite in alignment to the Second Empire), who's famous charts already remind of the kind of knowledge required for a planned economy, had been General Inspector of Roads and Bridges in France.
(Meaning, while soviet planned economy was radical, it was by no means alien to the general development of economy, it was rather an extension of what we would now call conservative policies. The very idea of policy (as in "Policey" as a means of increasing the efficiency of a national body by general directives), is a conservative one. Therefore, it shouldn't come to much surprise that we find commonalities in both of them. Just because we find an elaborate state of planning in, say, a US manufacturing process, it doesn't mean that this is Marxist, nor does it mean that the EU is a Marxist conspiracy.)
Europe's experiences with untethered capitalism in the 19th century had been generally problematic, and it had waddled from the great crisis of the late 1920s and early 1930s directly into the war, now facing enormous efforts in reconstruction and redevelopment. The idea of doing better, this time, wasn't totally unconceivable. Especially, since European powers were also facing a significant loss of power and influence in general, and thus also limited economic prospects. (Even the first program of the German conservative party, after the war, declared untethered capitalism and Marxist economy as failed in equal ways, giving rise to what became the predominant model, social market economy, which met with analog concepts popular among social-democrats.)
