Pan-Europeanism is in some respects a kind of “Pan-Nationalism” that came about in response to the circumstances surrounding the two World Wars. After arriving to the conclusion that other “Nationalisms” and “Socialisms” had ravaged Europe in the early 20th century, the founders of the European Union (NATO) and North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) created a status quo in Europe with the Jeffersonians in America. The EU/NATO, as I have referred to it elsewhere on The Fourth Estate, represents an attempt at achieving an integrated, unified Europe within the framework of Neoliberalism. The EU maintains a technocratic bureaucracy that presides over the continental affairs of what is essentially an intricate Free Trade Agreement (FTA). Every nation affiliated with the EU/NATO has some form of representation in the EU’s administrative apparatus in Brussels and Strasbourg, their economic and monetary policies beholden to the terms of the EU’s FTA. NATO keeps the US in Europe, any conception of “Russia” out of Europe, and the German-speaking world from achieving a hegemony in Central Europe. In practice, it acts as the mechanism by which to enforce the terms of that same FTA.
What is important to note is that the EU/NATO never functions as a genuine federal system like the one America has. There may have been a desire to envisage Europe as a continental nation on par with America, but those plans never succeeded in being realized. For the establishment of any federal system, let alone a confederal one, requires something that could enable different polities to coalesce around a centralized national government. It implies the presence of a type of Nationalism where different local and regional bodies of people recognize themselves as members of a larger nation. There is a National Culture, a National Identity, a National Essence, and a sense of National Consciousness distinct from human consciousness in general.
It is easier to imagine England, Wales, Scotland and perhaps Northern Ireland as a “United Kingdom” or as parts of the “British Empire,” but it is impossible to conceptualize this United Kingdom as part of a “continental-wide European nation.” Even if Europe was united under a resurrected British Empire, the odds of Europe rallying behind the English-speaking world was already unlikely, long before Brexit. It is likewise difficult to imagine an opposing Pan-Nationalism like Pan-Germanism coexisting with the sort of Pan-Europeanism on display in the EU/NATO. Pan-Germanic Socialism’s future still belongs to Euroscepticism in the German-speaking world, not to these Hitlerists in the English-speaking world.
Thus, the only way for Pan-Europeanism to justify its own existence through the EU/NATO is to defer to the economic and military-industrial benefits of the EU/NATO and the broader Empire of Liberty. As long as the Jeffersonians in America are capable of marshaling the necessary economic and financial firepower to prop up a worldwide presence through the world order they created in 1945, Pan-Europeanism may stand unopposed in Europe. That was the old Cold War rationale since the beginnings of the EU/NATO. If all of Europe was dependent on each other economically, financially, and militarily, then nobody will be able to lead the continent in any meaningful way. Europe would then be aligned with the US against whatever conception of Russia exists.
Granted, such an arrangement presupposes that the US is committed to Jeffersonianism, the Empire of Liberty, and is committed to the EU/NATO through Free Trade and the garrisoning of US military personnel and materiel. It may have been fashionable throughout the late 20th century, but the early 21st century thus far has begun to raise the question of just how long that arrangement can last. The EU cannot exist without NATO and NATO cannot exist without EU. Once either exits the picture, the other will become vulnerable by dint of its newfound inability to justify its own existence. Pan-Europeanism was never a genuine Nationalism by any stretch of the imagination, even when it presented itself as such.
This in turn leads to an important realization that deserves to be mentioned here in its own post. Should Hamiltonianism and the Federalist Party promote Euroscepticism for the purposes of demonstrating the capabilities of its own conception of American Nationalism? In America, there are Hamiltonian and Jeffersonian conceptions of American Nationalism, the latter of which happening to resemble “a 1950s barbecue commercial” (to quote what an old acquaintance of mind had said in the past). National Cultures and National Essences are not born beyond the borders of individual nations within the technical bureaucracies of multinational military alliances and trade agreements. Pan-Nationalisms, meanwhile, come about within geographical regions that share the same National Culture and National Essence.
Between the newfound hostility toward the Empire of Liberty and the growing inability to sustain it at home, there should be no reason why Hamiltonianism cannot acquire newfound allies in Euroscepticism. As John Jay noted in one of his Federalist Papers, American Federalism only became conceivable when people within the Thirteen Colonies began defining themselves as “Americans” first before “New Yorkers” or “Virginians.” Its Americaness came about because of the Revolutionary War, implying the establishment of an American Nationalism that coexisted with the American Liberalism espoused by the Jeffersonians in the Democratic-Republican Party. A “European Federalism” is inconceivable because most Europeans legally and culturally view themselves as members of their respective nations before members of Europe.
However, the real challenge is not so much the issue of whether a Hamiltonian Foreign Policy pivot could obtain Eurosceptic positions. Rather, it is the question of conceptualizing what the nations of Europe can and should become without the EU/NATO. If there is one obvious benefit for both America and Europe, then it has to be Europe will no longer be too dependent on America for virtually everything, and America will no longer have to focus so much of its attention on Europe. The EU/NATO is obviously not going to collapse like the Congress of Vienna, which fell because the old European colonial empires ran out of places to conquer, thereby making World War I inevitable. It will undergo the same protracted decline and collapse that awaits the Empire of Liberty.
Categories: Philosophy
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