Make Europe Great Again

American and European Far Right ideologues are joining forces to promote the dismemberment of the modern settlement and impose a reactionary future

Donald Trump's decision to quit the G7 summit in Canada a day early sent a clear message to his mainly European colleagues: you pygmies don't matter, I as the embodiment of untrammelled United States power, call the shots. Coupled with an open invitation to Russia to rejoin the G8 fold and a put-down of "publicity-seeking" (sic) Emmanuel Macron, it reinforced the Trump2.0 administration's approach to Europe: vassaldom.

This approach, spelled out first by Vice-President J D Vance at the Munich Security Conference and re-emphasised since by the likes of Pete Hegseth, defense secretary, and Marco Rubio, state secretary, aims not just at cutting Europe down to size but at breaking up the European Union itself, the better to control the western hemisphere and confront the bigger enemy/rival, China.

Over here, the Trumpistas and their ideological twins in Project 2025 (often indistinguishable) have their European counterparts/followers working to go back to the "founding principles" of the EU, i.e. 1957, and, at the same time, rename the Union as the European Community of Nations (ECN) "to reflect a union of sovereign states, rather than a supranational entity."

I'm grateful to Le Grand Continent, an online journal founded in 2019 by a group of political scientists at the Ecole normale sup in Paris, for directing me towards some key texts setting out this body of work and revealing the links between ultra-conservative European thinkers and America's Heritage Foundation. One is The Great Reset: Restoring Member State Sovereignty in the European Union, written by scholars at the Mathias Corvinus Collegium in Hungary and at the Ordo Iuris Institute in Poland. Their collective thinking is being mirrored elsewhere in Europe and, crucially, in the USA too.

Back to a MEGA future

Like Viktor Orban, Hungarian premier, and (cynically), Vladimir Putin, Russian President, these conservative ideologues aim to restore/reinvent a Christian state and civic order - reminiscent for me of the Joseph de Maistre (1753-1821) I studied over 50 years ago, a savage critic of the Enlightenment as a prime source of social disorder and strong protagonist of the vertical state built on hierarchical tradition and religious authority. He extolled the virtues of the hangman....

The modern thesis is that the EU "has evolved from a simple economic cooperation project into a powerful supranational entity with its own currency, court, and ability to impose financial sanctions on Member States. What began as a vision of free trade and peaceful coexistence has morphed into an institution shaping nearly all aspects of governance in Europe, centralizing power at the expense of national sovereignty."

Europe, facing "an existential crisis," should eschew deeper integration which has simply exacerbated that crisis and opt instead for: • National sovereignty over EU primacy • National constitutions over judicial activism • Representative democracy over technocratic governance • Subsidiarity and respect for national competences over centralization • National interests over self-proclaimed EU values • Free speech over ideological control

The think tanks argue that EU institutions, above all the Commission and Parliament, have over-reached their powers and should be stripped of many of these, with the elected parliament reduced to a consultative assembly that includes national MPs and the Commission to a mere arbiter, losing its role as the EU's sole initiator of policy-making legislation and sanctions-imposing monopoly over infringements. Member states would regain sovereignty, with the European Council (of heads of state and government) the EU's supreme legislative body, while the European Court of Justice would lose its authority over national courts.

Forget about federalism and hubristic measures like joint/mutual bonds to finance the (hated and discarded) Green Industrial Deal...the revised EU/ECN would be built on mega-flexibility and myriad opt-ins/opt-outs. "The European Union is rapidly declining into the status of a third-rate political, economic and scientific backwater," the authors argue and their remedies would revive Europe. (Their words pre-date those of Vance in Munich but his speech reads as if they inspired him...).

But their goal is more than this, it's to stop this dire process: "The European Union is consistently evolving in a direction that causes us deep concern, undermining the values we hold dear: representative democracy, sovereignty, respect for national cultural identity, pluralism of opinions, economic freedom and development, the family (husband, wife, and children) as the natural and fundamental unit of society, and internal security."

And: "Meanwhile, guarantees of freedom of speech are eroded by regulations mandating the criminalization of so-called 'hate speech'—a term defined so broadly that it encompasses not only incitement to violence but also any statement deemed offensive according to the subjective sensitivities of certain groups (typically aligned with left-wing ideologies)."

This passage from their report could have been composed by Vance/Hegseth: " For reasons that remain unclear, the European Union seems to distance itself from Europea’s rich heritage, which encompasses Roman legal thought, Greek philosophy, Christian religion, ethics, and the opulence of unique national cultures.

Instead, the Union seeks to forge a new collective identity by invoking banal and nebulous concepts such as diversity, respect for freedom, rights and dignity, the rule of law, equality, political pluralism, the separation of powers, democracy, protection of minorities and respect for civil society. These ideas are vaguely reflected in five official symbols of the EU: the Union’s flag (a circle of twelve golden stars on a blue background), the anthem (the “Ode to Joy” from Ludwig van Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony), its motto (“Unity in diversity”), the euro currency, and the celebration of Europe Day on May 9th throughout the Union...."

MAGA rools OK

On a day when Christine Lagarde, European Central Bank president, is making the case for the euro as increasingly the global reserve currency via greater EU integration (“legal and institutional integrity"), she and her ilk (folk like me) are put in their place by a Rubio sidekick: railing against the EU as mounting "an aggressive campaign against Western civilization itself."

On an official State Department Substack, Samuel Samson, Senior Advisor for the Bureau for Democracy, Human Rights, and Labor (DRL), writes: "Across Europe, governments have weaponized political institutions against their own citizens and against our shared heritage. Far from strengthening democratic principles, Europe has devolved into a hotbed of digital censorship, mass migration, restrictions on religious freedom, and numerous other assaults on democratic self-governance."

What's he on? one is tempted to ask after this display of alienation from reality and truth. Including the assertion that the Digital Services Act is " used to silence dissident voices through Orwellian content moderation." When the real censoring zealots like Orban and Kaczinski crush opposition voices, including media, and seek to impose a conservative Christian monoculture.

Samson's words send a chilling warning to defenders of an enlightened, progressive Europe: "... a similar strategy of censorship, demonization, and bureaucratic weaponization was utilized against President Trump and his supporters. What this reveals is that the global liberal project is not enabling the flourishing of democracy. Rather, it is trampling democracy, and Western heritage along with it, in the name of a decadent governing class afraid of its own people."