Having just posted a condemnation of the follies of US imperialism, I thought I’d pair it with a sneer in the direction of the Euro-Imperialism of the European Union. It is interesting, for instance, that the Brussels eurocrats were preceded two centuries earlier by Napoleon in envisioning a “united Europe” imposed by force against the will of the European peoples. Writing in early 1812 to Joseph Fouché, Napoleon explained that his goal in attacking Russia was the dream of a “united Europe”:
“Think of the war against Russia as a war of common sense, for our true interests and for the peace and security of all … We need a European code, a European court of appeal, a single currency, the same weights and measures, the same laws. I must make one people out of all the peoples of Europe. That, Sir, is the only outcome which suits me.”
Thankfully Napoleon’s dream of forcing the peoples of Europe into an unwanted union was broken on the frosty teeth of the Russian winter, putting Euro-imperialism on ice for more than a century. Three years after the retreat from Moscow, Napoleon met his Waterloo, freeing the peoples of Europe from their would-be Emperor. Hitler, the new would be Emperor, followed in Napoleon’s footsteps 130 years later, with the same tragi-comic outcome. No sooner had the ice melted on the corpse of the Third Reich than Euro-Imperialism was resurrected at the Treaty of Rome. With any luck, Russia will again play a role in the destruction of the latest manifestation of euro-madness.
Russia’s contribution to countering European ambition this time has already been made–if the Europeans had only noticed it. It was what happened to the Soviet Union when it imploded under the weight of its own bureaucracy. Americans don’t seem to have noticed it either. Both the EU and the US are headed in the same direction.