The fascist origins of the EU

Plus: Why you can't be “pro-family” and neoliberal at the same time; Donald Tusk wins elections in Poland and what it means for Europe

Hey everyone, I’ve got a few new articles out in the usual mags. Over at UnHerd I’ve written about Donald Tusk’s victory in Sunday’s Polish elections and its momentous consequences — for Poland, the EU and NATO. Long story short: it’s clearly a big win for pro-EU forces, but attempts to use the result to justify a new integrationist power grab will backfire. Interestingly, the Polish right-populist ruling party, Law and Justice, would appear to be the latest victim of the “Zelensky curse”: the Polish government has been one of the staunchest supporters of Ukraine — but growing anger over Ukrainian refugees, economic turmoil and support for Kyiv ultimately led to its downfall.

I’ve also written about a recent report revealing that Italy is the country with the fewest young people in proportion to its population of any country in the European Union, due to free-falling birth rates. I argue that the reason “pro-family” conservative politicians like Giorgia Meloni are unable to reverse this trend is that they rely on empty anti-woke platitudes rather than addressing the root cause of the problem: the dominant economic orthodoxy, which, in the EU’s case, is hardwired into the “economic constitution” of the bloc, and of the single currency in particular. Ultimately, there’s only one “pro-family” policy capable of truly reversing the trend: a radical overhaul of the failed neoliberal policies of the past twenty years. But banging on about “family values” is admittedly cheaper.

Last but not least, I’ve written for Compact about the Nazi-fascist origins of the European Union. The Canadian parliament’s “Nazi salute” was more than an embarrassing gaffe; it was a a Freudian slip — an unintentional mistake which reveals one’s true nature. More specifically, it revealed that contemporary liberal-progressive ideology overlaps with Nazi-fascist ideology in more ways than many would like to admit. Nowhere is this more apparent than in the in the latter’s birthplace — Europe:

Taken at face value, it seems absurd to compare the European Union—officially founded on values such as human dignity, freedom, equality, and peace—to the chauvinistic, racist, and militaristic Nazi and fascist regimes of the previous century. Indeed, it is commonly believed that modern European federalist thought has its origins in the anti-fascist resistance, and was conceived of as an antidote to the ultra-nationalism that had given rise to the horrors of Nazi rule. But the reality is less edifying. Comparisons of the European Union to Nazi Germany are no doubt extreme, but there is a kernel of truth to them that is obscured when contemporary advocates of national sovereignty are tarred as fascists. 

The ideology of European unification, usually associated with the Italian anti-fascist Altiero Spinelli, predates World War II—and has more in common with the fascist vision that led to that conflict than is typically acknowledged. As the English historian John Laughland wrote in his 1997 book, The Tainted Source: The Undemocratic Origins of the European Idea: “Not only the Nazis, but fascists and collaborators from many European countries, made very widespread use of European ideology to justify their aggression. Nazis, Vichyites, Italian Fascists and others spent many of the war years—as they or their spiritual fathers had done in the 1930s—developing sophisticated programmes for European economic and political integration”. Indeed, the dream of the economic and political unification of the Continent was a central aspect of the Nazis’ political philosophy, and made its way into Hitler’s propaganda.

Read the rest of the article here.

Finally, a brief reflection that I shared on X where I explain the political disorientation I’ve been experiencing over the past week:

As an old-school socialist, in recent years I’ve often found myself more aligned with people on the right than on the left — on issues such as national sovereignty and the EU, opposition to the Covid regime, the defense of free speech and the whole gender ideology madness. This isn’t because I’ve “shifted to the right” — my stance on these issues would have been common to the left up until not too long ago — but because the left, quite simply, has gone bonkers. Over the past week, however, I’ve noticed much of the anti-woke right go bonkers as well: I’ve seen “free speech advocates” invoke censorship of pro-Palestinian voices; conservative influencers say that every blue-haired critical race theory student is a closet Hamas terrorist; people that have been deconstructing mainstream propaganda for years lap up the official narrative of events (“it must be true because Biden says so”, I kid you not); and honestly a whole bunch of people instinctively side with Israel for no reason other than the fact that their skin is whiter than that of Palestinians (often accompanied by the 2001 throwback “they’re all terrorists”). I’ve lost a lot of friends on the left over the years; I’ll probably lose some friends on the right now over my pro-Palestine stance. But that’s the nature of politics these days I guess. Given the lack of coherent ideologies and worldviews, the best we can hope for is temporary alliances on certain issues, with new ideological blocs coalescing and disintegrating over and over again. It’ll be interesting to see what emerges from this latest political reshuffling.

That’s all for today. As usual any feedback is welcome. If you enjoy my writing, please consider upgrading to a paid subscription. Putting out high-quality journalism requires constant research, most of which goes unpaid. Plus, you’ll also get access to a lot of exclusive stuff — such as the regular updates and commentary on the Israel-Palestine war that I’ve been putting out for the past week.

Best regards,

Thomas Fazi

Website: thomasfazi.net

Twitter: @battleforeurope 

Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/thomasfazi

Latest book: The Covid Consensus: The Global Assault on Democracy and the Poor—A Critique from the Left (co-authored with Toby Green