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I know why it makes many Eastern Europeans angry. They want the European Union, a deus ex machina, to rescue them from history and from domination by Russia or Germany. Their natural elites were destroyed by the Bolsheviks. They want anything rather than rule by their own politicians.
Germans think: tie me down before I kill again. Meanwhile the EU enables them to rule Europe (in tandem with France) despite themselves.
France has been enabled by the EEC and then the EU to rule Europe for 64 years, a much longer time than Louis XIV or Napoleon managed. Without England speaking up for the small state and for the small states, France is even more powerful.
But why do so many English people and, even more oddly, Americans feel this way?
It's because they think nations are on the losing side of history.
The only excuse I can make for my not understanding is that given by Dr Johnson, when a lady asked him why he had defined pastern as "the knee of a horse" in his dictionary. (It is the part of the horse's foot just above the hoof.)
"Ignorance, Madam, pure ignorance."
Ignorance, in my case, of what those people have been saying and writing for decades.
Now I start to discover the truth.
Bill Clinton’s Deputy Secretary of State Strobe Talbott III said shortly after leaving office, in his book The Great Experiment, that in the 21st century
“nationhood as we know it will be obsolete; all states will recognize a single, global authority and that all countries are basically social arrangements, accommodations to changing circumstances. No matter how permanent and even sacred they may seem at any one time, in fact they are all artificial and temporary.”
Doesn't he sound like the naive, high-minded title character who wreaks so much harm in Graham Greene's The Quiet American?
As my assiduous readers know, Bill and Hillary Clinton said their vision was of a borderless world, in his case (speaking on September 10, 2001), and 'a borderless Western hemisphere powered by green energy' in hers (speaking in private to Goldman Sachs at one of her innumerable fund raising events behind closed doors during the 2016 election campaign).
Even Dennis Skinner, a hard left English politician so left-wing that he supported Brexit, said he wants to see world government.
These ideas are part of the zeitgeist, people learn them in the air, as Romanians say, and Brexit outrages people who think like that.
“nationhood as we know it will be obsolete; all states will recognize a single, global authority...."
ReplyDeleteThat single global authority will of course be the US Government.
There probably are well-meaning deluded globalists who think otherwise but it's clear that globalism in practice will be good old-fashioned American imperialism with a new coat of paint.
I'm vaguely in favour of the EU in the sense that the world desperately needs alternatives to American global imperialism.
The real threat to the rest of the world is NATO, not the EU. I would have been strongly in favour of Brexit from NATO.
Yes - the establishment elite have believed in world government for a long time. The first American President to do so was Woodrow Wilson (his understanding of Kant or even Dante). This is why Woodrow Wilson was a lot more dangerous than "Teddy" Roosevelt in spite of them having very similar "Progressive" economic opinions - T. Roosevelt thought in terms of the United States (his foreign policy opinions were about traditional alliances - he supported alliance with Britain and France), but Woodrow Wilson thought in terms of a world economic and social policy.
ReplyDeleteWhen, for example, the CIA talks of a "rules based international order" (via the the Economist magazine - or directly) this is what they mean, which means that such American agencies are very different from, say, the Australian Security and Intelligence Organisation (which thinks in terms of protecting of Australia - NOT ruling the world), and it means that agencies such as the CIA (or FBI - or any of them) CAN NOT be loyal to a President in the nation-state tradition of T. Roosevelt or Donald Trump, because they do not believe in the nation state.
and it means that agencies such as the CIA (or FBI - or any of them) CAN NOT be loyal to a President in the nation-state tradition of T. Roosevelt or Donald Trump, because they do not believe in the nation state.
DeleteThey may not believe in the nation state but they certainly believe in global American empire.
Very interesting comment, Paul. Wilson was indeed very dangerous. I so wish we had not abrogated our alliance with Japan at the Americans' behest in the early 1920s. That was a moment that, to use a Graham Greene phrase, let in the future. I rather wonder if Great Britain should leave Nato. I am sure we should have used the threat in our negotiations with the European Union.
DeleteYes they may approve in theory of the idea of the nation state and what they call civic nationalism, but in practice (in practice under Donald Trump) the people who run things see rightly that it is opposed to the global empire and the rule of values.
DeleteI disagree with some of the other comments. The new global order will not be an American empire - it will be dominated by the Chinese. The puppet masters - Soros, Gates, Zuckerberg et al - care nothing for America, if they don't actively despise it.
ReplyDeleteAmerica is becoming a platform on which they can instal their operating systems?
DeleteI made a typing error. I meant to write that Mr. Skinner is so left-wing that he supports Brexit.
ReplyDelete