In a recent article in J’accuse’s crisp white pages, Rhodes Napier made the case for nothing less than the abolition of the EU and its replacement with a new and based form of ever-closer union. I concur and have nothing to add but the following considerations.
Napier is quite correct in his assessment that the „Europe of Nations“ advanced by the continental right presents patriots with a dead end. This polity would a Kleinstaaterei or Rzeczpospolita at the whim of Russia, China, and the United States, each of which Europe’s rogues have indeed courted to free themselves from the banality of Brussels. This is even recognised by decentralisation’s proponents, whose spiritual loyalties have always been more complex than mere Ruritanian parochialism and for whom national sovereignty was always something of a pragmatic stance. In the dreary 2010s, when the Woke world spirit’s march seemed unstoppable, the nation-state represented a preexisting source of legitimacy within the EU’s legal order which could be used to carve out a niche of „traditional values“; perennial verities like „no troons“ and „migrants out of the swimming pools“. This is changing; with Trump’s State Department openly propounding Europe and America’s „shared civilisational heritage“, the old dream of European integration under the sign of the cross is — if hardly an imminent possibility —at least back within the realm of the thinkable.
Napier, of course, has something else in mind, yet presents no battle plan for how this vision might be translated into reality. It would be unreasonable to expect one of him whilst meritocratic operations remain confined to the shades. He offers no further guidance than to suggest that the impetus must by historical necessity — and not merely because we might wish it — come from these isles, and here his arguments are compelling. Let us therefore survey the levers at Britain’s disposal.
Britain’s strength has always been the crimson arts; geopoetry, not geopolitics. The farce of what the britpoppers called „soft power“ has obscured that the subtle science of seduction is indeed „what we do best“; providing global thought leadership and discrete, custom-tailored consulting services has been our role since the days of the Hiberno-Scottish mission. The European mind’s flesh is more malleable to the touch of Britain’s scalpel than ever in this twilight realm of Woke, where the six killer apps are firmly installed in the world’s hard-drive and the collapse of continental education standards has rendered English pidgin the language of all international communication. Unless you are a fully sovereign German boomer who makes his wife print out every webpage he wishes to peruse, you are reading this on John Bull’s own internet. The modern world is the Englishman’s creation; within it he alone moves with perfect surety and nimbleness.
One does not need to consult the esoteric sources of LaRouche or Galkovsky to observe this in practice, and there is surely much behind the curtain to which we are not privy. MacMillan was prescient to foresee Britain wearing the mask donned by the Greeks in the Roman Empire, although it may be somewhat bold to compare the Daily Mail, The Economist, Christopher Hitchens, Andrew Sullivan, or any of the rumpled chancers who have washed up on the other side of the pond to Plutarch and Epictetus. Wokeness was pioneered in Blair’s Britain; the worldwide fronde against „that trans business“ emanated from these isles. Multipolarism no less than antiputinite transatlanticism were first proclaimed from Lionel Barber’s balcony. In Trump’s Washington, the infernal loom spinning the dirty dreams of dubious conservative internet commentators into of Messrs. Vance and Rubio’s thoughts is none other than Old Queen Street’s own blog of terror, which has taken on the role of loyal opposition to the Woke that sturdier gentlemen like Ambrose Evans-Pritchard and John O’Sullivan once played. Some, like Anne Applebaum, have batted for both sides. The Americans are a creative and intelligent people, but they do not care for thinking, and this is where Britain’s humanities bluffers collect their thirty pieces.
A similar situation prevails in Germany. The country’s major centre-left journals (Zeit, Spiegel, stern) were all founded in the British occupation zone by Hanoverians with support from the military administration; that Britain leant on the Social Democrats (as against the Franco-American-Vatican-backed CDU) to rule postwar Germany is an uncontroversial matter of mainstream historical record openly boasted about by the Foreign Office. In more recent times, where the eclipse of mass politics has degraded traditional mass media’s capacity to shape democratic institutions, the focus of British soft power projection has turned towards direct appeals to elite opinion via think tanks, conferences, and highbrow policy journals. Two of Berlin’s three major foreign policy think tanks, the partly London-based European Council on Foreign Relations (ECFR) and the German Society for Foreign Policy (DGAP), are both sponsored by the Open Society Foundations and, in the case of the latter, the British and Estonian embassies (the third, the Science and Policy Foundation (SWP), is a more complex case). In 2021, Brexit zest still fresh on the tongue, the DGAP ran a discrete project on „German-British foreign policy cooperation“; its flagship journal, Internationale Politik, regularly features contributions from downmarket British bubble creatures.
Where these organisations have made themselves felt is in assembling the intellectual firepower behind the 2020s’ signature German ideology; the Zeitenwende. With the exception of a handful of untranslatably vulgar voluntarists from the Bundeswehr University, the ECFR and DGAP’s usual suspects, red-nosed old Merkel enforcers like Nico Lange and the quiet Austrian Gustav Gressel, have formed the Zeitenwende’s avant-garde. The grand doyen of highbrow Zeitenwendismo, the even redder-nosed Munich history professor Martin Schulze Wessel, whose book The Curse of Empire provides a rousing historical case for why Germany has always been at war with Eurasia, was a fellow at the notoriously spooky St. Antony’s College at Oxford (incidentally Ms. Applebaum’s old haunt) at the outbreak of the war, where that other illustrious (albeit less imaginative) German transatlanticist Andreas Umland also served a spell. Schulze Wessel’s institute, which has been host to at least one Russian spy, seems like a zone of mystery and intrigue, which is more than can be said of his tedious little pamphlet.
The German boomer, who is supposed to vote for these things, is not satisfied with the murmurings of washed-up 68ers: he craves authenticity and needs to hear his own thoughts whispered back to him by authentic „Ukrainian voices“. Where we first hear these voices is in the old annual reports of Arseniy Yatseniuk’s NGO „Open Ukraine“ (curiously „open“, відкрий in Ukrainian, is the verb in the declarative and not an adjective), much of whose work consisted in bringing then-obscure Ukrainian liberal literati and current Zeitenwende stalwarts like Serhiy Zhadan and Tanja Maljartschuk into dialogue with the Western European cultural establishment. In its early days, Open Ukraine’s director was Orysia Lutsevych, now head of Chatham House’s „Ukraine Forum“ and recently pronounced an OBE for her think tanking services. Many such cases, as it were…
An illustrative example of the Anglo-German defence intellectual’s progress in the age of the Zeitenwende is the career of Benjamin Tallis. Tallis, a graduate of Sheffield, translated an unpromising social science MA from Bath into a series of short-term „strategic planning“ roles in various EU „police and border assistance missions“, before bouncing around Anglo-Czech academic sinecures for the better part of the 2010s. In 2022, he was appointed the inaugural head of the DGAP’s „Action Group Zeitenwende“, in which role he theorised the dawning of a powerful, epochal turn called „neo-idealism“, which had less to do with Kant and Hegel than with libtarded moralising, and was exemplified by the statesmanship of Ms. Kallas, Mr. Landsbergis, and Ms. Marin, although interestingly not Mr. Morawiecki. Even in a discipline as patently unserious as political science, this was not taken seriously by anyone, and so when the Action Group’s funding ran out last year Tallis left the halls of high theory and decamped to the London-based drone startup Helsing; a guelphine enterprise which — as previously documented by J’accuse — has the ear of the Bavarian CSU. At Helsing, Tallis’ job description is „thought leadership“, which I welcome — a world where private military companies employ official pseudo-philosophers as a matter of course is one in which I only stand to profit.
Hard as it may be to believe, these ridiculous chancers’ words carry weight with Germany’s provincial politicians and their senescent electorate. To the Hinterkaifeck backwoodsmen and University of Augsburg social science dropouts who sit on the government’s benches, they hold whispers of great games, grand chessboards, Bülowian Weltpolitik done with a social conscience. The sine qua non of a Based policy must be to capture these networks of subversion and redirect them to patriotic ends. These cannot be proclaimed openly: if the boffins from the DGAP and ECFR were to suddenly espouse „AfD talking points“, this would only alienate them from the political bubble, whose denizens are actual believers in all that weepy singing of Ode to Joy. The strategy should be to egg on the Eurocrats’ most megalomaniacal impulses through a mixture of false intelligence, bellicose policy papers, and smarmy lobby journalism: a revitalised EuroFederalism must be the poisoned syringe through which the disease enters the body; an AstraZeneca of the mind, as it were. Here a British Informationspolitik must be circumspect; the repetition of Merkelian schemes to foist mass immigration on the periphery would only be self-destructive, and in any case Orbán and his Based Eastern European chums are happy to brownify their countries without any outside pressure. Instead, it must use Germany as a vessel to leverage constitutional issues beyond what the Eastern Europeans, the Mezzogiorno, whatever fragile centre-right coalition happens to be ruling the Netherlands, or even the French can bear.
Europe is exhausted, bereft of ideas. The old continent’s heart heaves in the breast for some old-style English perfidy; for the Warburg Bank and Kaiser Bill’s gay mates and theosophy’s tender kisses to rouse her from her dreamless democratic slumber. The continental right is totally contained by the wacky wazirs of Woke: hemmed in by proportional representation and cordon sanitaires and marginalised by its own incompetence, its brittle and ossified counter-establishment — from the Sellners and Kubitscheks to Le Pen and her eunuchs — has no more of that iron in them than the Mensheviks in 1917. The only hope for Europe’s salvation is a sudden shock in which the centre implodes, old assumptions crumble, identities are subject to — in the parlance of Woke academia — ad hoc „renegotiation“, and the breakdown of all norms seeds the earth for various Cao Caos to try their luck and men of pure heart to emerge from the countryside holding high the banner of whatever strange thoughts survive the deluge. The task of British „soft power“ in this strange antechamber to the halls of eternity is to lay the banquet of bad ideas through which the crisis materialises and to fire up the crucible in which the breakdown of egalitarian universalism can be transmuted into the Sonnenstaat. Let London’s coffeehouses ring again with the chatter of Enlightenment.
As rants go, this one is at least chewy: cosmopolitan à l'extrême; ridiculously erudite; biting, mocking, humorous - and as to the main argument, supremely ironical
Bewildering yet thoroughly enjoyable read