By Theodore Shoebat
The former Prime Minister of Italy, Mario Monti, just recently gave a type of warning that you almost never here: that if the current status quo of European governance disintegrates, then the old hatred between European countries will resurface and another war will devastate Europe. What will happen if the current structures of integration get eclipsed? Monti asks. The same thing that has gone on in Europe for millennia: war. From all of her wars in antiquity, to the Thirty Years War and the two World Wars, Europe has been plagued with wars and it appears that in the 75 years or so of peace that the West has enjoyed has been taken for granted, leaving the masses to think of a war between European countries as unfathomable. Monti, making his statement at a presentation in Rome, affirmed that if “the sovereigns” (and by this he means the nationalist political parties) in Europe win, then there will be war:
“If the sovereigns win it will be world war. Otherwise we will be just isolated “.
He went on to warn:
“they will actually change European policies and can join the single common goal of the sovereign countries, which is to greatly reduce the powers and role of the European Union. This is scenario one, which I consider the most unfavorable for all, because supposing that they are going to be great there will be this reduction in the role of the European Union first and then when this role has been eliminated, destroyed and razed to the ground, the war in Europe will return … All the national flags once they have been hoisted to lead an anti-Brussels crusade, anti-European Union, what will they have? What they have had in hundreds of years and in millennia of history: turning one against Yalta. This is very easy in Europe, and the hatreds that are reviving here between countries are indeed a very favorable humus. This scenario I consider disastrous. It should not be excluded from the hypothesis, we must be aware of it “.
Monti also noted in a recent article on this potential chaos that “nobody today denies that European integration has allowed seventy years of peace between historically conflicting nations; and that Italy has found a positive position in that framework, which would not have occurred outside the EU”.
An argument that Monti presents is that if the nationalist political parties dominate the European Parliament, then they will not make measures to help maintain the unity of the EU, but rather will do things for the national interests of their own countries and thereby dismantle the Union, replacing the system with polarized countries pursuing their own power which would mean nations rising up against nations:
“In fact, once the sovereigns have acquired power in the European Parliament and, on that wave, strong positions in the Commission and perhaps in the Council, following successes in the various national elections to come, it is difficult to think that the European institutions ask the Member States to give the necessary powers and resources to develop a common foreign and defense policy. … There is the risk – historically almost inescapable – that, having no longer to turn national flags against Brussels, they return to doing what so often nationalisms have done: directing those flags against other countries, starting with those that were part of the EU. Such a gloomy scenario, it should be emphasized, does not seem at all probable. But it is useful to have in mind what the consequences could be.”
Monti also writes that what is “much more probable” is an Italy that is very weak and isolated. While it is true that Italy — and other Mediterranean countries like Spain and Greece — are economically weak and dependent on the European Union, such economic depressions cannot remain the way they are forever, and will either come to an end or implode in a conflagration of violence.
War will happen in Europe. This is obvious for several reasons. Firstly, for thousands of years wars have occurred in Europe. People will say things that like, ‘Well, war has not happened in Europe for over seven decades,’ but this is a vacuous thing to say because it was just in the 1990s that there were very bloody wars in the Balkans in which tens of thousands died and millions were displaced, and it was only in 2014 that you had a war between Russia and Ukraine. It is ludicrous to think that there will be no war between European countries, and to think so will be only perpetuating the same illusion that they had prior to the outbreak of the Second World War. Secondly, there is currently major military buildups being discussed and taking place in Europe. The United States government understands the possibility of a nuclear Germany. The issue of a resurgence of German and Japanese militarism was made known in a report addressed to the Committee on Foreign Relations of the United States Senate in 2008, entitled: Chain Reaction: Avoiding a Nuclear Arms Race in the Middle East, in which it says:
“In the cases of Germany and Japan, both countries can easily obtain nuclear weapons but have chosen not to because of their integration beneath a NATO (Germany) or an American (Japan) security umbrella. Today, all of these countries have the technical capacity to obtain nuclear weapons in a matter of months or a few short years. … If these countries ever begin to question the reliability of this security umbrella, they would almost certainly reassess past nuclear weapons decisions.”
On August 12th, 2018, the influential German political scientist, Christian Hacke, wrote an article for the National Interest entitled, Why Germany Should Get the Bomb, in which he says:
First of all, Berlin should try to accommodate the United States in terms of its security policy: Germany’s insufficient defense spending must be increased quickly and substantially. The half-hearted approach we have seen so far is not enough. … Germany’s new role as enemy number one of the United States president forces it to radically reconsider its security policy.
…
Particularly Germany, as President Trump’s new enemy, can no longer count on U.S. support. This forces us into a disturbing conclusion: for the first time since 1949, the Federal Republic of Germany is without the protection of the U.S. nuclear shield. Accordingly, in case of a serious crisis, Germany would be defenseless! Yet, who talks about this issue? Who presents a well-reasoned argument about possible consequences? Clearly, the German security debate is in need of more intellectual and material contributions. In order to again convince the United States that both NATO, as well as its member state Germany, are worth defending, Germany must think and act, especially in regard to nuclear deterrence, with a view toward the future. … Since the U.S. nuclear guarantee has become increasingly doubtful and a common European deterrent does not seem to be forthcoming, only one possible conclusion can be drawn: in a serious crisis the only one Germany can truly rely on is itself. … Thus, our attention turns to the elephant in the room, which nobody in Germany wants to acknowledge: What about Germany as a nuclear power?”
The polarization of the EU with Brexit is another sign of a coming European war. When an empire, confederacy or bloc breaks down, it foreshadows conflict. The break down of the monetary system of the gold standard after World War One was a sign of impending war. The loss of enthusiasm of the current ways of the European Union, alongside a drive for independence from the American security umbrella, signifies that the Germans want to use their own weapons, which means militarism. Yanis Varoufakis makes the observation that:
“The moment a monetary union between different nations begins to fragment, and as the fault lines expand inexorably, only serious dialogue and a readiness to return to the drawing board can mend the fences on which peace and shared prosperity must rely. The lack of such dialogue in the 1930s led to the disintegration to that era’s common currency: the gold standard. Eighty years later, it is happening all over again in a Europe that ought to know better. Europeans have taken far too long to understand that 2008 was our version of the tragic generation’s 1929. Wall Street was the epicenter on both occasions” (And The Weak Suffer What They Must?, preface, p. xxvii)
We are not arguing that the next European war will be caused by the current day political parties. But what we will argue is that the current break down of the European Union is a sign of a coming war. If such a supranational power such as the European Union breaks down, the incentive for peace will as well disintegrate. After the Second World War, the United States — through the Bretton Woods enterprise — decided to use the German economy as a shock absorber for the US dollar in order to help establish the American greenback as the world’s dominating currency. This enabled Germany to be the powerhouse economy of Europe. If the European Union breaks down, this will give Germany the incentive to control Europe not through financial power, but through military strength. The European Union as we know it now will transform into a union that will still be under Germanic dominion but with a more militarist policy. We can also not forget that NATO for decades was working to spark nationalism in Europe under the Gladio operation.
American and European intelligence agencies facilitated terrorist attacks by Right-wing paramilitaries like the Bologne massacre in Italy and then had them blamed on the Left in order to create a narrative that would stir the masses to nationalist fury. The migrant crises of 2015 has done more to spark nationalism in western Europe than any other event since the end of the Second World War. The migrant crises was an expected consequence of US foreign policy in Iraq, Syria and Libya The violence of the Iraq War, the subsequent violence of insurgency and Islamism in both Iraq and Syria, and the destabilization of Libya, provoked a mass migration of people into Western Europe. This entering of outsiders into Western Europe sparked a major nationalist surge which we are seeing currently intensifying. With nationalism would obviously come a breakdown of the EU system; not completely, but just enough to get the Germans riled up to begin to discussing being militarily independent.
What actually could happen is the formation of a new pan-European confederacy, or a European Union with a militarist policy. This is not far fetched at all, given that there has been serious political discourse about a pan-European military force being led by Germany. Nationalist leaders have also been pushing for this EU military force. Viktor Orban, the beloved leader of the Right-wing, supported the formation of a Euro army: “We should list the issue of security as a priority, and we should start setting up a common European army” A major German politician, Jorg Meuthen, of the nationalist Alternative for Deutschland Party (AfD), who sits in the EU Parliament, declared: “We want a Europe of the Fatherland”. Sebastian Kurz of the nationalist Austrian People’s Party has been lobbying for Muslim Bosnia and Albania to be allowed to become EU member states. If this happens, and the European military force is created with Germany as it leader, then you will have a German ran supranational military force with Muslim Bosnian and Albanian auxiliaries.
Lastly, if nationalism intensifies to dangerous levels, you will have war; for you cannot have war without nationalism or tribalism. Even if a Euro military force forms, it will be under a European nationalism.
Get ready for the next Reich.