The European Union is falling apart

Written by Alfonso Elizondo

Created on Wednesday, October 19, 2016, 9:16

The electoral processes for the election of the highest political leaders in the immediate future are experiencing a serious crisis in the major countries of Western Europe, for example in the case of France, the UK, Italy, the Netherlands, Belgium and Spain. An even more chaotic situation obtains in Russia and most Eastern European countries, like Poland, Serbia, Croatia, Bulgaria, Romania, Hungary and the Czech Republic. The only countries that seem removed from the problem are the countries of the Scandinavian group, Denmark, Sweden, Norway and Finland, because their basic education systems are far ahead of the rest of Europe and the West. Moreover, their political models have remained untouched by corruption, and public officials do not seek to enrich themselves when they become part of the State structure.

Although from all appearances the migration processes from Africa and the Middle East have been the main causes of the crisis, the reality is that in most European countries the growth of the young population that used to attend universities and institutions of secondary and higher education has stopped, and the state has to provide the basic elements for the subsistence of a population that has attained the age of majority without the ability to adapt to the new production systems or the new technologies. Paradoxically, the waves of immigrants reaching several million do not have the ability to replace the young people of these countries, because they do not have the basic education and in most cases do not speak the languages of the countries to which they are going.

In addition to the serious issues of demography and education, perhaps the main source of this huge problem is the obsolescence of the political model of republican federal democracy in the West, which has been working successfully for over two hundred years. Most countries which practiced it thought it was an eternal formula accepted by the entire world society as the best way for the most diverse nations of the world to live together peacefully.

With the development of science, technology and the myriad forms of communication that have been putting an end to the use of the spoken and written word, all religious, cultural and social myths, all forms of transmission of political power and mechanisms to exercise dominion over other countries have been disappearing. Consequently, the major Western powers do not want to admit that their model has run out of steam, and instead of looking for new solutions to current global problems such as international trade, finance, the monetary system and the ecological crisis, they insist on creating conflicts in different regions of the world in order to be able to continue their traditional systems of domination in a charade of diplomacy and using well-organized covert military activities in predetermined regions. This is in addition to state terrorism that allows them to invent enemies in dangerous regions of the world that they consider most convenient.

Everything seems to indicate that the European Union, after just a few decades of having been created, will break up in the next few years, due to the fact that its presumed hegemony has failed to preserve regional trade and it has not contained the wave of immigrants, nor strengthened the euro. It has not even facilitated the consolidation of the old-style family structure where couples got married and marriages lasted for long periods, or the development of a cultural or religious tradition to unite the different nations.

If one adds to this situation the complicated electoral process in the United States, it is very likely, as pointed out by Stiglitz and Krugman, the great economists who received the Nobel Prize a few years ago, that the die is cast and no one has any idea what will happen with a fragmented Europe suffering the onslaught of several million immigrants, and a US government that refuses to accept that it has lost its global leadership and that it has neither the arguments or the money to control the life of European, Asian and African countries. So it will have to settle for administering the areas in its own country and some of the poor areas that it still manages to control in Latin America and the Caribbean.

Addendum: Another immediate consequence of the breakup of Europe will be the gradual disappearance of their monarchies which, in the present circumstances, only represent a huge additional cost to the operations of the state. They lack the ability to solve any internal or external political problem and have become in a kind of theater of the absurd in a new world where all the myths about the divine power granted to monarchs thousands of years ago are disappearing.