It was Beijing in 2008; now it’s London. Social experiments have become Olympic sports. Many Canadians going to Europe this summer want to know if Europe has changed, and if so, how. (Yes: Notice I call London, Europe?) People ask me such questions sometimes because they think I’m from Europe. Of course, no one is from Europe. There’s no such place, except in the sense that there’s a Mediterranean Basin or a Western Hemisphere. It’s difficult even to be from Poland or Germany or Czechoslovakia because borders keep changing and countries change with them.

You CAN be from Venice. If you are, depending on politics, sometimes you’ll be from Venice, Italy, sometimes from Venice, Austria. You could even be from Venice, Venice, as Shakespeare’s Roderigo in the days of the Doges, although by now you’d be well past retirement age.

But no one comes from Venice, Europe. “Europe,” as Otto von Bismarck put it, “is a geographic expression.”

The Iron Chancellor pointed this out not long after the Crimean War, about which most people remember little, except maybe four words from Lord Tennyson’s The Charge of the Light Brigade: “Some one had blundered!”

That was a frequent occurrence. Many people had blundered in that part of the world. As we’re speaking, though, the old continent is enjoying a lull between blunders. This has led some to think that Europe is more than the sum of its parts.

I don’t think so.

Rising from the Atlantic ocean and extending to the Ural Mountains – or, more prosaically, perching on a paper plate between a slice of warm ham and a mug of beer atop a bank of computers in Belgium – the European Union has emerged as something between a desire and an illusion. The desire is to be the United States of Europe, and the illusion is that it is about to be.

The “lull between blunders” is the absence of a major shooting war in Europe for more than half a century. There have been skirmishes, civil wars, uprisings, massacres, but no Napoleonic encounters. For Europe, that’s a record. It’s almost un-European. Some say it alone justifies the Union. Others say it had better, because the barren little scam of a petit-bourgeois bureaucracy in Brussels doesn’t have much else going for it.

The flip side of the Chinese experiment, instead of exploring command capitalism, the European Union has introduced regulated free enterprise or interventionist liberalism. The art of paying German dividends on Greek productivity, it’s designed to prove that beggars can be choosers.

Brussels is about reconciling dichotomies hitherto regarded as contradictions, such as taxing and spending nations into wealth, and coercing citizens into freedom. Its left-centrist bureaucracy investigates how to make red-tape efficient, cronyism transparent, corruption creative, adventurism altruistic, militarism pacific, statism hands-off and socialism democratic. EU-type bureaucracies think they have no ideologies, only values. In practice, they just value their ideologies. As leftists, they’re soft on the left, hard on the middle and consider the right illegitimate. Brussels was forgiving about the confessed sins of an ex-communist regime that ruled Hungary between 2002-2010. “We lied in the morning and we lied in the evening,” said former prime minister Ferenc Gyurcsany to the party faithful in a secretly recorded audio tape, as it became clear that through a combination of dogmatic inefficiency, corruption and cronyism his SZDSZ-MSZP coalition had driven his long-suffering country into the ground. The EU’s response was to say essentially that boys will be boys. In stark contrast, when a new centre-right government, having wiped the floor with the ex-communists in the election of 2010, set about to make fundamental changes in some of Hungary’s laws and institutions, the same EU became aggressively censorious and punitive, even blatantly interventionist, with prime minister Viktor Orban’s centre-right government for using its two-thirds majority in parliament to make changes to which his FIDESZ party has been constitutionally entitled (wise or unwise as making changes might have been).

The European Union has created sonorous phrases, but generated much resentment and economic instability. The Union has become associated with rising insolvency, a lame currency, ethnic unrest and chronic underemployment. Brussels performs, in terms of historical parallels, no better than the Weimar Republic. Its appeasement of militant Islam, premised on soft words turning away wrath, has only elicited a backlash of abuse, xenophobic demagoguery and the rejuvenation of far-right party fractions.

Touring Europe is shopping at a bankruptcy sale one can’t afford. Poor places usually offer bargains, but Europe offers mainly the opportunity to throw good loans at bad debts. The playing field is a compass. “Here’s the deal,” says south-eastern Europe to north-western Europe. “If you let us share half of what others owe you, we’ll let you share half of what we owe others.”

From a noble attempt to avoid constant wars, the EU turned into a Franco-German stab at reincarnating Charlemagne’s Holy Roman Empire – the one Voltaire famously described as neither holy nor Roman nor an empire. Such a Carolingian entity could probably mutate into anything. It looks right now as if it’s all set to become the next German Reich – but the fat lady, far from singing, hasn’t even walked into the theatre yet. Meanwhile, enjoy the London Olympics.

This article was originally published at NationalPost.com.

George Jonas has published 16 books, including the international best-sellers Vengeance (1984) and By Persons Unknown (with Barbara Amiel, 1977). His columns appear every Wednesday and Saturday on the OpEd page of National Post.


The BasicsProject.org informational and educational pamphlet series is now available for Kindle and iPad. Click here to find out more...

The New Media Journal and BasicsProject.org are not funded by outside sources. We exist exclusively on tax deductible donations from our readers and contributors. Please make a tax deductible donation today.