I recently spoke with a staffer working for a mainstream Member of the European Parliament (MEP). We were discussing her boss’ hiring practices and I found that the young politician was willing to employ someone of just about any political background except someone who had worked with nationalist parties like the French National Front. I was indignant at first. What intellectual intolerance! What closed-mindedness! Harming someone’s career prospects purely out of political prejudice!

But after some reflection, I thought better of it: All societies have taboos which lead to social ostracism and censorship of wrongthinkers, as White Nationalists and European Identitarians in particular know too well. A good taboo achieves this through the spontaneous action and revulsion of society itself, not through official government persecution and censorship. My problem with the MEP wasn’t with his adherence to a taboo; indeed it showed he had some moral or ideological principle even though I might disagree with it, but rather that this particular taboo is undermining the future of European peoples. We’ve seen this taboo at work in the massive media reaction against Jean-Marie Le Pen when he reached the second round of the presidential elections in 2002 and in the European and international pressure against Austria when Jörg Haider joined the government in 2000. As a rule I strongly favor effective free speech, but perhaps we rather need to perform the inverse rather than try to eliminate this phenomenon of social ostracism (which is as old as human nature): That in all European and European-derived societies, any attacks on ethnic Europeans should be taboo leading to social ostracism.

Joseph Stalin once dismissed the head of the Catholic Church saying: “The Pope! How many divisions has he got?” The European Union and its institutions are in much the same position: Their authority and influence are primarily moral and institutional, the force of norms and of habit. Unlike the United States Federal Government, Eurocrats have no soldiers to enforce their authority at gunpoint upon recalcitrant states. Even the eurozone, where the European Central Bank’s (ECB) power to blackmail and even topple national governments is real, the EU’s power is premised on the refusal of national governments to print their own money. But the ECB, and anyone else for that matter, would be powerless to stop a government if it wished to do so.

The EU then exists and has power — above and beyond the interest that national oligarchies find in escaping democratic accountability in arcane proceedings in Brussells and in locking in economic and migratory borderlessness in the European Treaties — through the taboo against nationalism which works because of the power of the idea — widespread among a certain class of educated European — that defending national interest is evil and any clawing back of power from EU institutions is morally wrong.

Europeanism, I am convinced, also is also an exemplar of that distinctively European moral idealism and universalist altruism that motivated centuries of Christian missionaries, the French Revolution’s granting of citizenship to Black Senegalese, the American Civil War abolishing slavery, and our current pathological altruism. This is also suggested by the fact that the EU is unique in the world: no other regional body — the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN), the Arab League, the Union of South American Nations (UNASUR), the African Union — comes even close to the EU in creating a genuine single market with common rules or, more remarkably, having sovereign states cede power to create a common currency. European self-abnegation may well be a prerequisite to nation-states giving up on their narrow national interest in the name of a broader common good. Incidentally, how does Christian theology compare to that of the Jewish and Islamic traditions? I suspect the Christian is more moralistic.

This European altruism is only pathological under certain conditions: if it is restricted to fellow Europeans or other peoples who can be expected to reciprocate, it is in fact highly adaptive. This points to one highly valuable thing in the attitude of that MEP I noted above: That violent, nationalist conflict among Europeans should be taboo. After two debilitating fratricidal World Wars, it is good that young Europeans are brainwashed to feel revulsion at the idea of war among themselves. This is a taboo, promoted in the current “globalist Europe,” that we would want to keep in the nationalist Europe of the future.

In one sense, one could say that Europeans need to be ethnocentric enough to oppose non-European immigration but not so ethnocentric that they fight each other. Perhaps a better way of thinking about it is that a new cultural consensus is needed that makes anti-European sentiment taboo. This cultural and political consensus should have at least these two planks at its core:

Rejection of non-European immigration, particularly displacement-level African/Islamic immigration, as such immigration will eventually make indigenous Europeans minorities in their own historic homelands. Rejection of intra-European conflict, particularly violent conflict.

The second point is a welcome characteristic of the EU. Of course, the Union’s members have in fact a history of stoking conflict against Serbia and other pro-Russian countries. This is regrettable but can be understood in much the same way as Charlemagne’s beheading of 4,500 captive Saxons at Verden or the Teutonic knights’ crusades against the Pagan Balts: This was violence against Europeans to create a Christian order which culturally unified Europeans and for a time may have reduced conflict among Europeans within it.

I am happy to say that, at least in Western Europe, nationalists are for the most part not focused on petty conflicts with their European neighbors, but rather on opposing African/Islamic immigration. There are exceptions of course. At a recent event of Flemish nationalists, a Dutch friend of mine was struck by the amount of Francophone-bashing.

Brussels is a perfect example of the fruitlessness of intra-European bickering: While Francophones and Flemings (mainly in the mainstream political parties, I might add) have argued endlessly as to who has rights on the historically-Flemish and majority-French-speaking city, the Muslim population has been growing so rapidly that it has been projected to become an outright majority in the “Capital of Europe” by 2030. There are also serious problems in Central-Eastern Europe, where there are relatively few immigrants and nationalism is often aimed against neighbors.

I hope a cultural approach could help us overcome the divergence between Nation-Statists (or “petty nationalists” such as Greg Johnson) and pan-European Superstatists (Richard Spencer, Roman Bernard). While the criticisms of the Nation-State, particularly when it meant fratricidal war among Europeans, are well taken, I tend to side with petty/State ethno-nationalism for several. Intra-European diversity would continue to pose problems within a Superstate. European history has been characterized by competing and diverse sovereign polities and cultures, rather than united but stifling Asiatic-type empires. I believe our political and cultural diversity has been a strength, a source of our truly remarkable dynamism, despite the inter-state conflict this has inevitably resulted in. (Incidentally, many of China’s internal conflicts, such as the Taiping Rebellion (over 20 million deaths) or the Chinese Civil War, were as violent as any inter-state European conflict.) Better a multiplicity of free Republics than a single oppressive Empire.

Furthermore, I am not convinced by the argument that Europeans need to be politically united against external threats such as China. Beijing would indeed be the only foreign capital which could plausibly pose a threat to Europe — no Latin American, Islamic or African country is even remotely powerful and organized enough to do so. But then I have a tough time seeing why the Chinese would have an interest in menacing us at a time when even small states can arm themselves with nuclear weapons if need be. The UK, Switzerland, Sweden and Finland show that medium-to-small countries can maintain their independence through bravery, cohesion, luck, pluck and occasional compromise.

But as I detailed previously, I believe the institutional anti-/pro-EU question is secondary to this question of achieving a genuinely pro-European political and cultural consensus. In the short run, I have no doubt the Nation-Statist route through parties like the French National Front offer the best prospects of reducing or even reversing migration flows. In the long run, a nationalist EU regime may be possible.

The Globalist-Nationalist Dialectic

Whatever the more hardline EU-phobes may think, it is obvious that the EU exists for some good reasons, and those reasons would continue to be valid in a nationalist Europe. In any case, we Europeans will still have to regulate our economic relations, we will still have regular meetings of European heads of State and government with the publication of communiqués and joint declarations on issues of common interest, we will still have some kind of secretariat and administration to monitor and enforce what has been agreed to organize our little continent. The EU experience is useful in this respect, especially as, almost undoubtedly, European cooperation would be more difficult if nationalists come to power.

Certainly we should learn from the EU’s mistakes. Given the Union’s rather limited powers, clearly there are too many “policymakers” in Brussels: 28 European Commissioners, a considerable bureaucracy of about 50,000 functionaries, dozens of national ministers coming for regular meetings, 751 MEPs, and armies of business and para-governmental “civil society”*** lobbyists…. The result is endless noise. Through constant negotiation of these actors, “policies” for every area are produced, although these often seem to exist more as fantasies on paper than anything else (one EU propaganda video seemed to take this literally, as with this bureaucrat’s nocturnal emission).

*** “Civil society” organizations often receive government funding and are employed to propagate this or that aspect of the regime’s ideology: “human rights” (e.g., more immigration to Europe or harassment of independent rivals to Western power like Russia), trade unions (e.g., paying them to support the EU program), environmentalism (justifying ever-more-intrusive governmental control of the economy), and so on.

The European Commission, the EU’s executive and bureaucracy, is less than it could be. Like the Organisation for Economic Development, it could be a vast think-tank providing social, economic and environmental study and data on the state of Europe and providing comparisons between countries and regions. It would be virtually the only organization in the world to have the resources and remit to do such work (and indeed, Eurostat does some of that). But by having been given a small amount of power, much of the Commission’s work has become politicized, often simply arguing for whatever would justify more EU laws and powers as ends in themselves.

Probably it would be better if the EU directly involved national parliamentarians, perhaps having them meet and legislate once a month, rather than having a separate class of isolated MEPs. No doubt the eurozone was a leap too far in integration given the lack of pan-European consciousness and solidarity. In its economic dysfunction and underperformance, vulnerability to usury, lack of solidarity among different ethnic groups within the body politic, and unaccountable and arbitrary technocratic rule, the eurozone is a prelude to what awaits us if globalism — with its transnational capitalism, multiculturalist immigration and “global governance” — triumphs. But there is one sense in which the euro is positive: So long as dissolving the common currency is taboo, intra-European conflict among its member nations is basically impossible. And I say that even though I have a preference for a return to the French franc.

Speculation as to what a nationalist Europe would or should look like is one of my favorite things to ponder. But in the end, the institutional questions are secondary. For the most part, the EU is a non-sovereign (in the Schmittian sense), non-decider, it deals with technical and secondary bread-and-butter issues, rather than politics as such. To debate it too much, as the United Kingdom Independence Party and the French National Front tend to, is probably a waste a time.

It is clear that the “globalist-nationalist dialectic” in Europe will lead to greater opportunities for European consciousness and unity. Globalism is destroying all European Nation-States and their cultures. For example, anyone traveling across Europe is often more likely to hear ugly Anglo-American pop in a bar than anything local. At the same time, the spread of Anglo-American culture and of the English language also provides diverse Europeans with common frames of reference and a common working language that enables cooperation. English has progressed by leaps and bounds in Europe over the past decades. It is often possible to live in major cities with little knowledge of the local language. According to EU figures, 93.8% of upper secondary students were studying English. White consciousness is also likely to increase as all European populations decline demographically.

I believe Americans can play a key role here in disseminating nationalist and race-conscious counter-cultural material. The entire field of human biodiversity and IQ studies appears to be very weak outside of the United States. A Swedish or a German nationalist may come across the works of the French New Right through translations published by Counter-Currents and Arktos. Thus, the globalist advance in Europe may well sow the seeds of its own destruction as it creates conditions which make the spread of nationalist ideas and building of nationalist cooperation possible. This was evidently visible at the National Policy Institute’s suppressed conference in Budapest where European political activists bailed, while American metapolitical activists spread the good word. (Americans, notably Kevin MacDonald, were also a major reference of the Europeans I spoke with; the work being done in the U.S. is often seen as being cutting-edge.)

I therefore do not preclude some kind of European political organization which would rightly grow in influence over time as European consciousness grows. If I were to describe my preferred outcome, I would want: fundamentally sovereign Nation-States (probably with national currencies), a democratically-regulated (by majority) continental-scale market for real goods and services, a “borderful” EU-like organization (with cooperation against migratory/financial flows, as opposed to the EU’s promotion of the opposite), and ad hoc multilateral cooperation on great projects (ITER fusion reactor, Arte cultural TV channel, defense and aerospace industries like EADS, space projects like Galileo). Some or all of these structures would ideally include the Russians.

Towards a Nationalist Culture

Politically, we should be opportunists, doing whatever works best to promote our people. Culturally, we should be united in creating a social and political consensus making anti-European activism and policies taboo. I have discussed this pan-European nationalist culture purely in negative terms: preventing war among Europeans and preventing the displacement of Europeans in their homelands. But of course such a culture should also be positive and feed upon a wide variety of confident, unique and genuinely vibrant national cultures. (Here is an example from Hungary of what that might look like.)

Such a culture would make genetic cohesion and quality core principles. Such a culture would reject the current excesses of individualism and egalitarianism, combining responsible liberty with organic hierarchy. Such a culture would cultivate pride in our ancestors: the Ice Age survivors, the Aryan conquerors, the Ancient Greeks and Romans, the medieval Christian defenders against Islam, and the great explorers and scientists of the Modern Age. European Man is by nature an explorer, a fighter, a dreamer, a stargazer…. We are not defined in opposition to others, but by our restless, brilliant, explosive and endless aspiration for truth and for the beyond.