As we reported a few weeks ago, French President Emmanuel Macron and German Chancellor Angela Merkel met last month in Aachen to sign a compact that I’ve been calling the Zweikaiserbund*.

The essay below by Robert Kearney about the treaty signed in Aachen was originally published at Compact News in a slightly different form.

The Franco-German Union, last step towards an EU Empire

By Robert Kearney

On January 22, 2019, the President of France, Emmanuel Macron, together with German Chancellor Angela Merkel, signed a treaty of bilateral cooperation which pledged to unify both France and Germany in a way not dreamed of since the ninth-century reign of Charlemagne. A new Franco-German Empire of sorts (this was clearly the intent as evidenced by where the treaty signing took place, the town hall of Aachen, France, the city that had been the historic capital of the old Carolingian Empire), this new treaty was received warmly by various European and global elites. However, it raised concern among the more Eurosceptic nations such as those of Central Europe, Italy and even some in Britain (not to mention nationalist and anti-EU parties and citizens within France and Germany themselves). The great fear amongst many in Europe is that this agreement will lead to a unified Franco-German superstate that will further shift the balance of power in the EU away from sovereign nation states and toward a centralized bureaucracy ruled from Brussels with the economic and even military backing of Paris and Berlin.

This Franco-German treaty represents the culmination of years of attempts by the leadership of the European Union to move the bloc from a loose federation of nation states united by economic concerns into an actual centralized, supranational entity akin to a federal republic such as the United States or Germany wherein member states would lose much of the sovereignty they have still managed to maintain, giving it over to a system controlled by a handful of unelected elites who, when allied with corporations, multinational banks, and media systems, will have an almost unlimited control over the lives and freedoms of their member states. Whether this was or wasn’t the original endgame of the EU’s founders is something that can be open for debate. What is clear, however, is that this is precisely the trajectory that the modern European Union is, by its own admission, headed towards.

At first a union of European states was seen by many as not only a way to strengthen the continent’s economy through trade and free movement of goods, and people flowing across now almost nonexistent borders, but also as a “remedy” to the nationalistic impulses of its various member states. On the first premise the entire system was sold, many times very reluctantly, to the nations who joined its bloc, but the second concept was always very present and constituted a large reason why the entire project came about in the first place.

The biggest backers of a unified Europe were always the economic elites who desired the transformation of societies into atomized collections of individuals bereft of any strong national or ethnic ties, who would see themselves as only lone members of a great mass of humanity whose entire existence would be based on the endless consumption of cheaply manufactured consumer goods with little interest or concern for the fate of their wider communities and their descendants who would inhabit them.

This dream had already come to pass throughout the United States of America, the paradise of capitalist consumer culture where the individual and his immediate rights and needs trumped any concern for a lasting and established society based on a common culture, traditions and set of values. In stark contrast stood Europe, a continent of many cultures and subcultures, each having been in existence for centuries, all intertwined by a very collective spirit which emphasized the communal over the individual, tradition over the novel, and national life and values over every passing, mass-produced fad. True, this description of Europe may sound considerably idealized when compared to the lives of many, especially the more prosperous parts of that continent today, but it is still a strong part of the strength and ideal that have made up European man and his worldview for far longer than the present age that has been foisted upon us.

The European Union itself is best represented by a striving, especially of its leaders, to transform the old one and its ideals into a recreation of the United States and its ideals and values instead. Beyond any sinister motives, European elites probably see a society based on such ideals as more pragmatic for their financial ends. The fewer roots one has, the more individualistic one becomes and the more willing one is to hold one’s own personal well-being up as the only value to live and die for. Stable nations with young and healthy populations are seen as ill-fitted for such a vision (or remedy). This has doubtlessly fueled the two greatest destructive acts that the EU has foisted on many of its members in recent years: the imposition of harsh austerity measures against largely poor countries with the stagnant population growth of smaller nations, and the encouragement of mass migration as a “solution to the declining birth rates” in those austerity-affected lands.

Firstly, these EU leaders impose harsh austerity measures and the privatization of public services on those nations it has already entangled in its debt schemes. Large sums of money were loaned to nations which never could possibly pay back the debts. The failure to pay leads to the imposition of harsh measures, which affect not only workers and the elderly who are already dependent on pensions for day-to-day survival, but also the nation’s youth, who are unable to find enough money with which to afford marriage and a stable family, and in many cases are forced to flee to other places for work, leaving a large vacancy in job markets.

Secondly, there comes a desire for large scale mass migration to alleviate this lack of workers caused by the fleeing youth. Large numbers of unskilled immigrants are brought in under the pretext of fulfilling these job roles (although this is only an excuse used to allow them in, and many simply never work but go on the public dole instead). The results of these policies are twofold: to reduce the nation’s youth to impoverishment, and then to replace them with those who have no historic connection to that nation and its culture and values. The end result will one day be countries where the majority of people are not part of the historic population, but from many divergent backgrounds and traditions whose unifying factor will not be the traditional culture and ways of the land they live in, but only a mass-produced consumer-driven form of society alien to that of traditional Europe, but very much familiar to that of the USA.

All seemed to be going smoothly for these globalists and their plans, but then suddenly, an almost miraculous rise of nationalism and populism throughout the nations of the EU, beginning in the mid-2010s, quickly put up a strong resistance to their scheme. The populations of the various nations began to cry out against the machinations of their unelected overlords in Brussels as well as their own elected leaders who willingly collaborated with them.

From the traditional Left came those who decried the crippling austerity measures undemocratically forced upon the working classes, elderly, youth, and other vulnerable members of the affected nations. From the traditional Right came those who spoke up against the forced migration policies that seemed to be transforming their native lands into almost unrecognizable masses of people who held no lasting connection to the country, its people and culture. As time went by, these two groups began to slowly find that they shared more in common with each other than would be supposed by the false dichotomy of “Left/Right” that the establishment had imprisoned their minds to believe was an inescapable part of modern political discourse.

The new populism and grassroots, anti-establishment movements that have formed in recent years are all working towards the same goals, although perhaps at different ends. These would be the restoration of true European civilization and mores, those that place individual, community, nation and most importantly, family life at the forefront of society and not a for-profit driven model based on mass production, consumerism and excessive, live-for-the-moment individualism that the elites have forced upon them as the “only option” for so long.

The best example of this in our modern times is the Yellow Vests movement that has emerged in France since the end of 2018. They manage to not only express the rage of ordinary French people towards the cold, neoliberal policies and replacement migration schemes of the Macron government, but have even managed to assemble a list of policies which cross over to both the concerns of the traditional Right and Left wings of politics, all to find a pragmatic solution to the issues that are so troubling to that country.

This is why the elite globalists who control the EU are so desperate to push through a plan of greater control of Europe by the creation of this new Franco-German superstate. Their hope is to form a union of the two largest countries in the EU bloc for the application of stronger economic and even military domination of that continent. The plan is to make any attempt at resistance to the control of Brussels a direct threat against France and Germany, one that could possibly be met with the pressure of a financial or defensive counter strike. Unless the other nations of Europe come together soon in some type of public vanguard (such as an expansion of the already existing Central European Visegrad group), the power of the Franco-German elites will only continue to grow and seek to suffocate any resistance against itself and the organization that holds its true power.

In closing, Europe is faced with two choices: to bleakly copy that of the nation across the Atlantic to the point of becoming a mere clone of America and its consumerist values and losing its European-descended majority, or to continue to struggle and fight in order to preserve and, one could only hope, revive the traditional principles that have made it a shining example of the greatest and most unique civilization humanity has ever managed to produce. A Europe that has been completely Americanized and completely Globalized would not be Europe at all, but rather a reflection of the rootless, soulless, atomized individuals that have come to dominate and disintegrate the tenets of the old social order that Western man has labored at for so many centuries, and whose roots spring from that very continent now under such threat.