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World News See other World News Articles Title: Macron Calls for “European Renaissance” in Controversial Alt-Right Pivot If there is one thing I like about French President Emmanuel Macron, it is his voluntarism. While his presidency necessarily embodies the incoherence and indecision of both the French people and oligarchy – hence the current suboptimal political equilibrium, recognized by all to be highly unsatisfying – Macron as a young globalist evidently has a rare passion and will in promoting his grand designs. Macron recently wrote an op-ed, translated in the various Europeans and published in newspapers across the continent, making his case for a reformed European Union. The text is interesting for the practical proposals, the implausible promises, and the persuasive arguments against a certain petty-nationalism. Macron is undeniably a smart guy. Granted, his discourse is notoriously vague, frequently resorting to the expression “en même temps” (at the same time), describing both sides of an issue without pinning himself down. He however has a good understanding of what works with globalism. The globalism of smart and/or hard-working people gathering in multinationals and institutions objectively works on its own terms, producing wealth and innovation (even if some are economically left behind by obsolescence or culturally alienated by immigration and/or Americanization). On the other hand, Macron also has some idea of what doesn’t work in globalism and can’t help making the occasional politically-incorrect observation. Most productively, he has repeatedly called on black African women to breed less so as to reduce immigration to Europe. He has also pointed out that journalists, as pack animals, are too stupid to understand his “complex thoughts.” Therefore, he concludes sensibly enough, he is avoiding interviews with them. There was also the recent case of Christophe Dettinger, “the Gypsy from Massy” (a town near Paris), the gilet-jaune who managed to push back several riot policemen fully equipped with armor, shields, and batons, using only his Fists of Righteousness, a moment immortalized in a viral video. Dettinger is in fact a Yenish, an apparently indigenous European nomadic group unrelated to Gypsies, but with a similar reputation for anti-social behavior and theft. He later released a video statement definding his actions before handing himself over to the police. Macron found Dettinger implausibly well-spoken: The boxer, [in] the video which he made before turning himself in, he was briefed by a far-left lawyer. It’s obvious! This guy, he doesn’t speak like a Gypsy. He doesn’t speak like a Gypsy boxer. So there you have it, Emmanuel Macron, ethnologue. As a matter of fact, all top French politicians – while paying lip-service to a notionally colorblind republic of equal and interchangeable citizens – are very conscious of the often ugly ethnic realities of France today. Former prime minister and then-mayor of Évry Manuel Valls, an ardent Zionist, once complained of the number of Africans and Muslims around while walking through his city: “a fine image of the city of Évry. . . . Could you put me a few Whites, a few Whites [in English], a few Blancos?” François Hollande, a former Socialist president, has also made many statements recognizing the racial fragmentation and feelings in the country, even seeing the prospect of civil war and “partition” in the long run. French politicians know that they shouldn’t make these statements in public and so usually these are off the record, but leak anyway. Anyway, Macron is also relatively aware of what works and doesn’t work in the European Union. He acknowledges that the EU is too often indecisive and reduced to a “soulless market.” He opens his letter with candid admissions: Never since the Second World War has Europe been so essential. Yet never has Europe been in such danger. Brexit stands as the symbol of that. It symbolizes the crisis of a Europe that has failed to respond to its peoples’ need for protection from the major shocks of the modern world. There is that word: protection. Every community, every nation has a theodicy, an account for the existence of evil in the world. In the case of French politics, what is frequently lamented is the lack of protection for citizens in the face of globalization. Concretely, Macron is making the case for more “reciprocity” and protectionism in European trade policy, rather than the current naïve position of unilateral openness and ‘neutral’ rule-following in the face of more self-interested partners: We need to reform our competition policy and reshape our trade policy, penalizing or banning businesses that compromise our strategic interests and fundamental values such as environmental standards, data protection, and fair payment of taxes; and the adoption of a European preference in strategic industries and our public procurement, as our American and Chinese competitors do. Personally I find all these measures quite reasonable: trade is only a means towards the kind of society you want (determined by your values) and should not compromise your sovereignty, that is to say your agency. Then again, I’m French. With the traditionally free-trading United Kingdom on the way out, and a recent protectionist turn among German big business, the EU may well turn against free trade or at least take a much more qualified position. There is evidence that Macron has been reading Steve Sailer’s arguments in favor of “continentalism.” In order to protect and defend the interests of one’s citizens, you need borders, but Macron argues that these should be continental rather than national, on the grounds of Europe’s shared race values and civilization: A market is useful, but it should not detract from the need for borders to protect and values that unite. Nationalists are misguided when they claim to defend our identity by withdrawing from the EU, because it is European civilization that unites, frees and protects us. Other than European protectionism, a long-standing French demand pioneered by such intellectuals as Emmanuel Todd, Macron’s letter is pretty thin on specifics. He touts the EU’s accomplishments and potential in the areas of peace, prosperity (“How would we resist the crises of financial capitalism without the euro, which is a force for the entire EU?” . . . right), financing of local infrastructure (various redistributive “pork” projects), and standing up to tech giants and foreign powers. Some of these claims are more plausible than others. The EU has, on the whole, certainly increased economic interdependence among European nations and given their shared economy a continental scale. The enlargement of the EU into Central Europe (especially the Visegrád countries) has secured much of that region’s human capital (mostly hard-working and often gifted migrants) and markets for the West-European economy. The EU has real clout in trade negotiations, competition policy (blocking mergers or slapping multi-billion-euro fines even on large American companies), and market regulation (witness all the scroll-bars appearing on your favorite websites following the passage of the EU General Data Protection Regulation [GDPR]). The EU has also had a surprisingly strong position in the Brexit negotiations, while the British government – under pressure from obstructionists in both the Conservative and Labour parties – has proven an incoherent mess. Without wishing to exaggerate the parallel, the EU’s strong hand, in sticking to agreed defensive positions, somewhat recalls the unity of the newborn United States of America in the war with Great Britain in the eighteenth century, despite these fragile confederacies’ difficulty in agreeing to positive measures binding on all of them. In other respects, Eurocratic rhetoric is generally not in line with reality. The EU remains almost a geopolitical nullity – notwithstanding some influence, usually misused, in its immediate neighborhood among North African and Eastern European states – rather justifying Léon Degrelle’s passionate assertion that “the small, miserable Europe of this impoverished common market cannot bring men happiness.” Macron’s own letter lacks realism in many areas. He claims to want a “zero carbon” European economy by 2050, which strikes me as laughable. He also wants to increase the EU budget for innovation so as to regain lost ground in the area of artificial intelligence, a laudable goal, even if it seems Europe will be permanently behind America and China in this area. Macron also says with self-satisfaction: “We have shown that things we were told were unattainable, the creation of a European defence capability and the protection of social rights, were in fact possible.” Again: right . . . By the way, the YouTube video in which Degrelle’s speech is made is now banned in my country. This kind of censorship does not trouble Emmanuel Macron’s conception of “democracy.” Indeed, he is going along with the general moral panic of metropolitan elites across the West, attributing the rise of populism and political-incorrectness not to their own failures and the Internet’s enabling of free speech (which would require too much self-criticism), but rather on dastardly “fake news” and “cyber-attacks.” In the same paragraph, Macron defends the “European model” of “democratic freedom,” which is “of people, diversity of opinions, and creation.” The protection of “democracy,” with its “diversity of opinions,” requires according to Macron “European rules banishing incitement to hatred and violence from the internet, since respect for the individual is the bedrock of our civilization and our dignity.” Hence, in the name of the teetering EU’s notional democracy, Macron wants a pan-European censorship regime to crack down on all speech the State deems to be “hate” or “violence.” This is unsurprising coming from the man who seemingly wants to make ZOG literally true by formally criminalizing anti-Zionist speech in France. (By the way, BDS, that is to say boycotting Israel, is an illegal and punishable offense in France.) In the same area, Macron also wants to ban foreign funding of European political parties, which strikes me as eminently sensible. On immigration, Macron’s discourse reflects the usual incoherence of globalist politicians, who in principle are open to infinite immigration, but in practice are, after all, still in charge of rooted citizens and administrations for whom millions of unskilled and often violent migrants are actually a huge practical problem. Macron claims to want stronger pan-European border controls and a common asylum policy, so that the EU “protects both its values [read: ignoring borders] and its borders.” In practice, nothing will come of this as there is no European consensus on immigration and border enforcement is almost exclusively done by national authorities with national interests and incentives (e.g., Italy has an incentive to dump all their excess migrants on the rest of the Union). Macron’s op-ed singles out Africa for special consideration: A world-oriented Europe needs to look to Africa, with which we should enter into a covenant for the future, ambitiously and non-defensively supporting African development with investment, academic partnerships and education for girls. “Education for African girls” is of course a well-known Alt-Right dog-whistle: both Emmanuel Macron and the Alt-Right have a shared objective of radically reducing African birth rates. (On a similar note, one of the most politically-correct and effective things we can do about The World’s Most Important Graph, in addition to educating African women, is to promote contraception/abortion rights and a minimal level of economic development in Sub-Saharan Africa.) Finally, Macron proposes that a “Conference for Europe” be organized with citizen panels and debates so as to launch a reform of the European treaties (the EU’s de facto constitution). That should be a big ol’ mess. The EU is a good example of both the inexorable logic of globalism and the insurmountable reality of nations and states. Yes, individuals and businesses want to work across borders, as much as possible, in the name of individual interest and collective efficiency. But, even within Europe, among comparable nations with basically the same ideology and outlook, it is extraordinarily difficult to then govern and make something coherent of this borderless “space.” Because the German and French peoples, not to mention all the others, do not talk to each other, have their own mentality and rhythm, and the various national oligarchies use what remains of the nation-state to defend their own selfish pecuniary and institutional interests. That’s called, going nowhere fast. The EU only works if democratic politics is studiously limited to “consensus” among deracinated elites in Brussels and Frankfurt. Said consensus must be as vague and opaque as possible to prevent the citizens of any country from becoming upset and blocking the whole process. The other way is simply to hand over autocratic power – our “democrats” speak of “independent” institutions of “experts” – who can do things without effective democratic accountability, as with the EU’s competition authorities and central bank. The EU then is torn between indecision and unaccountability. Case in point, Macron’s op-ed is conspicuously silent on the eurozone, the EU’s most ambitious and, not coincidentally, dysfunctional attempt at federalization. Politico’s European edition (generally a solid source of EU coverage) observes that cross-border lending has declined and national financial regulators are clawing back powers (notably in moving to bail out their own banks, and thus, their own citizens’ savings), preventing a coherent pan-eurozone approach. What’s more, national governments have been pushing more and more localist measures to the detriment of European common market: France is restricting Central European truckers (who don’t have the same wages or social charges as French ones), while some Central European countries have imposed taxes on foreign-owned European companies or tried to force supermarkets to buy local. Confederacies of divided sovereignty, like the EU or the Antebellum United States enjoy a fragile and fluctuating unity, according to the attitudes of their constituent parts. Or as Macron himself says, EU integration is “a daily commitment.” I make this point a lot, but it bears repeating: autocratic governments are generally better able to manage multiethnic societies than are democratic ones, where each ethno-national ego is free to develop and tear the commonwealth apart. Macron is at his most persuasive not in defending the European Union but in denouncing petty-nationalism as a dead end: Retreating into nationalism offers nothing; it is rejection without an alternative. And this is the trap that threatens the whole of Europe: the anger mongers, backed by fake news, promise anything and everything. . . . What country can act on its own in the face of aggressive strategies by the major powers? Who can claim to be sovereign, on their own, in the face of the digital giants? . . . We can’t let nationalists with no solutions exploit people’s anger. We can’t sleepwalk to a diminished Europe. This kind of argument will naturally resonate with the metropolitan types, whether they be corporate managers, academics, or idealists, who cannot see how their nation alone can remain relevant in the world. While a willful small nation can certainly maintain its identity on its own, the metropolitans certainly have a point. And while it’s true that Macron’s vision does not jive with most Frenchmen – over half have not even heard of his “European Renaissance” initiative – the educated folks matter a great deal. (The Guardian version of the op-ed was shared 19,000 times on Facebook.) We need to conciliate nationalism and Europeanism: a European nationalism, in harmony with the reality and sentiments of each nation, defending indigenous Europeans’ collective identity and interests in the world. Macron concludes his plea: “It is for you to decide whether Europe and the values of progress that it embodies are to be more than just a passing episode in history.” But how could Europe, a 3000-year old civilization, with deeper roots still, be a mere “passing episode”? Macron’s Europe is not ours. As the identitarian think-tanker Jean-Yves Le Gallou said in a viral video on European identity (English subtitles available): Europe is not the Brussels organization [the EU], nor a currency or a central bank. Europe is not a globalized and borderless space. Europe is not the African world, nor is it an Islamic land. . . . Europe is the continent of the Europeans. Macron at least encourages us to think big for Europe, but we ought to go further. The identitarian writer Guillaume Faye, who recently passed way, wrote in his influential classic Archeofuturism: Some of my positions in this book, in favor of a United States of Europe or a Euro-Siberian Federation, may shock some. But hear me out: I am not an advocate of this mollusk-like Europe of the treaty of Amsterdam [of 1997], nor an enemy of France. . . . To not disappear, our people, whether living in Toulouse, Rennes, Milan, Prague, Munich, Antwerp, or Moscow, needs to return and resort to ancestral virility. . . . Let us conceive the inconceivable.[1] Notes [1] Guillaume Faye, L’Archéofuturisme (Paris: L’Æncre, 2011), pp. 16-17. Post Comment Private Reply Ignore Thread
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