Europe and the British Right

As Britain approaches nearly a decade since the decision to vote Leave, many, including dissident wings of the British right, have concluded that leaving was a mistake. Any Brexiteer time traveller fast forwarding to see the events of the late 2010s and early 20s would be unpleasantly surprised by the trajectory the country was placed on. A tortuous three year purgatory under Mayite post-liberalism nearly bequeathed the country to a socialist government. Britain was saved by a triumphal blue tsunami of Johnsonite neoliberal populism, which in turn squandered a massive majority by flooding the country with millions of Subcontinentals and Africans, while subjecting the youth of the nation to two years of panoptical totalitarianism. The Conservatives fostered an autistic Indian billionaire as premier on the nation because of ‘ethics’, eventually resulting in a left wing alcoholic lawyer taking control and unleashing a wave of violent repression against a working class nativist revolt. ‘Brexit’ Britain is less white, poorer, politically more oppressive and lurching towards ungovernability. And while now the previously fantastical probability of a Farage premiership is a certainty, his political front is promising to expand the financial privileges of the parasitic multicultural ‘Second Estate’ at the expense of the already burdened British taxpayer.

I’ve had this narrative of events expressed to me in simplified terms by racist Romanian taxi drivers and anglophile German liberal conservatives, all of whom revel in schadenfreude at the misery of presumptuous Albion. ‘You replaced Poles with Pakistanis while being governed by Indians’ are cheap shots, but nevertheless sting because there is an element of truth to them. If we look back the political programs of the two Brexit camps-‘global’ vs ‘fortress’ Britain-we’ve ended up with the bastardised intersection of both visions which is worse than if either of them had been implemented in full. Britain has opened its borders to a far more globalised inflow of migrants while maintaining an expanded welfare state with correspondingly easy access to residency and naturalisation (for all the rabidly exuberant celebration of the recent ILR ‘reforms’ on some corners of the right, these will achieve little in practice). We’ve not chosen significant regulatory divergence from the EU while also preserving all of the indigenous pathologies of a dysfunctional planning system and environmentalist economic self-harm.

However, I would caution against right wing Bregret. Firstly, EU migration was never exclusively white. Free movement quickly became a vector for extra-European migrant populations to settle in Britain. Around 20,000 Goans and Somalis respective immigrated to this country on EU passports, of course in addition to the 250,000 Romani Gypsies who are in loyalist crosshairs as of the moment of writing. Nelson, the English town with the highest number of non-English speakers, also received significant numbers of Muslims diasporics from the continent. No doubt this problem would have worsened over time and will re-emerge if the Youth Mobility Scheme comes into place.

Additionally, many of the problems Britain is now facing are not inevitable structural derivatives of our departure from the EU. Instead they stem from the class of policy makers who sought our integration to the European project in the first place. Replacement migration, discretionary planning laws and pro-deindustrialisation energy policy were all going to take their long term toll on the human capital and economic standing of the country, irrespective of whether we remained or exited the EU. Brexit was a neutral reaffirmation of parliamentary sovereignty; that our leadership chose to use it for nefarious purposes of national self-destruction is not an indictment of the decision itself.

There’s also a broader point to be made that Brexit, irrespective of cost benefit calculations, was a dialectical process the British right (in contrast to its continental analogues) had to go through so we could reach a nativism driven principally by opposition to third world immigration. Continued membership of the EU would have always provided people the safe option of vicariously contesting ethnic substitution through ‘banging on about Brussels’. There’s no smoke or mirrors anymore about who is causing harm to our country; it squarely and exclusively lies with Westminster and its devolved Blairite satrapies. Its obviously difficult to express these nuances to compatriots let alone many foreigners with an interest in British affairs.

All this being said, I am not a Powellite advocate of an exclusionary vision of national sovereignty. There are many compelling reasons for the political integration of not just Europe but also its diaspora nations, from Canberra to Calgary. It is simply the EU which as an institution leaves me cold. As correctly identified by the post-war radical right, it was always an American ploy to prevent the substantive union of Europe and its remaining colonial holdings into a genuine third force in world affairs. Eurocrats have no love or vision for the continent. Their mythology is one centred on Christian Democratic pacifism and a correspondingly perennial fear of conflict, a hobbit Europe nestled in the Confucian obscurantism of ‘human rights’ and the international ‘rule of law’. My Europe is a heroic one which asserts its egoistic interests on the world stage of history, as envisioned by Friedrich Nietzsche.

The EU cannot be reformed nor subverted through 4D chess manoeuvres into a nationalist superstate. There will be no grand electoral coalition of nationalist parties which achieves a majority in the European parliament, nor will will there correspondingly be a nationalist Commission. The coordination problem involved in this would be significant in and of itself, but also ignores the reality that these political structures are relatively powerless beyond the conditional authority granted them by member states. The EU was never the harbinger of superstate but is a means by which Eurocommunists, who view themselves as dimly committed by legal norms to the demographic dissolution of Europe, can occlude he exercise of power in a series of transnational frameworks.

For Europe to be unified the EU must be destroyed. This doesn’t preclude the possibility of structural continuity with whatever force takes its place-there is no reason for example to dismantle the Single Market or abruptly collapse the Eurozone-but the Council of Europe, its courts, presidency and parliament as well as the aesthetic trappings of the blue and gold flag and the mawkish ‘ode to joy’, must all be abjured. The question facing us is what form will its inevitable replacement take and how should the British right begin to take on the propagation of this vision (for indeed it must be from this island that this union is established).

The right wing alternative to the EU conventionally espoused is essentially a Gaullist or more latterly an Orbanist one, in which it reverts to the status quo ante the Maastricht Treaty. The ‘first pillar’ of the EEC is preserved but other areas, such as non-essential regulatory and legal alignment between member states, are abolished, with the Eurozone being progressively dismantled or partitioned into regional currency zones. If one looks at the work of the Heritage Foundation in Eastern Europe, particularly the patronised centre of ‘dissident’ conservative thought that is Budapest, much of it involves something along these lines. The ECJ continues as a legal adjudicator within the framework of the Single Market alongside the intergovernmental structures of the EU and the Commission in a weakened form. Indeed, the MAGA strategic vision for Europe would probably look like the EU being atrophied to a loose association of states under the political influence of the United States. Obviously there have been exceptions to this within the mainstream nationalist right. For example, Jean Marie Le Pen’s proposed to strengthen the Eurozone in the 2000s as a means of counteracting dollar hegemony, however some sort of confederalisation is the bog-standard populist position on the European project.

There are many problems with this solution, already partly alluded to. While no doubt viable, a confederal Europe would be a strategic error for European peoples in an era in which demographic hegemons like China and India are able to leverage their population size to gain favourable trade and migratory agreements. The United States is an uncertain friend as even the Trump administration, while containing Eurocentric elements, relies upon a large coterie of ethnic groups in its electoral coalition, not all favourable to the birthplace of Western civilisation. And while a ‘Jeffersonian’ Europe dependent upon a Vance administration would be preferable to the current state of affairs, there’s no steadfast guarantee that the future of America will not belong, even if temporarily, to the likes of Zohraran Mamdami. The Russian Federation continues to be lead by self-described ‘anti-fascists’ who are in the process of settling the south-eastern Ukrainian littoral with Chechens, Tajiks and Dagestanis. To be short a politically decentralised Europe surrounded by hostile or potentially hostile super states is a non-starter for the 21st century.

To find a genuine alternative we should look to an earlier time when the relative weakness of Europe was manifest. The post-war period saw a renewed and sometimes neglected period of transnational radical right wing activity, which sought to provide novel solutions to Europe’s predicament in the context of social-democratic-communist bipolarity in the Cold War. Indeed, counter-intuitively, it was the British activist Oswald Mosley who was the architect of a new vision for the continent dubbed ‘Europe a nation’. Before I go further this not an endorsement of Mosley or of the BUF. There are many things, such as his pro-Irish republican sentiments and his economic corporatism (which was the actually the substantive cornerstone of his fascist ideology) which I find objectionable or are simply out of date. But we must recognise that he did attempt to grapple with the problems facing Britain and other European states at this critical juncture in history.

‘Europe a nation‘ proposed that Europe form a unitary political entity, more centralised than anything achieved by the incremental integrationism of the EEC. It was not entirely novel as a concept. Ideas of European unification had emerged on the radical right previously; the Verona manifesto of the Italian Social Republic in 1943 had called for the formation of a European community as had Joachim Von Ribbentrop in his developed proposals for a European confederation in the same year. More obscure proposals are those which emerged which imagined the continent in the form of a national socialist HRE. Indeed, Mosley himself had already countenanced such ideas as early as early 1936 when he wrote in the ‘World Alternative’ that ‘we must return to the fundamental concept of European union which animated the war generation of 1918’. What distinguished Mosley’s post war proposals from previous ones was 1) its abjuring of any notion of national hegemony within the union, 2) that the union have nation-state levels of political centralisation and 3) that it be unified by the missionary development of a pan-European African condominium.

I won’t concerns myself with the syndicalist aspects of his vision or the international dimensions of his work as I assume readers are relatively familiar with the occupational partition of Europe. But its worth exploring how the proposed Mosleyite political structure for Europe would have worked. In ‘Europe: Faith and Plan‘, his most comprehensive exposition of his vision for the continent, the European governance would have followed a conventional partition of powers. A directly elected executive would assume matters for defence and foreign policy as well as the setting of prices and pay while a European parliament, also directly elected, would have control over elements of social policy which did not belong to the domain of ‘high politics’. Additionally, a pan-European judiciary would guarantee the civil liberties of the peoples of Europe, in particular preventing the suspension of Habeas Corpus as well as the persecution of political dissidents (which Mosley, due his internment during the war, was particularly alert to). National and local governments would continue to operate but at a considerably reduced remit of authority, being confined to the purely domestic affairs of their country’s respective spheres.

Of course at the time of Mosley’s activism in the 1950s, many European states maintained large colonial holdings and his ‘third way’ between nation-statist recalcitrant colonialism (as exemplified by the Salazar regime) and the decolonial agenda sponsored by Europe’s enemies, was actually the linchpin of his project. Africa was to be turned into a pan-European condominium, with respective historical zones of influence recognised, accompanied by a guarantee for the equitable economic division of the continent. This is where Mosley’s ideas perhaps draw more inspiration not from the emergent Europeanism of figures in the Axis powers, but from earlier interwar activists, who saw the the shared governance of Africa as a means of resolving inter-state disputes in the continent. Figures such as Karl Haushofer, Erich Obst and Herman Sorgel (the latter of whom conceived of the Atlantropa project which plays a key part in the storyline of ‘The Man in the High Castle’) all saw the Franco-German economic exploitation of the continent as means of establishing European autarky and unity. Mosley simply extended these ideas to include Britain in a leading role.

Mosley’s vision did not find much resonance with his compatriots at the time of writing. While prophetic, many radical British nationalists were instinctively hostile to a vision which they construed as involving the subsummation of our island into a continental superpower. Although the Union Movement and the League of St George would act as standard-bearers for his vision, they remained very much fringe positions within a scene which was more indebted to legacy of Arnold Leese and AK Chesterton, as witnessed by the tenacious hostility of the National Front to the EEC. However, his ideas did resonate with continental neo-fascist scene, becoming official policy of Italian Social Movement and the Socialist Reich Party. Indeed, most of the post war radical right, before its gradual evolution or displacement by more ‘mainstream’ national populists, were committed to varying degrees to his proposals.

My point in revisiting Mosley’s vision is, once again, not to give a endorsement of everything he did or said, but rather to explore what shape right wing British Europeanism actually could take (as opposed to the smug garden variety ‘racist case for Remain’ slop which exists in some corners today). His vision was important because it articulated the need for there to be a constructive outlet for European energies, and that European unity would be furthered by an external project of development. Europeans, and the British in particular, have a natural wonder-lust. The great shame of the existing European project is that, beyond the aborted vision of Jean Monnet and Robert Schuman, it has been fundamentally insular. This has inevitably generated national neuroses because the process of integration can then only be viewed as a process of national decline and self-abrogation. A Britain given the purvey of governing Southern Africa within the framework of a neo-colonial commission would never have voted Leave.

Additionally, it also proves that European integration can never happen in defiance or at the expense of Britain. ‘Island exceptionalism’ is not a romantic myth but rather a geopolitical reality. Britain will always obstruct projects of continental unification because they will leave her isolated. The logical corollary of this is that we must therefore lead the project of European unity. Indeed, Mosley himself saw such an endeavour as a natural extension of England’s unification of the British Isles. Continentals must understand that Britain cannot be cowed, mocked or berated into joining a unified Europe. It is a great pity that many Europeans have given themselves over to an incredibly spiteful attitude towards this island since 2016 and genuinely hope it suffers. The only real chances for European unity were the Treaty of Troyes and the proposed Franco-British unions of 1940 and 1956. The tragedy of Brexit was that it launched Britain into the position of a revisionist power which could have outlined an alternative to the EU. Instead our political class, committed to a spurious friend-enemy distinction founded on a normative division between ‘liberal democracies’ and ‘authoritarian’ states, maintained amicable relations with regime which aim to do us harm.

It is ultimately beyond the limits of this article to outline what a new occidental union could look like. Undoubtedly it will extend beyond the mere geographical confines of Europe. It will have a commission for Africa and for the transnational management of reparative foreign labour, as well as for programs of multilateral resettlement. We already see harbingers of this in Bjorn Hocke’s proposals for a European Defence Community. For the future, it is vital that the youth of this country reach out to their cousins wherever they may be. It is the task of this exceptional child of Europe, born of their union of some of her fiercest peoples, to give shape to a new world order.

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This article (Europe and the British Right) was created and published by J’Accuse and is republished here under “Fair Use”

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