Visegrád for the Future?

The old hit song is wrong—it isn’t love that makes the world go round. Relationships based on compatibility or hostility are far more important.

During the 20th century, much of the world gyrated around the axis we called ‘Atlanticism,’ a policy of close alliance between the US and Europe; it dictated our security agreements, such as NATO, and the ‘special relationship’ between the US and England. Today, this factor in global politics is more a fading myth than a fact. To elucidate requires discussion of matters that I’m as reluctant to bring up as many readers will be loath to hear; like rubbing a cat against the grain of his fur, it will be no more pleasurable for me than for the feline. But it must be done.

My focus is Europe, but a quick word on America. The traditional role of the US in the transatlantic agreement was to preserve her politically and economically progressive—and voluntarily participating—allies. But now America’s governors lead from behind. Though her size makes her a world leader, she is carelessly ruled by a bipartisan elite, who indulge their fashionable ideas instead of taking actions that would succeed if pursued vigorously. This is tolerated by a locally-oriented public that is distracted by trivia to the point that it loses sight of the national interest. The likely party nominees for president are symptomatic of misdirection by popular consent: one is honest and outspoken but emotionally incontinent, the other polished and insincere.

Not that Europe’s leadership is much better: Brussels stumbles from one cow dropping straight into the next. Take the way they bungled the Greek financial crisis; it’s still festering. How can an entity that’s five hundred million people strong lack the will to return a country of ten million to sanity? And when Russia shows signs of expansionism, we reluctantly hand out limited sanctions.

The migrant crisis is a special case. To echo Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orbán, a country that is unwilling to control its borders is no country, and a state that is unable to assert its laws is not sovereign; therefore it is not a state. Thanks to Merkel’s miscalculations and misdeeds—and an overall impotence to enforce our laws and sovereignty—an avalanche of ‘refugees’ has now broken into Europe, and the problem will worsen in time, if our leaders fail to grow a spine. Unfortunately, in the ruling circles of the EU, weakness masquerades as a moral principle that lends a moral halo to polite surrender.

Furthermore, the Union is unable to cope with domestic and imported crime. This incapacity highlights not so much the rigor of the challenge as the extent to which the EU has hobbled itself. The elites who are supposed to protect society go on casting impostors in the role of victim, till it’s not the criminal but his target who gets blamed. If you mention the facts you’re a xenophobe, while the uncritical conception of misbehaving aliens as victims reinforces the equally thoughtless creed that crime expresses the unfairness of the social order.

It’s clear the EU has made a crucial error when its PC proclamations provoke a hitherto passive population to resistance. For the newly politically awakened, ‘Brussels’ is synonymous with failing and resented policies. That association is reinforced as the EU clings ever more doggedly to the water-soaked life-raft of anti-White dogma.

Alienation accelerates when Brussels clashes with the new patriotism that’s surging in the East of the continent; the East-West gap coincides with the tensions between small and large member countries.

The past experience of Europe’s two halves diverges significantly.  In the nineteenth century, by contrast to the powers in the West, supranational empires prevented Europe’s East from setting up sovereign nations for its peoples; servitude and foreign bossing continued and expanded in the 20th century. Yes, the Nazis subjugated most of Europe—but their rule in the racially related West was a kindergarten compared to the Eastern zone where, starting with the Jews, entire nations were marked for extermination. The East became ever more resentful of rule by great powers, as they established the nexus of limited independence and extinction.

Soviet rule—which once again featured the mass murder of ethnicities, and now classes too—amplified the association between sovereignty and survival. All this explains much about the current clash of perspectives: the West never lived through the East’s degradation to colonial status under Moscow. Western Socialism expressed itself not through bayonets, but in the form of nice cuddly Social Democrats.

The past should teach us to be wary of great powers who would exert their ‘guidance’ over the cacophony of the ‘small fry’ to the East. Take note of British and German complaints about certain other member states: it hardly relieves tension when powerful member states are run by Leftists who preach that commitment to a newly liberated nation equals ‘fascism’.

The prospect of a united Europe without a European people might not create much apprehension in the West. However, in the Eastern precincts, a new super-state that negates ethnic-cultural identity is alarming. The more so since bureaucratic centralization is supposed to compensate for the lack of natural bonds between allies—making it all the more tempting for large members to convert a federal facade into a system of rule by themselves.

Finally, what of security? If those who wish to centralize power in Europe are determined to extend the grasp of their bureaucracy, one might hope they feel a similar determination to protect the realm they are creating from imperiling external entities. This is not so.

On the whole, EU potentates are either one-world internationalists, cultural relativists, or guilty apologists for past colonialism. The more assertive an alien force becomes, the more these doctrines determine our responses—even in cases that imply a threat to the indigenous way of life. Europe is reluctant to defend herself because, subconsciously, she is convinced that nothing bad can happen to her. Indeed, clinging to their beliefs that all cultures are equal, our leaders loudly tell us that obvious threats are merely racist phantasms. Unfortunately, a danger you ignore is a danger you can’t resist.

But amidst the symptoms of decadence, a new alternative center is emerging within Europe: the Visegrád Group, comprising Poland, the Czech Republic, Slovakia, and Hungary. (A sub-franchise is reportedly in the making in the West.) All four nations share a proud historical record, which, combined with their recent experience of life under tyranny, gives them the heady sensation that they have something that deserves to be defended, and is under attack.

Such determination has vast potential—particularly if America’s next round of elections unearths a will to reassume her leadership. If so, Visegrád is a potential cluster of willing allies. A series of bilateral commitments could provide Washington with a more virile parallel to the indulgent joke that is NATO—if her leaders are bold enough to embrace it. The entrepreneurial truism that ‘the future is unpredictable and only innovators can cope’ holds just as true in international relations.