The promise of the European Union, tacit or explicit in every treaty, was a future land of common agricultural policy–funded milk and honey.
It would deliver, you see, employment, stability and growth.
Let us then take stock.
In a quarter of a century, unemployment rates across the beleaguered Union have regularly been twice that of the United States.
Over that long period, the best average European Union unemployment numbers at 5.9 per cent, reached in December 2024, would have sent US policymakers into a spin.
Of course, average numbers hide a great deal.
For instance, in Italy, Spain, and Greece between 2013 and 2014, between 40 per cent and 60 per cent of under 25s sat at home without official employment.
While numbers have dropped in these three countries, between a fifth and a quarter of their young are still watching TV on their mothers’ sofas in lieu of proper work.
In France, numbers for unemployed under 25s never really left the 20 per cent mark.
These levels of unemployment, in particular at that time of life when one ought to be straining every sinew, are an irreparable loss of hope and aspiration for the person and a terrible blow to the nation.
Much of the anxiety that comes from inactivity leads, among other things, to distortions local and trans-national, as a crisis of joblessness at home forces a great many to leave and starve their native lands of youthful vigour and talent.
That in turns puts pressure on both the youth, who leaves, and his counterpart in the chosen land of immigration, who competes then for scarce jobs and home building, pushing wages down.
Nothing illustrates how far Europe has fallen better than the response to JD Vance’s speech – Alex Story
Getty Images/X
So much then for our European Bureaucratic dream of full employment.
Let us then turn to stability.
In a quarter of a century, the European Union has brought perpetual turmoil, interfering with increasing frequency in the affairs of nation-states.
Centralised decision-making over such a diverse continent, while interesting on paper, has turned out to be deleterious in practice, as imposing theoretical concepts on complex realities always does.
Worse, by working for the abstract general good but against the best interest of individual nations, according to the wishes of their people, the European Union has hollowed out constitutional democracies.
Voting has become a game of choosing the colour of a politician’s tie, mostly an automaton, whose bureaucratic concerns are fully at odds with those of the disenfranchised taxpayer – the slave who toils for his untouchable master.
Across the continent, politicians are told very much the same thing by their citizens – internal and external borders, cheap energy, national considerations matter – but the European Union’s aims are not those of the peoples whose vote the institution does not need, though they do need the disenfranchised’s wealth.
The result is a rapidly changing political landscape in which the formerly majority and centrist parties have shrunk to the level of hitherto extreme ones.
And conversely, minority parties of old have increasingly become mainstream, either forming governments as in Holland and Austria or stand to the cusp of political power.
The quasi disappearance of France’s formerly all-conquering Socialist Party, which won 52 per cent of the votes at the 2012 Presidential election but only garnered 1.72 per cent ten years later, should be a cautionary tell.
Given the unreformable demands of the European Union and France’s political landscape, nothing between now and 2027 will change, thereby paving the way for Marine Le Pen’s victory.
So much then for the promise of stability.
We now come to growth.
Over the last few years, there has been none.
By focusing on the much-vaunted level playing field, the EU ended up suffocating its host.
In 2011, EU economy stood on par with the United States, having been larger than the latter, which only nine, in 1980.
By 2025, the United States raced ahead, leaving the enfeebled Potemkin European artifice in frozen statis, while it nearly doubled in size to $30trillion.
Catastrophically, Germany, the continent’s overstretched and ageing workhorse, has been in recession for longer than most would like to admit.
Eurostat, the EU union’s statistics department, recently published data that should keep the framers of the doom union awake now and forever.
Industrial production dropped by two per cent in just one year to December 2024 across the board.
Germanysaw a four per cent collapse.
Italy’s industrial base collapsed by seven per cent, putting her in penultimate position in the race to full deindustrialisation.
Walking away with the gold medal is Austria.
Her industrial base fell by an eyewatering 9.5 per cent.
Luckily, for balance, Malta, with the population of Bradford, did really well. We all cheered mightily.
The poorest states of the United States, Alabama and Mississippi, are richer per capita than our most important European countries.
The European experiment has not been the injection of testosterone European countries and peoples were promised.
Quite the contrary.
The European Union has acted like puberty blockers for the nation-states of Europe, forever in transition between the great nations they were and the ever-shrinking (physically and financially), morally bankrupt, effete Lilliputian zombies they are becoming.
Nothing illustrates how far Europe has fallen more than the Chairman of the Munich Security Conference, Wolfgang Ischinger, former ambassador to the United Nations and advisor to Angela Merkel, being applauded for crying in public a couple of days ago by other permanently funded bureaucrats during his farewell speech.
He used the occasion to remind the audience about the importance of gender balance on panels, praised John Kerry and his constant tilting at the Climate Crisis windmill, and the fact that the speech of the American Vice President pointed to (European) “common values not being that common anymore”.
In this, he was right.
His views are not common, widespread or popular; those of JD Vance are.
The Vice President’s intervention was the clearest speech by an elected representative since Margaret Thatcher and a welcomed re-affirmation of our Judeo-Christian heritage.
It was received in silence in Munich but cheered worldwide by all who heard it.
A mark of the gulf that now separates our permanently funded bureaucrats from us, the plebs.
Further, JD Vance quoted Pope John Paul, who, his gaze facing Eastwards towards the multitudes crushed under the yoke of Socialist tyranny, told them, “Don’t be afraid”.
Quoting a Pope at a conference in Europe, you see, is now anathema.
That’s how fast a tree rots once its roots are severed.