The EU Mystery

The mystery is why anyone thought the EU is a good idea.

The EU began as a trading club, but the idea that it should develop into a multi-ethnic superstate was there from the beginning.  Only one politically coherent superstate, it was thought, would finally put an end to centuries of ruinous war on the European continent.  This idea developed at the end of WW II, the single most cataclysmic event in Human history, so people were motivated.

The motivation was clear enough, the thinking not so much.  It's not as if multi-ethnic states have not existed before.  To the contrary, there have been multi-ethnic states for millenia, and the experience is not encouraging.

Every empire in history was a multi-ethnic political entity.  They were forged in violence and they were destroyed in violence.  I used to think the USSR was the one great exception to that rule.  The USSR was forged in violence, alright, but on its face it did not fall apart because of some combination of the usual suspects:  civil war, pestilence, and certainly there were no invading foreign armies.

However, the USSR did have an enormous internal security apparatus.  Short of invading foreign armies, there was a great deal of internal violence.  The state waged perpetual war against its citizens.  Mainly because socialism is an irrational way to organize human society, and violence was the only way to preserve the integrity of the state---until people, including the nomenklatura and apparatchiks themselves, just woke up one day and realized they could no longer live in that insane system, anymore.

I now believe the multi-ethnic character of the USSR was another important reason for that perpetual war of the state against the people and, ultimately, for the demise of the socialist empire.  There are plenty of other examples in the modern era.

On the more violent end of the spectrum there was Jugoslavia.  This had been a multi-ethnic state for approximately 73 years, from about 1918 to about 1991.  Three generations were not enough to make  "e pluribus unum" and Jugoslavia exploded into a fratricidal war.

World War I is an object lesson, but not in what you think, necessarily.  A lot of gibberish is written about the causes of WW I, and serious historians throw up their hands, in frustration.  This is amazing to me.  You have only to look around to see war after war after war waged as one ethnos against another:  Arabs against Persians, Arabs against Alawites, Punjabs against Balochs, Tamils against Sinhalese, Burmese against Rohingya.  The horrific Nigerian Civil War (1967-70) was the mainly Christian Igbo against the mainly Muslim Hausa-Fulani.  And on and on and on.

The Austrian-Hungarian Empire was a bubbling cauldron of antagonistic ethnon, and historians can't figure out why, in 1914, it exploded like a super nova?  Seemingly out of the blue?  Who could have seen that coming?  (Come on!)

My very first thought about the Rwandan genocide was disbelief.  When reports first started reaching the West,  I did not believe you could kill a million people with machetes.  I was wrong.  Multiculturalism "concentrates the mind wonderfully", and it turns out that if you try hard enough, you, too, can kill a million people with machetes.  By the way, I couldn't tell a Hutu from a Tutsi if my life depended on it, but there's multiculturalism for ya.

Today, the gruesome multiculturalism of Syria and Iraq and Pakistan are on full display.

On the less violent end of the spectrum there is the confederation of Czechoslovakia.  Oh, wait!  No, there isn't.  The Czechs and Slovaks are my heroes.  Their political divorce, if not amicable, was bloodless.  Bloodless can be a great thing!  Here, too, I couldn't tell the difference between a Czech and a Slovak if my life depended on it.  I can barely even spell Czech, but their differences were enough to drive them apart.

Belgium is a less than idyllic union of Walloons and Flemish, always threatening to collapse.  Even placid Canada experiences some mainly friendly and sometimes not so friendly friction between its English and French constituents, to say nothing of the very real antagonisms between disparate parts of Canada that have more in common, both economically and demographically, with adjacent pieces of the U.S. than with other parts of Canada (Alberta vs the Maritime provinces, eg).  Which brings us back to Great Britain.

Great Britain is its own little European Union of English, Scots, and Welsh (and Northern Ireland).  After 300 years of a common market and political union, an unhappy Scotland wants to trade its union with England, with which it has a great deal in common, for a union with---Romania?  This makes sense how, exactly?

The writer John Derbyshire tells the story of hiking through Wales, as a young man, and encountering villagers who would refuse to speak English to him.  This, in the 20th century.

What a multicultural society, more successful than GB, should look like, I frankly cannot imagine.  And yet, after 300 years, there is the real danger it will fall apart.  And somebody thinks the European Union, as something more than a trading club, is a good idea?

How?