Europe, An Empire of 400 Million

Jean Thiriart

• Publisher: Arktos Media Ltd
• Year: 2021
• eBook ISBN: 9781914208058
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Geopolitics
• Index: Politics & International Relations

Jean Thiriart was a true prophet of the coming age of empires and continental multipolarity. He foreshadowed a conservative European Union by decades, arguing that such a supranational organization would be necessary to crush outmoded nationalisms, which only lead to disunity and eventual fratricidal slaughter. Needless intra-European competition will only ensure the defeat of all Europeans, in competition with the scheming Americans and the multiplying Asiatics, on the world stage. Only a unitarian Europe, bonded by a common heritage and a truly Faustian goal, is a strong and defensive Europe!

He envisioned the age-old dream of a Magna Europa, stretching from Brest to Bucharest, at that time in collaboration with the Soviets in the East and in opposition to the Americans in the West. His Europe would be a marriage of the technological West with the resource-rich East, leading to an unchallenged hyperpower status, unbeatable and invincible - a beacon of the only worthy civilization radiating its glory all across the globe, elevating itself and mankind with it.

This new edition is translated, annotated and introduced by author and historian, Dr Alexander Jacob.

Chapter VII

How Unitarian Europe Will Be Formed

A state is first an idea, a historical conception.

Jacques Doriot, Congress of the PPF,⁷⁸ 1942

And one cannot pass from the small society to the big through the same process. One needs here a coagulating factor, which, in the great majority of cases, is not the instinct of association but the instinct of domination. It is to the instinct of domination that the big system owes its existence.

The nation did not at first bring out its leaders for the simple reason that it did not exist before them, either in fact or in instinct.

Bertrand de Jouvenel

Where there is a will there is a way.

William of Orange

Only those will win who are ready not to win anything for themselves, for the future belongs to those who risk everything for an ideal. Wisdom is to live heroically.

Alexis Carrel

A factual hierarchy must be founded on the need that a revolution has of revolutionaries. The most necessary ones are the first.

Sergey Nechayev

The relative homogeneity of the race and language, which they enjoy, is the result of the prerequisite political unification. Consequently, neither blood nor language constitute the national state; on the contrary, it is the national state that levels the original differences of the red corpuscles and of the articulated sounds. And it was always so. Rarely, not to say never, will the state have coincided with a prerequisite identity of blood and language.

José Ortega y Gasset

Pilot Nation or Pilot Party? Hegemon State or Springboard State?

A numerous but old school advances the formula of a process of unification of Europe starting from a preponderant nation.

Another school, ours, much more modern, maintains the technique of unification of Europe starting from a European party. Let us specify clearly, of an integrated party and especially not of a vague amalgam of ‘nationalist specks of dust’ (petty nationalists) reunited by the very loose bonds of a so-called ‘coordination’ or a fragile ‘federation’. The party that unitarian Europe will herald should be — evidently — itself unitarian and centralised.

The Europe realised by and around a preponderant nation has been a formula tried several times and aborted several times. France tried it with Bonaparte, Germany with Hitler, de Gaulle flirts with it still and, which is better, his ‘pretenders’, that is to say, the last survivors of the CNR⁷⁹ -OAS, do the same.

The process of a strong nation, of a chosen nation, ‘predestined’ in a way, federating in its orbit the other nations of Europe, is condemned and to be condemned. In fact, every reactivation of any nationalism, yesterday the German, today the French, is of a nature to resuscitate immediately, and as a direct reaction, other small and old nationalisms. Europe came out of this infernal circle in 1945. Let us not return to it. It is necessary to know what distrust the old nationalisms arouse — besides justified by the history of the recent centuries — in the neighbouring countries to never wish anything but their gradual but radical disappearance. We shall say that, for ten units of positive nationalist ENERGY in a determined nation, the reaction of negative ENERGY in all the neighbouring nations is five times that of the initial positive power. The result is therefore definitely tragically negative. The hypertrophy of any given nationalism unleashes dangerous allergies in all the neighbours.

It is nevertheless clear, up to the present, that Europe presents zones favourable to a revolutionary action and others that are unsuitable. The successors of Salazar, the successors of Franco, the successors of de Gaulle, may announce the worst and the best. But in any case, they will have profound and very wide repercussions. By contrast, one does not see that the European national revolution would be able to have at its disposal favourable conditions, either institutional or emotive, in Sweden or in the Netherlands.

The progression of the European revolutionary reality will therefore be very rapid in certain states, very slow in others. We have for that reason before us a hierarchy of terrains that are more or less favourable.

If a nation presents a terrain favourable to an accelerated awareness and the establishment of an apparatus, that gives it in no case any privilege — a privilege which would have emerged directly from the petty nationalist conception. Let us suppose that, in extremely favourable conditions, ‘ONE’ ‘French’ European party succeeds in attaining power in ONE specific country. Here, hypothetically, France. A real catastrophe would arise from this success. In fact, the French European party, buoyed in its success, would not resist the temptation of national nepotism in the European Revolution. With this, one would have only displaced the problem of conflicts between nations to that of conflicts between European parties.

The theoretical construction of a local European party helping the others after its personal success is an extremely dangerous heresy.

The orthodox conception at the revolutionary level is that THE (I say here THE as opposed to the term ONE used above) European nationalist party establishes its logistical bases in the first country of the old regime that will present conditions of weakness or trouble.

Which is the same as saying that, in case of the rise to power of THE European nationalist party in France, it should be realised first of all with powerful non-French assistance (what General Salan⁸⁰ was incapable of understanding and what Colonel Argoud⁸¹ began to timidly perceive a little before his arrest), and then the party will have to be consolidated with the support of numerous non-French elements. These numerous contributions of non-French people would constitute a total guarantee that the new regime will not try to return to narrow nationalism, even if it be at the level of the party.

Thus the nation favourable for the installation of bases would not in any case be:

1. tempted to play the classic game of the preponderant nation,

2. tempted to hypertrophy ONE European party within a coalition of European parties.

Every construction of a Europe of coordinated nationalisms contains a mortal seed of impotence or of failure in the long term. This heretical conception should be opposed by the integrated European nationalism. The international of the nationalists is not only a chimera but a contradiction, a formal antinomy.

One would see then a sick state taken by storm by an integrated European revolutionary organism and then this revolutionary apparatus USING the conquered state as an operational base.

This concept will make numerous persons grind their teeth who have not yet been able to overcome, sublimate their present local nationalism.

But this is the condition itself of final success. In fact, in such conditions, this springboard state (a springboard state is especially not a hegemon state, commonly called a guide state) will have so many antennae in Europe that it will cause the structures of the old regime to split rapidly in all the neighbouring states. Hypothetically we shall say that if, from Paris the revolutionary action in Germany is orchestrated by a European apparatus containing numerous militants and cadres of German origin, it will obtain deep echoes of sympathy because this apparatus will thus have provided formal elements to arouse confidence. If, on the contrary, it is in the hands of French people, even the German Communists will easily reactivate the old German national feeling to cause the operation to fail.

The international Communist revolution failed already for a very simple reason and, in two cases, very precise. The reason is that in Moscow — since 1935 — people have been infinitely more Russian than Communist (in reality today Communism serves Russia; the contrary — and that was the situation in 1923 under Trotsky and Borodin⁸² — has not been true for a long time). The ‘International’ of the song⁸³ is long dead.

This Russian nationalism caused the integration of Eastern Europe to fail through Russia and caused the welding together of China and the USSR to be lacking.

The nationalist comportment of the Russian policy has aroused the classic and well-known reaction of other nationalists at the threshold itself of the Communist world. Poor Karl Marx, he must be turning in his grave.

This is the error that we should avoid with the greatest care even and especially within the European national party. Within the party all the vestiges of ancient nationalisms will have to be rapidly eliminated by an accelerated integration. The success of the European integration will depend on the preliminary development of integration within the ranks of the party. These conceptions are revolutionary and collide with the customs of many, we know, but they are the conditions sine qua non of success. We have discarded the formula of a preponderant state and later that of a ‘European’ party. But we have to speak of the pilot party, which we will do in the next paragraph.

On the Nation as a Creation, on the Nation as a Cult

The nations have never been pre-existent as unities within people’s souls. However, all the ‘nationalisms’ reason as if that had been so. They do not know the history of the formation of nations. If we use the term nationalist in its classic significance, we shall say that the nationalists have followed the nation, and that they never, and emphatically never, preceded it: they have never been its fighters. By fighters I mean those who fought to make it. Of course they will fight to defend it. Why? Through lack of imagination, through lack of stature, through opposition to change, and conservatism.

Nations are — at the start — the fact of the will of a man or of some men, the entirety realised by the force of a fortunate war (England) or by an artifice of dynastic matrimonial connections (Austria).

A nation must be made, as it were, against everybody for it disturbs the customs and threatens the oligarchies. France was made against the French; in the same measure Europe will be made against many Europeans. It was not necessary to make people believe that the people would welcome Philip II of France⁸⁴ as a liberator or as a unifier in Normandy, Anjou, Aquitaine and Poitou. Only Philip II perhaps — and I say perhaps — nourished the grand plan of France in memory of the Carolingian adventure. At best, he — with his advisers — was the only one who understood the scope of this plan.

The same men who squawk, fulminate, grumble, chip away at unitarian Europe — under the stupid pretext that ‘this has never existed’ — did the same in 1210 against the rise of the Capetians. At that time, and they were the Maurassians⁸⁵ and the Barrèsians⁸⁶ of the 13th century, they were in revolt, in the name of some contemporary local petty nationalism, against the ‘senseless’ pride of the Capetians. There was not a pre-existing France wished for by God. There was France because some men wished for it and made it. I intend to emphasise that the French of the 13th century were against France just as many Europeans are (in fact) against Europe in the 20th century. The arguments are the same: ‘It has never exi...

Table of contents

• Introduction
• Dedication
• Acknowledgements
• The Dimensions of the European State
• The Style of the Unitarian European State
• The Friends and Enemies of Unitarian Europe
• Legal Europe Against Combatant Europe
• The Place And the Role of Man in the European Communitarian Society
• The Universal Mission of Europeanism, Our Natural Right to Hegemony
• How Unitarian Europe Will Be Formed
• Those Who Will Constitute Europe or the Modern Party. That Is to Say, Organisation Introduced into Politics
• For a Lucid Morality and against a Debilitating Morality
• Other Books Published by Arktos
• Notes