As described by Christopher Caldwell in his book Reflections on the Revolution in Europe, the European Union (EU) from its inception had as a central purpose “getting rid of inefficient economic nationalism,” which over time he says evolved into a project for “getting rid of nationalism altogether.”
Nationalism however proved too vague a concept for the Brussels bureaucrats to root out—but what they could root out was national sovereignty, and this is what they have done incrementally over the last thirty years.
This is relevant to the United States because the Biden administration in its brief tenure has launched an unparalleled assault on American sovereignty that is breathtaking in its scope and potential consequences.
A partial list of the new president’s initiatives as aggressively promoted by the Democratic Party’s left wing would include the proposed global minimum corporate tax, the waiving of the intellectual property rights of U.S. Covid vaccine producers, the cancellation of the XL pipeline, and banning of offshore drilling—which torpedoes American’s hard-won energy independence—and most egregiously the abandonment of serious border control and tacit encouragement of the waves of migrants now engulfing our southern border.
To understand the genesis of these policies and how they relate to the EU we need look not to Obama, nor as far back as Carter, but most specifically to the widely misrepresented but retrospectively transformational trade policies that became law in the Clinton administration—NAFTA, WTO, and China trade normalization.
The impact of these laws is skillfully illuminated and given context in a widely praised recent book that is at once a masterful treatment of twentieth-century economic history and a riveting biography of the most influential economist of modern times. That book is The Price of Peace: Money, Democracy, and the Life of John Maynard Keynes by Zachary D. Carter.
Carter asserts that the Clinton Administration pursued a unified economic vision on every policy front that relentlessly “transferred power from the government to financial markets,” believing the latter to be much more efficient agents of change than the cumbersome processes of democracy, particularly the awkward requirement of often risky elections.
Furthermore, it was well understood, according to Zachary Carter, that the Clinton trade project amounted to “a specific form of international political organization—a rearrangement of the rights and powers between global elites and national democracies.”
Ironically this project involved a total rejection of Keynes, who consistently held that governments with all their imperfections were better instruments of the common good than financial markets, which always entailed the potential for dangerous instability unchecked by any trustworthy system of accountability.
At the same time the Clinton administration was building its New World Economic Order and supercharging the already growing forces of globalization, people of a very similar mindset across the Atlantic were creating the European Union.
They portrayed the EU as a natural evolution of the successful European Economic Community but now aspiring to be a supra-national political entity built around the guiding principle of “ever closer union” as proclaimed in the founding Maastricht Treaty of 1993.
In order to transform the EU into a true union and legitimize the European Parliament sitting in Strasbourg, a vote of the peoples of the member states would be required. But this ended disastrously in 2005 when the French people decisively rejected the new constitution, as shortly after did the Dutch by a two to one margin—leading to cancellation of the other scheduled elections.
Then and subsequently the peoples of Europe made clear that they were very open to economic cooperation, but not to forfeiting their national identities. The final death knell for
EU grandiosity came with Brexit in 2016 (finalized in 2020), when the sovereign British people chose the maintenance of their centuries-old democratic traditions over what world elites said was good for them.
Soon after the EU’s 2005 electoral disaster, Clinton’s project of swapping the wisdom of democracy for that of financial markets came to grief on an even grander scale with the economic crisis and world recession of 2007-2008.
Fortunately for Clinton he was out of office by the time these worldwide economic miseries occurred, and thus it would be Republicans not Democrats who would pay the political price for his deeply flawed economic vision.
Sadly, however, that vision has found new life in the Biden administration where the ascendent progressives still see great virtue and political benefit in the dismantling of national sovereignty. Left unchecked, it is hard to see how this direction bodes well for the American people, or for the future of American democracy itself.
Bill Moloney is a Fellow in Conservative Thought at Colorado Christian University’s Centennial Institute who studied at Oxford and the University of London and received his Doctorate from Harvard University. He is a former Colorado Commissioner of Education.