The European Forum Alpbach is the embodiment of Brussels Bubble thinking.The annual conference in the Alps, brings together euro-federalist youths, fonctionnaires, and Europeanist politicians from central Europe.
The conference has seen better days. Ever since the inauguration of the new Trump administration, the American delegation has stopped attending, the British are practically nonexistent, and the event has skewed so far left that it beggars belief. Whether it is the event’s pride parade featuring the trans flag, polyamory talks, greater openness to dictatorial China than to the much-despised Trump Republicans, or the large consensus on doing away with nation-states, there is no disguising the general drift of the meeting.
One of the revelations this year, however, was a rediscovery of a love for the counterrevolutionaries of Viennese diplomacy: Wenzel Anton von Kaunitz and Klemens von Metternich. In one of the sessions, EU and international diplomats discussed a “diplomatic counter-revolution” to counter the emerging populist and unilateralist disruptors.
Wenzel Anton, Count of Kaunitz-Rietberg revolutionized 17th century European diplomacy by essentially laying the foundations for what centuries later would become the Holy Alliance. Under Kaunitz’s diplomatic leadership, Vienna traded its alliance with Britain for one with absolutist France and Russia, thus countering London’s littoral liberalism.
Klemens von Metternich was Austria’s foreign minister during the Napoleonic Wars. He managed to build and maintain the European coalition that would ultimately succeed in defeating the revolutionary emperor of the French. By uniting conservative monarchies in the old continent, Metternich succeeded not only in securing a premier seat for Vienna in the European international order but equally guaranteed the destruction of the extreme French Revolution ideals and delayed for another century the wave of positivist republicanism.
The extreme lack of self-awareness characterizing Brussels believers now seems to inspire in them the supposition that they are responsible statesmen. In fact, it is the EU’s totalitarian agenda that has ignited a reaction by conservatives within and abroad, and it is Brussels’ fanaticism that fuels opposition to its power and policies. Uniting Europe into one centralized state and subverting the sovereignty and legitimacy of millennia-old nation-states, is the revolution. The promotion of sexual transgression and perversions, obsessive cultural Marxism and feminism, the ethnic replacement of traditionally homogeneous nation-states, language-policing in EU documents and in bodies such as the EU Parliament, the undermining of democracy in such EU members as Austria, Ireland, Hungary or Romania, all of it proves that the Europeanists are our generation’s Jacobins and Bolsheviks.
One of the incessant questions addressed by the speakers was how best to sell “Europe” as “friendly, predictable, and reliable” to countries and regions where the influence of bad nativist actors would be in competition. Brussels revolutionaries seem oblivious to the fact that the European Union’s image can be described by anything but those adjectives.
Far from being “friendly,” Brussels insists on lecturing the rest of the world and on sponsoring subversive NGOs across the planet. The speakers mentioned the heavily politicized International Criminal Court as a project to proudly promote. As for being “predictable,” one supposes it was a form of predictability when the EU unilaterally decided to sabotage sovereign governments in Austria and Hungary by quarantining Jörg Haider and Viktor Orbán for their nationalistic ideological deviations. Was it not the EU that exercised influence to impose a second referendum on Ireland or cancel the winning campaign of the leading presidential candidate in Romania? As for “reliable,” was it not Brussels and NATO that unilaterally decided to bomb and overthrow the Gaddafi regime in Libya, after having signed a UN resolution expressly foregoing that option?
The EU’s policy of sanctions is perhaps the most widely employed in the world, often unilaterally violating trade agreements. Far from standing up for international norms, Brussels has diverted from the international community as a whole: while the EU is on its 21st sanctions package on Moscow, the rest of the planet can only sigh and suffer the economic consequences.
Speaking of misconceptions, the masculine Ukrainian female activists ubiquitous in Brussels, who possess one-track minds contorted by febrile Russophobic belligerence, constantly insist that the “End of History” was an illusion. But if that is so, then Ukraine is on the wrong side of the Fukuyama-themed debate. For it is Russia that is arguing for spheres of influence, national sovereignty, and balance of power, while the EU is promoting “shared sovereignty,” the end of nations and of power politics. The cognitive dissonance is absolute.
The reaction of the EU’s neighborhood, as well as that of the conservative electorates of its own member-states, is the actual path to normalcy and to the restoration of tradition. Brussels is the dystopian project attempting the recreation of Man and the laws of nature. The only ones unaware of objective reality seem to be the ones who draw their salaries from the Berlaymont.
