His offense? Opposing Brussels’s plan to seize Russia’s frozen assets held in Europe. The overwhelming majority of them are parked at Euroclear, a Brussels-based clearing house that sits at the heart of global securities settlement. For Europe’s pro-war lobby, led by France and Germany, confiscation was presented as the only way to continue financing Ukraine’s war effort — or, failing that, to force member states to assume the burden collectively through other, increasingly extraordinary means.

Belgium, however, had compelling reasons to resist. Confiscating — or functionally expropriating — Russian central bank assets would violate one of the most sacrosanct principles of international finance: the neutrality and inviolability of sovereign reserves. Breaching that principle would not only set a dangerous precedent, but would also expose Belgium to potentially severe legal, financial and geopolitical consequences — as Euroclear is domiciled there.

As Robert Volterra, one of London’s most respected international lawyers, warned, confiscating Russian assets would be “absolutely illegal” and would haunt the EU for generations. The legal fallout could be enormous. Russia had multiple avenues for challenge and had begun to explore them, already filing a lawsuit in Moscow against Euroclear.

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From there, Russia could pursue litigation in Belgian courts, potentially all the way to the supreme court. Belgian judges would be forced to determine whether Russian property rights under domestic law had been violated and whether the principle of sovereign immunity had been breached. On both counts, Russia’s case would be strong. Were Russia to prevail, Euroclear itself would be liable. Given the sums involved, the clearing house would almost certainly be rendered insolvent, triggering national and EU-level deposit guarantee mechanisms.

In such a scenario, Euroclear would in turn be compelled to sue the Belgian state, which would have ordered the effective expropriation of client assets. The prospects of such a claim would be far from negligible. Beyond Belgium, Russia could also bring cases before the European Court of Justice, the International Court of Justice and multiple international arbitration forums. Even setting litigation aside — one might argue that in the current context it would be hard to find a Western judge willing to rule in Russia’s favor — it is difficult to see how Belgium could justify refusing to unfreeze Russia’s reserves if and when a peace settlement is eventually reached.

It is therefore hardly surprising that Belgium emerged as one of the most vocal opponents of the plan. De Wever has bluntly warned that confiscation would amount to “an act of war”, likening it to entering a foreign embassy, stripping it of its contents and selling them off. One might reasonably conclude that he is simply defending his country’s interests by upholding international law. And yet, for this, he has found himself subjected to a smear campaign by the EU’s political and media establishment. He has been accused of acting under Russian intimidation — or worse, of being a Russian asset himself. At the same time, Brussels threatened to “treat Belgium like Hungary” if it continued to oppose the plan. That’s what happens when even loyal pro-EU governments dare to step out of line.

Despite the massive pressure, De Wever stood his ground. And he was joined by a growing front of dissenters. Hungary and Slovakia openly rejected the scheme, with Hungarian prime minister Viktor Orbán accusing the Commission of “systematically raping European law”. Italy, Bulgaria and Malta also expressed reservations.

The economic and financial implications of confiscation, after all, would extend far beyond Belgium. Once the assumption that sovereign reserves held abroad are immune from political seizure is broken, there is no telling what the consequences may be. Countries would begin to view euro-denominated assets not as a safe store of value, but as a political liability — one that can be confiscated at Brussels’s discretion. The message would be unmistakable: your assets are safe only as long as you remain politically compliant. The result would almost certainly be that capital would start to flee Europe — even faster than it already is.

Nonetheless, faced with growing resistance, Brussels last week resorted to invoking emergency powers under Article 122 of the Treaty on the Functioning of the European Union to indefinitely freeze the Russian assets, claiming this would allow it to act by qualified majority rather than unanimity. Yet this represents a blatant distortion of the Treaty. Article 122 applies strictly to emergency economic measures in response to natural disasters or severe economic disturbances. It does not apply to foreign policy, which unequivocally requires unanimity. The fate of Russia’s frozen sovereign assets, however, is self-evidently a foreign policy matter. Claiming otherwise is an extra-legal sleight of hand.

This is another example of a Brussels power grab. If Article 122 — or any other provision — can be stretched to justify the seizure of foreign sovereign assets and the imposition of massive liabilities on unwilling member states, it can be used to circumvent unanimity across a wide range of foreign policy decisions.

The threat, however, worked. On Friday, at the European Council meeting, the Commission failed to secure an agreement on the use of the frozen Russian assets. Instead, it secured agreement on a separate €90-billion loan, backed by the EU budget and underwritten by all member states except three (Hungary, Slovakia and the Czech Republic), which were granted opt-outs. In effect, the political obstacle was bypassed not by changing strategy, but by shifting the financial risk directly onto European taxpayers. As von der Leyen made clear in advance of the summit, there was little room for dissent: “No one will leave the EU summit until the issue of Ukraine’s financing is resolved.”

Incredibly, the deal foresees that the loan will have to be repaid by Ukraine only if and when Russia agrees to pay war reparations — effectively transforming hypothetical future reparations into immediate financing. This idea is, at best, wishful thinking. It is highly unlikely that Russia would accept binding reparations even in the event of a peace deal, meaning that there is little chance Ukraine will ever repay the loan. This is all the more striking given how much Europe has already spent: EU parliaments have approved at least €187 billion in support for Ukraine, on top of massive indirect costs.

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This episode illustrates how the EU operates: by manufacturing false binaries that foreclose genuine political choice. Member states were presented with a stark alternative — either agree to confiscate Russia’s frozen assets or be prepared to collectively underwrite a massive new loan. What was never seriously considered was a third option: to stop pouring money into a demonstrably failed strategy and instead work to bring the war to an end through negotiations.

Yet it’s easy to see why the EU can’t afford to confront the failure of its Ukraine strategy — one that has inflicted immense economic damage on Europe while delivering nothing on the battlefield, and that has left Ukraine in a worse position than at the start of the war. Acknowledging this reality would carry enormous political costs for EU elites, particularly those most invested in the victory-at-all-costs narrative — hence their determination to keep the war going at all costs. This is why, even after failing to agree on confiscation, Brussels pushed through a massive, budget-backed loan as a substitute. The consequences will be dear: Ukrainians will continue to suffer and die in an unwinnable war, while Europe will remain entrenched in a permanent state of economic warfare and military-by-proxy confrontation with Russia, with a constant risk of escalation into direct conflict.

If there is a silver lining to this grim trajectory, it is that the recklessness of these choices will only exacerbate the contradictions of a project that is pushing the continent to the brink, ultimately forcing a reckoning — within member states and among Europe’s citizens alike. Indeed, the Commission may have succeeded in avoiding a catastrophic humiliation, but in doing so it exposed the increasingly authoritarian nature of the Union, willing to override national interests and discard legal constraints, democratic norms and basic economic rationality in pursuit of ideological crusades. Meanwhile, the enormous financial burden imposed by the latest deal will only deepen internal fractures and push national budgets to the breaking point — especially when it becomes clear that it will entail yet more resources diverted from Europe’s own crumbling infrastructure, underfunded hospitals and overstretched schools.

And Ukraine is far from the only flashpoint. Brussels is also struggling to secure backing for the Mercosur free-trade agreement with Argentina, Brazil, Paraguay and Uruguay. Here, too, resistance is growing. France has long led the opposition, with Emmanuel Macron reiterating recently that the deal lacks reciprocity on production standards, pesticide rules and food safety. The front broadened significantly this week, when Italian Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni described the deal as “premature”, citing inadequate safeguards for European agriculture. Italy’s stance is pivotal, as it raises the prospect of a blocking minority in the Council that includes Poland, Hungary and Austria too.

Protests have added to the pressure. On Thursday hundreds of tractors converged on Brussels as farmers from across Europe denounced what they see as unfair competition. Proposed safeguards have done little to calm opposition — leading to the ratification of the deal to be postponed once again at the European Council.

And so, as the contradictions within the EU continue to accumulate, it is increasingly difficult to see how Brussels can manage the backlash for much longer. The Union is beginning to resemble a crumbling empire, reliant not only on repression, censorship and electoral manipulation to maintain control, but also on ever more aggressive tactics directed even against pro-EU governments themselves. By forcing through ever more reckless commitments in the name of unity, it is simply setting the stage for an even more catastrophic implosion down the road.

As part of the Democracy Shield, the Commission proposes the creation of a Monitoring Center that would identify and remove “false content” and “disinformation” from the internet. As Henna Virkkunen, Executive Vice President for Security and Democracy, stated, the Shield will enable Europe to “respond faster and more effectively to information manipulation and hybrid threats”. The EU’s High Representative for Foreign and Security Policy, Kaja Kallas, made no secret of the anti-Russian nature of the initiative: “we are seeing campaigns, including from Russia, specifically designed to polarize our citizens, undermine trust in our institutions and pollute politics in our countries.”

The term “independent” appears repeatedly in the press release. A new “independent European network of fact-checkers” will be set up in all official EU languages, while the European Digital Media Observatory (EDMO), the EU’s flagship “fact-checking” network, financed to the tune of almost €30 million, will gain new “independent” analytical powers to monitor elections and crisis situations. But, remember, independence in Brussels translates to financial dependence on the Commission. Indeed, to guarantee this “independence”, the Commission promises generous funding to “independent” NGOs and media outlets.

The Democracy Shield builds upon the recent Digital Services Act (DSA), the most sweeping internet regulation ever implemented in Europe. In theory, these initiatives are meant to protect democracy; in practice, they do the opposite. Their aim isn’t to “fight disinformation”, as claimed, but rather to control the narrative at a time when Europe’s political elites are facing unprecedented levels of public distrust, by centralizing control over the flow of information and imposing a single “truth” defined by Brussels. In short, the European Commission is building a continent-wide censorship machine

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As one EU diplomat recently put it, in truly Orwellian fashion: “Freedom of speech remains for everyone. At the same time, however, citizens must be free from interference.” But who decides what constitutes “interference”? Who determines what is “true” and what is “fake”? The same institutions and corporate media outlets that have repeatedly engaged in fearmongering and disinformation themselves. Just a few weeks ago, Ursula von der Leyen claimed that the GPS system on her plane had been jammed by Russia — an allegation quickly debunked by analysts. Meanwhile, the BBC, often held up as a paragon of journalistic integrity, was recently caught editing footage of a Donald Trump speech to make it appear more extreme.

The EU claims to be protecting citizens from “falsehoods” but on what democratic or moral basis does the Commission assume the authority to decide what is true, especially when it is clear that the EU’s political-media establishment itself engages in disinformation and propaganda on a regular basis? Moreover, when so-called independent fact-checkers are hand-picked and financed by the Commission itself, the result is a closed feedback loop: the EU funds institutions that then “verify” and amplify the EU’s own narratives. The Democracy Shield, like its predecessors, thus institutionalizes the power to define reality itself.

In a series of reports, I have shown that the European Union already operates a vast propaganda and censorship apparatus that spans every level of civil society — NGOs, think tanks, the media and even academia. The cornerstone of this system is a network of EU-funded programs — notably CERV (Citizens, Equality, Rights and Values), Creative Europe and the Jean Monnet initiative — that collectively funnel billions of euros into organizations that are, in theory, “independent” but are in fact deeply enmeshed in the Brussels machine.

Through the CERV program alone — which boasts a budget of almost €2 billion for 2021-2027 — more than 3,000 NGOs have received funding to carry out over 1,000 projects. Officially, these funds promote “European values”. In practice, they finance progressive and pro-EU activism: gender ideology, multiculturalism, anti-nationalism and “countering Euroscepticism”. Many projects are explicitly designed to “increase trust in the EU” or “counter anti-EU narratives”. Meanwhile, NGOs in Central and Eastern Europe are generously funded to “combat autocratic narratives” and “challenge Euroscepticism”, often directly targeting governments in Poland (under the previous executive) or Hungary — external influence strategies not unlike those historically associated with agencies like USAID.

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The result is a pseudo-civil society — a network of nominally “grassroots” actors functioning as proxies for the Commission, amplifying its agenda and manufacturing the illusion of popular support for its policies.

The same pattern applies to the media. My research has shown that the EU channels at least €80 million annually directly to newspapers, broadcasters, news agencies and “journalistic partnerships”— amounting to nearly €1 billion over the past decade. Programs such as IMREG (Information Measures for Cohesion Policy) have paid media outlets to publish articles praising EU cohesion funds, in some cases without even disclosing that the content was EU-financed. The Commission calls it “raising awareness”. In any other context, it would be called covert advertising or propaganda.

The EU’s propaganda machine extends into academia as well. Through the Jean Monnet program, the Commission allocates about €25 million a year to universities and research institutes worldwide, financing over 1,500 Jean Monnet Chairs in 700 institutions. The goal is not to support independent scholarship but to embed pro-EU ideology into higher education. Official documents state explicitly that recipients are expected to act as “ambassadors of the European Union” and “outreach agents” engaging with media and NGOs. The academy has effectively been transformed into an ideological instrument.

With the Democracy Shield, the Commission now intends to vastly expand this machinery. It proposes to not only establish what amounts to a de facto Ministry of Truth, but also to inject even more money into NGOs, “independent” media and fact-checking networks tasked with promoting “European values”. Von der Leyen is, in effect, buying consensus — and using citizens’ own money to do it — collapsing the boundaries between the European super-state, media, civil society and academia.

And if the EU’s goal, here, were merely to manipulate narratives, that would be alarming enough. But the pattern now points towards direct interference in electoral processes. We have already seen this play out in countries like Romania and Moldova, where local elites — with open or tacit support from Brussels — invoked the specter of “Russian interference” (without providing much evidence) to justify blatant manipulation of domestic elections. In Romania, authorities canceled an election and barred the leading populist candidate from running. In Moldova, pro-EU authorities used “security concerns” to prevent Russia-leaning expatriates from voting. Protecting democracy thus becomes the pretext for suspending it, even as the Democracy Shield explicitly foresees strengthening the European Cooperation Network for Elections and, ominously, promoting “systematic exchanges on the integrity of electoral processes”.

The Commission’s appetite for control is not limited to information and elections. Ursula von der Leyen recently also initiated the creation of a new intelligence unit under the direct authority of the European Commission. The goal, according to the Financial Times, is to unify intelligence data from member states and “enhance the EU’s ability to detect and respond to threats”. The plan foresees the eventual creation of a European intelligence cooperation service, effectively a supranational agency that would operate alongside national intelligence services. Officially, it would enhance “strategic autonomy”. In practice, it would likely function as a subsidiary of Nato and, by extension, of the CIA, especially since the same proposal explicitly calls for “strengthening EU-NATO cooperation”.

It points to a broader worrying trend of power centralization in the hands of the Commission — and of von der Leyen personally. Understandably, many observers find the prospect of giving “Empress Ursula” an army of supranational spies — operating beyond the oversight of national parliaments — profoundly disturbing. Giving an unelected, opaque institution like the Commission its own intelligence apparatus would mark yet another milestone in Europe’s transformation into a techno-authoritarian juggernaut — one that surveils not foreign enemies, but its own citizens.

Seen in this context, the Democracy Shield appears like nothing more than a tool to further institutionalize a regime of managed speech and narrative control. Its goal is to police online speech according to vague, politically charged definitions of “disinformation”; to compel platforms, journalists, academics and citizens alike to conform to a narrow, Commission-approved worldview; and to silence dissent in the name of “fighting foreign interference”. Yet it is becoming increasingly clear that the real war on democracy isn’t being waged by Moscow or Beijing; it is being waged from within, by the very institutions claiming to defend it.

It was in honour of this mission that EU leaders held an “informal” dinner in Brussels last night. Amid frenzied briefings and counter-briefings, the discussions largely centred on the presidency of the Commission — the most powerful and coveted post in the EU. And even if they failed to reach an agreement for all three posts, von der Leyen’s reconfirmation seems all but certain.

As far as the European Council is concerned, von der Leyen can count on the backing of the 11 heads of state or government who are affiliated with the EPP bloc, as well as the four belonging to the centre-left S&D, including Germany, and the five belonging to the liberal Renew Europe, including France. These three groups are, after all, part of the “super grand coalition” that has supported von der Leyen in the European Parliament for the past five years.

For now, Germany and France haven’t formally endorsed her, but everything indicates Olaf Scholz and Emmanuel Macron — faced with record-low domestic support and massive gains by the AfD and the National Rally — are betting on a second von der Leyen term as a way of securing an “anti-populist” ally in Brussels. “We will build a bastion together with others against the extremes of the Left and Right,” von der Leyen stated after the elections — something which Scholz and Macron are desperately in need of.

This is arguably why Scholz has said that “there is every indication that Ursula von der Leyen will be able to serve a second term”, and why even Macron, who had previously flirted with replacing her with the former Italian prime minister and president of the European Central Bank (ECB) Mario Draghi, would appear to have fallen in line. “I think that things can move quite quickly,” he coyly remarked before last night’s summit.

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It was, if we needed it, a reminder that the EU shouldn’t simply be viewed as a supranational authority that infringes upon the autonomy of nation-states (though it is also that, of course), but also as an institution which pro-establishment national authorities can, if needed, deploy against their own “populist” adversaries — and against their own electorates. France is a case in point. As soon as Macron called a snap election in response to Le Pen’s crushing victory last week, the “spread” between French and German government borrowing costs immediately rose to the highest level in years. Now, this could be seen as a “natural” reaction of financial markets to the prospect of a “populist” majority coming to power in France — and this is certainly how much of the media is framing it. But this ignores the fact that, ultimately, the spread is determined by the central bank — in the EU’s case, the ECB — which always has the power to bring down interest rates by intervening in sovereign bond markets. Markets only have power over states insofar as the central bank refuses to act.

Regrettably, the ECB has a long history of selectively refusing to intervene in support of sovereign bond markets, and engineering financial and fiscal panics. It did this, for example, with Italy’s Giorgia Meloni — allowing interest rates to rise as soon as her government came to power, and only intervening to bring them down once the new government pledged to submit to the EU’s economic agenda. It would now appear to be pre-emptively applying the same strategy against Le Pen in France.

This does, of course, run contrary to what should be the ECB’s principal job: keeping the spread down, or at least mitigating its rise, and thus allowing the democratic process in France to proceed as smoothly as possible. But unfortunately, the ECB isn’t a normal central bank; it’s a full-blooded political actor that has no qualms with coercing governments to comply with the overall political-economic agenda of the EU. It seems inevitable, for instance, that if Le Pen were to win the next election, the central bank’s pressure on France would only increase: expect hysterical takes on France’s ballooning fiscal deficit, despite the fact that France has had a higher-than-average deficit for years, though this was never a problem so long as pro-EU governments were in power.

It also goes without saying that this strategy plays perfectly into Macron’s hands, who can point to the turbulence in financial markets to paint Le Pen as an economic menace. Le Pen, it seems, is about to learn that dropping her anti-euro agenda might help her get into power, but it won’t help her hold onto it, unless she jettisons her economic populism and aligns herself with the establishment on major economic and foreign policy issues.

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A variation on the same logic applies to Meloni. Though she hasn’t officially endorsed von der Leyen, she’s likely to come round in the end for very much the same reason: her political survival depends on having an ally in the European Commission, and on the good will of the ECB, especially with the threat of a new round of crushing austerity measures hanging over Italy’s head. Von der Leyen has worked hard behind the scenes trying to lock in Meloni’s support, even reportedly going as far as burying an official EU report criticising Italy for eroding media freedoms. As one Commission official told Politico: “There is visibly a willingness to put the brakes on issues related to Italy and the rule of law.”

If, as appears likely, von der Leyen succeeds in getting the backing of the European Council, she looks set for a smooth ride in the European Parliament. Von der Leyen’s current “super grand coalition” actually increased its seats compared to the past legislature. This means that, even accounting for some rebellious MEPs within those groups’ ranks, she appears to be on a clear path to re-election — especially if she can secure the support of the 24 MEPs elected with Meloni’s Brothers of Italy party.

And if this does happen, it’s hard to imagine a bigger slap in the face to the millions of voters who used the recent ballots to express their opposition to the disastrous consequences of Brussels’s agenda: rising living costs, growing socioeconomic precarity, high immigration, creeping deindustrialisation, divisive identity politics and the growing risk of war with Russia. But then again, the EU was never about democracy.

A similar logic is likely to inspire the choice of the president of the European Council. According to the Italian press, one of the names being touted is that of former prime minister Enrico Letta, as mediocre a politician as they come, whose main claim to fame is to have failed miserably in every position he has ever held. As an unflinching pro-EU zealot, however, he would be a perfect sparring partner for von der Leyen, helping her to keep recalcitrant governments in line — especially in view of Hungary’s upcoming six-months-long rotating presidency of the European Council, which the EU establishment looks upon in horror.

But as stitch-ups go, will it endure? It was hard not to shake the odour of complacency wafting through Brussels last night. Yes, the only thing less predictable than last week’s results was the EU machine’s response to them. But even so, looking at the populist sweep across the bloc, one cannot help but wonder: for how much longer can Europe’s delegitimised elites continue to override popular discontent with “informal” dinners and horse-trading deals?

For years they’ve been painting Brussels as a beacon of progressivism, peace and democracy, as opposed to the far-Right, racist and economically suicidal project of Brexit. Yet, ironically, it is the European Parliament, not the British one, that is about to swing firmly to the Right, as several European governments already have. Meanwhile, in just over six months, Britain will almost certainly vote Labour back into power — making it one of the few countries in Europe to have a centre-left government.

Across the Irish Sea, by contrast, an anti-immigration backlash has spiralled into country-wide unrest, while several EU governments — and even Ursula von der Leyen’s European People’s Party — are contemplating Rwanda-style asylum deportation deals. Meanwhile, the EU is aggressively cracking down on free speech, both online and offline. Over the past few weeks alone, the police have intervened to break up peaceful assemblies on at least two occasions — a pro-Palestine conference in Berlin and the NatCon conference in Brussels.

On the economic front, Germany, the most important economy in the EU, is mired in stagnation, and facing outright deindustrialisation, along with several other EU countries — all while the EU announces the return of harsh austerity measures. Angry farmers have been laying siege to the bloc’s capitals for months. As for the EU’s “peace project”, all European governments are now on a war footing, while Macron is leading the charge to send Nato troops into Ukraine, lurching Europe closer to an all-out war with Russia.

All this clashes with the Remainers’ rainbow-tinted view of the European Union. But their vision was always predicated on a fantasy: everything that is happening across the Channel is not a betrayal of “EU values”, as they are probably telling themselves — it is an inevitable consequence of the EU’s architecture itself.

Even though Remainers have always tended to view the EU as a bastion of social and workers’ rights, the reality is that the Rightward drift across the EU has its roots in the Brussels-driven assault on the post-war European social and economic model following the 2008 financial crisis. High unemployment rates, stagnant wages and austerity measures implemented in response to the crash exacerbated existing inequalities, fuelling resentment towards the political establishment.

To make things worse, the EU attempted to prevent any democratic backlash to these policies by restricting the scope of democratic decision-making by democratically elected governments, focusing instead on quasi-automatic technocratic rules imposed by undemocratic bodies. The European Union effectively became a sovereign power with the authority to impose budgetary rules and structural reforms on member states — not exactly what you’d expect from the “bastion of democracy” often portrayed by Remainers.

This, however, only exacerbated the disillusion of many Europeans with both mainstream political parties and the EU institutions themselves, which were perceived as beholden to global financial interests and disconnected from the needs of ordinary citizens. Meanwhile, the EU’s handling of the refugee crisis, which peaked in 2015, further galvanised anti-immigrant sentiments and fuelled the rise of Right-wing populist parties across the continent. The influx of migrants, primarily from war-torn regions in the Middle East and North Africa, strained resources, fuelled social tensions and demonstrated once more the failure of the EU’s top-down approach to policymaking — exemplified in this case by the idea of relocation quotas, which several countries refused to comply with.

Today, immigration has once again moved to the forefront of the political debate. The EU’s border agency, Frontex, detected over 350,000 irregular border crossings into the EU last year — the highest total recorded since 2016. EU countries recorded more than 1 million new asylum requests, a 20% increase compared to 2022 — on top of the almost six million refugees taken in from Ukraine since the start of the war. It shouldn’t come as a surprise, then, to learn that seven out of 10 Europeans believe their country is taking in too many immigrants — and that governments, faced with the prospect of serious social unrest, are running for cover.

On Monday, representatives of several European governments met in Denmark to discuss various types of “durable solutions” to immigration, including plans to relocate asylum seekers to third countries, reminiscent of the UK’s government’s Rwanda scheme. Even more astonishingly, von der Leyen herself admitted in a recent presidential debate of being in favour of third-country migration deals with places such as Tunisia and Egypt, even though this would not be possible under the EU’s recently approved Migration Pact. Ironic, considering that just a year ago several EU governments and senior EU officials were castigating the British government for proposing the exact same policy.

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But then consistency has never been a valuable currency in Brussels. On Sunday, it was revealed  that von der Leyen is also recrafting her image as a grandmother with “traditional, conservative family values”, in the hope of whitewashing her reputation as a champion of the EU’s green-rainbow agenda. “#ProudGrandma” read her hashtag — though this is likely little more than PR. After all, even as the EU establishment pays lip service to the concerns of ordinary Europeans, to try to contain the popular backlash against its various policy failures, it is also doing what it does best: attempting to subvert democracy.

Today, this doesn’t come primarily in the form of economic governance tools, which are already in place, but rather in the form of narrative control. Over the past few months, EU authorities have been peddling their own “Russiagate” hoax, claiming that that Russia bribed European politicians to spread disinformation and interfere in the upcoming elections. Russia “is using dodgy outlets pretending to be media [and] using money to buy covert influence”, said European Commission Vice President Věra Jourová. “We uncovered a pro-Russian network that was developing an operation to spread Russian influence and undermine security across Europe”, claimed Petr Fiala, the Czech prime minister. However, following an investigation, the head of the Czech intelligence agency admitted that his agency had no information about any bribery scheme.

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Even von der Leyen conceded that there is no proof of a Russian bribery network. But don’t expect this to deter the EU from doing exactly what it accuses Russia of doing: interfering in the upcoming elections. On Monday, EU Parliament President Metsola met with 50 pan-European NGOs to thank them for pushing “EU values” ahead of the elections. This followed an announcement that the EU has signed Partnership Agreements with more than 500 NGOs — many at national level — all tasked with promoting EU values ahead of the forthcoming elections. It is, in other words, an explicit attempt to control the official narrative, by designating any communications that don’t conform to the official narrative as “disinformation”.

All of which is to say that, as challenging as Britain’s economic and political challenges may be, the EU’s dysfunctional and increasingly authoritarian nature is evidence of the fact that the UK made the right choice in decoupling from a failing bloc. As much as the British political class failed to address many of the concerns embodied in the Brexit referendum, that vote nonetheless provided a democratic outlet for many of the tensions that are now building up across the EU — and potentially opened up the country to the possibility of democratic national renewal. And if that isn’t justification enough, we need only look to the EU to witness the dismal alternative.

It’s an outcome that will have momentous consequences — not just for Poland but for Europe as a whole. Since the PiS came to power in 2015, Poland’s relations with the EU have grown increasingly strained. Over the years, the European Commission has systematically charged Poland with failing to uphold the “rule of law”, as defined by Brussels — for threatening media freedom and judicial independence, not doing enough to tackle systemic corruption, violating LGBT and minority rights, and thwarting the bloc’s immigration policies.

The PiS government, on the other hand, has always contended that these were matters of national sovereignty over which the EU had no say, locking horns with Brussels over what is arguably its most important article of faith: the primacy of EU law over national law.

When Brussels claimed that a new judicial disciplinary body created in 2017 — composed of jurists appointed by Parliament to hear complaints against judges facing misconduct allegations — violated EU law and should be revoked, the Polish government refused to comply. It claimed the demand represented an unacceptable infringement on the country’s national sovereignty. The Polish Constitutional Tribunal upheld the Government’s decision, insisting that national law enjoyed primacy over EU law.

In the eyes of EU officials and pro-EU elites, this, even more than culture-war issues, is what made Poland, along with Viktor Orbán’s Hungary, an existential threat. It was, after all, a serious blow to one of the crucial pillars of the bloc’s empire-building project: integration by law — the stealthy hollowing out of national constitutional and legal systems, through which the EU has slowly aligned policies across the bloc regardless of electoral outcomes. As Luxembourg’s foreign minister, Jean Asselborn, put it at the time: “If this principle is broken, Europe as we know it, as it has been built with the Rome treaties, will cease to exist.”

And this wasn’t all. The PiS also clashed with Brussels and other countries over its opposition to the extension of qualified majority voting, in place of unanimity, to new areas such as foreign policy — seen by integrationists as a way of overcoming the ability of individual countries to block EU initiatives, as well as a precondition for further enlargement.

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Yet what made the PiS hated in Brussels is also what led it to become something of a role model in the eyes of other Eurosceptic and national-conservative parties across the continent. As Nicholas Lokker wrote in a recent article for Foreign Policy, “PiS has actively sought to lead a coalition of populist and far-right political parties across the bloc. Warsaw hosted a meeting of numerous leaders of such parties in 2021. This February, Polish Prime Minister Mateusz Morawiecki and Italian Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni proclaimed their determination to push back against a ‘centralist vision’ of Europe.”

Amid such strong rhetoric, what went wrong? For a long time, the PiS’s grip on the country seemed unshakeable, with the party persistently enjoying strong support in the polls. The outbreak of the war in Ukraine seemed poised to strengthen the ruling party even further, not least because it dramatically shifted Europe’s geopolitical balance of power from the West to the East — first and foremost to Poland.

Almost overnight, the country, which has always been staunchly pro-US and pro-Nato, and which already had one of the most formidable armies in Europe before the conflict, went from being the EU’s bête noire to being the tip of its spear in Ukraine and Nato’s de facto logistical hub. “Poland has become our most important partner in continental Europe”, a senior US Army official in Europe claimed in November. All of a sudden, in the eyes of Brussels — and especially Washington — Poland was no longer a threat to democracy but, purportedly, a crucial ally in the struggle against autocracy.

These developments strongly emboldened the country’s geopolitical aspirations: as the biggest and richest nation in Central and Eastern Europe (and the sixth-largest economy in the EU), it has long aspired to a leading role in the central and north-eastern quadrant, capable of counterbalancing both Russia and the Franco-German axis. The conflict gave this project a huge impetus.

Indeed, it seemed inevitable that the PiS would benefit from this — but events took a different turn. The fortunes of the PiS were already waning before the war, due to criticisms over its handling of the pandemic, a hugely controversial ruling by Poland’s constitutional tribunal (stating that abortions as a result of foetal defects were unconstitutional), and rising tensions within the governing camp.

The war in Ukraine further complicated matters for the Government: not only did it lead to sky-high inflation, but as a result of the so-called “solidarity routes” set up by the EU, cheap Ukrainian grain flooded the local market, undercutting prices and angering farmers, among whom the PiS had traditionally enjoyed strong support. Confederation, a Right-wing party created in 2018, weaponised the growing frustration among sectors of Polish society with the country’s support for Ukraine, which included taking in at least 2 million refugees. The Government responded by introducing a unilateral ban on Ukrainian grain — and by dramatically withdrawing military support for Ukraine. But it did little to reverse the trend.

Meanwhile, the real beneficiary of the ruling party’s troubles was its arch-enemy: Donald Tusk. A pro-market, pro-EU liberal-centrist, he was the country’s prime minister from 2007 to 2014, before going on to become the EU’s president and then the president of the centre-right European People’s Party until last year. Throughout his career, he has been a devout servant of the EU’s integrationist, supranationalist project: in 2015, when Greek Left-wing leader Alexis Tsipras clashed with the EU over austerity, Tusk played a crucial role in crushing the Greek government’s revolt and pressuring it to accept a new bailout conditional upon a new round of austerity measures. Then, in 2016, he bitterly opposed Brexit, saying that there was “a special place in hell” for Brexiteers.

It was unsurprising, then, that he became the sworn enemy of the PiS — which has always accused him of being responsible for the 2010 plane crash that killed Polish President and PiS co-founder Lech Kaczyński — and in particular of prime minister Morawiecki. In 2021, Tusk decided to make a political comeback with the launch of Civic Platform. Since then, he has skilfully exploited the ruling party’s growing problems, especially the massive backlash against the new abortion law, leading several mass demonstrations against the Government in June and then again two weeks ago.

His victory represents a seismic change in Poland’s political landscape. Tusk has pledged to resolve the country’s rule-of-law disputes with the EU — which essentially means bringing Poland back under the “soft tyranny” of the EU’s legislation, the so-called acquis communautaire, in exchange for which the EU has promised to unlock €35 billion in post-pandemic funds. He has also pledged to offer greater protection for LGBT and women’s rights, as well as renormalising relations with Ukraine. On the economic front, Tusk will likely pursue a pro-business agenda, probably reversing some of the PiS’s generous welfare policies, while on other issues, such as immigration, he will probably maintain the status quo, even though this is unlikely to defuse the country’s hyper-polarised political landscape.

But the ramifications of Tusk’s victory extend well beyond Poland. The most obvious winner is the EU. Not only will it weaken the Right-populist and Eurosceptic front, but it will also give new lifeblood to the EU’s integrationist project. Tusk’s Civic Coalition has, for instance, pledged to “return to the decision-making group in the EU institutions”, and he has often endorsed the use of qualified majority voting in the past. As Lokker put it: “A fresh approach to Poland’s EU partners by a Civic Coalition-led government would significantly widen the window for further EU integration.”

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Yet there is also a less obvious winner of Sunday’s election: Germany. The PiS was viscerally anti-German. Last August, for example, Polish foreign minister Zbigniew Rau likened “Russian imperialism” to “imperial practices within the EU”, particularly in Germany; the Polish deputy PM had previously accused Germany of trying to turn the EU into a federal “German fourth Reich”.

Under Tusk, by contrast, Poland is less likely to compete with Germany for leadership of Nato, making it easier for Germany to enact its plan of “becoming the guarantor of European security” — in other words, managing Nato on behalf of Washington, in exchange for being allowed to re-establish a position of economic leadership within the EU. To further drive the message home, a member of the German parliament’s EU committee wrote on Sunday: “Within the Nato framework, the message should be: Germany feels responsible for Poland’s security!”

There is, however, just one problem for pro-EU elites in Germany and elsewhere: while the Right-populist threat might be declining in the East, as Poland’s election attests, it is growing in the West — especially in Germany — largely due to the EU’s prioritisation of US-driven foreign policy diktats over the economic interests of member states. Attempts to use the Polish results to justify a new integrationist power grab by the EU will only embolden anti-EU forces. Brussels might be celebrating for now — but after the party, comes the hangover.

An earlier version of this article did not properly attribute quotations to Nicholas Lokker. This has been corrected.

How many French people does it take to re-write the lyrics of a Beatles song? Answer: One million.

That was the combined size of the crowds which filled the streets of towns and cities across France last Thursday. Their message to President Emmanuel Macron was roughly as follows: “Do you really still need me (to work), will you still bleed me, when I’m 64?”

The size of the demonstrations took the government and its internal security services by surprise. The marches were especially large in the mid-sized, provincial towns where trades’ unions appeals for “manifs” (demos) and nationwide strikes usually go disregarded.

Unlike the atypical and unstructured Gilets Jaunes protests of 2018-9, this was an old-fashioned revolt led by the trades’ unions. Unlike any such protest for more than a decade, all eight of the French trades’ union federations took part.

Another day of nationwide strikes and marches has been called for a week on Tuesday. Battle-lines are being drawn for the biggest and most disruptive government versus union confrontation in France since 1995.

The issue back then was broadly the same as now — social security and pension reform. The unions triumphed. President Jacques Chirac capitulated after three weeks. Will President Emmanuel Macron also be forced to back down?

Some of his officials and supporters have been rattled by the size of Thursday’s marches. The President is right, they whisper, but he has failed to persuade the country. You cannot change a querulous nation like France against its will — even if the change is for its own good. Au contraire, say others close to the President. France is always reformed against its will. Protest is a national ritual. Future generations will thank Macron for leaving the country stronger than he found it. Maybe. In the meantime, grinding confrontation is inevitable. Compromise appears impossible; neither side can afford to lose.

Defeat for Macron would leave him, aged 45, a domestic lame duck for the remaining four years of his second mandate and the last four years of his political career. Defeat for the union federations, after years of declining membership and influence, would mark the end of their power as an organised — or even disorganised — force in French life. What displaces them might look more like the Gilet Jaunes movement: angry, chaotic and violent at the edges.

But was this confrontation really necessary now, when war is raging 1,500 miles to the east and Scholz is in town to dicusss it, when inflation is booming, and when tempers are still stretched by the Covid pandemic?

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Macron has good reason to want to reform the muddled and often unfair French pensions system. He is right that French people must work longer if they want to maintain the strength of their economy and their generous (for some) welfare system, pensions included. One in four of France’s population of 68,000,000 is retired. Unless the state pension system changes, there will be only six French workers to support five pensioners by the middle of this century.

To face this challenge, most other developed countries have raised the legal retirement age to 65, even to 67. Macron is publishing detailed legislation to shift France’s official retirement age from 62 to 64 over six years. It is due to be enacted in March and go ahead from September. If the reforms go through, French people will still retire earlier in 2030 than Britons, Germans, Belgians, Italian, the Spanish or the Americans do now.

But while the argument for reforming the pension system is strong; the argument for doing so immediately is weaker. The Covid pandemic killed so many old people that the system is, for the time being, in reasonable balance between pension payments and monthly contributions by workers and their employers. That balance will be lost in the years ahead but only gradually.

Macron’s reasons for pushing ahead now are partly political. He promised a radical but painless pension reform when he was first elected in 2017 but withdrew his complex and much-hated package of changes when Covid struck in 2020. A second attempt at pensions reform was the headline proposal of a mostly unmemorable Macron re-election platform last year. He won in April but lost his parliamentary majority in June. If he abandons pension reform again, what will he do in his second term?

There is also another reason for rapid action which dares not speak its name: money.

The reform should save Euros 100bn in state or tax-payer top-ups to a loss-making state pension system over a decade. Without the changes, it will be difficult for Macron to reduce France’s annual budget deficit to the 3% of GDP which is the official limit for countries which use the Euro. France’s deficit will be 5% of GDP this year. Macron has pledged to hit the 3% target by 2027. But this is not an argument that is used publicly. Increasing the pension age to please Brussels does not play well through the country.

In fact, there is even more taxpayers’ money at stake.

France has no private pension schemes or individual pension pots. All but the very richest people depend on the state pension system for their old age. In theory, payments to the retired are matched by the contributions of active workers and their employers in each of 42 different state regimes — whether for rail workers, the self-employed, farmers, lawyers, Paris Opera ballet dancers etc.

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Some of these regimes are roughly in balance. But the generous pension provisions for state employees – including retirement in their late-50s for rail workers and pensions of 75% of final year pay for all state-sector workers – are catastrophically and permanently in the red.

The shortfall of around Euros 30bn a year is paid by the national government (ie the taxpayer) on top of its normal contributions as an employer. This has become so accepted that it is never mentioned as part of the overall, annual pension “deficit”.

This permanent drain on French state spending is equivalent to more than half the country’s annual defence budget. Macron’s reform would not end such losses overnight but would free a few useful billions for more constructive spending and for deficit reduction.

As a political argument, though, it’s pretty taboo. Reducing taxes is always portrayed in France as a “policy for the rich”. So the President is peddling another line. France can no longer afford to work less than its EU partners or international competitors. According to an OECD study, France worked 630 hours a year per inhabitant in 2018, including children and the retired. Germany worked 722 hours per inhabitant; the UK 808 hours, and the USA 826. This is partly because of the 35-hour-week and unemployment but also because of the early retirement age.

The trades’ union response to these arguments is a mixture of reasonable fact and obfuscation. France’s real average retirement age is already 62.9, they point out (true). Some people already have to wait until they are 67 to claim a full pension (also true). Any increase in the official retirement age would disproportionately punish working-class people because they start work young, while the middle classes are studying (true but addressed in part in the small print of the reform).

The pension deficit could be made up in other ways, the unions say, by higher monthly contributions from workers and their bosses or by a levy on high pensions. That would work, for a while. It would also increase the jobs-destroying, pay-roll tax burden in one of the highest-taxed countries in the world

The present system is often unjust to women, farmers, the self-employed and to the employees in the private sector generally. If you work for a private company, rather than the state, your pension is 50% of average earnings in your best 25 years, compared with 75% of final salary for state employees.

And private-sector employees pay not only their own pension contributions but, as already mentioned, subsidise the pensions of state worker through their taxes.

Obviously, the unions have no reason to draw attention to this anomaly. Their waning support is heavily concentrated in the state sector. And the big marches and strikes last week were dominated by public employees, from rail workers to teachers. There were few big strikes in private enterprise — but a surprising number of private industry employees joined the provincial marches.

Macron and his government for some reason have chosen so far not to try to exploit this potential private-public divide. Perhaps they would rather sell it as something uniformly positive, rather not divide and rule. That may yet change.

The unions also have to be careful what they do next. Militant voices are calling for open-ended rail strikes, cuts in electricity supplies and blockages of petrol refineries. But the national union leadership fears that such a hard-ball strategy would turn public opinion against them, not against Macron.

Seen from abroad, there is something demographically and economically irrational about the French aversion to an advance in the retirement age from 62 to 64 by 2030. Irrational or not, the opposition to pension reform is deep and passionate. Up to 70% of people tell pollsters they see no reason to work longer. And as the pro-government politician Jean-Louis Bourlanges points out: “Opinions may be mistaken but the fact that millions of people hold those opinions remains a political fact.”

French people are not lazy. Those who work do so very productively. But much of the country has a kind of teenaged relationship with the state — a blend of petulant rejection and needy dependency. There is a constant demand for “change” but an opposition to all changes. Presidents are elected to get stuff done but, once elected, are resisted. The “street” counts more than in almost any other large democracy.

So what next? Despite his lack of a parliamentary majority, Macron has a reasonable chance of pushing the reform through the national assembly in March. The centre-right Les Républicains, who hold 62 swing votes, are, in theory, in favour. The final version of the proposed reform, with 64 as the new retirement age, not 65 as originally suggest by Macron – was partly shaped by them. However, the prospect of a two-month long battle with the “street” and unions is causing some centre-right deputies and even some pro-Macron parliamentarians to have cold feet.

Macron and his Prime Minister, Elisabeth Borne, could use their emergency constitutional power to ram through the reform by decree if necessary. But that would doubtless cause more strikes and, possibly, street violence.

Macron has the casting vote. The decision on whether or not to bow to public anger will be his. He is, by all accounts, determined not to be a “second Chirac”.  And paradoxically, the intensity of the opposition could allow him to appear (abroad at any rate) as a courageous and resolute leader after enacting what is, in all truth, a modest reform.

He knows that if he blinks he faces a lonely and empty final four years in the Elysée Palace.

So will he blink? Probably not.

They weren’t very good. The poor kid had to pretend his can of Mojito was a hand grenade because they didn’t have any real ones. Tanya, a 38-year-old graphic designer who was also there “training”, told me they were there to learn “the basics” so they wouldn’t be killed in the first minute of a war. “Maybe with what we’ve learned we might last one or two days,” she speculated.

Frankly, I thought she was being optimistic. But what struck me most was what she said to me later: “We want to build something like the Swiss or Israeli army—a people’s army,” she concluded. “That’s the long-term goal.”

It was startling for me as a Brit to hear someone from a country battling a far larger enemy, which was, moreover, occupying it with military force, hold Israel up as a model. Back in London, New York and Brussels, ensconced within the uterine comforts of human rights dogma and the language of supranational institutions, Israel was something that almost all right-thinking people considered anathema.

But, as I discovered, it wasn’t just Tanya who felt differently. Friends in Kyiv and in the occupied East told me that the Russian invasion had made them understand who exactly they were: citizens of a state who, despite supportive talk from allies, would always have to fight alone against Russia, a far larger enemy perpetually menacing their border. Now when they looked at Israelis, they felt kinship with these people who would always have to fight alone against the Arab world.

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Even then-Ukrainian President Petro Poroshenko seemed to see Israel as the model. Later that year, he declared: “Just like Israel, Ukraine has the right to defend her territory — and it will do so, with all the courage of her heart and dedication of her soul.”

Once again, Ukraine is menaced by Russia, which recently stuck a decent chunk of its army on the border. And not just men and guns: all the supporting infrastructure for an invasion is being deployed. Recently, they even moved in blood supplies. As one analyst has observed, “if it’s a bluff, then hands [sic] off to the Russians for making sure they get every tiny detail right”.

Once again, the supportive talk flows. In fact, the UK and US have been almost unprecedentedly forceful. Earlier this month, the UK Foreign Office announced that it had “information that the Russian government is looking to install a pro-Russian leader in Kyiv as it considers whether to invade and occupy Ukraine”. It even named politicians inside the country that the Kremlin still had links with.

I don’t remember the British government saying anything as blunt as this in 2014-15, when there was an actual war going on. It’s also now flying arms to Ukraine. Last Thursday, US President Joe Biden had a call with his Ukrainian counterpart Volodymyr Zelensky during which Biden told him that a Russian invasion could happen as soon as February, when the ground in the East freezes over and Russian track vehicles can move. Biden apparently got so worked up that Zelensky had to ask him to “calm down the messaging”.

But while Biden may get emotional down the phone, he won’t send Americans to fight Russians on behalf of Ukrainians. And it’s not like we’re going to send a substantial British force. Kyiv is not in Nato, and it has no allies it can call upon here. It’s on its own, which is, of course, nothing new. For years, Ukraine desperately needed javelin anti-tank guided missile systems to defend from Russian attack in the East; the Obama administration refused. Kyiv had to wait several years until Trump finally agreed to help. Who knows how many deaths could have been prevented had the systems been delivered earlier.

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During 1948 War of Independence, the Israelis desperately needed arms; the world said no (and indeed doled out lectures on international law). So they went out and illegally bought a load of Czech arms. They refused to take lectures when facing the literal extinction of the nascent Jewish state. I’m not saying Ukraine should start scouting the black market, but the broader principle should be internalised.

And widely. These sentiments are not just confined to Ukraine. When I reported from Greece just before the pandemic, I noticed that Israel, for so long a bogeyman for a country steeped in leftist ideology of the most reductive kind — “Free, Free Palestine!” roar the protestors who march each November in remembrance of the 1973 student uprising against the Greek Junta — had become a friend to be courted. The culmination was an April 2021 defence deal worth around £1.2 billion between the two. And why not? After all, what is Greece if not a small country perpetually menaced by Turkey, a much larger enemy on its border?

As my friend Constantine Lerounis, once an adviser to the former President of Greece, Prokopios Pavlopoulos, told me recently: “Both Greece and Israel are facing states or potential coalitions of states with far greater resources and larger military forces. When Greece looks to Israel now, it sees not a colonial oppressor but a state that has little choice but to maintain a disproportionately large military and a high state of readiness. And it understands why. The Greek-Israeli rapprochement has been in the making for some time now. What was unfathomable a decade ago is now merely common sense.”

Over the years, I’ve listened to people in Moldova and Belarus and in the Baltic States tell me more or less the same thing: Israel is a model for small countries in an increasingly unforgiving world. And it’s not just about an accretion of individual beefs between neighbours, either. Something has changed.

In 1806 the German philosopher Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel saw Napoleon ride onto the German city of Jena on horseback and thought he had, loosely speaking, witnessed the final manifestation of progress. Almost two centuries later, the American political scientist Francis Fukuyama picked up on this image to declare “the end of history” following the victory of liberal democracy in the Cold War.

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Everyone now pretty much agrees that this idea is dead. Napoleon’s horse has bolted back out of the Jena gates. History has returned with ferocity and, as Damir Marusic Senior Fellow at the Atlantic Council, observes: “Ukraine learned a hard lesson in 2014 that many countries outside of the heart of the so-called liberal world order take for granted: you can only count on yourself.”

The problem is that Fukuyama-like triumphalism swept through governments and created a generation of what Marusic calls “activist policymakers steeped in a progressive vision of the world” whose best intentions and half-baked promises brought about so much pain. At the 2008 Nato summit in Bucharest, the United States’ desire to extend Membership Action Plans to Georgia and Ukraine was thwarted by the vetoes of France and Germany. To compromise, Nato offered “an explicit promise to join the bloc, but no specific timeline for membership.” Ukraine and Georgia were left to fend for themselves — with predictable results.

Meanwhile, the EU was delighted to “welcome” the  “European choice” of Moldova and several other countries in Europe’s East without making any commitment to EU accession. The door was not open, but neither was it shut. The Kremlin, though, now knew the US and Nato would never fight for these countries. The results are painfully inevitable.

Here in the West, the world of Brussels and the UN dominated the post-war settlement. We could afford the luxury of finger-wagging at Israelis for having to use old-fashioned means to repel old-fashioned threats; we sneered at their atavism.

But out on the edges of Europe, and across the former USSR, geopolitics and history is returning; indeed, they probably never left. No one is coming to save Ukrainians or Georgians. Their only chance is self-reliance; and they have neither the time nor luxury to grandstand. Now the world of Moscow and Ankara and Beijing is rising — and the only way many countries can effectively respond is to adopt the principles and behaviour of a world that runs not through Brussels but Jerusalem.

On the night of the 20th, a special guest from the European Parliament got up on stage: Guy Verhofstadt, the arch-federalist and former Prime Minister of Belgium. Addressing the cheering throng he was full of praise: “you are defending European values and European principles.” 

Two days later, the pro-Moscow Yanukovych government was forced from office. The protesters had won — and so, it seemed, had the European Union. Who needs an army and a navy when you’ve got “values” and “principles”?

Fast forward to the present day and the Russian military is massed on Ukraine’s borders, poised to complete a conquest that began with the annexation of Crimea. I suppose Mr Verhofstadt could be deployed to stand in Moscow’s way, but on this occasion I doubt it would do much good.

However, Brussels could focus on something else he said back in 2014: “we as the European Union have one obligation… that’s to stay behind your cause.” In that regard, the EU might not have any military power of its own — but it does have diplomatic power. 

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Indeed, the EU has a fully-fledged foreign policy apparatus. It has a High Representative (currently Josep Borrell) to act as the EU’s foreign minister; it has embassies and consulates around the world; and it has direct representation on powerful bodies like the G7 and G20. Its diplomacy is also backed with the clout that comes from being the world’s biggest trade block.

So given that capacity, one might expect the EU to be leading the effort to save Ukraine. But instead its diplomats are on the sidelines — much to the frustration of Emmanuel Macron, among others. Instead, the future of Ukraine — and by extension Europe — is being hammered out between Washington and Moscow. Even Britain, supposedly isolated by Brexit, has made a bigger impact than Brussels. 

The Russians, meanwhile, are laughing. Commenting on the EU’s lack of involvement, Sergei Lavrov — the country’s Foreign Minister — expressed mock sympathy: “We can see that the European Union feels somewhat disadvantaged.” As to the possibility of a separate EU-Russia dialogue Lavrov observed that “the US needs to be asked if it is willing to let [the EU] take any independent action.”

He was making mischief, of course. It’s not the US stopping the EU from taking a leading role — but the EU itself. The Ukraine crisis is the greatest test that the Common Foreign and Security Policy has ever faced, and so far the failure is comprehensive. Beyond the usual empty words and token gestures, the 27 member states of the European Union have been unable to present a united front. 

There’s no doubt as to which of the 27 is most to blame. As I have argued before, Germany was warned years ago that its collaboration with Russia on energy supplies would undermine the security of Russia’s neighbours. Now that these fears have been realised, the new German government has a chance to make amends. But far from showing leadership, the German Chancellor, Olaf Scholz, has weakened Europe’s resolve — for instance by blocking defence exports to Ukraine. 

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The EU is Russia’s biggest trading partner — accounting for more than a third of its imports and exports. Comprehensive economic sanctions could therefore act as a serious deterrent to war. However, the threat has to be credible. There was fighting talk this week from the Danish foreign minister, who said the EU is ready to impose “never seen before” sanctions. However, that doesn’t match Scholz’s less-than-resolute language: “no one should harbour the illusion that there is any step that has no consequences for us.”

It also didn’t help when Vice Admiral Kay-Achim Schönbach, the German naval chief, had to resign after some unguarded comments about the current crisis. “What [Putin] really wants is respect,” he was reported as saying, “and, my God, giving someone respect is low cost, even no cost… It is easy to give him the respect he really demands — and probably also deserves.” No doubt Putin was left wiping away the tears.

So is the EU’s problem actually a German problem? Up to a point, but the blame must be shared by other member states for tolerating it. If they won’t stand up to German flakiness on foreign and defence policy, then what chance do they have against Russian aggression?

Unfortunately, EU governments are under very little pressure from their voters to take the continent’s defence seriously. Consider the core principle of NATO — the Article 5 obligation that every member of the organisation should come to the military aid of any member that is attacked. In other words, one for all and all for one. According to this 2020 Pew report, there was majority support for this principle in some EU countries, but not others. Asked whether their own country should respond militarily to a Russian attack on a fellow NATO member, 64% of those asked said yes in the Netherlands, but only 41% in France and Spain, 34% in Germany and just 25% in Italy. This compares to 60% in the US and 55% in Britain. 

Somewhat hypocritically, much higher percentages expect that the United States would respond to a Russian attack: 75% of Italians thought so as did 63% of Germans. Clearly, many Europeans assume that they will be defended — even if they aren’t prepared to contribute to the defence of their neighbours. 

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Ukraine, of course, is not a NATO member. And perhaps that’s why the EU isn’t doing all it can to deter Russia. The assumption is that Kyiv represents an endpoint for Moscow’s ambitions — not a pit stop on the way to Vilnius or Warsaw or Berlin. Let’s hope that theory is never tested. 

What makes the EU’s irresponsibility harder to take is the very nature of the “European project”. On the 1st January, 1999 the euro came into being — and changed the character of the European Union forever. From that moment, it became a fundamentally inward-looking enterprise devoted to the survival of the single currency at any cost. The alternative path that the EU could have taken: a looser association of nations — but one that doesn’t stop halfway across the continent — was forever closed off. 

Well, so be it. Every empire has to have a frontier. But when the line is drawn, one has to be ready to guard it. One cannot exclude unless one is prepared to defend. The EU seems oblivious to this — and that is its greatest failure.

But, although it seems to have slipped the minds of the EU’s finance ministers at their meeting yesterday in Brussels, the truth is that the scope of the bloc’s support package has been wildly overblown. The IMF puts the EU’s discretionary fiscal stimulus at a paltry 3.8% of GDP — a figure dwarfed by the massive discretionary fiscal stimulus of 25.5% of GDP in the US.

The same chasm between narrative and reality can be seen with the much-vaunted Europe-wide “recovery fund” known as Next Generation EU (NGEU). Despite the fanfare, it amounts to barely 5% of the EU’s GDP. What’s more, the funds will be disbursed over the course of six years, resulting in, at best, a fiscal expansion of around 1% of GDP on average between 2021 and 2024. And that’s compared to a GDP loss for the EU as a whole of around 15% just in 2020.

Predictably, the funds come with very strict troika-like conditions attached. They are conditional on compliance with the European Commission’s infamous country-specific recommendations, which in the past have consistently demanded that governments cut public spending — especially on social expenditure (particularly pensions), healthcare and unemployment benefits. This is ultimately what the NGEU is all about: increasing Brussels’s control over the budgetary policies of member states and strengthening the EU’s regime of technocratic and authoritarian control. It’s the EU doing what the EU does best.

So overall we can say that the pandemic has not resulted in any radical rethinking of policy at the European level. Neither has it resulted in any structural change. Indeed, the old fiscal rules are set to be reinstated in 2023. Even though there’s much talk of “reforming the EU’s fiscal rules”, the truth is that everyone knows that serious treaty reform is off the table — as Valdis Dombrovskis, executive vice president of the European Commission, has repeatedly stated.

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It’s not just the opposition of the so-called frugal countries — the Netherlands, the Nordic countries, the Baltics and Austria. Anyone who expects a change of heart from the new German government is also bound to be disappointed. Olaf Scholz, Angela Merkel’s successor, is, as Wolfgang Münchau has noted, “a staunch fiscal conservative, on a par with his predecessors, Wolfgang Schäuble and Peer Steinbrück, the Social Democrat behind the debt brake”.

Moreover, regardless of who takes over Jens Weidmann’s role at the Bundesbank, growing inflationary pressures in Germany — in September, inflation hit a 29-year high of 4.1% — mean that fiscal hawks will easily gain the upper hand in the debate. Regardless of the actual cause of inflation (which is largely a result of the massive supply chain disruptions happening around the world), German fiscal hawks will blame it on overspending — with cuts being the only solution.

So, all things considered, we can expect a return of austerity to Europe in the near future. Indeed, it is already taking form. Mario Draghi’s Italy is a case in point. In the current debate, the EU’s most indebted country is often presented as a champion of flexibility and European fiscal reform. However, the reality is quite different. Italy’s latest budget report forecasts a huge deficit reduction — from 10% to 4% of GDP (more than 100 billion euros) in little over a year. Italy’s age of austerity, then, seems far from over.

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A return of austerity to Europe as a whole would be devastating, especially given that many countries are still recovering from the post-2008 austerity shock therapy. That experience didn’t just prove to be a colossal failure in economic terms but also led to nothing less than a social and humanitarian catastrophe, particularly in those countries that were subject to the “economic adjustment programmes” (EAPs) demanded by the EU-led troika: Greece, Ireland, Portugal, Spain and Italy (which was never officially in an EAP but saw the imposition of EAP-like policies by former European commissioner Mario Monti, who came to power through an EU-orchestrated “soft coup”).

Numerous reports over the years have confirmed that the budget cuts and tax hikes implemented in these countries disproportionately hit the poor and are directly responsible for a dramatic rise in inequality and unemployment levels (especially among the youth), as well as rates of suicide, poverty (including child poverty), severe material deprivation, homelessness, social exclusion and distress. Even a report from a few years back by the European Parliament’s own employment committee claimed that “the austerity policies and the structural reforms imposed in the troika countries have led to a real social tsunami of massive unemployment (it has tripled in some countries) especially among young people, the closure of hundreds of thousands of companies, mainly SMEs; and a sharp rise in poverty and social exclusion”. These policies have in many respects undermined the very material bases of democracy, leading to social and economic instability.

In recent years, some countries have introduced measures to cushion the effects of austerity. In Italy, for example, the Five Star Movement-League government that emerged from the 2018 elections — which was first and foremost a rebuke of the parties that had administered the disastrous austerity policies — introduced two major policies that went in that direction: a “citizenship income”, a form of income supplement for poor households, and a pension reform lowering the retirement age.

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Both those policies are now under threat from the techno-authoritarian government led by Draghi, who is, let us not forget, one of the chief architects of the EU’s post-2008 austerity framework. A new reform raising once again the pension age has already been announced, and the ranks of those in the Government calling for the abolition of the “citizenship income” continue to grow.

This would leave millions of families with no support whatsoever, in an economy that has been ravaged by 18 months of pandemic. But punishing the poorest and weakest members of society for crises they have not caused — first the financial crisis, now the Covid crisis — has long been standard policy, in Italy and elsewhere. As the saying goes, the strong do what they can and the weak suffer what they must.

Against logic and justice, the EU’s 340 million western rich suck in wealth from the 103 million eastern poor. The elites in Central and Eastern Europe (CEE) rarely rock the boat as they hate to admit the facts; many have been co-opted or cowed. But now and then resentment bubbles up. “We’re not a colony, we’re not a second-class member”, Slovenia’s premier growled at the European Commission last year. Clotilde Armand, a Frenchwoman who is a mayor in Bucharest, has also been clear that “much of the wealth in Europe flows from the poorer countries to the richer ones”.

In the West, those in the know are not just quiet, they egg on the bien-pensants who are convinced that the Old EU keeps the East afloat. “See those pesky Poles, Czechs and Hungarians,” your typical Eurocrat will whine. “They’re lurching away from liberalism, even as their hot paws reach out for our largesse!” This kind of thinking is doubly skewed. The East’s purported nastiness merely matches supposed Western sins (compare Hungary on gender with Denmark on its Muslims, say). It’s the colonial status of CEE that really splits the EU, not any over-hyped cultural cleft.

To see what’s going on, start with the deal struck when the eleven joined in or after 2004. CEE was weak after communism but was forced to throw open its borders prematurely. Capital from the Old EU was to compensate. But as so often in history, the biggest impact was unforeseen. As frontiers fell, there was a human haemorrhage in CEE as the West hoovered in ten million of its workers. Up to a third had higher education; they’ve driven much of the West’s growth.

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In Brussels, however, it is taboo to talk of this epochal shift of wealth. No one dares claim the credit for capturing those diligent white migrants, Christian in culture and capable of quick assimilation. Imagine the howls of “ray-cist!” if they did.

In the East, meanwhile, the elites are shamed to silence, for they’re complicit in a population collapse of wartime scale. Croatia has lost almost a quarter of its people (an existential meltdown, one premier dared to moan). Romania, Bulgaria and the Baltic three of Lithuania, Estonia and Latvia have seen a fifth of workers go. Poland has lost over a tenth.

The social devastation has been horrendous. Hospitals have been hollowed out. Of the EU’s top ten countries for excess Covid mortality, eight are in CEE. You can be sure that the dearth of doctors helped cause the 315,000 extra deaths tallied up to June. Overall, the demographic disaster has probably put paid to hopes of ever catching up. Beata Javorcik, Oxford professor and chief economist at the region’s development bank EBRD, judges that “Eastern Europe could grow old before it gets rich”.

The other unexpected consequence was a radical recasting of CEE’s business landscape. This too is a taboo topic in Berlin, and points West. Cash-rich offshore companies swooped in and bought the leading firms at knock-down prices. They rescued some bankrupt red behemoths (think VW with Skoda in the Czech Republic, Renault with Dacia in Romania). But it went much too far; with new implantations which followed, most key sectors in industry and services are now dominated from abroad.

In Poland, foreigners own a half of the manufacturing and retailing industries, mainly in the form of larger firms. Non-locals account for half of Czech and Polish industrial exports. In Hungary, it’s four-fifths. This is unprecedented in countries with their competence. After all, the Czechs remember that in 1938 they were as prosperous as Switzerland and Sweden; the Poles and Hungarians recall that they were ahead of Spain before the latter’s civil war.

Unpick the statistical thicket, and the balance is bittersweet. Take the lost workers. The rich-country club OECD says that in educating them CEE donated a mind-boggling €400 billion or more. This far exceeds anything Brussels has sent. (Poland spent €160 billion to educate the 2.6 million who’ve gone, so far it has received €138 billion.)

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The boost to western GDP delivered by CEE’s migrants is more massive still. The Old EU benefitted by over €1,000 billion in just the three pre-Covid years, official figures state. Then there’s the corporate investment. It’s now mature, so foreign profits and dividends sent home from CEE often exceed annual transfers from Brussels. And in any case, much EU money is spent on infrastructure, where western firms recoup up to four-fifths of the flows.

On the plus side, the region is now a supply chain Powerhaus (so the German financial paper Handelsblatt calls it). The Old EU syphons out components and embeds them in exports to China and elsewhere. Poland outranks France, Italy and Spain as supplier to Germany. CEE is also the Old EU’s key, and wholly captive, market.

Its German hegemon depends on it. In 2020 Berlin exported €179 billion-worth to the eleven, compared to €103 billion to the US, €96 billion to China and a measly €23 billion to Russia.

The region’s economies have duly grown, but figures for real GDP per capita yield bitter reminders of the challenge still ahead. Poland generates only around one-half of the EU’s average, the Czech Republic two-thirds. Of course, this occludes the distance to the advanced Northwest. Your average Pole produces 26% of what a Dane does, your Czech, around one-third. Bulgaria generates a mere 14% and Romania 18% of Denmark’s output per head.

Will CEE ever catch up? The odds aren’t promising. Demography and China’s galloping self-sufficiency are brakes enough, but the colonial system could be the clincher. To enjoy advanced-country wealth you must match the productivity. Here CEE desperately needs to improve its pathetic innovation, but dominion status now is a major block.

In a branch economy non-local firms sit atop the best value chains. Foreigners skim the largest returns and send the profits back. Nothing guarantees they’ll reinvest. They do most development at home, and nothing forces them to share. The IMF confirms that increasingly they force their CEE offshoots to buy high-value inputs from outside. And foreign-owned firms are barred from classic routes to growth, such as building brands or buying out the competition.

So CEE depends on its native firms. They tend to be small and are hard pushed to innovate. They battle with EU bureaucracy and fight a plethora of extra ploys. Certification games can add a fifth to export costs (Northern Ireland ring a bell?). Public tender rules prevent you from favouring your own. You want your government to develop new sectors?  State aid rules are draconian. In one of those rare public outbursts Poland’s Premier Mateusz Morawiecki lamented: “The technology-rich EU sells us their VWs and Renaults. But when our truck drivers enter their markets, they go for protection”.

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Dense webs of incumbents rig the rules. “In Brussels they feign surprise when no CEE companies turn up to plan standards,” a Czech official in charge of high-tech policy told me. “It’s pure hypocrisy. Our firms are too small, they aren’t in the old boy networks. Time and again the regulatory game’s been fixed before we get there, stitched up by the usual suspects”.

Lacking big industrial groups, the East is locked out of giant high-tech projects on which billions are lavished. The West hogs spending on space, defence and research and development (€120 billion is earmarked for these to 2027). Though it has over a fifth of the EU’s population, scandalously CEE received a mere one-twentieth of the €65 billion disbursed for R&D in 2014-20. (Compounding the insult, non-members Israel, Norway and Switzerland cashed in more.)

Things will get worse as the EU devotes more to chips, champions and other chunky goals which favour established players. Expect Old EU firms to grab most of the €56 billion in Covid recovery grants allocated to CEE (only 13% of the total, discrimination again). Then there’s the absurd net zero carbon target. The region can’t afford it. Nevertheless, cheap energy sources will be banned. CEE’s competitiveness will be squashed, and the region’s taxpayers will be made to subsidise western producers of green kit such as wind turbines and their ilk.

There’s little sign, then, that native firms can achieve global scale and productivity en masse. Meanwhile, foreigners will retain every incentive to milk their implantations and withhold the best technology. So CEE faces a “middle income trap”. It’ll be stuck behind for good, even as the Old EU’s anachronistic economies themselves battle to keep up with the US and Asia.

Of course, within the bloc the economic crevasse will still count. Too wide, and there’ll be a massive new mezzogiorno, festering with resentment, depopulating fast and prone to implode at any point. To minimise this threat Brussels must urgently cut a New Deal for its inland empire. It should free up its rules and help the region’s businesses to expand.

For their part, politicians in CEE should call out the colonialism and extract freedom for their firms. If there’s no radical change, the Old EU had better brace for the strange populisms and other ills that a chronically two-tier Europe would unleash.

On the issue of Brussels, however, Salvini appears to have undergone a conversion. On several occasions over the past year, Salvini has stated that he no longer believes Italy should leave the euro. Indeed, the formerly “anti-European” League now wholeheartedly backs the ultra-Europeanist Italian government led by former president of the European Central Bank (ECB), Mario Draghi — the very embodiment of the European currency that Salvini once railed against.

Why the change of heart? In a recent interview with the Financial Times, Salvini claimed that his conversion is a natural reflection of the “changes” that have occurred over the past year and a half as a result of the pandemic. “It is clear that Europe is changing for the better by equipping itself with new tools and new rules, and we must accompany it”, he says. “Covid has forced European institutions to listen to us. We hope that Covid has taught everyone that austerity doesn’t work”.

But what “new tools and new rules” is Salvini is referring to exactly? The much-vaunted Europe-wide “recovery fund” known as Next Generation EU (NGEU), I presume. Yet despite all the fanfare, the fund amounts to barely 5% of the EU’s GDP. What’s more, the funds will be disbursed (largely in the form of loans) over the course of six years, at best resulting in a fiscal expansion of around 1% of GDP on average between 2021 and 2024, according to the ECB’s own estimates. And that’s compared to a GDP loss for the EU as a whole of around 15% just last year.Furthermore, in exchange for this pittance, member states will be subject to very strict troika-light conditions.

The notion that “Covid has taught [Europe] that austerity doesn’t work” is also highly questionable. Yes, since the pandemic started, the EU suspended the Stability and Growth Pact’s (SPG) notoriously tight fiscal rules. Despite this, however, the euro area’s discretionary fiscal stimulus in 2020 was a paltry 4% of GDP — half the United States’ discretionary fiscal stimulus over the same period.

Moreover, the suspension of the SPG was always intended to be temporary. Indeed, the European Commission has recently stated that the “general escape clause” — which, in effect, suspended the SPG, giving governments space to spend – will no longer apply in 2023. From then, governments will have to start tightening their belts once again, in a repeat of the disastrous approach following in the aftermath of the 2008 financial crisis.

If anything, the real question is by how much? Judging from the actions of the Draghi government, a lot. Not only does the Government’s fiscal policy remain “very restrictive”, as the economist Gustavo Piga recently noted, but the latest budget report “sets out for the next three years a path of massive deficit reduction, unlike anything ever seen before in the country’s history”. So much for lessons learned.

All things considered, there appears to be very little in the way of positive changes within the EU to justify Salvini’s conversion. Indeed, I would argue that the very opposite is true: Salvini’s switch to Team EU is not a reflection of the bloc’s improvement, but rather of its inability to reform.

Salvini, like most of his Right-wing and formally “Eurosceptic” bedfellows, knows all too well that any attempt to challenge the EU’s economic governance will result in swift and merciless retaliation by the European authorities. Indeed, he experienced it first-hand, when the Conte I government (2018-2019) — supported by the League and the Five Star Movement — found itself on a collision course with Brussels over a minuscule budget deficit increase, required to finance the Government’s two flagship proposals: a citizen’s income and a reform lowering the pension age.

So Salvini, who has a good chance of becoming the country’s next prime minister, knows that he needs to get in Brussels’s good graces if he wants to have a chance at government. Of course, he is aided in this by the fact that his Euroscepticism was arguably always more show than reality, and that his neoliberal economic outlook, just like that of his ally Giorgia Meloni, isn’t that different from that of the EU itself  — in his interview with the FT, Salvini boasted that “on the economic front we are absolutely liberal”, as testified by his fondness for quoting Friedrich Hayek, largely recognised as an intellectual forefather of the euro.

But that’s not the point; the point is the way in which the EU’s economic pensée unique, by ruling out all alternatives to managing society and the economy other than the neoliberal rulebook, inevitably ends up pushing political challenges to the status quo, and to the EU itself, onto a strictly cultural and identitarian terrain.

Hence Salvini’s reframing of his critique of the EU, no longer couched in terms of the bloc’s economic policies but of its encroachment upon the “diversity” of the European peoples. The same goes for other European Right-wing parties, as testified by the recent declaration undersigned by sixteen of them, including Hungarian prime minister Viktor Orbán’s Fidesz, Poland’s governing Law and Justice, France’s National Rally, led by Marine Le Pen, Austria’s Freedom Party, Spain’s Vox and, of course, Italy’s League and Brothers of Italy, Giorgia Meloni’s party. The document says nothing about the EU’s economic policies, but revolves entirely around its criticism of Brussels’s intention to “transform basic social institutions and moral principles”, and calls for the need for European nations to “be based on tradition, respect for the culture and history of European states, respect for Europe’s Judeo-Christian heritage and the common values that unite our nations”.

The question is not whether one considers these claims to be sensible, outrageous or anything in between. The point is the way in which the EU has succeeded in shifting any opposition to itself from the socioeconomic terrain to the identitarian terrain, thus fuelling the very culture wars that are tearing our societies apart. Indeed, the Left’s embrace of wokism is part of this same process. This is the terrifying new world the EU’s economic superstructure has in store for us: one where our “democratic” choice will be limited to choosing whether we want to want to live in relatively conservative or liberal societies, but where no one will dare to challenge the EU’s overarching socioeconomic regime.

Now that “progressives” have returned to the White House, aping the EU has become a national policy. Taking his cue from his party’s Left, President Joe Biden has already sought to federalise many functions — from zoning to labour laws to education — that historically have been under local control.

But while Biden’s administration has been embraced by the Eurocrats, Americans would do well to consider the EU’s remarkable record of turning Europe into the developed world’s economic and technological laggard. Overall, nearly a third of Europeans consider Brussels an utter failure; half admit the EU’s pandemic response was inadequate. Indeed, while the American media was busy denouncing the US response to Covid under Trump as the “worst” in the world, the EU was showing them how it was done: of the 15 countries suffering the highest fatality rates, 13 are European, of which nine are in the EU — all worse than the US.

The US may always have had a “Federal Government”, but the notion of dispersed power gained approval from many on the Left only after President Trump’s election, as many Democrats looked to local government as a means of fighting back. Cheerleaders for Barack Obama’s imperial presidency, such as The New Yorker, started to embrace states’ rights with an almost Confederate enthusiasm.

But once the Democrats won back the House in 2018, the appeal of total central power became irresistible, with leading Democrats competing for who could most expand DC’s remit. Kamala Harris, now Vice President, demanded Washington give teachers across the country a federally funded five-figure pay rise, while Beto O’Rourke and Julian Castro sought to hand over local planning and zoning powers to the DC bureaucrats.

President Trump, for what it’s worth, had little interest in such issues — though even he made a point of trying to overturn states’ laws  when it suited his agenda, particularly with the border wall and his attempts to crack down on radical education policies. In many ways, Trump’s authoritarian brand of Republicanism was always going to express an interest in an expanded federal role.

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Yet in looking to expand federal power, Biden is picking up the mantle of President Obama, regarded by Republicans as one of the most prolific authors of executive power in US history. During its first six years, the Obama administration put forward more than twice as many major rules as George W. Bush’s government during the same period, focusing largely on issues such as climate change and immigration.

Of course, the notion of decentralised control — and the benefits associated with it — predates America. Ancient Roman cities enjoyed particular autonomy from central control, while the great Italian and Dutch cities of the early modern period developed extensive forms of self-government and, in some cases, functioned as independent states. Indeed, born out of Enlightenment ideals about limited government, the US Constitution lays out a system of dispersed power, creating in localities “the habits of self-government”.

In some cases, however, federal action was necessary; for example, to end the abomination of slavery and keep the Republic safe from European encroachments. And of course, some local governments continued to pass detestable laws, such as Jim Crow segregation in the South — though states also innovated in a more positive direction, providing models for other jurisdictions. For example, western states less tied to parochial ways of thinking — such as Wyoming, Utah, Idaho, Washington and California — introduced female suffrage well before the federal government. New York built the earliest welfare state, while my adopted home of California invested heavily in roads, schools, universities and technical training, leading to its remarkable boom in the late 20^th Century.

States, as progressive Supreme Court Judge Louis Brandeis noted, were “laboratories of democracy”, places that experimented with policies that, when they were successful, would be adopted by others, and sometimes the federal government. In contrast, Europe’s bureaucratic meddling has served to keep wealth concentrated, as it has been for centuries, in places like Germany, the Netherlands and Scandinavia, while the south and east lag perpetually behind.

Back in the US, federalism has shaped another seismic shift, as New York, California, Illinois and New Jersey lose out to less regulated states like Texas, Arizona, Nevada and Florida. These lower-tax administrations were gaining ground in terms of jobs and population before Covid; and as the pandemic weakens, they are also rebounding faster.

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Indeed, it’s hardly surprising that most Americans favour decentralisation; more than 70% of them trust their local governments more than their national institutions. Even in deep blue California, 70% of adults think local communities should have more of a say. And these attitudes are even shared by the generally Left-leaning millennials; fewer than one-third of them favour federal solutions.

In order to justify centralisation, US Governments have always relied upon a perception of a common crisis that requires a unified response. Certainly the Great Depression, World War Two and, to some extent, the Cold War required national and even multi-national action. But the current drive to centralise coming from the Biden Administration has strikingly little to do with what used to be considered national security. Rather, it is justified by a new wave of “crises”: ranging from race and gender to immigration and the pandemic.

But by far the most powerful lobby for centralisation is climate change. By ramping up hysteria, the Left has created the logic for ever-more control over daily life — essentially by establishing impractical steps to replace fossil fuels. Overall, President Biden has promised to spend $500 billion each year on abating climate change — roughly 13% of the entire federal revenue.

Yet just as the EU’s overzealous federalism is starting to face criticism, so too does Biden’s climate change agenda risk becoming seriously unpopular, particularly in Middle America. For example, among the President’s first actions was to cancel the construction of the Keystone Pipeline system across to Canada, with a potential loss of upwards of 10,000 jobs. Meanwhile, attempts to ban fracking could also cause major job losses: in Texas alone, as many as a million good-paying jobs would disappear. As for Biden’s promise of “green jobs”, it’s unlikely they will lure the oil riggers, geologists, welders, haulers and machine tool operators now thriving in blue-collar America; typically, these jobs pay far lower salaries, are usually shorter term and far less likely to be unionised.

As for working-class consumers in California, which has been running its own Green New Deal for a decade, we have already witnessed the rapid expansion of “energy poverty” — meaning that they spend 10% or more of their income on household energy costs. Already the situation is strikingly similar to countries in the EU; as a result of Brussels’s own strict green policies, a quarter of Germans and three-quarters of Greeks have had to cut other spending to pay their electricity bills.

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Likewise, in both the EU and the US, it’s often rural communities that pay the price for federalism. In Germany, for example, a recent study concluded that green energy policies hit rural communities much harder than cities, even though they are “on a par” with big cities in terms of greenhouse gas production. Similarly, under the new federal diktats, much of the American countryside — from the California desert to the East Coast — could be transformed into wastelands to accommodate solar farms and legions of windmills: one study by the Carnegie Institution for Science and Stanford University suggested that building enough solar power to reduce US emissions by 80% by 2050 could require more than 27,500 square miles of space, destroying both farmland and unique natural habitats along the way.

Faced with policies totally inimical to their core interests, it is hardly surprising that many American states and localities are already mobilising, challenging Biden’s ban on the use of Covid funds to lower taxes — a critical part of their recovery strategy. Meanwhile, a number of states are already pushing back on Biden’s new environmental rules, with future lawsuits likely to focus on other issues such as affirmative action, gun rights and labour laws.

And so it seems that, ultimately, imposing unanimity will be difficult in a country considerably more divided on cultural issues than their European counterparts. To date, things are yet to turn ugly. And for the moment at least, it is unlikely that we will see open secession — though I wouldn’t rule out a series of mini-Brexits as states challenge, ignore or even defy federal rules. Even if these challenges fail, and the progressive hold on Washington lasts for a decade, these political divides could metastasise into something more serious.

Faced with the “EU-isation” of their country, Americans, whatever their politics, need to understand that by copying Brussels, the current Government risks sacrificing the fundamental principles of their country: that wherever it is feasible, control of daily life should be left to local communities, and even individuals. The American system may not be perfect. But the current shift towards a Brussels model won’t cure it of its deficiencies — it will only make them worse.

As the leaders of the EU’s member states prepare to meet tomorrow for a European Council meeting, I suspect few believe it will be another “touching moment of unity”. For the truth is that the “European success story” has been anything but.

Even at the last meeting of the European Council, roughly a fortnight before Von der Leyen’s victory lap, the mood was hardly buoyant. During the all-night session, the representatives of the member countries failed to agree on everything except for the fact that a no-deal scenario was the most likely outcome of the Brexit process — another EU prophecy that has since unravelled.

Yet there remains a sense of solemnity to these European Council meetings. They are, after all, often convened in times of crisis. And whether it’s the collapse of the Eurozone, the sudden wave of migrants or the emergence of a new deadly coronavirus, if the past decade has taught us anything, it’s that the EU has never been short on crises.

Of course, not all of these disasters are of the EU’s own making — though some certainly have been. But throughout each of them, a remarkable trend has emerged: that no matter how bad the situation is, the EU always finds a way to make it worse.

When, for example, the Eurozone crisis hit in 2010, the federalists were intent on showing that only the EU could save the Mediterranean countries from economic collapse. Far less important for Brussels was the fact that Greece, in particular, would not have been in this mess if it had not been accepted into the Eurozone in the first place. Similarly, when the immigration crisis peaked five years later, Brussels insisted that only a unified block could respond to such a challenge. Predictably, it failed to take into account that it was failures at an EU level — in particular its unilateral approach to migration policies — that had exacerbated the problem in the first place.

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And now we are seeing the results of the EU’s botched handling of the Corona crisis. Despite Von der Leyen’s promise of vaccine success, Paris has just gone into another lockdown and Germany is set to implement nationwide restrictions over Easter. Meanwhile, the vaccine roll-out across the majority of the bloc remains calamitously slow.

Yet while it’s easy to criticise individual governments and leaders for mistakes in their countries, we must not lose sight of how the EU’s decision-making has often amounted to nothing more than a catalogue of errors.

First there was the whole issue of vaccine development, with French and German companies both being protected by their respective governments even as they preached a message of unity. Then there came the procurement disaster, in which Franco-German protectionism once again delayed production. Then there was the disaster of the roll-out, where the bloc’s efforts to ensure that nobody raced ahead meant that every country advanced at the slowest rate possible. In the meantime, the Commission still found the time to order raids on laboratories and threaten to seize AstraZeneca manufacturing plants.

The Commission has, of course, apologised after every misfire. But on no occasion has it looked as though it has learned its lesson. At present, the EU seems more focused on the bloc’s “bad boys”, notably Hungary, for going their own way and acquiring massive quantities of the Russian and Chinese vaccines. Yet in Hungary, the country’s vaccination rate has raced ahead with around 16% of its population having received at least one jab, as opposed to a mere 9% average in the bloc as a whole.

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In the face of these facts, one would expect tomorrow’s Council meeting to be a sombre if not sobering affair. But as those who have attended previous Council meetings can attest, they rarely are any such thing — for the simple reason that the Council is incapable of absorbing criticisms which cast any negative light on its own direction of travel.

Evidence from around the world suggests that countries which are limber and independent — such as Israel, Singapore and Britain — have been able to act swiftly during the pandemic, particularly with regard to vaccinations. Indeed, there is no logical reason why EU countries could not have been allowed to pursue independent vaccine development, procurement and roll-out. Except for the fact that any such conclusion runs counter to the heart of the EU’s fundamental principle: that its members must act in concert.

In Brussels, it has already been decided that an EU-wide approach is always the only approach. And as we are seeing, it will doggedly remain committed to the wrong answer even when that answer has been proved wrong. There are, of course, issues on which a multilateral approach are needed, as there are issues on which unilateral policies are required. But once you have decided that there is never — and never will be — an alternative, you are bound to encounter problems which you cannot solve.

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In recent years, critics of the EU have repeatedly noted that while there was much criticism in Brussels of the UK for leaving the bloc, there was no self-reflection over why we might have chosen that decision. There were none of the procedures in place that would normally allow a political entity to consider criticisms and adapt accordingly. Why is this? Because if you believe that the answer to everything is an “ever-closer union”, then contemplating the benefits of a more relaxed arrangement is an impossible task.

All of which grates somewhat, given how the EU repeatedly asserted that it was Brexiteers who were the immovable ideologues; when, as Brussels’s recent behaviour has shown, in reality it is the EU that is riddled with blind obstinance. So when the European Council meets tomorrow, expect it to blame everyone but itself. And as a result, when the next crisis comes around, expect it to fail yet again.