A federal Europe of nations: Is a new world emerging that will engulf Europe?

Mathieu Guihard President of the Breton Party / Strollad Breizh

Russia’s military aggression against Ukraine, a sovereign and independent country, from February 24, 2022, was a wake-up call for us Europeans.

This brutal return of war to our continent reminded us that the old reflexes of a past we thought buried could resurface when the imperialist logic of nation-states prevailed.

The election of Donald Trump to the presidency of the United States, the world’s leading economic and military power, on November 5, 2024, was another sign.

Each time, the French media and political world failed to see it coming.

Weak

A sign of what? That the world is harsh and merciless, and that the European Union, located on a small continent, is prosperous but slow and indecisive.

That it is weak and inconsistent in the face of the giants that are organising themselves and the confrontations that lie ahead. A Union that is unable to reinvent itself, nor to enchant.

These two recent signs remind us of the need to build, more than ever, a Europe-power that can hold its own against the world’s major political and military players: the Russian Federation and the United States, but also China, India, Brazil… in fact, all the BRICS, the major emerging states that are joining forces to dethrone the West, and which held a spectacular meeting in Kazan, Tatarstan (Russia), on October 22.

In the 21st century, the world is moving forward at high speed, and we’re making the most of it.

In terms of research, innovation (biotechnology, artificial intelligence, etc.), defense and trade, we Europeans are already dangerously outstripped by the giants and future giants.

Our old Western European welfare states have become incapable of ensuring the prosperity and well-being of our peoples.

Are we going to become an open-air museum, to be visited with condescension or pity by the new masters of the world, like visiting a bedridden old relative? Will Europe be swallowed up, like the legendary City of Ys?

More than one Europe

Let’s be clear: there is more than one Europe.

This worrying European engulfment is due above all to the great nation-states of Western Europe: Germany, the United Kingdom, Belgium, Spain, to a certain extent the Netherlands and Italy, and above all France, entrenched in its Jacobinism and its certainties, the real sick man of Europe (1).

This is less true of Western European countries comparable in size to Brittany, such as the Republic of Ireland, Denmark, Portugal, Switzerland and Norway, which are more flexible and virtuous in economic and budgetary terms.

Nor is this true of the countries of Central and Eastern Europe, which have been under Soviet domination and have recovered forever from socialism and imperialism, and whose freedom and prosperity are the fruit of a cherished independence won only 25 or 30 years ago, generally without violence.

All in all, Europe harbours tremendous potential, but it is above all its large states that have become inadequate, especially those that dominate the European Union.

Nothing is lost, therefore, if Europe has the ambition to rediscover its destiny as an economic, commercial, scientific, industrial and cultural power. This giant destiny can only be achieved in a federal Europe of nations, as we shall see.

The second of three articles calling for a federal Europe of nations from Mathieu Guihard will appear soon.

(1) Yann Fouéré, in his classic “L’Europe aux cent drapeaux” (Europe of the 100 flags, written in 1968!) already predicted the failure of the Jacobin “Europe of the 30 States”, the nation-states that stand in the way of Europe’s future (p21).