EU Rigor Tested As French Turn Against Immigration

France wants less integration . . . Eh bien, je jamais. The French government is demanding less European integration. President Sarkozy (left), furious at the sight of Tunisian migrants being waved through by Italian carabinieri, and uncomfortably aware that opinion polls put him behind the Front Nationale's Marine Le Pen, is demanding that the Schengen Treaty be revised to allow countries to reimpose frontier controls. – UK Telegraph/Daniel Hannan

Dominant Social Theme: Scurrilous EU policies much be staunched, even if WE put them in place.

Free-Market Analysis: So the French political leaders are finally reacting to the discontent of the larger French electorate with various EU programs. As a publication tracking the dominant social themes of the elites and their successes and failures, we find this an extraordinary turn of events.

As in America, from our point of view, one of the main points of the elite agenda is to leaven existing populations with new ones. This destroys cultural cohesiveness and when coupled with public school educations is a most effective way of demoralizing national identities and generally making populations more docile and less prone to resist whatever iteration of the new world order the elites currently have in mind.

One of the most interesting moments of the George Bush presidency was watching hyper-right wing elements including conservative neo-cons fall silent when Bush toward the end of his term tried to ram through an immigration bill granting amnesty to Mexican workers in America – creating what amounted to a guest worker program in the US.

Bush did this after facing a firestorm of criticism over a NAFTA superhighway that the administration was trying to build surreptitiously between Mexico and Canada. This North American Union was supposed to compete with the EU and Bush made many direct steps to implement a potential merger by signing – very quietly – various trade and security pacts with both Canada and Mexico that are still extant.

Bush's push regarding the immigration bill was a matter of sublime cognitive dissonance for the US right wing. This group had stuck with Bush despite his affinity for activitist government, had explained away his serial warfare by proclaiming that he was a decisive war-time leader at a time when the nation needed one, and had tried to deflect blame for the country's late-term financial collapse onto the Democratic Congress.

But the immigration bill that Bush supported was a bridge too far. There was no way to explain it. No way to justify it. The final element of Bush's support fell silent, quelled by Bush's radical disregard of his constituency and general contempt for the American electorate that had (admittedly) twice put him in office. The media coverage of the Bush immigration bill was no less confused. Since there was no right-left angle to work with, mainstream media simply emphasized the groundswell of anger against the bill and against Bush.

But to cover the Bush immigration bill and its subsequent defeat as a personal repudiation of George Bush is to miss the point. The effort that Bush made was an attempt to continue to fulfill the larger elite agenda which is focused on leavening Western cultural cohesiveness with whatever immigrant populations are available. The defeat of the immigration bill in the US was a defeat of this elite program. As this same program unwinds in Europe, can we suggest a similar defeat is taking place?

Europe's tribes, in fact, are increasingly rejecting their dilution. The Schengen Area Treaty is one such attempt. It is, as Hannan reports, a border-free zone that takes in most of the EU, but one to which Britain and Ireland are not signatories. Sarkozy fears that Italy's granting of six-month residency permits to thousands of North Africans to travel without restriction in the Schengen Area will apparently deluge France with additional immigrants, as most of the refugees speak French.

But Sarkozy is merely reaping what he has sown. Having chosen to help destabilize Tunisia, the Ivory Cost and now Libya, what does Sarkozy in fact expect? The French president is apparently terrified that his pro-EU policies are going to cost him the presidency in the next French election and is doing some late-season pandering.

Hannan, the author of the immigration editorial excerpted above, is a high-profile British opponent of the EU experiment. He points out how the EU immigration policies have posed a challenge to Britain and derives some satisfaction from France's current predicament. "Now, France finds itself on the wrong end of Brussels rules, and immediately demands that they be changed."

But Hannan notes the bigger picture as well. "France's demand could hardly have come at a worse time for the EU. Over the past six months, Eurocrats have become nervous and tetchy. Where they used to patronise Eurosceptics, now they lash out. The reason is plain enough . . . Voters in the contributor states are reacting furiously to the idea that their taxes should reward governments that have been more profligate than their own."

Here's some more from the article:

The European project depends, far more than is generally appreciated, on a sense of inevitability. Voters might not care very much for the constant transfers of power to the EU but, as long as they believe that they can't be stopped, they put up with them. The phenomenon is known in Brussels as the "occupied field doctrine": once the EU has acted in any area of policy, its jurisdiction in that area is guaranteed in perpetuity.

Repealing a goodly chunk of Schengen would, of course, shatter that doctrine. People might start demanding the return of all sorts of powers. Why should the EU run agriculture given the disastrous mess it has made of the CAP? Or fisheries? Or monetary policy? As that canny Frenchman, Alexis de Tocqueville, observed, the most dangerous moment for a bad government is when it begins to reform.

We have written a good deal about the elite's "immovable rigor" of late. It is the outcome of a larger problem Western elites have, which is the erosion of the believability of its fear-based promotions. The elite generally utilized such promotions throughout the 20th century as a way of frightening Western middle classes into giving up more power and wealth to international facilities that the elites had created for that purpose. The idea was to create ever-closer global governance.

But the advent of the Internet has helped destroy these dominant social themes by revealing their nature and content. For this reason the elites have fallen back on far more authoritarian formulas to try to continue to make progress toward a "new world order." The idea is to show in theory and practice that the elite's goals are unimpeachable and unstoppable. This, as we have pointed out, has grave difficulties, as even a few minor defeats jeopardize the psychological whole. It is not easy to insist on inevitability when one's program is being continually rejected.

Hats off to Hannan then for using the very word – inevitability – and for analyzing the ruse so efficiently. Setbacks do indeed shatter the notion, and it is why the elite is fighting so hard. It is insisting on global warming in the face of massive government skepticism, is forging ahead with a kind of creeping World War III despite much public opposition and is fighting every trace of a break-up of the EU itself.

Of course we have pointed out (just in today's other article, again) that the elite may seek to sacrifice some of its promotional themes to create maximum chaos in order to usher in a new global currency and generally further its centralizing goals. But we don't see the dissolution of the EU as something as a pawn that the elites will willingly sacrifice. Chaos may be a goal, but the EU itself is a major building block of global governance to come.

The immigration issue is most important as well. For the past 50 years, Anglo-American elites have sought to weaken national identities, specially racial and cultural ones, whenever possible. That Sarkozy, a major proponent of elite agendas, feels it necessary to step away from such a central EU priority shows how difficult these programs have become to sustain. The elite's immovable rigor is meeting with increased and ever-stiffer resistance on number of fronts as the Internet Reformation continues to take root.

Conclusion: This is the danger of implementing a strategy of inevitability – that you will not be able to sustain it. Sarkozy's sudden challenge on this issue is most important within this context and Hannon is right to seize upon it. If these sorts of elite programmatic setbacks continue to take place, what will become of this latest elite strategy? Elite programs have been exposed a thousand fold on the Internet. The idea now is to illustrate that the centralizing projects of the elite are inevitable. But if they are not, what then? Let loose "the dogs of war?"