Vatican proposes EU as example of Social Doctrine

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Yes indeed, the Strasbourg hemicycle of the European Parliament and the European Court of Justice in Luxembourg, and the European Bank in Frankfurt.

And lots of other agencies in other EU capitals, including London incidentally.

I was thinking primarily of the Commission (executive), parliament, council and other institutions in Brussels (which is the de facto capital of the EU where most of it’s governing bodies are found).
 
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I was simply reflecting on the fact that if a significant purpose of the EU is to provide security and stability, it suggests a self-judgment on the part of the constituent states that somehow Europe has been unable to achieve a stable and non-aggressive form of nationalism and its states tend, tragically, to aspirations of continental empire.

One observes that the Hapsburg Empire’s constituent parts did not reconstitute voluntarily. It was only when the major states threatened to isolate them by tariffs and other exclusions that they (and others) decided to give up self-determination.
 
OK, you are deflecting for AINg.

When one speak of ‘starving’ people on the street, it invokes “To suffer or die from extreme or prolonged lack of food”, not “I’m famished and could eat a horse” nor the definition of ‘food insecure’
 
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I’ll simply observe that at least on an economic basis, the EU has benefited Germany (and to a lesser extent France and Netherlands) far more than it has benefited some of the southern European countries and that is a source of ongoing tension that doesn’t appear anywhere near resolution. At this point in time, I’ll liken it to a squabble between cousins in different families but it does have the potential for something beyond that.

But I will say if things are going so well for the EU, then the recent call for an EU army doesn’t really make sense, not even in the context of possibly declining NATO presence. What’s wrong with the existing militaries other than they’ve been getting their defense subsidized by the US?
 
Vouthon said:
You cannot deny that the church discerned ‘nationalism’ in these interwar regimes and that this particular manifestation exorcised them greatly, because it violated church doctrine concerning human solidarity, fraternal brotherhood under the natural and supernatural law of grace, and supranational society.

The Church’s reading of Nazi ideology and of nationalism taken to extremes, was one of the most insightful of the pre-war era, given that its informed sources and interlocutors were churchman on the ground in Germany, Italy and the other countries.
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Yes but also both Italian and German nationalism was a response of left wing activists associated with socialism. What is happening today in Europe is very different.
 
Ridgerunner said:
I was simply reflecting on the fact that if a significant purpose of the EU is to provide security and stability, it suggests a self-judgment on the part of the constituent states that somehow Europe has been unable to achieve a stable and non-aggressive form of nationalism and its states tend, tragically, to aspirations of continental empire
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That’s not very flattering to us Europeans, but of course it is largely true. And it’s not surprising. Fifty or so nations, all to some extent rivals, crammed together in a small continent where boundaries have been fluid for thousands of years — it’s a recipe for conflict.

Things are different in the United States, of course, because there an empire has been established. The US has achieved what, but for Britain, Napoleon and Hitler might have achieved, an empire across the breadth of a continent, with the independence of conquered nations destroyed. Indeed, but for Britain again, that empire would have stretched north to Baffin Bay.

Europe is attempting to achieve the internal stability the US has achieved, only by agreement instead of by force.
 
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Manifest Destiny, eh? (Or as it should be called “Manifest Design”).

A continental empire constructed by means of a federal policy of enforced Native American expulsion courtesy of the 1830 Indian Removal Act, the annexation of Texas in 1845 and the invasion of Mexico in 1846, among other military endeavours.

“by joining their concepts of exceptionalism and empire, the expansionists found a rationale for denying to all other nations and peoples, whether strong or weak, any right to any portion of the entire North American continent” (Thomas R. Hietala, “Empire by Design, Not Destiny”).

In Coast-to-Coast Empire: Manifest Destiny and the New Mexico Borderlands , William S. Kiser attempts to remedy this notion by placing the territory at the front-and-center of U.S. efforts concerning expansionistic nation building. Kiser’s book shows that as a connecting thoroughfare to the budding markets of California, New Mexico was a necessary, valuable, and desired element in the construction of a continental empire.
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Compare:
“We are a very special construction unique in the history of mankind … Sometimes I like to compare the EU as a creation to the organisation of empire. We have the dimension of empire … What we have is the first non-imperial empire … We have 27 countries that fully decided to work together and to pool their sovereignty. I believe it is a great construction and we should be proud of it.”

José Manuel Barroso, President of the European Commission, 2007 statements at the European Parliament in Strasbourg
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I’ll dissent from this judgment, which I think is excessively negative both as to Europe and as to the U.S.

I don’t think there is sufficient justification to say European states are “a recipe for conflict”. There’s no sign of it whatever in our age, and hasn’t existed since WWII. Yes, there was the Warsaw Pact overshadowing western Europe, but that wasn’t a voluntary thing, and the Russians, who actually ran the Pact, didn’t trust any of the constituent states. So, the threat has been one nation since 1945 and is today; Russia. Russia is a polyglot, multiethnic empire that is unnatural in its composition, being ruled by a near-minority of Great Russians.

I did wonder whether European states really distrust themselves so much that they would trust to a conglomeration of them to save them from themselves.

The U.S. is a continental polity and economy. It’s not an empire. There were no “conquered nations” destroyed. There was, following the American Civil War, some sympathy with the notion of taking Canada, more as an act of revenge against a Britain the Union thought (to some degree rightly) supportive of the Confederacy. I have in my conference room an 1863 Enfield rifle, a relic of the Civil War. It was bought in Britain by Confederate blockade runners. The Brits knew full well what they were doing.

Since then, however, the U.S. has not moved a finger against Canada, and not out of fear of Britain. The Civil War proved to everyone, Britain included, that the U.S. could not be successfully attacked, and certainly not from across the Atlantic. Britain had no hope at all of matching the U.S. in men, armaments and supplies. So let’s not invent some kind of longstanding American desire to take Canada, prevented only by fear of Britain.

And let’s not forget that much of the U.S. was exactly acquired “by agreement”.
 
Ridgerunner said:
I’ll dissent from this judgment, which I think is excessively negative both as to Europe and as to the U.S.
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I agree with @PickyPicky

Europeans, you’ll no doubt find, tend to be brutally honest about the reactionary underbelly of our society and history, and the violent birth of our great continental peace project.

The shadows of our past are everywhere, from the still charred fields of France (strewn with the remnants of barbed wire fences, trenches and incendiary devices from WW1), to the concentration camps of Auschwitz in Poland and Dachau in Germany, the gulags in Russia and leftovers of the Berlin Wall.

You can barely walk a few paces before finding yourself face-to-face with a monument to some dark tragedy.

And it really isn’t surprising when you consider a small continent with gazillions of constantly changing chess-piece borders, sovereignties and territorial disputes in an atmosphere of ever-escalating competition for hegemony and resources.
 
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Ridgerunner said:
The U.S. is a continental polity and economy. It’s not an empire.
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Not according to many of your own historians, two of whom I have already cited above. Thomas Jefferson, in the 1790s, awaited the fall of the Spanish Empire “until our population can be sufficiently advanced to gain it from them piece by piece”. Historian Sidney Lens notes that “the urge for expansion – at the expense of other peoples – goes back to the beginnings of the United States itself”. Yale historian Paul Kennedy put it, “From the time the first settlers arrived in Virginia from England and started moving westward, this was an imperial nation, a conquering nation.”

The Native American nations were generally recognized as sovereign actors prior to the annexation of their land by the US and their forced depopulation. Their sovereignty was systematically undermined by the American government, with the tragic end-result being the ‘California Genocide’:

en.wikipedia.org

California genocide - Wikipedia

en.wikipedia.org en.wikipedia.org
Under US sovereignty, after 1848, the Indigenous population plunged from perhaps 150,000 to 30,000 in 1870; it reached its nadir of 16,000 in 1900. Between 1846 and 1873, European Americans are estimated to have killed outright some 4,500 to 16,000 California Native Americans, particularly during the Gold Rush. Others died as a result of infectious diseases and the social disruption of their societies. The state of California used its institutions to favor settlers’ rights over indigenous rights and was responsible for dispossession of the natives.
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(continued…)
 
https://chomsky.info/20080424/
The United States is the one country that exists, as far as I know, and ever has, that was founded as an empire explicitly. According to the founding fathers, when the country was founded it was an “infant empire.” That’s George Washington.

The model for the founding fathers that they borrowed from Britain was the Roman Empire. They wanted to emulate it. Even before the Revolution, these notions were very much alive. Benjamin Franklin, 25 years before the Revolution, complained that the British were imposing limits on the expansion of the colonies. He admonished the British (I’m quoting him), “A prince that acquires new territories and removes the natives to give his people room will be remembered as the father of the nation.” And George Washington agreed. He wanted to be the father of the nation. His view was that “the gradual extension of our settlement will as certainly cause the savage as the wolf to retire, both being beasts of prey, though they differ in shape.”

Thomas Jefferson, the most forthcoming of the founding fathers, said, “We shall drive them [the savages] — We shall drive them with the beasts of the forests into the stony mountains,” and the country will ultimately be “free of blot or mixture” — meaning red or black. Furthermore, Jefferson went on, “Our new nation will be the nest from which America, north and south, is to be peopled,” displacing not only the red men here but the Latin-speaking population to the south and anyone else who happened to be around.

There was a deterrent to those glorious aims, mainly Britain. In particular, it blocked the invasion of Canada. The first attempted invasion of Canada was before the Revolution, and there were several others later, but it was always blocked by British force, which is why Canada exists. The United States did not actually recognize Canada’s existence until after the First World War.

Another goal that was blocked by British force was Cuba. Again, the founding fathers regarded the taking over of Cuba as essential to the survival of the infant empire.

Adams, incidentally, later in his life regretted this. He condemned the Mexican War as an executive war and a terrible precedent. And he also expressed remorse over the fate of what he called “that hapless race of Native Americans which we are exterminating with such merciless and perfidious cruelty.” They knew what they were doing.
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America has been, for the most part, commendable in its self-critical honesty in facing up to the evil of slavery in its history, yet it has not been so nearly frank in grappling with the legacy of its imperial heritage. Britain is quite the inverse: we are only beginning to grapple with our aiding and abetting of both the slave trade and slavery, whereas the legacy of empire is very apparent to us and we face up to its crimes fairly often, as for instance just this year when we had to reckon with the anniversary of the Amritsar Massacre of 1919, which retains to this day a raw significance for the Indian nation, marking the decisive turning point in its struggle for independence.
 
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The shadows of European violence are, indeed, visible in much of Europe. But that does not mean Europeans are somehow an accursed people, doomed to self-immolate. Europe’s better angels are also visible, and one might ask why such a people could turn to those darker practices.

The answer is that they did not, but that evil ideologies infected a minority that gained power sufficient to drive a whole people. Size does not determine such a propensity. Ideas do.

Those of my ancestors who came from Alsace came to the U.S. largely because they were some of the favorite cannon fodder of both the French and the various manifestations of Germany. When they came to the U.S. they were still cultural Europeans, and, these generations later, so am I. But they were free to follow their better angels here, and did.

And so Europeans are today. There is no ideology compelling obedience to an aggressive minority (at least not yet) Indeed, the closest thing to a deadly ideology held by an aggressive minority is the very thing some of the member states complain about; the importation of Islam. Far from defending against it, those who appear to direct the EU politically, impose its adherents on the member states.
 
One needs to be careful about attributing “nation destroying” to the U.S. Notions about the American Indians’ death rates vary wildly. Nobody knows how many were here in 1491 or really are today. There was nothing approaching a census in 1491 and probably most Indians of old have disappeared into the general population due to intermarriage. Virtually everyone in my part of the country, for example, claims some Indian ancestry. Though you can’t tell it by appearances, the Cherokee Nation in particular registers many thousands of people with “some” provable Indian ancestry.

In the late 19th Century, the U.S. determined that deaths from direct conflict were about 20,000 whites and about 30,000 Indians. Death from disease, however, was enormous by anyone’s estimate. As a small example, when Desoto explored the lower Mississippi, he chronicled vast towns and farm lands in that fertile region. 200 years later, the French explorers found only a nearly deserted wilderness. Indians traded widely, especially in the Mississippi/Ohio/Missouri river complexes, and traders carried diseases caught from the Spaniards (and their hogs, interestingly) over a vast region. As white settlers moved west, disease had preceded them by 200 years or more, and the area was wilder and wilder the farther west they went.

But Indians also decimated each other. In my area, the Osage, a tribe from up north, got rid of all other Indians in order to make this their hunting preserve. While Osage hunters could sometimes be found here, none of them lived here.

The Comanche drove the Apache from the southern plains before whites ever arrived. And the “Comanche nation” probably never exceeded 20,000 people, though it held sway over an area larger than Germany and was the scourge of the people of northern Mexico. Did the American whites “destroy the nation” of the Comanche? I suppose one could affirm that since whites did break their power over most of TExas, New Mexico, Oklahoma and northern Mexico.
 
What can hardly be denied, however, is that the independence of the indigenous nations was destroyed when they were conquered by the expanding US. The result of such a system is called an empire.
 
Ridgerunner said:
I don’t think there is sufficient justification to say European states are “a recipe for conflict”. There’s no sign of it whatever in our age, and hasn’t existed since WWII
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You must have missed the invasions of Hungary and Czechoslovakia and all the conflicts in the Balkans. True, there has been an absence of conflict in Western Europe since WWII — or you could say since the establishment of the European Coal and Steel Community.

You speak of WWII as though it were an age ago. It was in my lifetime. My father fought in Europe; my mother lived through the London blitz; my siblings — my youngest sister only born at the start of the war — had to be sent away by my mother in the London evacuations; I was born during the V1 attacks on London. I grew up in a street where half the houses had been lost to bombing. Don’t tell me about absence of conflict.

The safety of Western Europe has been guaranteed by NATO and the alliance with the US. The absence of conflict has been a feature of the growing European experiment, bringing former fascist and communist states into a free democratic association. It’s been that post-war cooperation, trans-Atlantic and cross-European, that has produced the absence of conflict which Western Europe has enjoyed and the benefits of which we have tried to spread.
 
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