Why Europe is Breaking

The Center for Security Policy’s interim Executive Vice President, Christopher C. Hull, Ph.D, spoke at a panel co-sponsored by the US-Italy Global Affairs Forum and the Center for Transatlantic Relations at the Johns Hopkins’ School of Advanced International Studies (SAIS) on Thursday, October 19.  The panel, entitled “United Europe: Broken?” explored the question, “After Brexit, German and Austrian elections, the Catalan crisis and forthcoming referenda in North of Italy, is the Old Continent splitting apart (again)?”  Below are Dr. Hull’s notes for the forum as well as his presentation.

United Europe: Broken?

After Brexit, German and Austrian elections, the Catalan crisis and forthcoming referenda in North of Italy, is the Old Continent splitting apart (again)?

Yes, it’s breaking, for three endogenous reasons and one exogenous reason.

Outline

1. “Hijrah”
   1. Original Hijrah from Mecca to Medina: 622
   2. According to Mission Islam, Hijrah is defined as “migration for the sake of Allah”
   3. By 2000, immigrants to Germany had reached 3.5 million, mostly from Turkey
   4. According a piece in The Atlantic, in the “first seven months of 2015, Germany reportedly received well over 200,000 applications for asylum”
   5. In September, 2015, Angela Merkel’s government announced it could accept 500,000 immigrants/year.
   6. As a result, that year Europe saw 3 million “refugees,” a very large proportion of which were actually illegal immigrants
   7. Austria – One commentator wrote that
      1. “Campaigning before the parliamentary elections focused on migration, notably the 2015 migration crisis that polarized European politics.
      2. “That year, Austria was used as a gateway for nearly 900,000 migrants making their way to Germany.
      3. “It also received more than 68,000 application for asylum in 2015, one of the highest proportions on the continent compared to the population…
      4. “Kurz’s ÖVP promised to prevent a repeat of 2015’s wave of migration and cut access to social welfare benefits for newcomers for at least five years.”

2. “Cultural Marxism”
   1. Origin of term
   2. Link to Political Correctness
   3. OSCE “Human Dimension Implementation Meeting” (HDIM) story
      1. the OSCE Charter on Preventing and Combatting Terrorism, agreed upon in 2002 in Porto, Portugal, “Firmly reject[s] identification of terrorism with any nationality or religion.
      2. ODIHR staff echoed this Porto statement three times in personal conversations with me – in spite of 31,805 attacks by Islamic terrorists, honor killings or Sharia executions just since 9/11, in which literally thousands of times terrorists identified their terrorism with the religion of Islam.
      3. By the way, you might also have to chalk up the 3,323 deaths in the conflict in Northern Ireland to hate incidents, in spite of the cold, hard fact that it pitted Catholics against Protestants – and is frequently cited by Christianity’s critics and Sharia’s apologists as a result.
      4. Austria is a case in point. I attended the meeting as part of a team led by Elisabeth Sabaditsch-Wolff, an Austrian prosecuted under an actual blasphemy law for, at a private event, characterizing Mohammed as a “pedophile” for having taken a six-year-old girl as a wife and then consummating the marriage when she was nine.
      5. She aired the case of Michael Stürzenberger, a German journalist recently sentenced to six months in prison for posting a historical photo of a Nazi officer shaking hands with the then-Grand Mufti of Jerusalem, arguing it was evidence that Islam was “fascist.” She argued that “It is a perversion of tolerance when it is used as an excuse for censoring views which are deemed offensive.”
      6. In response to our appeals, over and over the ODIHR Moderator “reminded” us of OSCE countries’ commitments with respect to tolerance and non-discrimination.
      7. ODIHR Director Ingibjörg Sólrún Gísladóttir of Iceland herself
      8. Director Gísladóttir went further, decrying that meeting participants “unfortunately witnessed discourse which does not belong in a forum set on how we can further tolerance…In fact,” she said, “it does not belong anywhere.” [Emphasis added.]
      9. Likewise, Ambassador Florian Raunig, head of the Taskforce of the Austrian OSCE Chairmanship, scolded us for daring to tell the truth about the link between Sharia and terrorist violence. Without irony, he decried our statements “which were not aimed to preserve our OSCE principles and unanimously adopted commitments on human rights and fundamental freedoms.”
      10. Three times ODIHR staff, once including newly minted ODIHR Director Ingibjörg Sólrún Gísladóttir of Iceland, politely shut down private conversations with me mid-sentence rather than delve into actual arguments on the conflict between OSCE’s founding principles and Jihad and Sharia.
      11. The London Tube Jihadi attack took place literally during the meeting – and generated not a single mention.
      12. The bottom line is this: To use OSCE commitments as an excuse to shut down fundamental freedoms, to which Copenhagen refers 21 times, including especially free expression, to which it explicitly refers twice, in order to protect advocates of Sharia, which the ECHR has held is incompatible with democracy, is a travesty that will cost human lives, and potentially shatter the foundations of European civilization in the process.

3. AND: Russia, which is trying to polarize and break up hostile societies.  For example, in Italy:
   1. In December, 2016 Veneto’s Northern League Council approved a measure naming Venetians as a “minority,” allowing the language to be taught in schools, with the Italian daily Repubblica dubbed “Venexit.”
   2. On October 22, Lombardo and Veneto will hold referenda on “administrative authority.”
   3. The primary issue is financial, with the regions produce 20% and 10% of Italian GDP, respectively.
   4. However, a Russian-funded Sputnik Italia journalist asked member of the Northern League and the secretary of the Lombard League Paolo Grimoldi, “Despite sanctions, Veneto and Lombardy have always been very close to Russia. And how will relations with Moscow develop?”
   5. Grimoldi (allegedly) responded, “It is obvious that the more autonomy there will be, the more possibilities for Lombardy and Veneto, which are the two particularly polluted regions, will increase not only economic-trade relations, but also political relations with Russia.”

Bottom Line:

As my colleague Michael J. Waller points out:

1. “Big centralized governments were stable because they gave and took away favors, privileges, and property rights based on loyalty to the Center, or by the periphery’s ability to pay (or submit to their wealth being stolen in the name of the sovereign).”
2. “To justify their dominance, the central governments blamed opposition groups, religious and ethnic minorities, and others who refused to submit. They resorted to very high taxation, denial of property rights, political favoritism, censorship, imposition of central government religious or political doctrine, secret police, and brute force to maintain their control.
3. These central governments “expanded their wealth and power and created an establishment, where establishmentarian views were forced upon everyone else, all the way down to the way people were required to speak and dress…”
4. “Private land ownership for the many was quashed.
5. “Sovereign people were turned into vassals.
6. “Rulers ruled by claiming “divine right” from God, or, in the post-Christian era, by claiming the Greater Good as justification.
7. “Oftentimes, entire languages were stomped out or forced underground.
8. “Attempts at asserting ancient cherished linguistic, ethnic, cultural, or religious norms were repressed in the name of the Greater Good.
9. “Those refusing to submit were anathematized as extremists, as public enemies, and as threats to the established order.
10. “The tottering central governments would seek economic, political, and military alliances with external powers, thus eroding national sovereignty even more.
11. “These could be kingdoms, empires, totalitarian dictatorships, or Third Reichs…
12. “They basically operated with the same political technologies of manipulation and control.
13. “But they are now considered crude and unfashionable.
14. “So today’s European Central Planners take the softer approach of Greater Good progressivism, with not-so-violent means of manipulation and control, except when it comes to the unborn and elderly, and even then the gallows and gibbet have been replaced by scalpels, chemicals, and injections.
15. “Instead of resisting the foreign invaders at the Gates of Vienna, they allow them in out of hope that those new and non-assimilating immigrants, in a post-Christian Europe, can labor away to fund the welfare state to pay the pensions of the willfully childless who have no church to turn to and no generation beyond their own.
16. “Therefore, threats of national sovereignty – be it Poland or Brexit or Catalonia – are bad because they are independent. Therefore they must be branded as public enemies, as relics of an ancien regime or worse, and stomped out.
17. “Sovereignty can only be planned from above, as in the management of former Yugoslavia, and even then, imposed and managed under German direction with mainly American military force.
18. “At some point, those areas, once stabilized, can also come under Franco-German socioeconomic control for the Greater Good. So those types of sovereignty movements are fine, as long as Berlin can get foreigners to do the fighting.
19. “Interestingly, the single most stable country in continental Europe over the past 600 years – without suffering a single foreign invader or internal revolution – has been Switzerland, the least centralized of any European country.”
20. “Perhaps if Europe learned from the example of the Swiss Confederation, and encouraged local sovereignty, linguistic heritage, and all good things that go with a mature national identity and individual rights, Europe can be fixed.”

Why Europe is Breaking