Europe appears to be dividing on pre-EU lines, and even on pre-World War I lines.  It was conceived to be a melting pot by the dominant Power, Britain, in 1919, and new shapes were drawn from it to be states in the League of Nations.  Those shapes did not hold against the pressure from underlying national facts.

A second World War followed—precipitated by Britain—and again Europe was treated as having become a melting-pot.  And again a new system of states was drawn out of the melting pot.

Britain exhausted itself in bringing about the War.  The War against the enemy against which Britain had declared it passed into other hands—Russian hands in the main, supplemented by American hands in the final year.

If it was a war to save civilisation from German barbarism, then it was Russia that saved it.  But the fact that—when the Russian Army reached Berlin in May 1945 and destroyed the Hitler German State, it was itself held to be the enemy of civilisation;  and that America, seconded by Britain, made preparations for war against it, suggests that the war of civilisation against barbarism—preached by Britain in 1939—was bogus.

The Irish Government of the time did not believe that in 1939 Britain was making war to save civilisation from barbarism.  It declared neutrality, kept up diplomatic relations with both sides, and refused even to become a nominal belligerent against Germany for opportunist purposes in 1945—when it could have done so with impunity.

It is at present doing its best to take part in the preparations for war against Russia.  But that at least does not involve it in the about-turn of the States which hold that Germany threatened the world with barbarism, from which it was saved by Russia, but that in the course of saving civilisation from barbarism it made itself barbaric.

Germany’s view of itself in defeat in 1945 was that it had made a valiant attempt to save the world from Asiatic barbarism but had failed because Britain had treacherously launched an attack on it from the rear.

The Americans, who had maintained friendly relations with Germany during two and a quarter years of Britain’s war on it, saw merit in the German viewpoint in 1945, and it took German expertise in anti-Russian militarism into its service—whilst at the same time going through the motions of “de-Nazification”.  And it encouraged that part of Europe which it had saved from Russian liberation/conquest in 1945 to form itself into an alliance of states, which became the European Union.

Britain, though reduced to the status of a secondary Power, was still ambitious to be a major player.  Its traditional European policy—balance-of-power manipulation—was threatened by the Common Market, which was described by certain elements of the British press as a restoration of the Holy Roman Empire, and by other elements as the Fourth Reich.

These were exaggerations of possible lines of development back in those times, but a situation is coming about when it seems that Europe will become one or the other.  The Holy Roman Empire was, at least in its latter years, a loose Confederation of Governments of various kinds.  The Reich was an expanding and unifying system with an active centre.

What has been happening with the EU in recent times is that the Commission, drawing authority from Baltic and East European sources that were not part of the original compact, has been usurping the authority of the Governments, and has been getting its usurpations declared to be law by judicial action at the European level.

This is the course of development set out by Peter Sutherland in his vision of a post-national world in which capital moved freely, dragging populations along with it.

The ideologue of this development may be deceased, but its development is taking place around an ‘absent centre’—a black hole called Germany!  

Germany must deny itself.  It denies itself by grasping at Europeanism.  And the negative gravity of the black hole is such that the Governments of the Council give way to the decrees of the President of the Commission—the chief civil servant.  Von der Leyen is prevented from becoming President of Europe only by the insistence of some foreign Governments to abide by the official protocols of the EU as they were first established and never formally altered.

PS:  A book on the 2nd World War recently published, Allies At War, has the subtitle:  The Rivals Who Defeated Hitler.  But the Allies who defeated Hitler were no Rivals.  They were Enemies—the transient alliance of enemies against Germany was a product of British foreign policy bungling, as Churchill explained very clearly.