By Professor Geminello Preterossi
Geminello Preterossi is Full Professor of Philosophy of Law and History of Political Thought in the Department of Law of University of Salerno, Italy. He is also scientific director of the Italian Institute for Philosophical Studies in Naples, Italy. This work was originally published in Italian by La Fionda, under the title“Psicopatologia politica dell’Unione Europea“. This English version by The Indicter is published in agreement with La Fionda editors.
Faced with the warmongering delirium underway in the European Union, one wonders if we are not now faced with a macroscopic case of political psychopathology: all the defensive mechanisms described by Freud are at work.
The first is the negation: of reality, of the context, of one’s own destructive drives, etc., which has now gone so far as psychotic, that it has become denial, foreclosure (i.e. loss of the relationship with reality, typical of psychosis). Then the projection, the displacement, the splitting, the removal, the idealization of the self. After all, Freud himself in The Discomfort of Civilization, but also in his correspondence-dialogue with Einstein, had thematized the psychoanalytic background of war. This background is also accompanied by a strong dose of political infantilism, which contributes to fueling a fanatical and irrational drift that sacrifices the true interests of the European peoples, and their own will, to the maintenance of a false Europeanist Self. So there is cynicism, there are interests (even unmentionable), but what is at stake is an existential question, an identity issue with profound implications, which touch on the dark side of European construction.
There is certainly an element of (introjected) destructiveness, linked to a real obsessive-paranoid syndrome (anti-historical rubbish such as the Putin-Hitler comparison, the idea that we are in danger because Europe is about to be invaded by Russia, a hypothesis devoid of any political foundation, even trivially from a practical-military point of view). Europe is unconsciously anguished first and foremost by itself. The EU today preserves neoliberal and globalist ideological orthodoxy. Trump’s America is techno-marketist, but anti-globalist. On this basis, it accepts the world pluriverse, aiming for a modus vivendi in international relations, and tries to gain strategic advantages by positioning itself in the best possible way in global competition. He also questioned liberal dogmas and ended woke fanaticism. With respect to the decisive Ukrainian question, he is aiming for a possible, realistic peace.
While the EU, humiliated first and foremost by itself, by its own gross mistakes, by its own blindness, is prey to hysteria. Yet, despite the frenzied propaganda, there was no shortage of voices and analyses, which highlighted not only the groundlessness, but the fragility and self-harm of the EU position on Ukraine. The failure of the policy imposed by the American Dems and immediately welcomed in a completely subordinate way by the Europeans (even by those who would have suffered and paid for it the most, i.e. the Germans) was predictable, and had been predicted (for example by Mearsheimer and Todd). From a certain point of view, that the only “political” Europe (moreover illusory and anti-democratic) that they can conceive of is its warmongering simulacrum, is not surprising, since the EU is an instrument of technocratic depoliticization. So politics in the proper sense can only be given in a phantasmal form, as a symptom and not as a strategic resource. Faced with the irruption of reality that Trump and Vance represent, the European oligarchy reacts by clinging to fear and emergencyism. Despite having powerful means at its disposal, even in the media, there is no consensus. This is why we live in dangerous times, because an “accident” could happen, or could be sought, which imposes a fait accompli.
Currently, in America there is politics, in Europe there is not. It may be a crude politics, with strong pockets of state of nature, which are certainly not a novelty of today, but there is no doubt that with the MAGA movement a new political energy has manifested itself, albeit ambivalent, which has marked a hegemonic change in American society. It is no coincidence that Trump has chosen Vance as his deputy, a hillbilly who has made it and who, precisely by virtue of his story, told in the interesting autobiography American Elegy (but the original title is precisely Hillbilly Elegy), does not adhere to the globalist and pseudo-progressive establishment but gives voice, being a child of it, to the deep and popular, deindustrialized and abandoned America.
A more political profile than the businessman and pragmatic Trump: Vance brings significant social content, expressive of real problems, to the “populist signifier” Trump, “empty” (Lacanian) but not entirely, and for this reason able to subsume different, transversal and even contradictory instances: popular demands and technological pushes, the need to return to territories and domestic productions and relaunch the spatial challenge, popular “common sense” and AI mythology. In this context, Vance is clearly an alternative, or at least a counterweight, to Musk (with all his disturbing transhumanistic and hyper-techno-private profiles). The acidity of the European “leaders” towards Vance can be explained precisely by this “truth” of his, which derives from his matrix and from speaking frankly: it is as if he had put a revealing mirror in front of them. Moreover, the speech he made in Munich was a lesson in lucid political realism in international relations and at the same time a proof of confidence in popular sovereignty and in the free exchange of ideas, something that the Eurocratic censors clearly lack. After all, Europe has become the place of depoliticization. A continent without identity. The EU, which is its vector, is exactly the opposite of how it is smuggled (an embryo of political Europe, a civil power, etc.).Remaining within its scheme, only “simulacra of resilience” can be generated (such as the Linke in Germany, the fake Popular Front – easy prey to Macron’s instrumentalization – in France, or the radical pseudo-left in Italy). Useful only to the neoliberal and globalist Eurocratic oligarchy.
But what is the European Union, ultimately? It is not a federal state; it is not a confederation; but it is not even simply an alliance (although it is based on treaties, whose “lords” obviously remain the States). It has a currency without a state or political governance of the economy, which logically prevents true economic and financial integration based on solidarity and common fiscal policies; it has an elephantine technocratic apparatus, around which conspicuous lobbies revolve; it suffers from regulatory overproduction, it has an intrusive and self-expansive judicial power, but it is not a true rule of law; it does not have a constitution, but it has a treaty that has been pompously qualified as constitutional; it has a parliament, but it is not a true representative democracy (which implies, among other things, that the political representation of social conflict is inhibited from it: probably one of its real purposes after Maastricht, in homage to ordoliberal ideology). In short, it is a system of technocratic-financial domination, centered on legal hypertrophy and governance as technical management. All seasoned with a moralistic molasses increasingly detached from reality and also from historical truth. From the point of view of political culture, an illusionistic bubble.
The EU’s unidentifiability has led to the most imaginative qualifications being attributed to it. Or rather, to use improbable metaphors to cover up the fact that no one knew what it was. But if you can’t say what a phenomenon consists of, there is at least a problem. If we are dealing with questions that affect public law (domestic, international, comparative), this becomes embarrassing for the science of (positive) law, but also for the theory of law (and politics). Let’s say that jurists, but in general “intellectuals”, should have taken the issue seriously… Instead, it was taken as an opportunity, pursuing post-sovereign and post-state illusions, with a strong simplification of the identity, linguistic-cultural and national theme, and circumventing the political knot of the decision by functionalist means.
Thus, an “indirect” politics has been generated, apparently mild, or of low intensity, which has replaced the complexity of politics with moralistic and technocratic depoliticization. This has contributed to weakening Europe, not an alliance of equals, an instrument of cooperation between states, but a dilated jumble (after the imprudent enlargement to the East) and opaque of conflicting interests and fideism. It is this past that has led, in an avalanche, to a series of resounding reverses, to austerity and to the foolish management of the financial crisis triggered by American subprime mortgages (instrumentally presented as a crisis of sovereign debts, in reality of private debts, i.e. of banks, especially German and French): a real plane inclined towards the loss of legitimacy and consensus. Until total failure in Ukraine and support for the massacre in Gaza. It must be acknowledged that the sad outcome of a politically and morally failed EU is the paroxysmal emphasis on hostility, the abandonment of critical thinking and healthy realism, self-blindness, a bad conscience seasoned with a moral supremacism that is as hysterical as it is compensatory. Anything, in order to escape from reality. A grotesque and pernicious mix of warmongering, impotence and geopolitical marginalization.
Many have fallen into that suggestive spell of the indefinability of the EU. Some in good faith (the generically but indefectibly pro-European climate of the nineties helped). But it was also, for some skilled navigators, not surprisingly men for several seasons, who piloted the replacement of the economic constitution envisaged by the 1948 Charter with that of Maastricht and the euro, a form of intellectual arrogance and political-careerist cynicism. The narrative was that something so new was being realized, albeit gradually, between arrests and advances, that one could not even tell what it was, and which nevertheless represented a sure progress. Instead of asking, more realistically, if this was not a limit, a problem to be faced and possibly overcome, in any case a sign of difficulty. The UE is a UFO, an unidentified flying object, or a hornet, heavy, not nice to look at, but which flies. This was the dominant discourse, conveyed from above. Well, the UFO landed on the planet Mars (or would like to): the planet of the god of war. And the face of the bumblebee is increasingly devastated, from an aesthetic-political point of view. The attempts to replicate again – wearily, and precisely for this reason in increasingly paroxysmal ways – those interpretative schemes produce embarrassing effects.
In the end, it was said, the functionalist effectiveness of integration counts. A trivial version of the classic theme of effectiveness. Except that if, when consensus is shaky, compliance is imposed by force and therefore effectiveness becomes mere constraint with the emergency power that the EU has in fact attributed to itself, inevitably all its precarious scaffolding holds less and less. It is not surprising that in order to avoid facing a difficult but necessary discourse of truth, of self-reflexively coming to terms with a failure that is the result of a wrong path that at some point has been taken, or that has become prevalent, one ends up betraying. in a desperate attempt to buy time and stay afloat, those constitutional and axiological standards with which we hypocritically cloak ourselves.
The truth is that when a “ruling class” (so to speak) fails so spectacularly and culpably, it has to go home. The Eurocratic oligarchy (both in Brussels, Frankfurt, Strasbourg and Luxembourg, as well as in the capitals of the member countries) knows this, and is fighting to survive. The problem is that perhaps it is willing to make the European peoples pay any price, from the ultra-Atlanticist fort that it has remained to garrison alone (with the United Kingdom, but it remains to be seen to what extent the British will be willing to disalign themselves from the eternal American ally, a younger brother who has long since become much greater).
Recently Ferrajoli proposed to go to the streets with the worst Europe in the name of the best Europe (in the flat-box demonstration of March 15). One would say: let’s continue like this, let’s hurt ourselves! He also put forward the surreal idea of a grand alliance (including with von der Leyen and Macron) against global fascism. But the new fascism is the mainstream. Which, for example, cancels elections and arbitrarily excludes unwelcome candidates (as in Romania, but it is clear that the trend can extend). After all, the post-democratic drift, and now openly anti-democratic, has been underway for some time (the Trichet-Draghi letter and the blackmail to Greece were clear signs of this). The precipitation of that “new fascism” that Pasolini had prophetically intuited.
Just to lower the level, the “new fascism” of those who churn out (and hail) small “products” of serial consumption on Mussolini that perfectly express, with their anti-historical mediocrity, enemy of any serious critical analysis, the cultural apocalypse denounced by PPP in the form of the “anthropological mutation”. After all, this is today the main work of the communication and entertainment of the establishment: endlessly repeating to the supposedly reflective middle and upper classes, in reality affected by irremediable “half culture”, what they want to hear. To continue not to understand anything. And above all, for heaven’s sake, never have a doubt, which could possibly push you to think (a desperate undertaking, in fact). It is the postmodern, neoliberal and pseudo-progressive correlate of the “fascism of the antifascists” of which PPP always wrote: “there is today a form of archaeological anti-fascism which is then a good pretext to procure a license of real anti-fascism. It is an easy anti-fascism that has as its object and objective an archaic fascism that no longer exists and will never exist again. (…) This is why a large part of today’s anti-fascism, or at least of what is called anti-fascism, is either naïve and stupid or is specious and in bad faith”. After all, as Flaiano said, “fascists have always been divided into two categories: fascists and anti-fascists”.
But, to conclude, let’s go back to the dear EU, this alleged “exemplary stage in the process of unification of the human race” (so Ferrajoli always). Now, the grotesque thing is that decades of depoliticization, of post-sovereign and post-state preaching, result in a fanatical adherence to a simulacrum of the “political”, or to rearmament as a fetish, which should lead to who knows what historical outcomes (political Europe?) and guarantee European self-defense (but presumably it is just the desperate attempt of an elite loser and very mediocre of staying afloat).
The result is an unrealistic and deceptive mess, deeply unfair (money for weapons yes, for hospitals no), moreover in total contrast with everything that the pro-European clergy has always rhetorically preached (we are a civilian garrison of peace). If it weren’t dangerous, we would laugh. The EU is going in exactly the opposite direction to what is needed: to seize the opportunity for a truce that, through compromise, lays the foundations for a stable peace and brings us out of the nightmare of a third world war. Therefore, if peace is sought and the plurality of the world is respected, never at the demonstration on March 15. And if we hope that in Europe, particularly in the historic core of the founding countries, a policy of cooperation between states based above all on respect for the European peoples will be revived, the logic of the EU must be overturned.
Prof. Geminello Preterossi