That Good, Old-Time Religion

This is an absolutely fascinating interview with Peter Mandelson, on the subject of the Euro and the future of the EU. It's chiefly fascinating because it shows how unhinged the "moderate" common-sensical mainstream of British and European politics is, and how resistant they are to the mandates of reality.

Very few people understand what the European Union really is, which is not a trading bloc, or a standardising bureaucracy, or a political attempt to nullify Germany, although it became these things accidentally. What the EU actually is is a Revitalisation Movement, by which a morally and culturally decrepit civilisation, physically shattered by the rampages of the quasi-barbarian ancestor cult known as Nazism (itself a bizarre attempt at renewal), tried to reinvigorate itself by the creation of a mission-myth of a New Europe, born again to dazzle the world with its enlightened, endlessly evolving cultural dynamism. It's this essentially religious vision that explains the keep-voting-until-you-give-us-the-right-result fanaticism of the Europhiles; why the likes of Peter (actually a typical member of the British political class with regards to Europe) still believe.

But behind the facade of social democracy with which the EU pretended to distance itself from the "Anglo-Saxon" model of neoliberalism, it was up to the same late-Faustian game of agnotological voodoo-finance - the only way that the West can continue its progress-mythology: by inventing the (no longer plentiful) resources that enable the "progress" that is its very world-soul.

The Euro is dead. The EU is dead. But, like the banks, expect them to continue to stagger on in the standard zombie half-life that characterises the decline of the final institutions of The West.