President Trump this week described the EU as “in many ways nastier than China.” The media responded with the usual shrieks of outrage, but he had a point. The EU bureaucracy has imposed a structure on Europe that is perpetually Socialist, deeply anti-democratic and utterly intolerant of dissent. Traditionally, the EU benefited from being democratic and having better civil liberties than China, but those benefits are rapidly being eroded. We should consider the possibility that Europe would be very much better without the EU superstructure.

Governmentally, the EU and China may be approaching the same point, from opposite directions. China was a fully centrally planned Communist society under Mao Zedong with effectively no civil liberties. Then after Deng Xiaoping took over in 1978 state controls were lifted, private enterprise was allowed and the country began to grow rich. The Tiananmen Square demonstrations and their suppression showed that China was not about to become a democracy, but economic freedoms and prosperity greatly increased. Since Xi Jinping took over in 2012 there has been a further suppression of civil liberties, together with considerable violation of property rights and an increase in the number of political prisoners, especially since Hong Kong’s limited freedoms were suppressed. Still, even large private enterprise is permitted and the freedom to grow rich remains. On the other hand, there is no free speech, there are political prisoners and interaction with foreign media and travel to foreign countries are restricted.

Before 1914, the major European countries were far freer economically and in terms of civil liberties than China or Europe today, albeit not so fully free as Britain or the United States at that time. France, Germany and Austria-Hungary all had areas of opinion that would get you in trouble, with Austria-Hungary having perhaps the greatest sensitivities because of its multi-ethnic nature – the various nationalisms could get you locked up although in practice the authorities took a fairly relaxed view of minor transgressions. Russia was more authoritarian, as it has been throughout its history. Economically, on the other hand, continental Europe after 1848 was fully committed to the free-market economic model with relatively small public sectors and even socialist movements were moderate in size and not especially radical.

That all changed after World War I, certainly the greatest avoidable disaster in the history of Europe. No fewer than three pernicious new statist nostrums infected the continent: Communism, Fascism and Socialism. No country was free of one of the three, and several had more than one. Socialism at that stage involved little intrusion on civil liberties, to give it credit, but its intrusion on economic freedoms was at least as severe as that of Fascism, while Communism was immeasurably worse in both respects.

After World War II, Fascism was defeated and Communism restricted in practice to those areas conquered by the Red Army, but Socialism was rampant, with governments taking an even larger share of output than before the war. Nevertheless, a liberation of western Europe by primarily Anglo-American forces had injected a healthy dose of the Anglosphere tradition of civil liberty, while Germany and France developed governments under Konrad Adenauer and Charles de Gaulle that were superior to any those countries had seen since at least 1870. Thus, the period from 1945 to the 1970s saw Europe enjoy a level of genuine freedom that was an example to the world. Alas, after 1970 that picture darkened.

The European Coal and Steel Community formed in 1951 was, as its name suggests, purely a mechanism to rationalize the declining coal and steel sectors that were bleeding losses in most of Europe. The idea of doing this via government rather than through the market was itself Socialist nonsense, but it was Socialist nonsense with plenty of precedents – even Britain’s relatively free market National Government of 1931-40 had attempted to do the same thing with the textile and shipbuilding industries (with total lack of success and huge amounts of money wasted, needless to say). Had European integration remained limited to E.C.S.C. it would not have had significant adverse implications for the continent’s freedoms, while its interminable losses would have continued to provide attractive banking business for London’s merchant banks. (Disclosure: I worked on and later generated several deals for E.C.S.C. in the 1970s.)

However, that would not have suited the ambitions of the French fantasist Jean Monnet (1888-1979). For him, E.C.S.C. was just the first step in an ever-deepening European Union, whose total lack of democratic accountability was of absolutely no concern to him, since he was a French socialist intellectual. De Gaulle was suitably skeptical of this fantasy, but alas, de Gaulle did not last forever. Once de Gaulle was gone, E.C.S.C. was succeeded by the EU, with an ever-enlarging centralized bureaucracy and a Parliament that nominally made it democratic. However, since there were no political parties stretching across Europe, European elections from 1979 simply elected the same bunch of socialists from a wide variety of different “centrist” parties, with genuine outsiders like Nigel Farage reduced to the status of a gadfly. With every election resulting in a dominating coalition of the same socialists, popular sovereignty was thoroughly suppressed.

Matters were worsened by the steady leftist drift of national governments which, having no ability to influence EU policy, merely became an alternation of the same leftists. Notoriously in Germany, the great Konrad Adenauer was eventually replaced by an Angela Merkel, whose political training had come entirely in the Komsomol youth movement of the notoriously repressive Communist state of East Germany. Merkel had no understanding of free-market economics and hence gave in to authoritarian leftist dreams such as closing all Germany’s nuclear power stations, shutting down its efficient coal fired power stations and relying instead on a solar and wind power grid that (as Spain has just shown) was utterly unreliable and raised electricity prices to the highest in the world. Thereby Merkel doomed Germany’s world class heavy industry that had provided employment and prosperity for its people.

The economically illiterate authoritarianism of “net zero” fits perfectly with the economically illiterate but highly authoritarian instincts of the EU bureaucracy. As a result, heavy industry and living standards are devastated across Europe and we will soon have lengthy power outages as in Spain, which will quickly reduce the European people to a starving rabble. No amount of new technology such as “artificial intelligence” will be allowed to offset the collapse in living standards, because the power to run it will be unavailable; hence the bureaucracy will prohibit it, to protect European interests. All dissent against this harsh regime will be rigorously controlled with political leaders imprisoned (as the Merz German government is already attempting to do with the country’s principal opposition party) and technology used only to find and punish severely any dissenting free speech. Elections, of course, are already being cancelled if they produce an unexpected result, as in Romania last December.

China meanwhile will be better off. Net Zero has no place there; the country is opening one new coal fired power station a week, buoyed by the cheap coal now available through Western foolishness. Technology has been used to create various competing “social credit scores” determining your access to the good things of life, but this would appear a tech application that the EU could very well copy. One consolation in China: since China does not have elections, there are fewer penalties there for voting the “wrong” way. Economically, China is considerably freer than the endemically over-regulating EU. In summary, if the EU is not already “nastier” than China, it very soon will be.

The solution for Europe is simple but Draconian. There is no way to make the EU a democratically accountable organization because of the multitude of political systems in the states comprising it. Furthermore, it is an inherently globalist organization, seeking to suppress the healthy national instincts that activate the non-over-educated (i.e. non-brainwashed) majority of mankind. Additionally, its bureaucracy is literally a menace to civilization. Hence the work of the madman Monnet must be undone.

European countries are mostly perfectly capable of not going to war with each other – the original pretext for the EU’s creation. Without the EU, they will not be able to fantasize about being a “regulatory superpower” and will have to keep their regulation suitable to a medium-sized state. Without the EU, they will not be able to indulge in “net zero” fantasies and rely on their neighbors to pay for their mistakes. The only achievement of the EU that is worth preserving is intra-European free trade, but that together with any desired areas of cooperation, can be negotiated on a state-to-state basis.

If this were done, it would become clear that it is China, not the EU, that is bedeviled by an over-large and unaccountable government. After all, Europe developed the modern world and the Industrial Revolution because it was a collection of competing states that mostly evolved into free markets, whereas China was an undifferentiated blob. Only with the EU’s 50-year blight on Europe would that distinction ever have come into question.

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(The Bear’s Lair is a weekly column that is intended to appear each Monday, an appropriately gloomy day of the week. Its rationale is that the proportion of “sell” recommendations put out by Wall Street houses remains far below that of “buy” recommendations. Accordingly, investors have an excess of positive information and very little negative information. The column thus takes the ursine view of life and the market, in the hope that it may be usefully different from what investors see elsewhere.)