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President Donald Trump.
Just saying this phrase is conclusive evidence that ordinary voters in many different countries are strongly opposed to the global elite "one worlders" attempting to erase differences between nations by allowing hordes of uneducated, unskilled Third Worlders into Europe and America. It remains to be seen whether President Trump will reverse these trends, but there's no doubt that he was lofted into the Oval Office by millions of Americans who hope and pray that he can.
Thus far in this series, we've explored how global elites are much more like each other than like the people of the countries they nominally lead, and how the common folk in many of these countries have figured out they're being played for fools. None of this except the voter revolt is a new development: as we see it, our ruling elites have long wanted national differences to be absorbed into one super-national world government, just as President Wilson planned a century ago when he promoted the League of Nations.
Why do we find this notion so offensive? In this article, we'll explore why the "one world" idea seems so jarring and unnatural to those of us who found the previous 400 years of nation-states with their different laws, customs, and ways of life to be more congenial.
President Wilson's post-Great-War globalist vision failed when the American Senate refused to join the League of Nations, but after the horrors of World War II, the same idea was picked up by another generation of visionaries who promoted the European Union. The EU was not originally marketed as a political entity, but as a "mere" trading treaty or customs union which was called the "European Economic Community." The EU was sold as a laudable plan to help Europe get back on its economic feet after the war. The insiders always wanted a political union, but they didn't tell the voters that.
Having personally experienced the horrors of World War II, the founders of the EU saw World Wars I and II as a failure of Westphalianism, the principle of international law that each nation state has sovereignty over its territory and domestic affairs, to the exclusion of all external powers, on the principle of non-interference in another country's domestic affairs. However, since Westphalianism had been the foundation of international relationships for so many centuries, these elite leaders seem not to have properly understood its importance.
This doctrine is named after the Treaty of Westphalia, which was signed in 1684 to end the Thirty Years' War. In signing the treaty, the Holy Roman Empire, Spain, France, Sweden, and the Dutch Republic agreed to respect one another's territorial integrity no matter what went in inside each others' borders, so long as it had no direct effect outside of the borders. We see an echo of this principle in the saying, "What happens in Vegas, stays in Vegas."
The Thirty Years' War was a nasty, barbaric, unpredictable, and horrifying mess, leading to a complete restructuring of the way the world worked, because like many ghastly conflicts, it was fundamentally based on differences of religion.
From around 300AD through the Reformation in the 1500s, there had been basically one religion in Europe: Roman Catholicism. The rulers were Catholics; all the people who mattered were Catholics; and everybody more or less answered to the Pope as well as to the local ruler.
All that changed with Martin Luther and the Protestant Reformation. Now, there were an increasing number of different religious points of view whose adherents tended to hate each other, the infamous Spanish Inquisition being merely the most famous example.
The worst problem with the new religious views was that they strongly believed that individuals could change their mind about what they believed without anyone's permission. This was bad enough when ordinary subjects were evangelized by a religion other than what the king believed.
What happens, though, when some spectacularly lucky evangelist or extreme set of circumstances succeeds in converting the king? The traditional answer was: All the old priests get summarily retired and everybody in the kingdom is forcibly converted to the new rules. This happened in England under King Henry VIII with the swapping-out of Roman Catholicism for the Church of England. When Catholic Bloody Mary took the throne, the rules flipped back; then Protestant Queen Elizabeth put them back the other way, followed by Catholic King James, and so on.
On the Continent, things were even worse in the so-called Germanies because there were so many petty kingdoms and principalities, each with their own ruler and relations. The Thirty Years' War was largely a result of whiplash as princes converted, died, inherited other fiefdoms, and changed religions practically every year. Every time this happened, members of the now-banned religion would appeal to the next prince over who believed the same way they did and beg him to intervene, which more often than not was a useful pretext for a war of conquest.
The Treaty of Westphalia was an attempt to calm things down by making all the rulers agree not to intervene in what their neighbor prince did to his own people. This wasn't ideal for unfortunate subjects whose religion just got changed again for the nth time, but in the days before passports or immigration laws, it was at least possible to move to somewhere else ruled by a prince more in line with your own beliefs.
As a beneficial side effect, this ongoing churn of Europeans moving from principality to principality helped spread science, knowledge, trade, and all manner of best practices. It even led to the colonization of the New World by religious groups unlucky enough not to be able to find a sympathetic sovereign anywhere in Europe, such as the Pilgrims, the French Huguenots, and Baptists of many stripes.
Because so many of the American colonists were freeing religious oppression, a foundation was laid which would eventually lead to the American principle of freedom of religion and the belief that government has no business telling you what to believe. This let to the idea of "freedom of conscience" and our modern legal distinction between a "strongly-held conviction" which government couldn't override without a "compelling interest", versus a mere "preference" which did not merit "strict scrutiny" of government interference. This didn't take hold for several centuries, though, well into the era of colonization.
As European ideas spread across the globe, the principle of sovereign states which didn't mess with each other's laws, customs, or government spread along with European power. The principle of individual nations and noninterference meant that nations didn't answer to any higher authority, and their relationships with their peers were limited only by available military force. Thus, there was nothing to prevent European nations riding roughshod over whatever governments they found in India, Africa, Indonesia, and Asia, unless those governments had the strength to resist which mostly they didn't, or had nothing worth stealing.
In order to be able to honor and/or appeal to Westphalian principles, it was essential that borders be clearly defined. This was a relatively new idea outside of Europe; in most of the world, borders tended to get fuzzier the further you got from the capital until eventually you found yourself in the domain of a different prince.
That wouldn't do if you wanted the protection of Westphalianism from other European great powers, so everywhere they went, the European explorers carefully drew borders on maps laying out what belonged to whom. They often did this without consulting the people who actually lived there; some of these wholly artificial and unrealistic borders are still causing problems, particularly in the Middle East and around the Indian subcontinent but also in several swathes of Africa.
Although the treaty of Westphalia said that all nations were supposed to be treated equally, small nations observed that there was no organization which could settle differences between nations peacefully. They sought treaties requiring larger nations to support them should they be attacked; medium and large nations entered into treaties of mutual support for the same reason.
This provided a means for small nations to feel secure and an incentive for large nations not to be excessively bullying, but it had hidden dangers. The assassination of Austro-Hungarian Archduke Franz Ferdinand in 1914 was initially thought to be a tempest in a teapot because few people realized just how many nations had entered into such treaties. Even once the entire continent's armies were mobilized, many thought the war would be over by Christmas because the whole thing seemed so irrational.
A few saw the reality. Just before Britain's entry into World War I, British Foreign Secretary Sir Edward Grey told a friend, "The lamps are going out all over Europe; we shall not see them lit again in our life-time."
After four years of bitter, bloody, fantastically expensive and destructive conflict for no good reason and which had been expected by almost nobody, the victorious French and British blamed the Germans for the war. In fury, they exacted harsh financial and territorial penalties which caused great suffering among German voters. Germany's allies, the Austro-Hungarian and Ottoman Empires, entirely ceased to exist as recognizable nation-states.
The people of Germany, having suffered through a losing war, continued to suffer under the heel of the international community forcing reparations payments on a destroyed economy, something which had not been done in Europe for many centuries. Adolf Hitler convinced the German people that the German military had actually won the war but had been "stabbed in the back" by the venal political establishment, and, of course, the shadowy hands of evil Jews. He vowed to make Germany great again if only they'd vote him into power.
In effect, despite inflicting a devastating defeat, the allied powers hadn't truly convinced the German people that they'd lost World War I fair and square, so the conditions for truly ending the war weren't met. The German people were eager to start the war up again a generation later, and weren't particularly concerned with who got hurt in the process. This time, Germany was laid waste even more thoroughly, along with the entire continent of Europe and large parts of the rest of the world.
European political leaders who came to power after World War II were convinced that World War II was merely a continuation of World War I, just as the Thirty Years' War had been a series of nominally independent conflicts which flared up and died out only to have another conflict emerge soon afterward for the same underlying reasons. They regarded this thirty-year "Great War" as a failure of the Westphalian system based on individual sovereign nations which were not answerable to any power except by force of arms.
The only solution they could imagine was to create the United Nations which, they hoped, would gain control of all military forces over time. However, they understood that the people of Europe still hated each other; positively the last thing they would tolerate was a system in which their own country would be, even in part, under the thumb of their despised enemies. They may also have realized that rulers forcing subjects to change their religious beliefs had been one of the major causes of the first Thirty Years War.
It was therefore essential for the elites to cloak their plans in a goal that every starving refugee could wholeheartedly support, namely, rebuilding Europe's economies by trade as had been done during the glory days of the Victorian and Gilded Ages.
In order to create the European customs and trading union, of course, the "Treaty of Rome" needed some sort of organization which could set common standards for doing business. Individual nations in the union would have to subordinate their national legislatures to this shared bureaucracy and their taxpayers would have to help pay for it. The economic union was simple common sense which could be seen to be working well, so ordinary Europeans accepted it; they did not realize that it was the first step toward a planned political union.
These mid-century globalists sought to create a "United States of Europe" which would rival the United States of America because of its larger population and economy. Over time, they planned that all nations, including the United States and Russia, would surrender political sovereignty and military power to this para-national organization. They were convinced that only by bringing about a one-world government could they hope to end war.
They did not foresee that the spread of nuclear weapons would lead to the peace of "Mutually-Assured Destruction" which has been the true mechanism that kept peace since World War II. Nuclear weapons are so destructive that any nation which owns more than a handful can credibly promise to destroy the entire world, no matter who attacks them. Thus, no national leader even halfway rational will ever dare to seriously threaten a nuclear power, because the only way that could end is with everyone on all sides reduced to their component atoms.
The idea of unifying Europe's militaries was set aside as largely irrelevant, but that didn't stop elites' pushing toward the goal of "ever-closer union."
To further the one-world dream, the international elites realized that they had to create a one-world economy which came to be known as "globalism." In order to get everyone to accept the loss of national sovereignty required, they would have to wipe out all traces of nationalism and national culture in what were then sovereign nations. Having noted that most European peoples hated each other, in order to get masses of people to accept so many neighbors with different beliefs and customs, they promoted a secular religion of "tolerance and diversity" while accusing anyone who objected of being an intolerant racist, a bigot, or worse.
To be fair, some first-generation one-worlders may have acted out of sincere motives. President Wilson, who tried to bind America into the League of Nations, was a confirmed elitist who believed in scientific rule of the masses by elites such as himself, but he was certainly no murderous tyrant. The mass deaths under Stalin, Mao, Castro, and other tyrants who tried to force all of their citizens into a common mold were still in the future and even then took a while to be widely known. It's possible that the European leaders who suffered personally during World War II saw the EU as a vital step toward preventing World War III through a one-world government.
Similarly, the liberals who set up the British welfare state and Health Secretary Aneurin Bevan who founded the British National Health Service after WW II may have been sincerely concerned with helping the unfortunate. They may not have realized that welfare would become a way of life which fostered idleness and crime and that once health care became "free" under the NHS, demand would become infinite.
We know from his boasts that his welfare system would "have those n****rs voting Democratic for the next 200 years" that Lyndon Johnson, who pushed the Great Society, was thinking mainly of accumulating political power for his party while pretending to look out for the poor. Our observation that second-generation one-worlders like Hillary seem similarly more interested in gaining personal wealth and power than in securing citizens' welfare suggests that the modern one-world push is as much about accumulating personal wealth and power as about securing world peace.
Jill Stein, erstwhile Green Party Presidential candidate, would probably agree; as she pointed out:
We have 2,000 nuclear missiles on hair-trigger alert. And Mikhail Gorbachev, the former premier of the Soviet Union, is saying we are closer to a nuclear war than we have ever been.
Under Hillary Clinton, we could slide into nuclear war very quickly from her declared policy in Syria...
On the issue of war and nuclear weapons, and the potential for nuclear war, it's actually Hillary's policies which are much scarier than Donald Trump, who does not want to go to war with Russia. He wants to seek modes of working together, which is the route that we need to follow.
The one-worlders ran into two problems:
Having shown how the one-world idea grew out of perceived failures of the Westphalian system of sovereign nations, the next article discusses the failure of the cultural transformation our ruling elites have tried to inflict on us.