Javier Benegas (b. 1965) is a Spanish political analyst and writer, co-founder of the Spanish daily Vozpópuli, of which he was opinion director, and founder of the think tank ThinkAct, as well as editor of the political and sociological analysis journal Disidentia.
The accession of many Eastern European countries to the European Union (EU) in 2004, with the aim of expanding the European single market and its global influence, has brought with it an unexpected effect that has become particularly noticeable in recent years. Until 2004, politicians and bureaucrats in Brussels, largely under the strong influence of Germany and France, had guided EU policies, making them a true reflection of socio-liberalism and, especially, the prevailing social democracy in both countries.
Prior to the accession of the Eastern European countries, the EU had already evolved into a much more political than economic body. The original idea of the Europe of the merchants had given way to the Europe of the social engineers with little resistance from the governments of the member states, let alone their citizens who, in general, paid little attention to what was being decided in Brussels, naively believing that ultimate power would remain with their national governments, when it was their own representatives in Brussels who were giving the backing to this drift.
Gradually, the EU was transformed into a core of power that was more political than economic in nature and acquired a strong ideological bias, dressed up as cosmopolitanism and progress. It is on the basis of this bias that more than questionable policies, such as energy transition and sustainable economy and, to a large extent, the so-called gender ideology, secularisation and the denial of Christian roots, are imposed with a formally democratic appearance.
Thus, by 2004, the European Union was already de facto a supranational government that viewed the national identity, customs, traditions and religious beliefs of European citizens not only as anachronisms, but as elements that ran counter to the new Europe that was being projected from Brussels. It is into this EU, very different from its founding idea, that Eastern European countries are entering, not only alien to this whole process, but with a very different historical experience that will inevitably end up clashing with the dominant bias in the EU.
For Eastern European countries, the incentive to join the EU is not predominantly political, but economic. Integration into a much larger market, free of barriers for both goods and people, represents an opportunity for economic development and, consequently, greater welfare for their citizens. The EU itself reinforces this incentive through the Structural Funds and the Cohesion Fund for economic and social cohesion in the EU area. This, coupled with the old stereotype of democratic, open and modern Western Europe, puts everything else on the back burner. Once these countries join, they will discover that the positive part, the economic part, entails the assumption of a political bias that is not only occasionally contrary to that of their local governments, but largely incompatible with the cultural heritage of their societies.
EU officialdom has presented this conflict as a consequence of the cultural backwardness of Eastern European societies. The EU would embody modernity, progress and tolerance in the face of countries that are intolerant and backward due to their decades of subjugation to the Soviet empire. Thus, it is the progressives in Brussels, and not the supposed reactionary countries, who interpret this conflict as a cultural war, adopting a dismissive position of moral superiority over the newcomers. However, if this Manichean approach is ignored and the conflict is analysed in depth, the reality is far more interesting. While the decades of Soviet subjugation resulted in economic underdevelopment, they also had another unexpected effect: the civilian strengthening of the subjugated societies.
On the western side of the Wall, European citizens evolved in an environment of increasing freedom, prosperity and security. In such a promising environment, certain traditions, beliefs and institutions, such as the traditional family, seemed to lose their usefulness. On the Eastern side, Soviet authoritarianism had the opposite effect. Societies not only clung to what Western Europeans were beginning to consider expendable, even a nuisance, but also built around their identity, traditions and beliefs in order to resist and eventually prevail over the Soviet order. Obviously, not everything is black and white, there are nuances. But perhaps the dominant idea of progress in the EU is rather less progressive than the one that has allowed Eastern European societies to survive totalitarianism.
Javier Benegas (b. 1965) is a Spanish political analyst and writer, co-founder of the Spanish daily Vozpópuli, of which he was opinion director, and founder of the think tank ThinkAct, as well as editor of the political and sociological analysis journal Disidentia. He is a regular contributor to various Spanish media, both in the press and on radio and television, and is a prominent contributor to The Objective. He is the author of the essays Sociedad terminal: La comunicación como arma de destrucción masiva (2007) [Terminal Society: Communication as a Weapon of Mass Destruction], co-author of Catarsis. Se vislumbra el final del régimen (2013) [Catharsis. The end of the regime in sight] and author of La ideología invisible: Claves del nuevo totalitarismo que infecta a las sociedades occidentales (2020) [The Invisible Ideology: Keys to the New Totalitarianism Infecting Western Societies] y Vindicación (2022) [Vindication].
