The EU and the Iron Law of Oligarchy

The EU is an oligarchy governed by a small self-perpetuating ruling class that sees “the people” as impediments to its technocratic program.

long, long time ago—27 years, to be exact—my boss (the inimitable Mark Melcher) and I predicted that the European Monetary Union would be the death of the EU. The Euro, we wrote for our clients at a now-defunct big brokerage house, would be a disaster and would destroy everything that the post-war Europeans had spent the previous several decades working to build. Specifically, we wrote:

Psst! You wanna know a secret? The Euro, and the mess it represents, is going to be a social, economic and political catastrophe. Indeed, we think it is probable that the adoption of the Euro will be to 21st century Europe, what the killing of the Archduke Franz Ferdinand was to 20th century Europe; i.e., that point in time when history will record that the unraveling began in earnest.

Exaggeration? Hyperbole? Well, maybe. But maybe not. You see, the problem isn’t, as most critics claim, simply that the “policy makers” from the various “regions,” will fight over economic and monetary policy, and that the economic ignoramuses might win. The problem is that economic ignoramuses are likely to be the only ones at the table. . . .

Starting in about 2010 and running for the next decade or so, every January, in my annual foreign-policy forecast piece, I would lead with a reiteration of that prediction. The collapse of the Euro, I would write, was inevitable. It didn’t matter if it actually happened this year or next year or a decade down the road. It would all eventually crumble, largely because the ignoramuses simply couldn’t help themselves and couldn’t stop doing economically foolish things.

Sometime over the last few years, I quit making that prediction every year for a couple of reasons. First, I quit writing annual forecast pieces as my business model and focus changed. Second, and more to the point, it became unnecessary. The EU had already made itself economically irrelevant. Between its jealously fueled outrage at American tech companies, its obsession with carbon emissions, and its conscious decision to strangle its capital markets through the imposition of overtly political investing mandates, the EU guaranteed that it would become the first modern civilization in history to regress developmentally. It knowingly chose to deindustrialize and to build an economic future that was far bleaker than even its remote economic past. The Euro, I concluded, was pointless.

That’s not to say that I gave up believing that the EU would inevitably collapse. I just gave up wasting my readers’ time by prattling on about it.

Looking back at all of this now, it’s possible I may have been mistaken. No, I wasn’t wrong about the economic stuff. Not only are the ignoramuses in charge, but no one else is even in the discussion. Italy’s Giorgia Meloni is the only Eurozone leader who questions the Union’s climate policies, for example, rightly warning that they will lead to “industrial desertification.” Still, even she officially supports the EU’s position on climate change and carbon emissions more generally, as well as its agreement to the Paris Climate Accords. It’s ignoramuses all the way down.

Nevertheless, it’s probably the case that I was wrong that the economic ignoramuses would be the ones who would precipitate the official end of the EU. Or, more accurately, I suppose, I was wrong that their economically illiterate policies would be the proximate cause of the EU’s collapse. It’s the same ignoramuses, just different policies.

As you likely know, this past week, tens of thousands of “migrants” from Morocco invaded the Spanish city of Ceuta, which is along the coast in North Africa. The images from the enclave were grim: hordes of people, mostly young men, pushing, racing, and fighting to get out of Africa and into Europe (geographical technicalities, be damned). The conditions on the ground were grimmer still: as of yesterday, some 70-plus deaths had been confirmed, while more than a thousand people required medical attention. The whole thing was shocking—or at least it would have been if it hadn’t also been utterly predictable.

For most of the last forty years, Spain has been a hub of primarily North African and Middle Eastern immigration to Europe. Since the 1980s, Spain has had six major extraordinary regularizations for its migrant populations. Although different in name and details, these “extraordinary regularizations” are essentially broad general amnesties, grants of legal immigration status to those who entered the country illegally. In 2005, under the former Prime Minister José Luis Rodríguez Zapatero (a socialist), Spain granted amnesty to more than half a million illegal immigrants. Earlier this year, under current Prime Minister Pedro Sánchez (also a socialist . . . or worse), the country began the process of yet another regularization, the total size of which is unknown at present but is estimated to be between 500,000 and over 800,000.

Additionally, earlier this summer, the Spanish Supreme Court issued a ruling limiting the ability of the government to return immigrants who arrived in Ceuta and its sister city, Melilla, by sea rather than by land (over a technical “border”). All things considered, Spain has done everything in its power to encourage as much immigration as possible, and its government has openly conceded this fact, arguing that demographic and workforce realities make mass immigration an absolute necessity. Unsurprisingly, given all of this, the country’s foreign-born population jumped significantly in less than two years, from approximately 18.2% of the total population in 2024 to 20.3% today.

In light of Spain’s immigration policies and in the wake of the Ceuta disaster, over the weekend, several EU nations called for a suspension of Spain’s privileges under the Schengen Agreement, which allows borderless travel within the Schengen region: no passport control, a unified set of regulations, etc. Predictably, Meloni’s Italy was the first to speak up. Deputy PMs Antonio Tajani and Matteo Salvini announced a formal one-month suspension of Italy’s Schengen relations with Spain, closing Italy’s maritime and air entry points to Spain and introducing “targeted and selective” checks on non-EU travelers arriving from that country. France followed suit, reintroducing checks at its land border crossings with Spain. Finland began preparing to reimpose border controls along its own Schengen borders, and its interior minister, Mari Rantanen, offered the sharpest public statement by a government official to date: “Spain’s outer border is also our outer border, and. . . they have failed in their efforts to prevent this incursion, this invasion.” Denmark and Czechia both demanded Spain’s suspension from Schengen, but neither has taken unilateral action on its own.

In response, Pedro Sánchez complained that everyone, everywhere, was overreacting, stating that the rest of Europe was being “selfish, polarising, and unlawful.”

Taken as a whole, this entire episode—starting with Spain’s admitted desire to import as many immigrants as possible and continuing through this weekend’s demands for Spain’s suspension from Schengen—helps clarify some of the broader issues facing the EU.

First, in the age of mass immigration, Schengen shows clearly that the EU itself was a half-baked idea. Interestingly, Schengen did not start as an EU enterprise. It started as a side agreement between a handful of member states: Belgium, France, Germany, Luxembourg, and the Netherlands. It was only in 1999, via the Amsterdam Treaty’s Schengen Protocol, that the “Schengen acquis” (the whole body of Schengen rules and agreements) was formally absorbed into EU law. In 2004, the EU—as opposed to its member states, a key distinction—tried to push a European constitution on its members, including provisions formally mandating Schengen compliance, making the EU “an area without internal frontiers, in which the free movement of persons is ensured. . . .” The following year, French and Dutch voters explicitly rejected the constitution via referenda, which should, by all rights, have been the end of it. The EU being the EU, it decided that it wouldn’t take no for an answer and scaled the constitution back marginally and re-presented it as the Lisbon Treaty, which, among many foolish things, formalized and mandated participation in the Schengen migration policies.

Second, the Euro, the immigration mess, and the EU’s unwillingness to accept the will of the people as definitive confirm Robert Michels’ Iron Law of Oligarchy and show that the EU’s pretensions to “democracy” are rather laughable. Michels was a student of Max Weber, the founder of modern sociology, who sought to deepen his appreciation of socialism by studying the German Social Democratic Party (SPD), the most avowedly democratic, mass-participatory political organization in Europe at the time. He presumed that he would find a functional, egalitarian organization that confirmed all his fantastical priors. Instead, what he discovered was the opposite. He concluded, based on his study, that even organizations explicitly founded on democratic principles—universal participation, elected leadership, accountability to the membership—invariably develop into oligarchies, ruled by a small, self-perpetuating leadership class. It is simply the nature of large organizations. This, then, is Michels’ Iron Law of Oligarchy: “It is organisation that gives birth to the domination of the elected over the electors, of the mandataries over the mandators, of the delegates over the delegators. Who says organisation, says oligarchy.”

The EU is an oligarchy in Michelsian terms. It is governed by a small self-perpetuating ruling class that sees “the people” as impediments to its technocratic program and will do whatever is necessary to advance its agenda, regardless of the will of those people.

Finally, the EU will crumble. All Utopian enterprises eventually do. They must. They can’t help but do so. And while it may not be the monetary union that brings it down, something will. Maybe it will be Schengen and immigration. Maybe it will be something else. Who knows? Whatever the case, it will, eventually, collapse. The real, painful part of Michels’ Iron Law is the inability of oligarchies to reform themselves. They are incapable. What this suggests is that the EU’s response to the Ceuta incident and to Spain’s immigration unilateralism more generally will be to add more layers of centralizing regulation to the already oligarchical system, thereby making a bad problem even worse.

The EU won’t reform because it can’t reform. And so, it will collapse instead.

There is a reason why so few in history are noted for walking away from power like George Washington.

People can’t let go of power, period.

The EU can’t reform, and truth is in the end no government institution can, it is just a matter of resetting, and a new corrupt group takes over in some other form.

There is not ONE EU representative that is voted in by the citizens of the country that they represent.

They are ALL nominated to their positions — and have ZERO accountability.

All these countries have an unspoken class system. Generational planning by elites that see the peasants as something to be managed vs. empowered to succeed.

They thought the EU would be analogous to the USA, the “United Stated of Europe”. Except its form is nothing like the USA. There’s a massively disproportionate level of influence between EU countries, along with their economies and economic policies.

It’s nothing more than centralized planning by those unelected by the people, elected by corrupt politicians nobody trusts in the first place. It resembles the goals aspired by the Nazi’s....whose remnants formed the beginnings of the EU.

They force “net zero” policies on the masses, while the elites enjoy their AC and private jets. Germany has to be the worst, sacrificing their industrial might and automotive industry to China, all while becoming dependent on fragile energy sources.

...then came the “refugees” as icing on the cake, curiously lacking women and children. The so-called “leaders” need to be at the end of a rope, they’re pure traitors to their people

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