Элиты признают крах Запада: проект глобальной интеграции провалился и ведет к неизбежному гражданскому конфликту

Ready for a history lesson? If not, this essay is not for you.  No short essay can explain the historical forces that brought the West to the brink of collapse; it would take a book, then another, and yet another... And there are many reasons why the powers that be seem reconciled to the fact that the Third World can and should be allowed to invade and take over the West, despite how manifestly irrational it may seem. For many reasons, the people in power think they can manage the fallout, although to any rational observer it's clear that they are entirely mistaken.  Most of us are mystified by the irrationality of it all, but there are explanations of how it happened.  But it's not impossible to start explaining how we got here, and the series of choices and collective beliefs that got us here. So let me try.  As with so many ills in the world, it all began with the French Revolution, the ideological foundation of which set the stage for a rejection of nationalism and a deep belief among the leading elites in the spread of the "Universal Rights of Man" as the necessary next step in progress, replacing the Ancien Régime not only in France, but in all of Europe and eventually the world. Year Zero, they called it, when everything in the world changed, up to and including the clock and the calendar. Everything gets wiped away, and a new Regime would rule the world. Out of that came the Napoleonic Wars, the later growth of communism, and the reaction.  No point in going into all that. Nobody in power today outside of France would see the connection. For the current crop of transnationalists, they see the two world wars as the catalyst for the goal of eliminating the nation-state, first through the United Nations, and later the European Union.  Nationalism was the problem; transnationalism and eliminating the nation-state are the solution. It is the "post-war consensus" from which most of the ills we face today stem. As is so often the case, the pendulum swung way too far, and the result is that the solution is at least as bad as the problem it was designed to solve.  The goal was to create a rules-based international order that would replace politics with technocracy, nations with shared sovereignty (nations were to be something akin to US states), and eventually eliminate the causes and capacity for war.  Europe, where World War I and World War II originated, was to transition over time into something akin to the United States of Europe, starting with the integration of the French and German economies through the "European Coal and Steel Community," (ECSC)  making the countries so interdependent that war itself would become unthinkable. The eventual goal was to create so much interdependency that European states would become Nations in Name Only (call them NINOs), and ultimately a European Union would replace politics with technocrats running a rules-based order. Popular will is too volatile, and voters too stupid and uninformed to have much power. But because nationalism is deeply embedded in people's psychology, the transition had to be slow enough to ensure that the benefits of integration would acclimatize populations to the gradual erosion of their political rights.  None of this was a secret, evil plot. The theory and history convinced the elites that this was the solution to a political problem that had resulted in mass slaughter. For those paying attention, it was all laid bare, just as the World Economic Forum takes no pains to hide its plans. There may be secret agreements, as there always have been among nations, but the overall plan is no secret.  Anybody who has taken a 400-level college course in international politics should have learned the history and the theory, and any graduate student in Political Science should know it well (although academia is so awful these days that, perhaps, it is all lost to the haze of "irrelevant" historical knowledge that nobody studies).  If you glance at the history and governance structure of the EU, the path to political integration is plain to see. From the ECSC to the Euro, the European Parliament, where all power is centralized in the European Commission and MPs are essentially powerless, and the supporting institutions outside the EU's formal structure tied into a network that extends beyond individual countries' borders.  The WEF is currently the most prominent of these institutions, but hardly the only one. It's about integrating states, their economies, their militaries, and their regulations to centralize power.   It all began with the resolve to eliminate great power wars, which you have to admit is a noble goal, although the means have led to...this. Open borders, an ideology that deprecates all aspects of national and even Western culture, and a belief that the resistance to this movement is equivalent to the rise of Nazism.  Transnationalism, in the eyes of the elite, is self-evidently good. And, by the way, when you centralize that power, it's no accident that the people in charge benefit mightily from that centralization. If power corrupts, and absolute power corrupts absolutely, integrating all the world's greatest powers is pretty heady stuff.  Of course, nobody in 1945 expected that it would turn out like this, and certainly would not have imagined that open borders would mean that migrants from MENA countries would begin colonizing Europe. They assumed that the World Bank and economic integration would Westernize the Third World, and that decolonization would relieve tensions and the national power bases of the world's great powers.  Yeah, that didn't happen.  The ideological foundations of this movement seemed strong and coherent, and fit with the technocratic elite's belief that they knew how to run things. But that belief is just as wrong as the communist belief that there is a technocratic way to run an economy to create prosperity. The more they tried, the more totalitarian the communist countries became and the more corrupt the leadership.  The same has been happening in Europe, only more slowly. Call it boiling the frog.  Only the frog doesn't want to be boiled, and the backlash is here. The project has failed, and what we are seeing is a clash between populations that see it failing badly and a technocratic elite that clings to its hard-won power and still half-believes the project's ideological foundations are right.  All the evidence of failure is there for all to see, but as with the US Congress facing the budget deficit, fixing the problems seems too difficult and threatening to their power.  Rome faces problems similar in scale. The elites painted themselves into a corner, and their chosen solutions accelerated the decline. They assumed that expanding the empire, incorporating more and more foreigners, and propping up an economy built on unsustainable promises would somehow work.  They killed the Western empire. Europe is currently being killed by the people in charge.  Is it reversible? I doubt it. Germany is considering banning the AfD, as if suppressing speech and popular dissent will make the problems go away. In the UK, even the Brexit vote was only a speed bump. The problems remain and are growing.  The decline is well underway. Civil conflict appears inevitable. And nobody has the courage to face the problems.