The Blackening of Europe: Ideologies & International Developments

This book has footnotes, technically they are endnotes, MANY, MANY of them. Seriously, about 40% of the e-book file is sources and attributions. It does not affect the reading experience because they are safely at the back. Use, as necessary. Once you finish the book, you may have to scroll to the end for Kindle to realize that you have finished the book.This is a purely intellectual history. Occasionally there are disruptive events like the First and Second World Wars or the 1973 oil crisis. Decolonization occurs, but the intellectual seems to have barely noticed. And, in truth, the end of European colonialism seems simply to have been an excuse to invent neocolonialism. The same humanitarian impulses, misguided though they frequently are, facilitated colonialism in the first place. The author mentions Immanuel Kant and, in contrast to the last book I read, she mentions Edmund Burke by name. In fact, their ideas are discussed at length. This is especially true in relation to more recent academics and public intellectuals of the 20th Century variety. The Frankfurt school is also mentioned by name and discussed at length, as is neoconservatism. Here one sees the impact of the French Revolution and the Enlightenment. The narrative is not didactic and while it has direction the reader is often left to reach conclusions. This is refreshing given the subject matter.While paleo conservatives come across as beautiful losers, neoconservatives come across as the disenchanted liberals and reformed Communists that they very often are. More importantly, they seem to prefer babbling like an idiot in public to expressing open fealty to Israel or belief in God for that matter. But it is the new cosmopolitans who come off worse than anyone else. They seem obsessed with living the dream, unconcerned with any consequences in the present, or that may occur at some point in the future. The European project, at least after 1975, reveals itself to be a corporatist affair where nations abandon their sovereignty so that their citizens’ rights, freedoms, obligations, and cultural inheritance can simply be bargained away as part of an EU trade deal.Claire Ellis deserves high praise for her treatment of Count Richard von Coudenhove-Kalergi, pointing out that he at no time intended for mass immigration into Europe. Rather, his intention was to create a still Christian European man, some of whom would emigrate TO Africa and further its development while providing raw materials for the home continent. The “new Egyptians” are illustrative science fiction, a new golden age man arising at some indeterminate point in the future. Kalergi was a man of his age, Jewish financiers and socialist intellectuals were simply the most cosmopolitan, he saw their disproportionate influence in the ”modern age“ and accepted it. He saw them working together and accepted that too. The Pan Europa generation of cosmopolitan intellectuals is shown to have abhorred Soviet Communism, what would today be considered Islamism, and the use of uncultured barbarians by one European nation to bludgeon another. Whether these ideas are feasible or desirable is another matter entirely. Claire Ellis also chronicles Kalergi’s gradual loss of influence, which was concurrent with the loss of national sovereignty by European peoples, so that national immigration restrictions were negated at the European level as they were adopted by democratic governments. A later generation of intellectuals shows itself to be at odds with his vision but similarly unconcerned with their own ideas when any reciprocity from the new Europeans is neither forthcoming nor expected by those in authority. It is this subservience, this tyranny, this intellectual darkness that is the blackening of Europe.

This book should be mandatory reading for college freshmen. Im liberal! Maybe, maybe youre a neo-con. Im conservative! No, actually youre a neo-liberal. While already familiar with the terms, liberal, conservative, paleoconservative, neocon,neoliberal, leftist, socialist, etc...the author presents an ideaology and then its critics. The first part of a planned three part project, beginning with ideaologies, initially, with some of the men who first sought to unite Europe, their ideas, how their ideas were met, accepted or rejected, from the Fabians to the Frankfurt School, classical conservatives vs modern conservatives.It really should be the go to book for not just a young person who wants to find out what they are, or arent, but also for anyone interested in the Leviathan in Brussels, the Great Beast many of us would like to see expire. Im excited to read the next two books.Highly recommended. Her style is light, but exact. Just enough descriptions and theory to keep one turning the pages, bot so much detail that one is reading footnotes and footnotes, consulting Google.The beginning starts with Kalergi, a man with a strange pedigree, a garish name, a bold( ridiculous some may say) plan..a man I knew nothing about.Europe as a political concept does not exist. The part of the world with that name covers peoples and States in chaos, a powder keg of international conflicts, the breeding ground of future conflicts. This is the European Question: the mutual hatred of Europeans for each other poisons the international atmosphere and is a perpetual worry to even the most peace-loving countries of the world. ... The European Question will be resolved only by the union of the peoples of Europe. This will come about either voluntarily, by the construction of a pan-European federation or coercively by Russian conquest. … The greatest obstacle to the realisation of the United States of Europe is the thousand-year rivalry between the two most populous nations of Pan-Europe: Germany and France.31Germany and France are still bickering, will bicker long after the EU is gone and a new union , a better union is in its place, one conservative, traditional, peaceful and prosperous.

For anyone baffled by the demographic transformation of Europe, THE BLACKENING OF EUROPE gives the reader a most insightful historical and ideological explanation - this book is heavily documented with very extensive footnotes! Highly recommended!