{"id":99191,"date":"2025-11-21T04:00:55","date_gmt":"2025-11-21T09:00:55","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/?p=99191"},"modified":"2025-11-20T20:55:37","modified_gmt":"2025-11-21T01:55:37","slug":"the-eu-with-nato-as-a-substitute-empire","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/2025\/11\/21\/the-eu-with-nato-as-a-substitute-empire\/","title":{"rendered":"The EU (with NATO) as a substitute empire"},"content":{"rendered":"

On his Substack, Lorenzo Warby<\/a> discusses the European Union (and its essential military support, NATO) as an imperial subsitute in a post-imperial age:<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a><\/p>\n

Historian Timothy Snyder makes an argument in various lectures<\/a> and on his Substack<\/a> that what became the EU was a replacement for empire. I think he is right, but not in the way he suggests. Prof. Snyder holds that what became the EU is an economic<\/em> replacement because he appears to believe that empire was economically beneficial to their metropole<\/a> economies.<\/p>\n

This seems clearly wrong. Every maritime imperial metropole got richer after it lost its empire. This is true whether they were part of what became the EU or not: the obvious example of the latter being Japan and its dramatic postwar economic success after being stripped of its empire and devastated by American bombing. For the economies of all the former maritime-empire states, access to the US market, and the US-led maritime order<\/a>, was much more valuable, and way cheaper, than empire.<\/p>\n

It is not clear that even Britain made a “profit” from its Empire, once you consider<\/a> military and administrative costs. Portugal had the largest maritime empire \u2014 relative to the size of its metropole \u2014 for longest and is the poorest country in Western Europe. Compare that to rather wealthier land-locked Switzerland, which never had an empire.<\/p>\n

Empires are what states<\/em> do.1<\/sup> It is foolish to presume<\/em> that any particular state action is beneficial to<\/a> those that a state rules. Having an empire increases the power of state, and the opportunities within the state apparat<\/em>. That is more than enough to motivate territorial imperialism, whether by land or by sea.<\/p>\n

Conspicuous absences<\/strong><\/p>\n

A conspicuous absence from Prof. Snyder’s analysis of what-became-the-EU is NATO. There are a lot of regional economic cooperation organisations around the word. None of them are remotely as integrated as the EU because none of them have the equivalent of NATO.<\/p>\n

In order to pool sovereignty within the EU, states first have to have their territorial sovereignty guaranteed. This guarantee is precisely what NATO provides.<\/p>\n

The post-Versailles European order<\/a> of 1919-1939 was unstable because it interspersed between Germany and the Soviet Union a series of small states that the victors of 1914-1918<\/a> could not readily reach. NATO has two huge advantages that the nation-states of Eastern Europe did not have<\/a> in the 1919-1939 period \u2014 NATO is a geographically contiguous alliance and it includes the United States. The purpose of NATO, in the famous words<\/a> of its first Secretary-General, being:<\/p>\n