Unify Europe: a subversion of our deepest heritage

"(...) in western societies free-market relations don’t exist because of the State, but in spite of it. Classical liberals and libertarians are aware that the roots of our history of freedom are in the Middle Ages and in its institutional pluralism. As Boudewijn Bouckaert wrote, “polycentric extended orders, such as Medieval Peace of God (1100-1500), do not conform with the Hobbesian intuition about power and order.

(…) The Medieval order was an order without a sovereign power in the ‘modern’ sense of the word, i.e. a central power disposing of a monopoly of a coercive power enabling it to rule a whole nation and to act as a conflict-solver of the last resort.

We can find the same observations in Robert Nisbet: “medieval society, from the point of view of formal authority, was one of the most loosely organized societies in history. Despite the occasional pretensions of centralizing popes, emperors, and kings, the authority that stretched theoretically from each of them was constantly hampered by the existence of jealously guarded ‘liberties’ of town, gild, monastery, and village”

(...) one of the most important elements of this European identity is history. And history has not always been the Nation-State’s dominion. In fact, pluralism has been the key of our historical success, and such pluralism was the absence (at the end of Middle Ages) of a powerful center of political decisions.

We had Church, Empire, a number of Kings and Princes, a multitude of feudal relationships and – in some regions – independent Cities, but we never had a small group of rulers able to organize economic life and civil society. As Jean Baechler noticed in his important study about the origins of capitalism and about the role of medieval anarchy in this extraordinary history “the dark centuries have undeniably diffused a spiritual order, but also a deep disorder in politics and the economy”.

This manageable chaos was the explanation of our success.

The will to unify Europe shows a misunderstanding of what the European identity is all about and a subversion of our deepest heritage."

"European Unification as the New Frontier of Collectivist Redistribution The case for Competitive Federalism and a Free-market Economy" Carlo Lottieri, University of Siena