What explains the unprecedented results of the May 2014 European elections? Why are long-established political parties in steep decline throughout Europe while protest parties ranging all the way from the far-right to the mainstream to the far-left are on the rise? Do the European elections portend real change in Europe, or will the political elites succeed in further pursuing their agenda of creating a unified Europe without meaningful accountability to average voters?
Soft Utopia: The European Union at a Crossroads is a must-read for those who wish to understand the EU; it is the first book to pinpoint the essence of the EU in its utopian vision of a supranationally govcrned world, and from that perspective to shed light on its true meaning and purpose. The book’s thesis is that the EU’s commitment to the ideology of global governance, with its aim to achieve an unprecedented measure of world peace by establishing an ill-defined global order that would be essentially unaccountable to nation-states and national electorates, has pernicious implications for democracy, the protection of human rights and the world’s most important alliance the transatlantic alliance between North America and Europe. Why? With the global governance ideology at its core, the EU has become inherently anti-democratic; its adherents will not be impeded by electorates who do not understand the vision. The EU and its vision also suffer from overweening ambition; the most dedicated EU elites aspire to transform not just the world order, but also the lives of individuals, by promoting a human rights policy that denies the importance of tradition, rootedness in local communities, and the basic constancy of human nature. And finally, the global governance vision makes the EU, perhaps unintentionally but unavoidably, anti-American; it seeks a global order in which the sovereign powers of nation-states, including the United States, are severely curtailed.
