Soft Utopia ― The European Union at a Crossroads

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.

Todd Huizinga is Director of International Outreach for the Acton Institute for the Study of Religion and Liberty in Grand Rapids. He is charged with increasing Acton’s international engagement to promote free and virtuous societies abroad. The Acton Institute promotes the free and virtuous society sustained by religious principles.

A U.S. diplomat from 1992-2012, he speaks German, Dutch, Spanish and French. He served as deputy chief of mission at the U.S. embassy in Luxembourg, political counselor at the U.S. Mission to the European Union in Brussels, consul for political and economic affairs at the U.S. consulates in Hamburg and Munich, and consul for public affairs at the U.S. consulate in Monterrey, Mexico. He has also served in Dublin, Frankfurt and Costa Rica, and on the European Union Desk in the State Department in Washington, D.C.

A native of Grand Rapids, he received a B.A. in Music and German from Calvin College and an M.A. in German Studies from the University of Wisconsin-Madison. He is the co-founder of the Transatlantic Christian Council, a public policy network dedicated to strengthening the transatlantic alliance. He is currently also a research fellow of Calvin College's Paul B. Henry Institute for the Study of Christianity and Politics.