by Stephen Soukup
The EU is an oligarchy governed by a small self-perpetuating ruling class that sees “the people” as impediments to its technocratic program.
A long, long time ago—27 years, to be exact—my boss (the inimitable
Mark Melcher) and I predicted that the European Monetary Union would be
the death of the EU. The Euro, we wrote for our clients at a now-defunct
big brokerage house, would be a disaster and would destroy everything
that the post-war Europeans had spent the previous several decades
working to build. Specifically, we wrote:
Psst! You wanna know a secret? The Euro,
and the mess it represents, is going to be a social, economic and
political catastrophe. Indeed, we think it is probable that the adoption
of the Euro will be to 21st century Europe, what the killing of the
Archduke Franz Ferdinand was to 20th century Europe; i.e., that point in
time when history will record that the unraveling began in earnest.
Exaggeration? Hyperbole? Well, maybe. But
maybe not. You see, the problem isn’t, as most critics claim, simply
that the “policy makers” from the various “regions,” will fight over
economic and monetary policy, and that the economic ignoramuses might
win. The problem is that economic ignoramuses are likely to be the only
ones at the table. . . .
Starting in about 2010 and running for the next decade or so, every
January, in my annual foreign-policy forecast piece, I would lead with a
reiteration of that prediction. The collapse of the Euro, I would
write, was inevitable. It didn’t matter if it actually happened this
year or next year or a decade down the road. It would all eventually
crumble, largely because the ignoramuses simply couldn’t help themselves
and couldn’t stop doing economically foolish things.
Sometime over the last few years, I quit making that prediction every
year for a couple of reasons. First, I quit writing annual forecast
pieces as my business model and focus changed. Second, and more to the
point, it became unnecessary. The EU had already made itself
economically irrelevant. Between its jealously fueled outrage at
American tech companies, its obsession with carbon emissions, and its
conscious decision to strangle its capital markets through the
imposition of overtly political investing mandates, the EU guaranteed
that it would become the first modern civilization in history to regress
developmentally. It knowingly chose to deindustrialize and to build an
economic future that was far bleaker than even its remote economic past.
The Euro, I concluded, was pointless.
That’s not to say that I gave up believing that the EU would
inevitably collapse. I just gave up wasting my readers’ time by
prattling on about it.
Looking back at all of this now, it’s possible I may have been
mistaken. No, I wasn’t wrong about the economic stuff. Not only are the
ignoramuses in charge, but no one else is even in the discussion.
Italy’s Giorgia Meloni is the only Eurozone leader who questions the
Union’s climate policies, for example, rightly warning that they will
lead to “industrial desertification.” Still, even she officially
supports the EU’s position on climate change and carbon emissions more
generally, as well as its agreement to the Paris Climate Accords. It’s
ignoramuses all the way down.
Nevertheless, it’s probably the case that I was wrong that the
economic ignoramuses would be the ones who would precipitate the
official end of the EU. Or, more accurately, I suppose, I was wrong that
their economically illiterate policies would be the proximate cause of
the EU’s collapse. It’s the same ignoramuses, just different policies.
As you likely know, this past week, tens of thousands of “migrants”
from Morocco invaded the Spanish city of Ceuta, which is along the coast
in North Africa. The images from the enclave were grim: hordes of
people, mostly young men, pushing, racing, and fighting to get out of
Africa and into Europe (geographical technicalities, be damned). The
conditions on the ground were grimmer still: as of yesterday, some
70-plus deaths had been confirmed, while more than a thousand people
required medical attention. The whole thing was shocking—or at least it
would have been if it hadn’t also been utterly predictable.
For most of the last forty years, Spain has been a hub of primarily
North African and Middle Eastern immigration to Europe. Since the 1980s,
Spain has had six major extraordinary regularizations
for its migrant populations. Although different in name and details,
these “extraordinary regularizations” are essentially broad general
amnesties, grants of legal immigration status to those who entered the
country illegally. In 2005, under the former Prime Minister José Luis
Rodríguez Zapatero (a socialist), Spain granted amnesty to more than
half a million illegal immigrants. Earlier this year, under current
Prime Minister Pedro Sánchez (also a socialist . . . or worse), the country began the process of yet another regularization, the total size of which is unknown at present but is estimated to be between 500,000 and over 800,000.
Additionally, earlier this summer, the Spanish Supreme Court issued a
ruling limiting the ability of the government to return immigrants who
arrived in Ceuta and its sister city, Melilla, by sea rather than by
land (over a technical “border”). All things considered, Spain has done
everything in its power to encourage as much immigration as possible,
and its government has openly conceded this fact, arguing that
demographic and workforce realities make mass immigration an absolute
necessity. Unsurprisingly, given all of this, the country’s foreign-born
population jumped significantly in less than two years, from approximately 18.2% of the total population in 2024 to 20.3% today.
In light of Spain’s immigration policies and in the wake of the Ceuta
disaster, over the weekend, several EU nations called for a suspension
of Spain’s privileges under the Schengen Agreement, which allows
borderless travel within the Schengen region: no passport control, a
unified set of regulations, etc. Predictably, Meloni’s Italy was the
first to speak up. Deputy PMs Antonio Tajani and Matteo Salvini
announced a formal one-month suspension of Italy’s Schengen relations
with Spain, closing Italy’s maritime and air entry points to Spain and
introducing “targeted and selective” checks on non-EU travelers arriving
from that country. France followed suit, reintroducing checks at its
land border crossings with Spain. Finland began preparing to reimpose
border controls along its own Schengen borders, and its interior
minister, Mari Rantanen, offered the sharpest public statement by a
government official to date: “Spain’s outer border is also our outer
border, and. . . they have failed in their efforts to prevent this
incursion, this invasion.” Denmark and Czechia both demanded Spain’s
suspension from Schengen, but neither has taken unilateral action on its
own.
In response, Pedro Sánchez complained that everyone, everywhere, was
overreacting, stating that the rest of Europe was being “selfish,
polarising, and unlawful.”
Taken as a whole, this entire episode—starting with Spain’s admitted
desire to import as many immigrants as possible and continuing through
this weekend’s demands for Spain’s suspension from Schengen—helps
clarify some of the broader issues facing the EU.
First, in the age of mass immigration, Schengen shows clearly that
the EU itself was a half-baked idea. Interestingly, Schengen did not
start as an EU enterprise. It started as a side agreement between a
handful of member states: Belgium, France, Germany, Luxembourg, and the
Netherlands. It was only in 1999, via the Amsterdam Treaty’s Schengen
Protocol, that the “Schengen acquis” (the whole body of Schengen rules
and agreements) was formally absorbed into EU law. In 2004, the EU—as
opposed to its member states, a key distinction—tried to push a European
constitution on its members, including provisions formally mandating
Schengen compliance, making the EU “an area without internal frontiers,
in which the free movement of persons is ensured. . . .” The following
year, French and Dutch voters explicitly rejected the constitution via
referenda, which should, by all rights, have been the end of it. The EU
being the EU, it decided that it wouldn’t take no for an answer and
scaled the constitution back marginally and re-presented it as the
Lisbon Treaty, which, among many foolish things, formalized and mandated
participation in the Schengen migration policies.
Second, the Euro, the immigration mess, and the EU’s unwillingness to
accept the will of the people as definitive confirm Robert Michels’
Iron Law of Oligarchy and show that the EU’s pretensions to “democracy”
are rather laughable. Michels was a student of Max Weber, the founder of
modern sociology, who sought to deepen his appreciation of socialism by
studying the German Social Democratic Party (SPD), the most avowedly
democratic, mass-participatory political organization in Europe at the
time. He presumed that he would find a functional, egalitarian
organization that confirmed all his fantastical priors. Instead, what he
discovered was the opposite. He concluded, based on his study, that
even organizations explicitly founded on democratic principles—universal
participation, elected leadership, accountability to the
membership—invariably develop into oligarchies, ruled by a small,
self-perpetuating leadership class. It is simply the nature of large
organizations. This, then, is Michels’ Iron Law of Oligarchy: “It is
organisation that gives birth to the domination of the elected over the
electors, of the mandataries over the mandators, of the delegates over
the delegators. Who says organisation, says oligarchy.”
The EU is an oligarchy in Michelsian terms. It is governed by a small
self-perpetuating ruling class that sees “the people” as impediments to
its technocratic program and will do whatever is necessary to advance
its agenda, regardless of the will of those people.
Finally, the EU will crumble. All Utopian enterprises eventually do.
They must. They can’t help but do so. And while it may not be the
monetary union that brings it down, something will. Maybe it will be
Schengen and immigration. Maybe it will be something else. Who knows?
Whatever the case, it will, eventually, collapse. The real, painful part
of Michels’ Iron Law is the inability of oligarchies to reform
themselves. They are incapable. What this suggests is that the EU’s
response to the Ceuta incident and to Spain’s immigration unilateralism
more generally will be to add more layers of centralizing regulation to
the already oligarchical system, thereby making a bad problem even
worse.
The EU won’t reform because it can’t reform. And so, it will collapse instead.
Photo: CEUTA, SPAIN - JULY 31: Undocumented
migrants, mostly young men, who entered Spain's North African enclave
of Ceuta illegally, begin returning to Morocco after realizing their
chances of obtaining legal status in Spain are unlikely on July 31,
2026. Meanwhile, small groups of migrants continue trying to cross into
Ceuta by swimming or climbing the breakwater surrounding the Fnideq
coast. More than 48,300 of the approximately 50,000 migrants who entered
the Spanish enclave of Ceuta since early Thursday have returned to
Morocco by Friday afternoon, Spain's Interior Ministry said, according
to EFE news agency. (Photo by Abu Adem Muhammed/Anadolu via Getty
Images)
Stephen R. Soukup is the Director of The Political Forum Institute and the author of The Dictatorship of Woke Capital (Encounter, 2021, 2023)
Source: https://amgreatness.com/2026/08/03/the-eu-and-the-iron-law-of-oligarchy/
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