Well, yes, try to impose nationalist or protectionist policies in any EU country and watch yourself and your family get GLADIO'd out of existence extra pronto.
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It's not just about that. Most of your rulers desperately believe in neoliberalism. They mostly aren't being forced to be internationalist technocratic neoliberal assholes, it's their religion (there are exceptions, but they are exceptions.)
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Yes, but, this is just people being products of their environment.
Elites are carefully cultivated for ideological consistency. Exceptions are pruned, mercilessly.
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In the old Chomskian sense of manufactured consent, they would not be around to be "leaders" if they weren't of a certain spineless disposition.
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sure, but that no longer requires things like Gladio. It's self imposed, and not done so out of fear but of belief.
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All I see in this is the success of the program.
You get to Corbyn being ratted out by his own party through years, decades, of removing every single effectual person from power.
When all that's left is careerist cowards and softies, control can take on forms less overt.
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If there were a European revival in the sense of strength of belief, nationalism (or regionalism), etc., you can bet we'd see the return of annual mysterious deaths among prominent politicians.
Market forces, innit?
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Europe is powerful enough to stop that, if they were serious. It's time to stop pretending you HAVE to bow down to America. At this point, it's a choice.
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which your leaders just made again, by the way. The EU response to Ukraine was to crawl spinelessly to America and beg to be ruled and impoverished.
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You know fully well that choices require more than merely the notional ability to enact change.
It'd be vastly overestimating the moral fiber of European leaders to think that they'd be willing to take literally any risk whatsoever to their own careers. They are less than weak.
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One of the ways in which I respect US culture more than European is that while people here are even more heavily propagandized, even worse educated, and even more stripped of free time, effective autonomy, et. al., underneath all that there is at least a nominal will to power.
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that's because the daily grind of life is mean, and there's almost no social safety net. If you won't hurt other people, someone will stomp you into the mud because if it's not you, it'll be them.
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American life is a game of musical chairs, 80% of the chairs suck, there are millions less chairs than people and if you don't get a chair, you wind up homeless or in prison or die.
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