Editorial: Rumours of the Death of Europe have been Greatly Exaggerated

Harold Wilson was willing to defy the U.S. and refused to take us to war in Vietnam. Photograph by Allen Warren, Creative Commons License

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From an anti-hegemonic, class-conscious perspective in favour of UK sovereignty and European wide solidarity and cooperation, we should have concluded that Europe’s problems are more political and geopolitical in the short to medium term than they are fundamental or material. This editorial is a call to action for Europe to awaken to its own strength, purge itself of US-influenced elites in government, and chart an independent course.

The story being spun in the USA, The People’s Republic of China, and the Russian Federation is that Europe is in a state of de-industrialisation, geopolitical decline, and social fragility due to its own policy failures and partly as a result of blowback because it exercises its humanitarian principles of providing asylum to refugees.

Talking heads from China, Russia, and Iran paint a picture of Europe de-industrialising and declining, claiming the European economy is being hollowed out, primarily due to the loss of cheap energy from Russia following the 2022 invasion of Ukraine. The standing of Europe in the Middle East is also supposedly in jeopardy because of the material and political support of some of its governments for Israel (notoriously the Labour Government and the German Government) as a result of the pariah state Israel’s genocidal actions in Gaza and, now increasingly, the West Bank.

The central attack on European unity and European regionalism comes from American voices who assert, without decent evidence or any particular expertise, that European countries have nothing in common with each other.

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The reality is that Europe’s infrastructure—social, physical, industrial, and technological—is still in place: its autobahns, railways, healthcare, education systems, manufacturing base. Its social cohesion, still rests on solid principles of fairness, diversity, equality, and inclusivity, and the collective memory of previous wars on the continent will make it impossible for the ruling class of the US and its fellow travellers to con European citizens into prosecuting a crazy war with a battle hardened Russian Federation armed to the teeth.

Europe has the salutary example of Ukraine before it; devastated and with at least 1.7 million dead. The crisis we are experiencing in Europe is one of political leadership and the result of malign influence from the global capitalist centre, the United States. Europe is not experiencing a real, material collapse.

In Europe we do face political and external challenges, though our material and social conditions remain, for the moment, strong. The narrative of the UK and Europe’s decline is largely a fabrication. Europe’s perceived weakness is not due to an inherent failure but, where it exists, it is a result of a deliberate narrative campaign by media outlets active in the UK like George Galloway’s MOATS show. This fairy story of European failure is spun by right wing American media, revanchist Russian Federation propaganda operations, and Chinese and Iranian media outlets. These enemies of a united progressive Europe shamelessly scapegoat and exploit ‘hot button’ issues like trans rights and migration.

In reality, the European Union in the early noughties had a combined GDP in 2008 of $1.6 trillion more than that of the USA—peaking at $16.37 trillion, compared to the U.S.’s $14.77 trillion. The euro was increasing in value before the 2008 financial crisis. The EU boasts a regional development funds, and a platform for swift interstate conflict resolution. These were significant achievements. Moreover, the EU offers a full range of benefits to all of its citizens, far, far more than most US citizens obtain from their government.

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The European and UK transport infrastructure has not disappeared. European skills have not been lost. Unlike the USA, Europe and the UK possess a state funded world-class education system. Unlike in the USA, mass criminality is not on the rise and income distribution is relatively egalitarian. In Europe there is high social tolerance for diversity of all kinds and a certain level of freedom of expression and dissent which doesn’t exist in places like the People’s Republic of China or the Russian Federation. This is the marker of a healthy society. Literally! The universal, affordable healthcare systems in Europe are the world’s best and a mark of Europe’s civilisational robustness.

There has been modest GDP growth of under 1 percent since 2023, largely because of energy shocks and the reliance of countries like Germany on affordable Russian Federation oil and gas, but claims of de-industrialisation made by propaganda and disinformation operations like Russia Today, Press TV, and CGTN are vastly overblown. Manufacturing output is rebounding, and the continent retains its share of high-skill sectors. Crucially, the shift away from Russian energy has catalysed a faster transition to sustainable energy (renewables exceeding fossil fuels in EU electricity generation in 2022), a policy area where Europe leads globally, despite the disparagement coming from unreconstructed global warming denying brocialists and, short sighted US nationalists eager to expand US gas and oil (and even coal) exploration.

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Europe’s shift away from Russian oil and gas, which fell from 45% of EU imports pre-2022 to 18% by August 2024, while temporarily slowing the economy by 18% in gas demand reduction, has catalysed a faster transition to sustainable energy models (thank God) a goal embedded in the plans of Britain and European nations, but not those of Russia, China, or the U.S. In Europe renewables generated more EU electricity than fossil fuels for the first time in May 2022.

Europe’s geographic location remains a commercial asset, bridging Atlantic and Eurasian trade routes. Its infrastructure rankings are world-leading. The European Green Deal targets an ambitious 55% emissions cut by 2030 and 90% by 2040.

A sovereign Europe should be free from the influence of both the U.S. and Russia and China. For a European of any kind, communist or social democrat, this should go without saying. In fact the real and main problem for Europe has been its active and ongoing destabilisation by the ruling class of the corporate Anglosphere based in the USA.

The serious problem that we face is that key elements in European governments are closely aligned with US capital. There is a pervasive influence of comprador elites within Europe who prioritise American interests over their own country’s sovereignty and European unity. Political leadership in Europe is a infected by US nematode worms in our brain politik, with Blair, about to become the camp commandant in Gaza, the prime brain-wriggling demonic example, and Johnson merely the sinister, high-wire clown who nixed the Minsk accords which could have helped avoid the war in the Ukraine.

Leaders of the past like Harold Wilson were different; they were willing to defy the U.S. to preserve the national independence of the UK and refused to take us to war in Vietnam. The very opposite of that cavilling, scheming, unscrupulous little showman Blair, who went to war in Iraq alongside Bush with alacrity, based on a dodgy dossier fabricated by MI6.

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The United States wields a secret superpower: control over the global currency, with the U.S. dollar maintaining its status as the preeminent reserve currency, comprising 57.8% of allocated global foreign exchange reserves at the end of 2024 despite a gradual decline. When the U.S. prints money, it can be spent anywhere in the world, effectively bypassing traditional monetarist constraints. This financial dominance has allowed the U.S. to cultivate comprador elites across European states and throughout the world, promoting them to positions of power within national governments, trans-European organisations, countries all around the world, and to the United Nations.

This network of U.S.-nurtured figures entrenched transatlantic dependencies, further exemplified by the Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership (TTIP). This was proposed in 2013 as a supposed economic booster but was widely criticised as a deliberate U.S. ploy to undermine European unity by eroding regulatory sovereignty—allowing corporations to challenge food safety, environmental, and labour standards through investor-state dispute settlement mechanisms, potentially costing Europe up to 1 million jobs and prioritizing big business over public welfare.

A stark imaginative illustration of this dynamic of co-option and control by the USA of the EU governing class is presented in Roman Polanski’s film The Ghost Writer (2010), which depicts a British Prime Minister, Adam Lang hiding away from the public after leading the UK into the Iraq War under heavy U.S. influence. It is, of course, a fictional portrayal of Tony and Cherie Blair, with the fictional Cherie Blair, Ruth Lang revealed to be the CIA plant who manipulated Adam Lang into a war. Perhaps, the creative leap the film director took was warranted given the subsequent behaviour of the Blairs.

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Today, Europe seems to be cutting off its own hand to spite its face. It is being led to the brink of war and destruction by leaders in Germany, France, and the UK—British Prime Minister Keir Starmer, German Chancellor Friedrich Merz, and French President Emmanuel Macron—who lack even 30% public support, with net approval ratings plummeting to -44% for Starmer (21% favourable, 72% unfavourable), 29% satisfaction for Merz, and a historic low of 22% for Macron amid domestic scandals, protests, and policy failures as of October 2025.

But while approval ratings for leaders like Starmer, Merz, and Macron are low, this does not represent systemic collapse. The government shuts down in the USA, perhaps, but not in the UK. The EU continues to function as a platform for conflict resolution, regional development, and rights protection, rooted in decades of institutional evolution despite the spiteful comments of bad actors.

Moreover, although the crisis in Gaza has strained Europe’s ties with the Middle East, because the EU leadership is being puppeteered into supporting Israel by the USA, yet trade unions and ordinary citizens across Europe, in contrast to our US-nematode worm controlled governments of Prime Minister Starmer, Chancellor Merz, President Macron, and others, firmly oppose these policies in our majority, with the Spanish and Irish governments already distancing themselves by recognising Palestine in 2024 and pushing for EU-wide trade suspensions on Israeli settlements in line with ICJ rulings.

The hope is that the British people and other European nations are unlikely to settle for figures like Farage, and the pound-shop fascists that now tout themselves as the representatives of the majority. Instead of people like Farage and Le Pen, one way or another, we Europeans must eventually install leaders who prioritise sovereignty and competence over scapegoating migrants and LGBTQ people and the prosecution of expensive wars with foreign power far away. Despite initial high poll ratings, Reform was trounced in Wales.

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While all this is happening, the United States, under the guise of bellicosity, is pulling in its horns, retreating back to the western hemisphere, all the while engaging in high-stakes nuclear posturing it is masking its actual withdrawal in order to strategically reposition as a fortress hemispheric power.

The U.S.’s retreat is coupled with its exploitation of the UK—evident in U.S. tech giants like Google and Meta. The UK might be destined to become the redoubt of US capitalism in Europe.

The September 2025 US-UK Tech Prosperity Pact, which means a controlling £33 billion of investments will be made in the UK for these organisations which will then control UK AI, cloud, and data infrastructure. Microsoft will own £22 billion worth and Google £7.4 billion, building data centres in the so called Golden Triangle of the Oxford-Cambridge-London innovation hub. The notorious Amazon Web Services’ will invest £7.4 billion in cloud and AI services, and BlackRock’s invest £520 in the Gravity Edge data centre venture in west London to support AI infrastructure. This coercive intrusion of US Big Tech money into the UK data infrastructure may generate a strong reaction from a democratically elected future socialist government concerned with UK sovereignty.

Though, Starmer has invited U.S. firms like BlackRock to feast on the British public sector contracts, and to scoop up billions of pounds worth of housing, from a class and anti-imperialist perspective, the people of the UK and Europe could step up to craft a different trajectory.

Europe possesses the material conditions, societal cohesion, and strategic advantages to chart its own course as a region again, provided it can overcome the influence of comprador elites and foreign interference. For the moment, Europe’s fundamental strengths endure, and after a good dose of deworming powder and an operation to extract the compradores from government, Europe can reassert itself as an independent, progressive regional block.The challenge lies our reclaiming industries, data, and sovereignty from the pillagers and looters invited in by leaders like Prime Minister Starmer.

Yes, Capitalism may eventually meet its end in Europe and worldwide (possibly violently) but in the interim, Socialists and communists should not be seen to be attempting to catalyse disaster. We should agitate for smoother, stronger blends of social democracy and Keynesianism. We should vote and work so that a union friendly Your Party is installed into government in the UK. We need to keep the show on the road, and craft an independent UK and EU foreign policy. That will need to be backed by a high-tech joint, European-wide military sector; to ensure the independence of Europe and the UK in the medium to long term as US capitalism withdraws back to its lair.

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