AMAC EXCLUSIVE
As farmer protests against radical “green” policies continue to sweep across Europe, liberal governments risk upsetting a delicate social balance that has led to relative peace and prosperity on the continent for decades.
On February 19, hundreds of tractors rolled down the streets in Prague protesting the E.U. climate policies and high energy costs. Two days later, hundreds more tractors blocked roads in Spain. On March 6, farmers in Poland also took to the streets to oppose the E.U.’s climate agenda. Belgium, France, Italy, and Greece have all seen similar demonstrations – which are themselves an outgrowth of Dutch protests that have continued off and on for a year over proposed new nitrogen emissions policies.
While the corporate media has largely ignored the widespread demonstrations against globalist trade policies and new emissions standards being implemented by several European governments and the European Union, the unrest is nonetheless one of the most significant storylines that has developed in Europe over the last several months.
In addition to opposing trade practices that allow foreign competitors like China to dump cheap agricultural goods into Europe, European farmers are also irate over the European Union’s so-called “Green Deal.” The platform, which aims to make Europe the world’s first “climate neutral” bloc by 2050, calls for cutting greenhouse gas emissions by 55 percent by 2030 and halving pesticide use – policies which would decimate small and family-owned farms throughout Europe and make the continent completely reliant on foreign food suppliers.
The Green Deal is also expected to be followed by a “Blue Deal” which would overhaul water rights policy in Europe. Again, farmers say the plan would severely undermine their ability to remain economically viable and dramatically cut into yields.
But as the protests have developed, they have also evolved into a general backlash against the liberal establishment in Europe and a re-assertion of traditional religious and cultural traditions and customs. For many of these farmers and the citizens supporting them, the effort to defeat these attempts to “revolutionize” European society is a crusade to defend Western civilization itself.
Professor Aurelien de Lancey, who advised Republican Party candidates on agricultural policy in the 1980s and 1990s, told me that the farmer protests are an “existential” battle for the future of Europe and the European Union. “From its foundation, agriculture has been the E.U.’s second-most important economic pillar next to the energy-intensive industries like power generation and mining,” he said.
The importance of farming to modern European society began with the end of the Allied effort to rebuild Germany and Western Europe at the end of World War II. As the United States handed control of the German economy back to Germany and withdrew from the continent, farming became essential to creating stable incomes and livelihoods so as to avoid further economic turbulence and a resumption of hostilities, as was the case with the rise of Hitler after World War I.
The late conservative French Prime Minister Raymond Barre, who also served as a vice president of the European Commission, once told me in an interview that when the war ended in 1945, developing a productive and stable agricultural sector was viewed as the most effective way to make future war between France and Germany “unthinkable.”
“The idea that directed the leaders who founded the European Union,” he explained, “was to uphold citizens’ liberties while restoring the moral, spiritual, and intellectual powers that built Europe… They knew stable farming growth would fortify traditional European families, the bulwark of the continent’s defense system.”
Retired Political Science Professor Jannick Schlüsselfelder, who advised the German Christian Democratic Union in the late 1980s, told me that the heart of European society was always in the farming villages, where traditional values like family and Christianity were the most important forces in society. “Nowadays,” he said, “we see socialist attempts to sabotage farmers who still oppose progressive concepts which are now at their zenith.” He added that the E.U. Green Deal is based on the concept that nature matters more than human beings – something which is antithetical to Christian teaching.
Philippe Fabry, a historian of law and politics, told me that “Europe as a whole today is at the same stage as France was a few years before the French Revolution… It is now a struggle between proponents of the socialist mega-state and its critics.”
Indeed, seeming to confirm that analysis, a group of protestors in Spain held up a sign which read, “We are ready to defend our freedom.” Other demonstrators have also clashed with authorities as farmers become increasingly desperate to defend their livelihoods.
Alfred Bujara, the head of the National Section of Trade Employees of the Solidarnosc Polish national trade union, told the Polish Catholic daily that the E.U. policies are “the last call to fight for farming and the local food industry because the E.U.’s effort to destroy it has advanced.”
“Brussels designed the socialist control of production, stock, and retail sales – the same bureaucratic monster Solidarnosc once defeated,” Bujara said, referring to the union’s role in overthrowing Soviet rule. “Solidarnosc is convinced that Europe must restore its own spiritual identity and return to the richness of the Christian heritage, where the source of her renewal and continued well-being lies, as opposed to the socialist policies advanced today.”
However, European voters have a chance to change course at the ballot box rather than in the streets during European Parliament elections this June. Anti-Green Deal candidates are currently expected to make big gains, while parties such as the Farmer-Citizen Movement in the Netherlands have also seen major victories in recent national elections.
It may thus be the case that the socialist forces which have dominated Europe for years are due for a “greenlash” led by farmers that could help restore the traditional values which first built Western civilization.
Ben Solis is the pen name of an international affairs journalist, historian, and researcher.
