Le rapport soutenu par les cercles pro-Trump pour subvertir l’Union
Edifying is the only word to describe this text of some 40 pages published by “Le Grand Continent”, even though nobody could have expected anything else from the far-right European foundations which share the US right wing’s attachment to so-called traditional “values” and rampant nationalism of the 19th and 20th centuries. They also share a hatred of the European Union.
“The plan of the 40-page report presented in Washington by the Polish think tank Ordo Iuris and Hungary’s Mathias Corvinus Collegium can be summed up in a simple manifesto: to subvert the European Union. It is part of a well-documented campaign that has led the Trump administration over the last two months to make the European Union and its member states priority targets, by supporting attempted regime changes in Romania and Germany, targeting the European economy with tariffs [customs duty on steel, aluminium and all other products with the exception of medical drugs: Ed] and making the annexation of Greenland the keystone of a new imperialist project”, the authors write (our translation throughout).
The far-right project consists of two scenarios. The first, masquerading as a functional reorganisation of the European Union, contains 23 proposals. Under this text, the EU’s name would change to become a “community” once again; no longer a European community, but one “of nations”. Formally, the institutions would remain the same, but their mandates would be radically transformed. “In rhetorical terms, the report does not, moreover, call for revolution as a priority, but rather a kind of ‘back to basics’ – at the same time rewriting the history of European integration (with the Schuman plan swept aside, according to the report, by the “communist federalist” dynamic of the manifesto of Ventotene, from which the President of the Italian Council, Giorgia Meloni, has distanced herself in recent days)”, the authors explain.
Basically, the European Commission would become a secretariat general, with neither a legislative nor a ceremonial role, responsible simply for implementing the conclusions of the Council of Ministers. The Court of Justice would continue to exist, but with no real powers. The proposed reform would establish the primacy of the national constitutions over European law and the Court would lose the ability to interpret the Treaties. As for the European Parliament, its role would be scaled down to become purely consultative. Any decision-making powers would rest with the member states meeting in the European Council and the Council of Ministers, with unanimous decision-making brought back. The bottom line is that it would have the effect of transforming the European Union into a second Council of Europe, as if the continent needed more than one such organisation.
To complete the job, what would be better than to get straight to work on unravelling Europe’s economic and legal infrastructure? To do this, the report prescribes the introduction of a broad principle of opt-outs that would allow a group of four countries to withdraw from any comment legislation at any time.
The second scenario – for which read plan B, if the far right failed to bring about the planned changes under the first – is one of a “new start”, which would entail the dissolution of the European Union in its current form and the creation of a new framework of European cooperation.
“The authors of this report are not isolated or disconnected from the decision-making centres. Quite the reverse, they have increasing political and institutional power. In Hungary, the Mathias Corvinus Collegium (MCC) is Viktor Orbán’s sword arm in the world of strategic reflection and education. Headed up by the principal advisor to the Prime Minister, Balázs Orbán, it was granted the equivalent of 1.3 billion dollars by the Hungarian State and has been actively seeking to get a foothold in Brussels for several years. The Polish ultra-Conservative think tank Ordo Iuris has a solid influence over the PiS, which was in power in Poland until 2023. Several PiS ministers have stated that they took inspiration from its proposals. What is different about this publication is the fact that it reveals the two institutions’ close links with the American Conservatives of the Heritage Foundation, to which the authors of the report presented their recommendations in Washington on 11 March of this year. According to the former Secretary General of the European Parliament, Klaus Welle, the document confirms the emergence of a European ‘destructive right wing’, taking inspiration from the American model and becoming organised at global level”, the Grand Continent article stresses.
Out of what amounts to a sequence of pearls and fake news, the following quotations offer an insight into the motivation of those who wrote them:
Qualified majority voting should be abandoned because the “horse-trading within the Council and its preparatory bodies makes the EU decision-making process more opaque; very often, the citizens cannot hold their governments to account for the negotiations of the Council, because they quite simply do not know what goes on there”. The process is certainly opaque and this is to the detriment of democracy. But who, if not the governments, have consistently refused to make the process more transparent? Additionally, the opaque ‘horse-trading’ began well before the introduction of qualified majority.
The mandate of the European Parliament “is granted by a conglomerate of 27 nations with very different histories, cultures, languages and interests. It is therefore difficult to determine what ‘political community’ it actually represents”. Because a political community should be based on a single history, language and culture? If this were the case, the Swiss National Council would not be able to represent any political community. This would also be true of the United States Congress and many other parliaments throughout the world.
The European Union “refuses to protect those who need it the most by watering down the member states’ right to give unborn children or disabled patients a high level of protection from abortion and euthanasia. It is also putting pressure on the member states to legalise abortion on demand. Freedom of conscience is fully guaranteed above all for non-believers, while religious citizens of certain countries have to make do with limited rights to practise their faith in designated places, with restrictions on public manifestation of their beliefs (at their places of work, for instance)”. Myth or fantasy? It is difficult to say, other than to point out that there is no European legislation in this field.
“Over the course of many years, the European Commission has published various documents – known as strategies, recommendations or guidelines – which, on the pretext of tackling discrimination, racism and xenophobia, effectively force upon the member states an obligation to censor and severely sanction any critical opinion of certain social groups, mainly the homosexual and transsexual communities, and Muslims”. A couple of observations: (1) such strategies, recommendations and other guidelines are not binding in nature and therefore cannot oblige the member states to do anything; (2) the fight against discrimination, racism and xenophobia cannot be limited to homosexuals and Muslims alone.
“In the guise of the fight against disinformation, the Commission is systematically setting in place a complete system for the surveillance and censorship of the media – both public and private – and the global social network platforms”. No fear!
Another little piece of bravura: “for reasons that remain obscure, the European Union seems to distance itself from the rich heritage of Europe, which encompasses the Roman legal system, Greek philosophy, the Christian religion, ethics and the opulence of unique national cultures”. Obviously, when seen from Budapest, the Hungarian national culture cannot be anything other than opulent. And this is not completely untrue. But in many other countries of the EU, this unique national culture, which is between 150 and 200 years old at most, has in many cases swept away entire swathes of at least 1500 years of cultural evolution.
The report is topped off with a satisfecit from PiS member Ryszard Legutko, co-chair of the European Conservative and Reform group at the European Parliament, an institution he describes as “harmful”. “All institutions of the European Union should see their powers considerably reduced. The very concept of a political union made up of partners that differ so much in size and power calls for the urgent creation of effective mechanisms to tackle autocracy”, he writes. What autocracy? (Olivier Jehin)
Le Grand Continent. Changement de régime : le texte intégral du rapport soutenu par les cercles pro-Trump (available in French only). 51 pages. This document, together with analysis produced by Laurent Warlouzet, was published online on 25 March 2025, on the group’s website: https://aeur.eu/f/gaz
Géopolitique de l’ingérence russe
In a preface entitled “a post-Orwellian era”, General Thierry Burkhard, chief of staff of the French Armed Forces, points out that hybridity is “probably as old as war itself” (our translation throughout). It makes it possible to use a “broad range of effects that when taken together, saturate us, paralysing our capacity for reaction”. “Our adversaries have resolutely invested in the informational field and perceptions, where they have already won many victories, some of them against us. Therefore, if we hope to have the resources we need to win the war and, above all, not to lose it before it even begins, we must invest in this field to be able to oppose adverse manoeuvres”.
To understand the resources implemented and the desired effect – a prerequisite if we are to reduce our vulnerability, detect attacks as early as possible and ensure that we are able to act or react – the researcher Christine Dugoin-Clément, whose employers include the Observatory of Artificial Intelligence of the University Paris 1 Panthéon-Sorbonne and the research centre of the French National Gendarmerie, gives us a broad overview of the networks and technologies used by Russia in the informational field.
“The inclusion of the informational war in the Kremlin’s arsenal has allowed it to adopt an asymmetrical and symmetrical response to the West. It has thus taken on a role that the West struggles to read and include, particularly as regards how to respond to a State that misses no opportunity to reiterate its status as a nuclear power whilst making the borders between peacetime and wartime ever more porous”, Dugoin-Clément writes.
“Decision-making in the field of geopolitics and international relations is by its very nature complex, particularly because the decision-makers are under pressure from public opinion and their decisions can have radical and, sometimes, irreversible consequences. Furthermore, the uncertainty facing the decision-makers can have more than one source. It can be due to the asymmetry of the information on the characteristics of the enemy, which affects the target benefits that war can bring about. The uncertainty can also be based on fluctuations in the adversary’s intentions, or can be even more fundamental, relating to processes surrounding conflict”, the author states, going on to add that “within this configuration, leveraging stimuli, information concerning a situation, or multiplying crisis situations, will feed into the blocking of the decision-making capacity. Prohibiting the cognitive processes of the decision-makers to carry out updates quickly enough to follow the way the environment is evolving will alter their decision-making capacity. On top of this, there could also be fears of the reactions of the general public, which can have radical consequences for keeping the decision-makers in place”. It is the sense of the Russian strategy of “controlled chaos”, together with a simplification or linearisation of the Russian system itself with increased controls over the media access to foreign media and a stranglehold on the justice system, security services and political apparatus. The consequence of this is to block out access for foreign influence, which serves to generate a “notable advantage in terms of capacity”.
If “information operations” or IO – an expression that covers all influential activities, including disinformation – of the GRU, the Russian military intelligence service, were scaled up with the invasion of Ukraine in 2022, they have also more specifically targeted Moldova and its president, Maia Sandu, in the context of the process of accession to the European Union, the author points out, also describing operations targeting Poland and even France, for instance over the period of the Paris Olympics.
“Sahel, Mali, Burkina Faso and Niger have seen Russian influence embed during the coups d’État that toppled the ruling powers, whilst helping to weaken the status of France, which had historical connections with these countries, albeit tumultuous and coloured by a painful colonial past. Finally, Cameroon, a French- and English-speaking country, is also the subject of heightened Russian interest, reflected by IO and company structuring” Dugoin-Clément observes. She goes on to point out that “Wagner – now Africa Corps (AC) – is also present, on a more or less high scale, in Mozambique, Botswana, Chad, the Comores, the Democratic Republic of the Congo, Congo, Guinea-Bissau, Nigeria, Zimbabwe, Madagascar and Guinea has a number of aluminium and gold deposits that are controlled by Russia”. And China, which has “learnt the methods instituted by Moscow”, is never far behind. (OJ)
Christine Dugoin-Clément. Géopolitique de l’ingérence russe – La stratégie du chaos (available in French only). Presses universitaires de France. ISBN: 978-2-1308-8147-6. 242 pages. €15,00