(LifeSiteNews) — Editorial note: Ordo Iuris and MCC’s use of the expression “The Great Reset” is both ironic and suggestive of their radical proposed changes to the current federalist European Union.
A wave of hysteria was unleashed this week following a presentation at the Heritage Foundation in Washington, DC, of a blueprint for sweeping reform of the European Union.
The formerly USAID-funded, left-wing Central European media outlet VSquare expressed dismay, writing:
The Trump administration’s most influential think tank, The Heritage Foundation, is receiving proposals from illiberal [sic] forces in Poland and Hungary on how to shape the future of the European Union. The proposals, obtained by VSquare, include dismantling key EU institutions and renaming the entire bloc.
The article, widely reproduced in European media, was entitled: “Renaming the EU, Dismantling the Commission: What Polish and Hungarian Illiberals Seek U.S. Backing For.”
Indeed, a presentation of the report “The Great Reset: Restoring Member State Sovereignty in the European Union” did take place on March 11 at an event organized in Washington by the influential Heritage Foundation. The report was prepared by Poland’s Ordo Iuris Institute and Hungary’s Mathias Corvinus Collegium (MCC) and presents two possible scenarios for reforming the European Union to restore democracy and the sovereignty of its member states.
This was one of several events in the United States attended by Ordo Iuris representatives. This first ‘live’ presentation of these preliminary reform proposals—charting a course different from that envisioned by Brussels elites—took place ahead of the scheduled March 18 presentation in Budapest and the March 26 presentation in Brussels.
There will undoubtedly be more such presentations (one is already planned for Warsaw, though the exact date remains unknown). This is especially relevant as the push for an alternative EU reform project extends beyond Poland’s Ordo Iuris and Hungary’s MCC, encompassing a broader coalition of right-wing, conservative circles across Europe.
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Democracy at risk: Two competing visions for the European Union
In fact, the initiative to develop a counterproposal to the reform plan voted on by the European Parliament in November 2023—strongly backed by the French President and the German Chancellor—began at a conference jointly organized in September in Warsaw by Ordo Iuris and The Heritage Foundation. The conference, titled “On the Threshold of the State of Europe: Economy, Defense, Ideology, and the Protection of Sovereignty in a Transatlantic Perspective,” gathered representatives of think tanks, politicians, academics, social activists, and public intellectuals from Poland, Spain, France, the UK, Italy, Bulgaria, Slovakia, Romania, Hungary, Croatia, and the USA.
“The Heritage Foundation is now planning to destroy the EU—with the help of Polish and Hungarian partners,” wrote New York Times columnist Anne Applebaum in reaction to the VSquare article on social media.
Applebaum is the wife of Poland’s Foreign Minister, Radosław Sikorski (to whom Elon Musk recently referred as ‘a Soros puppet’ amid their high-profile feud on X). and a vocal Trump critic. During last year’s presidential campaign in the U.S., she went so far as to write, “Trump is speaking like Hitler, Stalin, and Mussolini.”
However, it was not the Heritage Foundation that authored the report but rather two independent European think tanks. Moreover, Europe’s democracy- and freedom-oriented patriotic circles are invited to contribute to the ongoing work on this preliminary draft.
Elon Musk himself has drawn comparisons between the contemporary European Union and the former Soviet Union in his X posts, while U.S. Vice President J.D. Vance warned at the Munich Security Conference:
The threat that I worry the most about vis-à-vis Europe is not Russia, it’s not China, it’s not any other external actor. What I worry about is the threat from within—the retreat of Europe from some of its most fundamental values, values shared with the United States of America.
A reform plan rooted in the Communist Ventotene Manifesto, as championed by zealous Euro-federalists such as MEP Guy Verhofstadt, Emmanuel Macron, and former German Chancellor Olaf Scholz, would spell the end of democracy on the continent—unless it brought the disintegration of the European Union. Their plan is not merely federalist but outright centralist.
The Ordo Iuris Institute detailed this in last year’s report, “Why Do We Need Sovereignty? Ten Areas of the Proposed Surrender of National Sovereignty in Light of the European Parliament’s Resolution on Proposals for the Amending of the Treaties.”
By contrast, the alternative vision proposed by European conservatives is outlined in the newly presented report: “The Great Reset: Restoring Member State Sovereignty in the European Union.”
In response to Anne Applebaum’s criticism, the president of Ordo Iuris took to X, stating:
The Great Reset provides for the restoration of true freedom and sovereign power to states. A common market free from overregulation. An end to bureaucratic rules. A flexible, multi-speed European Union ready for global challenges.
The need for such an alternative reform project is growing more urgent, with the goal of Making Europe Great Again. While U.S. President Donald Trump has criticized the EU as “nasty” in the context of trade policies, the bloc is becoming increasingly oppressive and indeed nasty in a political sense.
The liberal left in Europe now sees Ukraine’s war and America’s new approach to this war under Donald Trump as an opportunity to accelerate “European integration”—which, in reality, translates into further centralization of power in the hands of unelected Eurocrats who cannot be held accountable by voters.
Even without waiting for formal treaty reforms—currently being discreetly advanced by European elites with little media scrutiny—the European Commission and the Court of Justice of the European Union (CJEU) are already asserting that EU law and its interpretation by the CJEU should take precedence over national constitutions. This would directly subordinate the judiciary and constitutional courts of EU member states to Luxembourg-based judges, effectively sidelining national democratic processes.
A judicial European superstate is being built in place of parliamentary democracies, bypassing the will of national electorates. This shift is underscored by recent developments, such as the cancellation of Romania’s presidential election, the EU-funded “militant democracy” in Poland (a pretext for liberal-left control), and EU Commissioner Thierry Breton’s chilling declaration that the EU could intervene in Germany if the AfD were to win, and also elsewhere, just as it did in Romania.
Why ‘The Great Reset’ of the European Union?
The Heritage Foundation’s interest in this project stems from the fact that Americans have a vested interest in the trajectory of their European allies. Western civilization requires both a strong American democracy and a vibrant, democratic Europe. Such a Europe cannot exist without strong, democratic, and sovereign nation-states.
The conversation should therefore shift away from the Brussels elite’s vision of reform and toward a grassroots-driven transformation of the European Union. This alternative path involves moving away from the communist-inspired superstate model, envisioned by the Ventotene Manifesto (explicitly referenced in the European Parliament’s 2023 reform proposal), and returning to the Christian democratic vision of Robert Schuman, one of the founding fathers of post-war European integration.
Schuman once wrote, “Democracy must be Christian, or there will be no democracy at all.”
Today, we see just how true those words are—on both sides of the Atlantic.
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