In my last essay, I argued a push to abolish the EU from nationalists could be counter-productive to our project, and that abolition isn’t a very realistic prospect anyway. I also briefly sketched what an alternative vision of the European Union could look like.
This vision, especially the suggestion of Switzerland as a model for EU governance, seemed to provoke a lot of interest, so I think it’s worth a more comprehensive articulation. Identitarians seem to be divided into two camps: those that favour complete abolition or a stripping back of the EU to limit it to some basic economic arrangement, and those that fantasise about an even more centralised, federal version of the EU hostile to “petty nationalism.” I find myself in neither of these camps, but I rarely see anyone articulate the confederal model I will lay out here. So let this be an attempt to describe, in concrete terms, what a restored Europe would look like once we step beyond the clichés of both imperium europa fantasies and visionless euroscepticism and sketch a genuinely alternative direction for the European project.
One obvious counter to the case I am presenting is to simply ask why any union is necessary at all, if national restoration is actually the goal. The answer is that a Europe of proud nations still requires a framework for cooperation on matters no single state can manage alone: such as border security, strategic industries, and the defence of European civilisation as a whole. Even most abolitionists agree that after scrapping the EU, it would be necessary for the now sovereign collection of European nations to come together and devise some kind of continental system to handle these necessities. A confederal EU could satisfy their desire to preserve sovereignty where it matters while still providing the scale and coordination required to confront a multipolar world. So I will provide this vision, whether it is one to be implemented through a reformed EU, or one to come under a future European confederation that comes after its failure.
Europe: A People
A restored Europe would first have to recognise itself as a civilisation with a definable people at its core. Europe is not an economic zone, but the home of the indigenous European people, that have gifted the world the bulk of its achievements in philosophy, science, art, literature, engineering and other cultural achievements. At this year’s Remigration Summit, I watched the French philosopher Jean-Yves Le Gallou give a fine statement on the historical genetic identity of the European people:
Europe is the continent of Europeans. The settlement of Europe dates back 40,000 years with the expansion of hunter-gatherer peoples. We, contemporary Europeans, carry the same genes as the parietal artists of the Lascaux caves in France, Altamira in Spain, Hohle Fels in Germany, or Fumane in Italy. This initial settlement was partially modified, particularly in southern Europe, by the arrival of Anatolian farmers 8,000 years ago. It was then complemented by the expansion of the Yamnaya, a hunter-gatherer people from the Pontic steppes, 5,000 years ago. This migration brought the Indo-European languages we still speak today through their Greek, Roman, Celtic, Germanic, or Slavic branches, as well as a cosmogony and social structure, the tripartition, which has continually shaped European civilization, even after Christianization (oratores, bellatores, laboratores).
Jean-Yves’ statement is comprehensive, but a little long for political use. As a foundation for the renewed European project, the new EU will officially state:
The European peoples are the indigenous descendants of the Paleolithic, Neolithic, and Indo-European populations who shaped the continent’s genetic, linguistic, and cultural foundations over 40,000 years. They constitute a continuous civilisation whose identity has developed organically from these ancestral layers.
This must be the starting point of any reformed European project. Recognising Europeans as the indigenous peoples of Europe establishes a moral foundation for the new Union. The purpose of European integration is no longer to dissolve identity into a liberal universalism but to preserve the long continuity of the civilisation that emerged on this continent.
From this recognition would come a concrete proposal: that the indigeneity of the European peoples should be enshrined directly within the constitutional framework of the new confederation and formally articulated as a legal category. Europe would state, in concrete terms, that its native peoples possess the inherent right to cultural continuity, demographic security, and territorial rootedness in the lands that shaped them.
Europe would then take the unprecedented step of bringing its indigeneity onto the international stage. Drawing upon the existing frameworks used for other indigenous peoples, the new EU would submit a formal request for recognition of this statement to UN bodies, presenting demographic data showing the threat of population replacement, and initiate motions within the Council of Europe asserting the legitimacy of indigenous European claims. Given the current U.S. administration’s statements on Europe and mass-immigration, it is more feasible than ever that these proposals would receive support from the United States.
This could potentially be a paradigm-altering shift of global norms: for the first time it would be recognised on the world stage that Europeans, no less than any other indigenous people, possess the right to endure as a distinct civilisation. Once recognised, this doctrine would become a shield against ideological pressure, providing Europe with the moral and legal basis to defend its demographic future before the world, even if this conflicts with previous liberal legislation around ‘human rights.’ This would mean for the first time a reversal on the international stage of the all-engulfing spread of universal human rights doctrine, superceded by the right to self-preservation of the European peoples.
The European Cultural Academy
But a civilisational consciousness cannot be created by law. It would be necessary to take steps to rediscover European identity, and here the flagship would be a new institution: the European Cultural Academy. The Academy would be composed of scholars, historians, linguists, scientists, and philosophers from across Europe’s nations. Its mission would be to articulate Europe’s cultural inheritance, devise an intellectual canon, and ensure that education and cultural policy reflect the distinctiveness of European civilisation. This can provide a new articulation of European identity and history to combat the Post-War consensus of guilt around European history which dominates intellectual life.
To support this work, the Academy would establish a patronage scheme dedicated to nurturing European cultural life. This would include grants and residencies for artists, writers, composers, and scholars who work within the European tradition; funding for the preservation an revitalisation of regional folk traditions and architectural styles; as well as support for research into Europe’s ancient past, genetic heritage, mythology, literature, and philosophy. Rather than relying on the market to support these projects, this scheme would revive the older European model in which cultural production was sustained because of institutions convinced of the civilisational importance of their mission. This patronage would provide both material support and symbolic legitimacy to those engaged in the intellectual and artistic renewal of Europe, at a time when most private support goes toward leftist and postmodernist cultural projects.
The Academy would also administer a series of continental awards recognising excellence in science, art, literature, historical research, and cultural preservation—prestigious honours designed to celebrate what is best in the European spirit. These awards would function as Europe’s counterpart to the Nobel Prizes, grounded in the recognition of Europe’s incredible civilisational achievements.. Their purpose would be not only to reward achievement but to create a public narrative of European accomplishment, reinforcing a shared consciousness of belonging to a civilisation capable of producing beauty, truth, and greatness.
Aside from relying on public funding, the Academy would also recognise private individuals who contribute to cultural production in Europe. This would revive the tradition of private patronage that underpinned so much of Europe’s artistic flourishing in periods like the Renaissance. The contributions of these patrons would not be treated as mere acts of generosity, but as expressions of civic responsibility toward the civilisation to which they belong — encouraging other status-hungry elites to put their resources into Europe’s revival. By restoring the old European model of enlightened patronage, the Academy would cultivate a new class of cultural stewards: Europeans willing to use their wealth and influence to sustain the artistic and intellectual flowering of their civilisation.
The Great Repeal
Before any renewal could begin on the continent, we must first take a flamethrower to the mountains of legislation left behind by liberal technocrats designed to make the EU a means of neutering nationalism and sovereignty. A restored Europe would therefore initiate what might be called The Great Repeal, a deliberate and sweeping undoing of the centralising legal architecture of the modern EU. There is a view that the EU is destined to be an endlessly centralising, liberal organisation hostile to national sovereignty, but it’s important to remember that the EU is where it is now because of decades of incremental change brought about by liberals. Nationalists need to have a similar will to incrementally peel back this centralising infrastructure and implement changes that limit and redirect the EU. In theory, any piece of legislation that transformed the Union from a tool of cooperation into an instrument of social engineering could be removed.
A coalition of governments committed to Europe’s renewal could force the reopening of the Treaties that set the EU on its current course. Once that door is open, the first priority would be to roll back the Maastricht–Lisbon settlement that embedded centralising functions in the Union’s legal order. The supremacy of EU law and the empowering of supranational bodies to define the limits of national sovereignty must be removed.
One of the first things to be scrapped by the new Europe would be the European Convention on Human Rights. So emblematic of the universal human rights regime governing the EU currently, the ECHR has become a dangerous vehicle for judicial activism used by the EU to interfere with migration policy, block deportations of invaders, and elevate abstract cosmopolitan rights above the concrete interests of the European people. Its abolition will be a day of great celebration for nationalists who have seen it interfere with national border security for years.
Recent events have shown that one of the most urgent and symbolically significant part of this repeal would be focused on the Digital Services Act. This act, recently used by the EU commission to place a massive fine on X, reflects how the EU has adopted a regulatory posture that is treating the internet as a domain to be tightly regulated and sanitised according to the ideological preferences of Brussels. This threatens the political expression of all Europeans, and is being used by EU technocrats to privilege establishment narratives under the guise of “trust and safety.”
For a reformed EU, the priority in legislating around online speech would be protecting the rights of Europeans against Big Tech censorship. The ability of Europeans to speak freely and criticise authority is essential to the continent’s renewal. The Great Repeal would therefore include abolishing the censorship provisions of the Digital Services Act and refocus it on holding platforms accountable for censorship and political bias.
The new Europe would also establish a European Charter of Digital Freedom. Almost everyone involved in this project of renewal will have at some point been a victim of online censorship for their politics. Now, they will use the apparatus of the EU to ensure this kind of ideological censorship of proud Europeans is a thing of the past. The Charter will declare that political censorship of Europeans by social media platforms is prohibited, even under pressure from NGOs, corporations or other states. Every European would possess a legally enforceable right to free expression online, including protection against deplatforming, shadow banning, and algorithmic suppression, and a right to transparency from the platforms on how and why they have been censored. Platforms would be given an ultimatum to undo years of censorship and restore Europeans banned for political speech, or else face fines and other restrictions.
Freeing Europe’s Economy
Aside from demolishing the architecture of institutionalised pluralism and liberalism in the EU, the Great Repeal must also undo the suffocating regulatory regime that is holding back European innovation. Europe’s decline is not merely demographic, and if nationalists want to win the support of the people for our vision of a restored Europe, we must also deliver a new era of economic growth. But this is impossible under the EU’s existing structures. Decades of technocratic rulemaking have created a regulatory thicket that small and medium-sized businesses struggle to navigate, to the point that starting a company in Europe is harder than in almost any other advanced economy.
At the same time, a simplistic narrative has taken hold on the right that Europe fell behind the United States simply because of more regulation and less economic freedom. The reality is more complex: what really separated the American and European response to the Great Recession is that the EU adopted an aggressively conservative macroeconomic response. Following neoliberal orthodoxy, Brussels imposed fiscal compacts and prohibitions on state-aid to industries that crippled the chance for nation-states to develop national industrial policy and prevented governments from deploying the strategic investment to restore growth. In the wake of the Eurozone debt crisis, member states were locked into strict deficit limits that made it impossible to back the industries of the future — precisely the kind of long-horizon investment that allowed China and the United States to surge ahead. The result was a decade of austerity, underinvestment, depressed demand, unemployment, and lost growth and innovation.
Added to this economic straitjacket are needlessly punitive regulations like the cookie law and GDPR, which burden innovators while doing little for the common good. As part of our Great Repeal of the EU, these constraints will be dismantled entirely. Economic freedom in a confederal Europe primarily means the freedom of nations and regions to pursue their own developmental paths without vetoes from Brussels. As such, the Fiscal Compact will be scrapped, along with the broader framework of Brussels-imposed budgetary constraints, which will restore to national governments the freedom to invest strategically in domestic industries and innovation, and pursue long-term economic development without any external vetoes.
Sovereignty and Subsidiarity
The current EU has no ethos. An EU run by patriots will be built around two fundamental principles: sovereignty and subsidiarity. The new Union, after years of undoing legislation and limiting the scope of continental bodies, will become a clearly defined and limited confederation, rather than a superstate. Nations will retain final authority over issues like migration, healthcare and education. Supranational institutions exist only where the scale of an issue genuinely requires them.
This clarity is guaranteed by a new Confederal Constitution, modelled closely on Switzerland. The constitution will be a commitment to use the Union to protect the integrity of Europe’s historical nations; to empower and revive its historical regions and cultural minorities, and to ensure a doctrine of subsidiarity prevents the domination of the continent by any one power. It would set hard limits on the Union to prevent bureaucratic overreach and provide a permanent legal safeguard for the cultural and demographic integrity of European nations.
The principle of subsidiarity also guards Europe against the two great dangers that have always haunted it: the drift toward centralised rule and the domination of the continent by a single power. Subsidiarity would be enshrined in the new Constitution as a hard rule to pushes decision-making downwards. This would be nations where appropriate, but also Europe’s historic regions wherever possible, allowing places like Bavaria, Catalonia, Flanders, Tyrol, and countless others to now shape their own cultural life without being micromanaged from Brussels or overridden by national governments which have to centralise to assert themselves on the continent.
This would be a quite natural restoration of Europe as a diverse patchwork of strong local identities which is how it was constituted for most of its history. And by dispersing power across Europe’s natural communities, subsidiarity prevents any one state from dominating the direction of the EU, thus alleviating a common source of anger from countries on Europe’s periphery about German and French dominance.
Fortress Europe
After a recognition of the indigeneity of the European people and the threat of erasure they face due to mass-immigration, the top priority of a reformed Europe must be preventing this erasure. This will necessitate reversing mass-immigration, but we must start with first securing our borders and stopping the inflow. It is time to build Fortress Europe. This is one of the areas where the benefits of European cooperation on patriotic lines can become most evident.
For decades, the continent’s frontier has been left wide open to criminal traffickers, foreign governments exporting unwanted populations, and a network of NGOs who aid in this civilisational crime. This should be treated as the criminal conspiracy it is — emergency legislation must be introduced to dismantle the NGO network responsible for undermining Europe’s security. In collaboration with national governments, comprehensive investigations into their operations and funding networks must be conducted, with their patrons punished or sanctioned by the EU.
The Mediterranean is Europe’s sea, and it must be secured at all costs as a symbolic first step. Free of the constraints of the ECHR, emergency powers will allow states to deny docking permissions, impound vessels, revoke licences, and prohibit NGO activity in territorial waters. For the price of a secure civilisation, European states will collaborate on joint naval patrols, land border fortifications, intelligence-sharing, and coordinated deportations. States in Africa and the Middle-East who facilitate human trafficking into Europe’s borders will face diplomatic pressure up to and including sanctions.
Migrants intercepted in the Mediterranean will be taken to designated safe ports outside Europe, never entering the EU itself. Fortress Europe will require a unified continental framework for removals and entry denial. A migrant rejected by one European nation cannot be allowed to simply walk into another. Illegal entry can never create a pathway to residency anywhere in the EU.
Remigration
Fortress Europe secures the frontier; remigration restores the interior. Even with secured borders, many European countries are too far down the path of the mass-immigration experiment to avoid erasure without reversing immigration. Immigration levels have been so high that they have already put indigenous Europeans on course for minority minority status in many of their own homelands. If Europe is to endure, it must not only halt new inflows but reverse the demographic damage already done.
Remigration is the lawful, organised, and necessary return of foreign populations who no long-term place within European society. This begins with the obvious cases:
- Deporting illegal migrants, many of whom have remained in Europe for years due to lax deportation protocols or protections from EU human rights law
- Denaturalising and deporting foreigners with criminal convictions
- Denaturalising and deporting foreigners on welfare
- Deporting migrants residing on fraudulent or expiring statuses
But even dealing with all of these problematic groups cannot restore the demographic integrity of many European nations. Remigration must expand to include voluntary return programmes for non-European groups, supported by bilateral agreements and financial incentives. Here again, European cooperation can be beneficial in negotiating paths of return with countries of origin using the economic and diplomatic might of the whole continent. Without the constraints of EU-enforced human rights law, new deportation orders can be swift, enforceable, and coordinated across all European states. A migrant removed from one country will not simply reappear in another.
Eventually, European nations will have to come up with greater incentives to encourage migrants — including second and even third generation ones — to relocate, and here again, a strongly aligned European Union will be important to coordinate best practice on this and defend its legitimacy on the world stage.
Remigration will have to be central to any project of European renewal. The continent cannot rebuild cultural confidence or restore national sovereignty while its demographic base is eroded by ethnic blocs who (correctly) do not feel themselves to be part of this story. Every society in history has understood this truth, now Europe must rediscover it. With Fortress Europe securing the border and remigration restoring demographic integrity, the continent can finally begin the work of renewal.
These measures are only a starting point, the minimum of what is necessary for a civilisational reawakening. But they are also all very feasible were nationalist parties with the will to implement them to become dominant on the continent. They lay a foundation for Europeans to undo decades of bureaucratic overreach, harmful centralising tendencies, anti-European leftist cultural production, subversive human rights law, speech suppression, lax border security, and demographic replacement through mass-immigration. These measures alone may not be sufficient, but without them true a European renewal will not be possible.
This article originally appeared on Keith Woods’ Substack and is republished by The Noticer with permission.
The post Proposals for a new European Union first appeared on The Noticer.
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