Ask Lemmygrad

The European Union is in many ways the successor to the third and second reichs (4rth reich basically), and faces many of the same problems.

It was more or less founded as the "european steel and coal community", which was an economic agreement that finally gave german industrialists access to French and Belgian and other European coal and iron ores (gaining access to these natural resources was a key German war aim in both world wars).

Over time, this economic "partnership" has expanded more and more, giving German industrialists greater and greater access to European markets and European labor. This culminated in the 1990s with the maastricht treaty (establishing the EU and euro), and the conquest of the former USSR by European capital.

Effectively, the German imperialism problem was solved by rolling over to its war aims in peacetime. This is the real secret to "European peace". Although it should be noted that countries like france are too big to be exploited, and instead participate in the EU as exploiters.

Today then, we have a situation that can be understood as "what if nazis won the war and cleaned up their PR?"*. The answer is a system of imperialism that has survived for a remarkably short amount of time but already seems to be on its last legs.

Like all bourgeois economies, imperialism could give Germany and its exploiter compatriots a shot in the viens. Capital was exported and labor was imported, allowing western European capitalists to eventually destroy by market forces the post-war bargaining power the working class had achieved.

However, the new markets they gained access to filled up with capital quickly, while birth rates in the core collapsed (partly due to the capitalist dismantling of social safety nets).

EU capital is furthermore, facing competition from American capital and Chinese industry. For instance, did you know that US capital has an FDI of $4 trillion in europe**? Meanwhile EU capital has invested only $3.4 trillion in the US (same source). The difference doesn't sound like a lot, but the EU stock market is around $12 trillion while the American one is about $46.5 trillion. Relative to their mutual sizes, EU capital faces more competition from US capital than vice versa.

All of this had culminated in weak and inconsistent returns on European, especially German capital. Look at this data for returns on German bank equity for an idea.

Combine this with the rise of populist movements, and an inability to produce things, it becomes clear that the EU and western European imperialism as a whole are no longer sustainable in its present state. They are on a path to inevitable self destruction. The same was true of the third reich, which had reached its terminal crisis through a somewhat different mechanism, taking on unsustainable levels of debt (in secret) for rearmnament. It was the reason it literally had to go to war, or it would have gone bankrupt. Today, the drums of war beat loudly in europe once again.

*this is more literal than you might think, given how big of a role actual nazis (and their ideological successors) have played in the EU and NATO

**page 9 of the source I have linked