The fifth experiment and the EU
Fernando del Pino Calvo Sotelo
November 3, 2025
In recent articles, I have been explaining how Western societies are conducting five historically very recent experiments which are considered indisputable advances of civilization and whose results, therefore, are not being subjected to objective judgment.
The first four experiments, already analyzed, are the exorbitant increase in the size of the State, which has led to abusive tax burdens; a gigantic debt, which mortgages our future; an economic-monetary system that is undermining the purchasing power of the population, who see how their parents or grandparents were able to support a family of four children on a single salary, while they cannot support two children on two salaries; and democracy based on unconditional universal suffrage and the unlimited power of the majority, which is paradoxically leading to a serious deterioration of individual freedoms.
The fifth experiment
Finally, we come to the fifth and last experiment, which is much more profound and has much more destructive consequences. It is the experiment of living without God. Indeed, for the first time in history, Western countries are living as if God did not exist. There is no longer a Higher Being, no Ten Commandments, no natural law, no good or evil. Worse yet, there is no need to deny the existence of God; He is simply ignored.
This secularization of the West has Spain—historically the Catholic country par excellence—as a qualified barometer. If in 1978, 78% of the population declared themselves Catholic, today that percentage has dropped to 57%; if in 1978, 40% declared themselves to be practicing Catholics, today that percentage has fallen to less than half. In the last 30 years alone, the percentage of religious marriages in Spain has fallen from 80% to 20%[1]:
Eliminating God actually means replacing Him with other gods: power, sex, money, popularity, or Mother Earth, or with a series of ideologies that hide a sinister misanthropy behind their facade. As John Paul II warned in a truly prophetic manner, “man can build a world without God, but this world will eventually turn against man.” If we are no longer children of God, where do our rights come from? From what other men decide? Then, are they no longer inalienable?
If rules and rights are decided by other men, whether by a deified majority acting in the name of the goddess democracy or by a selfstyled unelected elite, as is the case in the EU; if vox populi, vox Dei, there are no longer any immutable rules or insurmountable limits, because in a relativist society everything depends on subjective opinions, the latest fashions, the changing whims of the majority, or the beliefs of the powerful.
Do not forget that when power is not subject to the restrictions of a higher norm, those who wield it become gods, but not righteous and good gods, but dark tyrants. And if our fellow human beings can decide what our rights are, then they cease to be rights, because a right cannot depend on the permission of others.
We are losing our freedom in the name of a substitute for freedom. Freedom without responsibility, freedom without truth, freedom without good, freedom without morality. And in the pursuit of this misunderstood freedom, we have become slaves. Worse still, we have become slaves who are unaware of their state of slavery.
Europe as a paradigm of decline
Perhaps no region on the planet better exemplifies the decline of the West and the pernicious influence of the fifth experiment than Europe. But what is Europe? A small continent bounded by the Urals, the Baltic, the Mediterranean, and the Atlantic? It would be very poor to limit ourselves to its geographical description.
Nor can we limit ourselves to defining Europe as the heir to Greek philosophy and Roman law. It certainly is, but at the height of its
expansion in the 2nd century—under the emperor Trajan, who was born in Hispania—the Roman Empire covered only half of today’s Europe. A contrario sensu, North Africa and Asia Minor belonged to Rome and are obviously not European.
Finally, it does not seem appropriate to define Europe as the continent of democracies, since, as we have seen, this is a very recent experiment, and for most of Europe’s history democracy was neither present nor expected.
So what common factor best defines Europe’s identity? Christianity. In other words, what all European countries have in common are the 600 Romanesque, Gothic, Renaissance, Baroque, and Neoclassical cathedrals that have adorned their cities for centuries. In fact, the capital of the EU should be Rome, not Brussels.
Christianity was the seed of Europe and its keystone. Even after the Protestant Reformation that would divide Europe in two, it remained so, albeit under the sign of religious wars, which, with the honorable exception of our Emperor Charles, actually concealed the very prosaic human passions and political ambitions of their protagonists. This explains, for example, why the perjurer King Francis I of France—a Catholic—signed an alliance with the Ottoman Sultan Suleiman the Magnificent—a Muslim—to form a common front against the very Catholic Spanish Empire.
After the bloody French Revolution of 1789, which had a marked (and violent) anti-Christian character, the course of Europe began to change. It is true that the Revolution failed in the short term, as France would experience a long period of rule by kings and emperors, punctuated by brief and turbulent republican episodes until 1870.
In fact, it was not until the 20th century that the sinister seed planted by Rousseau—who, together with Luther and Descartes, shapes the modern conscience, in Maritain’s apt expression—began to germinate. Europe, hijacked by the EU
This Europe, disillusioned and hopeless because of its secularization, is the perfect paradigm of the decline of the West, a process accelerated by its very recent hijacking by the EU. Indeed, today Europe is dominated by a superstructure called the European Union. This superstructure is not Europe, but the tyrant of Europe. In this sense, it is important not to confuse the terms.
Just as tyrants tend to confuse their countries with themselves and to identify any criticism of their person with high treason, the fallacy has spread that criticizing the EU is criticizing Europe. Nothing could be further from the truth: it is precisely my sympathy for Europe that leads me to wish for it to be freed from the yoke of the EU.
With a certain nostalgia and not without some irritation, I remember that attractive promise of free movement of people, goods, and capital (the bait) that was used as a Trojan horse to cover up the takeover by an unelected bureaucratic government with clear totalitarian ambitions. By saying yes to the former, we unwittingly created a monster that threatens to engulf us.
The five features of the EU
In this sense, the EU has five features. The first is a markedly antiChristian ideology, which is both a cause and a consequence of the fifth experiment.
When St. John Paul II addressed the European Parliament in 1988, few understood the depth of his analysis on the two opposing visions that existed in Europe. The first was that of those who “consider that obedience to God is the source of true freedom, which is never arbitrary freedom, but freedom for truth and goodness (…), which translates into the acceptance of principles that flow from the authority of God, which man cannot dispose of as he pleases.”
The second is the attitude of those who, “having removed all subordination of the creature to God, or to a transcendent order of truth and good, consider man to be the beginning and end of all things. Ethics then has no other foundation than consensus.” Such consensus, lacking moral limits, is what is deciding when life begins and ends, for example, a civilizational regression that surreptitiously returns us to the barbarism of the pagan societies of Antiquity.
Well, despite the fact that it was precisely Christian principles that prompted the Fathers of Europe to propose its union (such as the Catholic Robert Schuman), today the EU is controlled by a bureaucracy that clearly belongs to the second group, that is, one that rejects Christian principles and does everything possible to undermine them. As one author recently said, “the new European experiment is an unusual experience that seeks not only to dispense with religion, but to make its rejection an essential source of identity for the new civilization.”
In other words, the EU is not an ideologically neutral bureaucracy, but
one that seeks to impose its own ideology. This is its first feature. And when a country resists this imposition (such as Poland or Hungary), the EU mercilessly harasses it with shameless double standards. Thus, when one of its atheist co-religionists (such as Spanish PM Sánchez) commits all kinds of misdeeds, they turn a blind eye.
It was because of this ideologization that the failed European Constitution Treaty omitted any mention of Europe’s Christian roots, or that the European Parliament recently voted to include abortion as a fundamental right of the EU, or that the EU promotes the sinister gender ideology, which destroys individuals and families, or the impoverishing and fanatical green agenda.
A sickening interventionism
The second characteristic of the EU is its interventionist and freedomdestroying nature. In effect, its apparatchik—copying the model of the USSR—exercises suffocating control over the lives of its citizens with all kinds of invasive regulations. Hence the mind-boggling ban on the sale of internal combustion cars from 2035, the sadistic regulations imposed on farmers, and the grotesque obligation that bottle caps be attached to the bottle itself, a unique case in the world that will not go down in the annals of the history of intelligence.
The EU is always in favor of increasing the weight of the state and taxes, and while the rest of the world innovates, the EU regulates. This is the number of patents registered in the last year[2]:
NOTE: EE.UU. is USA in Spanish
Europe does not invent and is falling behind. Indeed, Europe’s focus on regulation rather than innovation has consequences. The following graph shows the decline in the relative weight of the European economy in the world since 1960, which has been particularly acute since the introduction of the euro[3]:
The third characteristic of the EU is that it governs with its back turned on the interests of its citizens-subjects. Remember the draft European Constitution, whose referendum was suspended after being rejected by the French and Dutch, despite the almost unanimous support of their respective political classes. The EU decided not to risk asking the citizens again, withdrew the draft and replaced it with the Treaty of Lisbon, which only required approval by the parliaments, that is, by the political class. More recently, we have the case of the Romanian elections, which were annulled by the Constitutional Court with the open support of the EU, obviously because the winner of the first round (who was prevented from running) was Eurosceptic.
The fourth characteristic of the EU is its great opacity, which may have made Brussels one of the world’s capitals of corruption. In this regard, there is no better example than the contract signed by the ineffable Von der Leyen with Pfizer for the purchase of 1.8 billion doses of Covid vaccines for €35 billion. The European Commission initially kept the
contract secret, and when it was forced to disclose it, it did so with entire paragraphs blacked out. The EU Court of Auditors repeatedly called for transparency, and the EU Court of Justice ruled that Von der Leyen must make public her personal messages with the president of Pfizer, which she refused to hand over. She will not do so, and nothing will happen to her, as impunity is the norm in the EU.
With his usual irony, the Colombian Catholic thinker Nicolás GómezDávila said that “the more serious the problems, the greater the number of inept people that democracy calls upon to solve them.” The fifth and final characteristic of the EU is ineptitude. Proof of this is the worst negotiation in history, which has led it to accept a unilateral 15% tariff imposed by the US despite having a trade balance in goods and services and the US Department of Commerce itself acknowledging that the EU generally had low tariffs. And now they want a war
Such ideologization, interventionism, despotism, opacity, and ineptitude of the EU make its defense incompatible with the defense of Europe.
They have led us to believe that this is the only model that can exist in Europe. This is not true. Another Europe is possible, but to achieve this, it must recover its Christian roots and free itself from the yoke of those who have hijacked it.
One more thing. I observe with great concern the frivolous warmongering escalation of European leaders, who are now inventing a non-existent Russian threat to cover up the decrepitude of their
crumbling empire. Why on earth would Russia want to attack Europe? Moreover, their stupidity seems unable to grasp their contradiction: on the one hand, they tell us that the Russian army is a “paper tiger” that is not even capable of advancing in Ukraine, but on the other hand, it is capable of simultaneously threatening Poland, Germany, the Nordic countries, and the Baltic republics.
The satraps of that US colony called the EU have slavishly obeyed the interests of their American master by creating out of thin air an artificial confrontation with Russia, their main and cheapest energy supplier. It has not been enough for them to impoverish their citizens. Now they want a war.
[1] Institute for Family Policy
[2] WIPO IP Statistics Data Center
[3] GDP (US$ at constant 2015 prices) | Data