The Dissolution of the European Union

Like many Englishmen, I’ve always felt a bit ambivalent about the European Union. I’m not particularly impressed by the economic advantages, because I think that in the West we are wealthy enough already without setting up protectionist blocs against poorer countries. Nor do I like being part of a much bigger, and more remote, political collective. My vote, and my ability to exercise influence, is small enough as it is, without it being diminished further.

What I like about the EU is that it potentially brings different countries and cultures closer together, particularly countries that have a recent history of war.

A lot of English people may well think the opposite to me: they like the economic advantages, but are happy to keep the frogs and krauts and spics and eye-ties at a healthy distance. And I think that is pretty much how it works. We are an island state, and mainland Europe seems just as foreign as it ever was. Britain has always been the odd man out in the EU. Geographically, this has a lot to do with our physical separation. Astrologically, this is because we have Uranus Rising, and our Uranus also hard aspects either the Angles or the Sun of the 2 charts for the EU.

It does not seem to me that there is a lot holding the EU together. The economic advantages are a significant binding factor. But there seems to be no pressing necessity for the social and political union that we have also been moving towards for some years, and a number of countries have voted No in recent years to the various attempts at creating a Constitution. It’s not just Britain anymore who is being the ‘awkward’ one.

A comparison might be the 13 states that originally created the USA. If they hadn’t pulled together politically and militarily, they would not have been able to defeat Britain in the War of Independence. It took a lot of haggling to get the 13 states to form the USA, but they had a strong reason to do so. The EU has no such reason. And our various states have been separate cultures for a lot longer than the various states of the USA ever were. It was hard enough getting the states of the US to form a union, even with pressing reasons for doing so. So I don’t see why the EU should ever get much beyond a loose economic union.

The deepening world economic crisis will, I think, prove make or break for the EU over the next few years, and I think it will be ‘break’ as countries worldwide increasingly retreat into protecting themselves.

In the New York Times yesterday was an article headed: Growing Economic Crisis Threatens the Idea of One Europe. It continued: The leaders of the European Union gathered Sunday in Brussels in an emergency summit meeting that seemed to highlight the very worries it was designed to calm: that the world economic crisis has unleashed forces threatening to split Europe into rival camps… The traditional concept of “solidarity” is being undermined by protectionist pressures in some member countries and the rigors of maintaining a common currency, the euro, for a region that has diverse economic needs. Particularly acute economic problems in some newer members that once were part of the Soviet bloc have only made matters worse… “The European Union will now have to prove whether it is just a fair-weather union or has a real joint political destiny,” said Stefan Kornelius, the foreign editor of the German newspaper Süddeutsche Zeitung. “We always said you can’t really have a currency union without a political union, and we don’t have one. There is no joint fiscal policy, no joint tax policy, no joint policy on which industries to subsidize or not. And none of the leaders is strong enough to pull the others out of the mud.”

For now, the problem centres around some of the newer and poorer members being in financial crisis, and the richer members being reluctant to bail them out.

The EU (or EEC as it then was) came into being as a result of the Treaty of Rome. As an organisation, it came into being later the same year. Below are the 2 charts.


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Either way, the EU is being powerfully hit by Uranus and Pluto in the coming years. The Treaty of Rome has both Sun and Angles being exactly hard aspected from 2010 through to 2013, and the EU as an organisation from 2008 through to 2014.

So there are very strong transformative pressures already under way in both charts. Pluto takes us down to bare necessities, to that which we need for our survival and continued evolution: anything else is dross, and has to go. Uranus can bring sudden separation and disintegration. The EU, as I have said, does not have a reason to stay together on a survival level. The astrology is telling me quite unambiguously that the EU is going to unravel in the coming years. The most that I can see being left is a protectionist bloc made up of some of the richer countries.

In the Treaty of Rome chart, there is a strong Uranus - in the 10th, trine the Sun, sextile the ASC and in a t-square with Neptune and a Uranus-ruled Moon. So the EU has a progressive idealism at its root that would bring countries together, that would result in civilising co-operation instead of conflict and war. But Uranus is also unsettling and unstable and likely to lead to disintegration.

This pronounced Uranus reminds me of the current Iraq chart, based on the handover of power on 28/6/4 at 9.26am in Baghdad. There is a Sun-Moon-Angular Uranus Grand Trine. So you can see the impulse towards a democratic future (Uranus). But it also introduces instability: it would be easy (trine) for this US supported government to disintegrate (Uranus). I think this probably will happen after the Americans have gone. And I think the pronounced Uranus in the Treaty of Rome chart also holds the possibility of eventual instability and disintegration.

The Treaty chart has unaspected Pluto in the 11th: this suggests that power struggles between the member nations, that are hard to contain, could prove the EU's undoing. Prog Pluto is currently square prog Sun and exactly conjunct Prog MC, highlighting this issue right now. The EU's Nodes are on the Scorpio (North)-Taurus (South) axis. So its lesson is about sharing resources and power (Scorpio North Node) versus retreating into material self-interest, which is the easy path (Taurus South Node). Over the next few years, Prog Asc will conjunct the prog and natal North Node. So again we have a time of reckoning: will the EU continue to share resources and power between its members, or will it withdraw into separate units of self-interest?

In the EEC chart, Prog Sun has recently moved into Pisces, and is opposite Prog Pluto. So the themes of dissolution (Pisces) and power struggle (Pluto) are here also.