That's to say: it is possibly true that the absence of competition would lead to stagnation, but it's totally arbitrary to claim that the only way to achieve competition is fragment Europe in tiny states.

I never said Europe should be broken into statelets. I want a Europe of great powers, separate great powers. The country of Germany alone has a GDP larger than Turkey, Iran, Iraq, Syria, and SA combined. It has the technical know-how and industrial strength to build a military that can conquer all those nations by itself.

France, Italy, Britain...they are all heavy hitters. They can stand upright in the world and lead an independent existence without fusing into a blob that's ruled by distant technocrats in Brussels.

As for historical determinism, yes, my view might fall on that. What Marx posited was more on the line of technological determinism and it has a strong grain of truth to it. However, that's beside the point. Historical examples and cycles offer insight into human civilizations and their likely outcomes because societies' basic biology, incentives, and hierarchies have fundamentally remained unchanged over the last 3000 years.

Humans have the same lust, fear, desire for glory, devotion to religions, and desire for power today as they did in ancient Sumeria.

Marx's analysis was stupid and flawed because there was never any example of his theory in history. Never in history did the working class/proles/common man rise up, band into communes, overthrow the established society, and form a democratic class society formed of communes.

It's just nonsense that goes against the grain of human biology.

There are countless examples of civilizational cycles of genesis, expansion, apogee, consolidation, decay, and ruin in history. Rome, Greece, Arabs, Assyrians, Sumerians, Babylon, Persia, and countless others as has been demonstrated by writers like Caroll Quigley, Spengler, and John Glubb.

As Caroll Quigley demonstrated in Tragedy and Hope, a lead cause of Europe's success was that it never consolidated into one blob that had a brief apogee and collapsed into decadence. There were attempts like the Hundred Year's War, the 30 years war, the Napoleonic Wars, and the world wars. But it never succeeded until 1945.

And under American consolidation, Europe is now heading in the same direction Mediterranean civilization head under the consolidation of Rome: Ruin and complete destruction by foreigners.