No, it very much isn't, although obviously the Kissingers of the world want to pretend that they're in the first category of clear-eyed utility maximising rationalists while they're actually in the second.
That doesn't mean that rational policy planning has never been a thing. The EU while imperfect and frustrating is explicitly orientated towards technocratic consensus rather than the mid-20th-century Europe of nationalist mass murder. Only a tiny number of people think that Von der Leyen and Hitler are equivalent.
(or rather, if you think technocrats and blood-and-soil are the same side, what do you call the "other" side?)
I think we're talking at cross-purposes here. I wouldn't describe the EU as technocratic at all; I'd reserve that label for the people who self-describe as the logical ones--"clear-eyed utility maximising rationalists" as you say--while pushing endlessly for more technology, less regulation and (pretty consistently) hawkish and nationalistic policies. That's very much not the EU.
I don't disagree that there are different approaches in conflict, but the binary of forward-looking technologists vs backward-looking nationalists is very out-of-date.
Right, yes I think this is just a confusion caused by my use of "technocrat". I've always used it for the technologically assisted bureaucracy, the tendency to view the economy as a cybernetics problem that can be solved by PID control (like inflation targeting). Thiel et al are more "techbro" than "technocrat". Crucially they operate outside of regular politics - they're not running for office, they're not part of the civil service (apart from the brief terrible conflagration of DOGE, an explicit Stalinist purge of old school technocrats)
That doesn't mean that rational policy planning has never been a thing. The EU while imperfect and frustrating is explicitly orientated towards technocratic consensus rather than the mid-20th-century Europe of nationalist mass murder. Only a tiny number of people think that Von der Leyen and Hitler are equivalent.
(or rather, if you think technocrats and blood-and-soil are the same side, what do you call the "other" side?)