AFTER IRELAND'S `NO' TO THE LISBON TREATY
Cancel All EU Treaties;
Build a Europe of the Fatherlands!
by Helga Zepp-LaRouche
The Irish have now fulfilled French President Nicolas Sarkozy's prediction of last November: that the new European Union Treaty would be rejected in any country where a popular referendum was held on it. The new crisis into which Ireland's "No" vote, on June 12, has now plunged the EU, gives us an excellent opportunity for Europe's nations to extricate themselves from the corset of every EU treaty already in effect, from Maastricht to Nice, and to opt instead for a system of Europe-wide cooperation of sovereign republics, in the spirit of Charles de Gaulle.
Immediately, on June 13, Martin Schulz, chairman of the Socialist Group in the European Parliament, announced that he would henceforth devote his efforts toward halting the process of EU enlargement—which most immediately affects Croatia's application for membership—and that he would force Europe's heads of state to go on public record before the European Parliament, on what kind of Europe they really want. Because then it would become clear to all, that there is a split inside the EU, and that some member-states have no interest whatsoever in the new reforms. Schulz didn't even exclude the possible dissolution of the European Union. On the other hand, his idea that those states most enamored of integration could return to the original draft of the EU Constitution, and that all the other EU treaties could be cancelled, is less promising, since that draft was defeated already back in 2005, in referenda in France and the Netherlands.
And so, this Friday the 13th has turned out to be a lucky day for the preservation of democracy in Europe's nations, because now the Lisbon Treaty, which was to transform Europe into an oligarchical and imperial dictatorship, cannot go into effect as planned on Jan. 1, 2009. Because the EU advocates' argument that the revised EU Treaty was necessary in order to shore up Europe's role in the face of the United States and a re-strengthened Russia, China, and India, simply does not hold water. The only thing that the Treaty would have done, would have been to consolidate the policy of neoliberalism, and thus to hand over quasi-dictatorial powers to the British imperial free-trade faction and to the EU bureaucracy.
It's precisely this neoliberal free-trade policy which, for the past 11 months or so, has been plunging us ever deeper into one crisis after another. The impending disaster of Lehman Brothers, the fourth-largest Wall Street bank, is only the most recent expression of a financial and banking crisis which already some time back, had turned into a crisis of confidence in the entire system. Meanwhile, the fires of raw material and food hyperinflation are being fanned most vigorously by the mega-speculators, and threaten the welfare, and even the very lives, of one billion people in the developing countries—hyperinflation on the scale of Germany's in 1923, only this time worldwide.
The 'Monster' Financial Markets
Leading financial institutions' presumption that the remedy for this crisis is globalization and world government, have extremely small chances of success now. For example, Timothy Geithner, president of the Federal Reserve Bank of New York, interviewed in the June 9 Financial Times, proposed even tighter centralization of the world's central banks, under U.S. Federal Reserve control—a proposal which most Asian nations will simply not agree to. German Chancellor Angela Merkel, on the other hand, writing in the June 11 Financial Times, recommended the creation of a European rating agency which could hold its own against the dominance of Moody's, and Standard and Poor's. Unfortunately, in the same article Mrs. Merkel refused to adopt the view of German President Hoerst Köhler, who had described the financial markets as a "monster," nor the view of Deutsche Bank CEO Josef Ackermann, who said he no longer believes in the market's powers of self-healing. Mrs. Merkel rejected these points of view, because, she said, they leave "an open flank" to protectionism.
And true enough, there is a widening chasm between the proponents of free trade, who have recently been resorting to using the most infamous financial locusts and speculators of every description, and the proponents of a protectionist policy oriented toward the General Welfare. That is precisely the reason why not only the EU Treaty, but also the so-called Doha Round of the World Trade Organization, have failed in recent days. At a meeting in New Delhi, on June 12, thirty top representatives of India's agricultural organizations passed a resolution rejecting the WTO agreements: "India should leave the WTO and should not sacrifice the livelihood of 800 million farmers, Adivasis [Aborigines], Dalits ["Untouchables," descendants of the Aborigines], and rural women." The resolution stressed that the WTO does not offer the slightest real protection to Indian agriculture, fisheries, and forestry.
In the coming weeks and months, the international banking and financial crisis, and the hyperinflationary explosion, will grow to tsunami strength. The chorus of those admitting the systemic nature of this crisis will grow in number and decibels. A further indication of the complete lock-step of the German media in this connection, is their total suppression of a letter issued on May 22, by 14 former leading political figures—among them Michel Rocard, Poul Nyrup Rasmussen, and Helmut Schmidt—which speaks of a systemic crisis, and which called for the convening of an emergency conference on the heads-of-state level, in order to define a new financial system. Meanwhile, Russian President Dmitri Medvedev has warned citizens about the effects of this systemic crisis on the welfare of the population.
The failure of the Lisbon Treaty has to be understood as an opportunity to put onto the agenda a new financial architecture in the tradition of Franklin Roosevelt's Bretton Woods. For many years, Lyndon LaRouche has been specifying the concrete steps that would be required for such a reorganization of the world financial system. A community of nations, which would have to include a changed-of-heart United States, along with Russia, China, India, and other nations, such as Germany, France, Italy, Japan, Brazil, South Africa, etc., must decide as quickly as possible to dispose of the unpayable financial waste which probably adds up to hundreds of trillions of dollars; to return to fixed exchange rates; and to use national banks to provide long-term credit at low interest rates for productive investment in the real economy. FDR's New Deal policy can serve as the historical model for how nations, both individually and in cooperation, can overcome economic depression, and can get the economy moving again. Russia's former President and current Prime Minister Vladimir Putin, Argentina's former President Néstor Kirchner, Italy's Economics Minister Giulio Tremonti, and the great number of VIPs who have signed this writer's call, have already spoken out to this effect.
Build the Eurasian Land-Bridge
The construction of the Eurasian Land-Bridge and its extension over the Bering Strait and down to Chile, and also via Egypt, Gibraltar, and through a tunnel from Sicily to Tunisia, and down to South Africa, can become the concrete framework for reconstructing the world economy following the financial reorganization.
The axiomatic basis of globalization—which in reality, is nothing but an attempt to subjugate the world to domination by the British Empire—and of the Lisbon Treaty, which is part of the same policy, has now completely crumbled. The Italian anthropology professor Giulio Magli has correctly pointed out that the EU Treaty is grounded in the ideology of Immanuel Kant. Kant was not the only one to advocate a utopia of eternal peace, based on the presumption that all nations could be united by a single common law and a single uniform culture. Friedrich List exposed the fallacious assumptions of Adam Smith and his free-trade doctrine, and traced this back to Abbé de St. Pierre's similar notion of eternal peace. List also warned that the only reason that Adam Smith had published his works, was in order to further the British Empire's interest in deceiving the population.
The multitude of nations and their diverse cultures and interests represent a multiplicity which we should not iron flat, but which must, on the contrary, fill us with joy. In the spirit of Nicholas of Cusa, they represent a multiplicity within unity. Such unity should not be forged by supranational structures, but rather must be brought about by sovereign republics with equal rights committing themselves to the common aims of mankind, as Dr. Edward Teller once put it. We in Europe can and should cooperate, but we must do so in a Europe of sovereign fatherlands.
