No EU Political Union,
But a Europe of Sovereign States!
by Helga Zepp-LaRouche
This article was translated from German.
Dec. 18—Although the European Union summit in Brussels on Dec. 16-17 did nothing substantial to propose or adopt solutions to the global financial crisis or the euro crisis, still the disputes that arose around the summit brought to light a number of interesting things. Also, while, thanks to Chancellor Angela Merkel, the worst proposals for transforming the EU into a transfer union[1] were blocked, at least for the moment, it was clear once again that the representatives of EU institutions see themselves primarily as champions of the oh-so-needy banking sector, and that means concretely the Inter-Alpha Group of the British Empire: "We will defend the euro, no matter what it costs," as European Commission President José Manuel Barroso put it earlier this year. Above all, the Social Democratic Party (SPD) and the Greens scandalously exposed themselves as protagonists of this concept of an imperial Europe.
One thing is certain: The euro crisis will continue, as part of the systemic breakdown. The announcement of the creation of a permanent EU crisis mechanism, starting on Jan. 1, 2013, has done nothing to stop speculation against Ireland, Portugal, Spain, Italy, etc. Even as the summit was taking place, the Moody's credit rating agency drastically downgraded Ireland's creditworthiness by five levels, which means that the interest rates that Ireland has to pay will now be even higher, and so the crisis will come to a head again. Spanish Finance Minister Elena Delgado's call before the summit, for a massive expansion of the European Stability Fund, will very soon be followed by a rescue package for Spain, as well as for Portugal, and Italy; even France has been mentioned. The doubling of the ECB's core capital signifies the intention to buy up more toxic government bonds—a useless and hyperinflationary undertaking, since the debts of the system are unpayable.
Idiocy and Worse
The speech by Frank-Walter Steinmeier (SPD), in response to Merkel's official Government Statement of Dec. 15, the day before the summit, will go down in history as a disgrace. He said that Merkel failed to understand the alarm signal from Frankfurt, that the European Central Bank (ECB) is "on the brink," and so now we have to correct the birth defect of the Economic and Monetary Union, and "muster the courage to take the next great European leap: to gradually overcome the Europe of the nation-states and transform this European Union into a political union."
The euro has failed because it was poorly conceived from the beginning; but instead of reversing the error, Steinmeier proposes to make the EU into a federal state—an idea that was explicitly ruled out by the German Constitutional Court in Karlsruhe, in its verdict on the Lisbon Treaty!
This transformation of the EU into a political union would be a fundamental change of the German Constitution and, according to Article 146, would require a referendum—yet the population has so far rejected all the outrageous EU treaties, from Maastricht to Lisbon. The population does feel very keenly, however, the huge "democracy deficit" of this EU monster, whose directives mostly seem to have been concocted in Absurdistan.
An EU federal state would be entirely a creation of the British Empire, which is already grabbing up more positions than other members, as can be seen from the latest appointments: Robert Cooper (a professing EU imperialist and mentor to Tony Blair), as the top advisor to Catherine Ashton, the EU High Representative for Foreign Affairs and Security Policy; and Bank of England Governor Mervyn King as deputy chairman of the European Systemic Risk Board (ESRB). The EU's foreign policy is thus defined by the British, and the head of the British central bank will get a bird's eye view of European banking! Let us recall that it was London and Washington that blocked the minimal attempts by the German government to effect any sort of re-regulation of the banking sector! So you could just as well set a fox to guard the chicken coop!
The advocates of an imperial European state will use all the tricks of the trade to achieve their goal. At the summit, Merkel was indeed still able to prevent the formation of Eurobonds and the doubling of the European Financial Stability Fund (EFSB); but at the subsequent press conference, she said, "This is another step in the direction of economic government"—an idea she had vehemently rejected one year ago, as well as before the rescue parachute for the bankrupt banks was put together. It was also announced that 2011 will be "the Year of EU Integration." And Luxembourg Prime Minister Jean Claude Juncker explained that, despite the rejection of his project to create Eurobonds, that proposal is headed in the right direction.
And because the Eurocrats have proved that they are following the directive of [Nazi crown jurist] Carl Schmitt—that power belongs only to those who, in a crisis, use a state of emergency to achieve their goals—we can be sure that they will try to use the next "threatened meltdown" to take a new step toward financial dictatorship.
Schmidt Gets His History Wrong
Even more horrendous were statements by former Chancellor Helmut Schmidt (SPD): First he described the calculating and sleazy Eurocrat Jean Claude Juncker (who said the German government had not properly "looked up the skirt" of his proposal?!) as superior to Chancellor Merkel, in overview and judgment; and then Schmidt unloaded a pile of his own economic garbage. He took the official globalist line, that a return to the deutschemark would seriously harm German exports and destroy the foundation of Germany's high-level social welfare system, since Germany would then export consumer junk, rather than the unique, special machine tools and other products that are sought the world over.
On the contrary, while Germany had the D-mark, this high technology was the reason for the success of German exports; it still is with the euro, and will be also in the future, with a new D-mark. On the other hand, the national economies of the currently bankrupt EU member states cannot recover if they remain in the euro system, because they cannot devalue their currencies; they will collapse under the burden of debt—as we can already see in Greece and Ireland—and then be eliminated as export partners for Germany.
Schmidt continued that for the European Union to stumble would be a moral catastrophe, because Germany has been and remains the main beneficiary of European political and economic unification. The exact opposite is true! Because President François Mitterrand, Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher, and President George H.W. Bush forced Germany into the euro and "contained" it by European integration, the natural economic cooperation of the reunited Germany with the states of the former Comecon was prevented, among other things; these countries, along with the new German federal states, were abandoned to the economic devastation of the free-market reform policy. If today whole regions of eastern Germany are impoverished and aging demographically, we have this policy to "thank" for it.
The main beneficiaries were firms in the export business, but the domestic market and wages have been stagnating ever since the introduction of the euro. And if Schmidt had even the slightest social awareness, he would know that, because of the catastrophic situation in the German municipalities and the social welfare system, further "financial equalization among the states" and "solidarity levies" for the insolvent EU countries amount to shortening the life expectancy of many people.
There are formulations in his new Die Zeit article that are completely unacceptable: Support for the euro will cost us Germans money, he writes, but since Germany had "contributed significantly to the strife in Europe and the world," Germans must now "contribute in a very different way, so that the horrors of the past cannot be repeated. Therefore further sacrifices of sovereignty and money are necessary."
First of all, in view of what is known today about the pre-history of the First World War, the position at the Versailles conference that Germany alone was to blame for the war, is completely without foundation. And it was the absolutely exorbitant financial claims on Germany [as a result of Versailles] that caused the crises of 1923, 1929, and 1933. Thus the debt corset into which the EU is forcing the both the bankrupt countries and Germany, has a definite parallel to the dictates of Versailles, and therefore threatens just such a possible repeat of the "horrors of the past." The danger is the further spread of chaos, which EU policy has already perpetrated in Greece and Ireland.
Second, it should not be forgotten that Hitler had influential supporters in the U.S.A. and England, such as Montagu Norman, the governor of the Bank of England. King Edward VIII, for example, felt even more "admiration and sympathy" for Hitler than did the appeasing politician Neville Chamberlain, and even after the defeat of France in 1940, he himself was not yet converted to the other side. Only after that did the British government turn to the United States with a request for support against Hitler.
Perhaps Helmut Schmidt's view of history has been shaped by his experience as a British prisoner of war in Hamburg, where British influence has historically been especially strong, and by the fact of his honorary presidency of the German-British Society. In any case, no one who has the interests of Germany's general welfare at heart would support his argument.
But also the argument that Germany's integration into the EU was necessary as a peace project, to prevent a repeat of the "horrors of the past," is, upon closer inspection, exposed as just a pretext. The underlying assumption, that an imperial Europe is necessary to confront growing China, America, and other big powers, is simply wrong. Behind it are the same geostrategic axioms that have led to wars in the past.
A Real War Avoidance Strategy
In today's real world, a durable war-avoidance strategy does not consist of creating a European federal state with as much territory as possible, and as large a population as possible, which can "assert itself" against current and future superpowers, but rather in, for example, increasing the effect of the Noösphere in the universe, in the spirit of the late Russian-Ukrainian scientist V.I. Vernadsky. In practice, this means, among other things, that Germany, together with powers such as Russia, China, India, the U.S.A., etc., should participate in the research and development of technologies with high energy-flux density, thus to guarantee the energy and raw material security of mankind for the next century. But the SPD has been too green, for too long, to think in these terms. And Helmut Schmidt is also not entirely innocent in this respect.
We should now adopt the vision of the two men who undeniably did more for postwar reconciliation in Europe than anyone else: French President Charles de Gaulle and German Chancellor Konrad Adenauer. For de Gaulle, the Brussels Commission was, at best, a possibly useful staff of clerks, but by no means did that give it the right to act like a kind of super-government. He told Adenauer at Rambouillet: "Supranational bodies have been created, because the supporters of a united Europe thought, a few years ago, that the quarrels between the French and Germans, and also the Italians, were insurmountable, so something had to be invented that would exist outside the States. However, this was an incorrect view of things. Certainly Europe should exist, but on other grounds."
De Gaulle remained on the alert throughout his life, to make sure that cooperation in Europe did not slip into supranationalism. And Adenauer insisted, even more than de Gaulle, that he did not want the British, whose policies he had always regarded with suspicion, to be part of the project of cooperation in Europe. Adenauer was right.
Cooperation among sovereign states in Europe does not need any supranational bureaucracy, and certainly not one that sets itself up as masters of a new world empire, and which is not accountable to the citizens, either in elections or in any other way. And cooperation in Europe with Great Britain will not work as long as Britain wants to retain its status as the world headquarters of the "financial industry."
The only way that Europe can assert itself in the world, is for its sovereign states each to revive their own highest levels of culture, and for the entire cultural paradigm of globalization to be replaced by a cultural renaissance. When in Germany the spirit of Nicolaus of Cusa, Schiller, Beethoven, and Humboldt comes alive again; in France, the ideas of Louis XI, François Villon, Rabelais, and the École Polytechnique; in Italy, Dante, Petrarch, Leonardo, Verdi—to name just a few—then the universal spirit will exist that truly joins the wonderful community of nations.
Only if we introduce a two-tier banking system[2] in the immediate period ahead, reestablish sovereign control over our currency and economy, and replace the thoroughly criminal casino economy by a credit system oriented to the common good, can we avoid a plunge into the chaos of a new dark age.
[1] The term "Transfer Union" was specifically created for the current situation in the EU, meaning that the debt of one or more members would be transferred to one or more other memberss—something which is specifically ruled out by the Lisbon Treaty.
[2] Known in the United States as the FDR-era Glass-Steagall system, which separated commercial banking from (speculative) investment banking, and was repealed by Congress in 1999.
