THE ORIGINS AND ESSENCE OF THE EUROPEAN UNION.docx

THE ORIGINS AND ESSENCE OF THE EUROPEAN UNION Ironically, it was probably an Englishman, William Penn, the founder of Pennsylvania, who sketched the first plan for a united Europe as far back as 1693. His proposal was that the Sovereign Princes of Europe should “agree to meet by their stated deputies in a General Diet, Estates or Parliament, and there Establish Rules of Justice for Sovereign Princes to observe one to another; and… before which Sovereign Assembly, should be brought all Differences depending between one Sovereign and another… Europe would quietly obtain the so much desired and needed Peace.” Penn, An Essay towards the Present and Future Peace of Europe by the Establishment of an European Parliament, or Estates, in Peter Shröder, “Penn’s Plan for a United Europe”, History Today, October, 2016, p. 32. According to Yanis Varoufakis, the idea goes back to “the time-honoured Central European tradition associated with catchwords such as Mitteleuropa or Paneuropa… “At its most wholesome, Mitteleuropa evoked a multinational multicultural intellectual ideal for a united Central Europe that the non-chauvinistic section of its conservative elites were rather fond of. However, Mitteleuropa was also the title of an influential book by Friedrich Naumann, authored in the midst of the Great War, which advocated an economically and politically integrated Central Europe run on German principles and with the ‘minor’ states placed under German rule. A great deal more liberal than Mitteleuropa, Paneuropa was the brainchild of Count Coudenhove-Kalergi, an Austrian-Japanese intellectual who conducted a lifelong campaign to bring about a pan-European political and economic union. “Despite these differences, Mitteleuropa and Paneuropa were aimed at protecting Europe’s centre from the geopolitical and economic encroachments of Russia from the east and the Anglosphere from the west. They also shared a view that European unity would have to be overlaid on Central Europe’s existing national institutions and, indeed, on its prevailing corporate power structures. A European union consistent with Mitteleuropa and Paneuropa visions would have to operate by limiting competition between corporations, between nations and between capital and labour. In short, Central Europe would resemble one gigantic corporation structured hierarchically and governed by technocrats, whose job would be to depoliticize everything and minimize all conflicts. “Needless to say, the Mitteleuropa-Paneuropa vision enthused industrialists. Walter Rathenau, chairman of AEG (Allgemeine Elekricitäts-Gesellschaft) and later Germany’s foreign minister, went as far as to suggest that a Central European economic union would be ‘civilization’s greatest conquest’. The idea appealed not only to corporations like AEG, Krupp and Siemens, but also to the Roman Catholic Church and politicians like Robert Schuman, another of the European Union’s fathers, who was born in Germany but ended up French courtesy of a shifting border…” Varoufakis, And the Weak Suffer What They Must? London: Vintage, 2017, pp. 56-57. However, the first politician to really get the wheels of European integration moving was the French statesman Aristide Briand. He insisted, writes Tony Judt, that “the time had come to overcome past rivalries and think European, speak European, feel European. In 1924 the French economist Charles Gide joined other signatories in Europe in launching an International Committee for a European Customs Union. Three years later a junior member of the British Foreign Office would profess himself ‘astonished’ at the extent of continental interest in the ‘pan-European’ idea. “More prosaically, the Great War had brought French and Germans, in a curious way, to a better appreciation of their mutual dependence. Once the post-war disruption had subsided and Paris had abandoned its fruitless efforts to extract German reparations by force, an international Steel Pact was signed, in September 1926, by France, Germany, Luxembourg, Belgium and the (then autonomous) region of the Saar, to regulate steel production and prevent excess capacity. Although the Pact was joined the following year by Czechoslovakia, Austria and Hungary, it was only ever a cartel of the traditional kind; but the German Prime Minister Gustav Stresemann certainly saw in it the embryonic shape of future trans-national accords. He was not alone…” Judt, Postwar, London: Pimlico, 2007, pp. 153-154. As Conan Fischer writes, “French leaders had also begun to question whether individual European states could sustain their empires in the longer term and whether they were a match for the emerging continental superpowers, such as the United States and (potentially) the Soviet Union. Such ideas informed Briand’s thinking when, in 1929-30, he proposed creating a European Union, while Stresemann entertained comparable thoughts up to his death in October 1929. It followed that France and Germany would pursue rapprochement through the medium of European integration as national governments pooled aspects of sovereignty. French and German officials understood that even economic integration would entail a wider range of common policies and both countries also evoked common values, democratic and Christian, further to legitimize European integration and to counter the growing challenges of Bolshevism and Fascism…” Fischer, “The Limits of Nationhood”, History Today, June, 2017, pp. 12-13. p. 14. Adam Tooze writes: “In light of America’s uncompromising stance over war debts, in June 1929 at a meeting in Madrid, Briand and Stresemann had discussed a vision of a European bloc large enough to withstand American economic competition and capable of releasing itself from dependence on Wall Street. In a speech on 5 September 1929, using the League of Nations as his stage, Briand seized the initiative. The European members of the League must move toward a closer union. The toothless peace pact that bore his name was not enough. Given the obvious downward trend in the world economy and the looming prospect of further American protectionism, Briand’s first approach was to propose a system of preferential tariff reductions. But this economic approach met with such hostility that over the winter he moved to a different tack. “In early May 1930, within weeks of the conclusion of the ticklish London Naval Conference, the French government circulated a formal proposal to all 26 of the other European member states of the League of Nations. Paris called upon its fellow-Europeans to realize the implications of their ‘geographical unity’ to form a conscious ‘bond of solidarity’. Specifically, Briand proposed a regular European conference with a rotating presidency and a standing political committee. The ultimate aim would be a ‘federation built upon the idea of union and not of unity’. ‘Times have never been more propitious nor more pressing,’ Briand concluded, ‘for the starting of constructive work of this kind… It is a decisive hour when a watchful Europe may ordain in freedom her own fate. Unite to live and prosper!’” Tooze, The Deluge, London: Penguin, 2015, pp. 492-493. However, Stresemann’s death a few weeks later brought an end to this initiative. Briand’s “Memorandum on the Organization of a Regime of European Federal Union” had to wait for the rise and fall of another scheme of European unity – Hitler’s – before it was revived and realized in the European Union of the late twentieth century. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aristide_Briand. * Tony Judt writes: “The very scale of the collective misery that Europeans had brought upon themselves in the first half of the twentieth century had a profoundly de-politicizing effect; far from turning to extreme solutions, in the manner of the years following World War One, the European publics of the gloomy post-World War Two years turned away from politics. The implications of this could be discerned only vaguely at the time – in the failure of Fascist or Communist parties to cash in upon the difficulties of daily existence; in the way in which economics displaced politics as the goal and language of collective action; in the emergence of domestic recreations and domestic consumption in place of participation in public affairs… “In more ways than most contemporaries could possibly have foreseen, a new Europe was being born.” Judt, op. cit., pp. 236, 237. In Western Europe, the post-war poverty and depression had been much greater than in the Anglo-Saxon countries (especially North America), and the consequent contrast as prosperity returned in the 1950s was therefore the more striking. Thus while in the period 1913-50 the average growth rate in Britain, France and Germany was 1.3 percent, in the period 1950-73 “French growth rate per annum had averaged 5 percent, West Germany had grown at nearly 6 percent and even Britain had maintained an average rate above 3 percent.’ Judt, op. cit., pp. 456-457. This extraordinary growth in prosperity, unparalleled in European history, could not fail to have an important and deleterious effect on the European psyche, accelerating its already pronounced turning away from religion and the spiritual life to Mammon. The American gospel of self-fulfilment played its part in this change, as preached by the wave of Hollywood films that poured into Europe. But there were other, still more significant factors. One was the increased size and influence of the state, not in the totalitarian form of the contemporary Soviet Union, but in the more subtle and beguiling form of the West European welfare state… West European welfarism, otherwise known as Social Democracy, was for the time being a great success. As Judt writes: “In the peak years of the modern European welfare state, when the administrative apparatus still exercised broad-ranging authority and its credibility remained unassailed, a remarkable consensus was achieved. The state, it was widely believed, would always do a better job than the unrestricted market: not just in dispensing justice and securing the realm, or distributing goods and services, but in designing and applying strategies for social cohesion, moral sustenance and cultural vitality. The notion that such matters might better be left to enlightened self-interest and the workings of the free market in commodities and ideas was regarded in mainstream European political and academic circles as a quaint relic of pre-Keynesian times: at best a failure to learn the lessons of the Depression, at worst an invitation to conflict and a veiled appeal to the basest human instincts. “The state, then, was a good thing; and there was a lot of it. Between 1950 and 1973, government spending rose from 27.6 percent to 38.8 of the gross domestic product in France, from 30.4 percent to 42 percent in West Germany, from 34.2 percent to 41.5 percent in the UK and from 26.8 percent to 45.5 percent in the Netherlands – at a time when that domestic product was itself growing faster than every before or since. The overwhelming bulk of the increase in spending went on insurance, pensions, health, education and housing. In Scandinavia the share of national income devoted to social security alone rose 250 percent in Denmark and Sweden between 1950 and 1973. In Norway it tripled. Only in Switzerland was the share of post-war GNP spent by the state kept comparatively low (it did not reach 30 percent until 1980), but even there it stood in dramatic contrast to the 1938 figure of just 6.8 percent. “The success story of post-war European capitalism was everywhere accompanied by an enhanced role for the public sector. But the nature of state engagement varied considerably. In most of continental Europe the state eschewed direct ownership of industry (though not public transport or communications), preferring to exercise indirect control, often through autonomous agencies, of which Italy’s tentacular IRI was the biggest and best known… “Doctrinal differences over the ostensible goals of the state might noisily oppose Left and Right, Christian Democrats and Communists, Socialists and Conservatives, but almost everyone had something to gain from the opportunities the state afforded them for income and influence. Faith in the state – as planner, coordinator, facilitator, arbiter, provider, caretaker and guardian – was widespread and crossed almost all political divides. The welfare state was avowedly social but it was far from socialist. In that sense welfare capitalism, as it unfolded in Western Europe, was truly post-ideological. “Nevertheless, within the general post-war European consensus there was a distinctive vision, that of the Social Democrats. Social Democracy had always been a hybrid; indeed, this was just what was held against it by enemies to the Right and Left alike. A practice in lifelong search of its theory, Social Democracy was the outcome of an insight vouchsafed to a generation of European socialists early in the twentieth century: that radical social revolution in the heartlands of modern Europe – as prophesied and planned by the socialist visionaries of the nineteenth century – lay in the past, not the future. As a solution to the injustice and inefficiency of industrial capitalism, the nineteenth-century paradigm of violent urban upheaval was not only undesirable and unlikely to meet its goals; it was also redundant. Genuine improvements in the condition of all classes could be obtained in incremental and peaceful ways. “It did not follow from this that the fundamental nineteenth-century socialist tenets were discarded. The overwhelming majority of mid-twentieth century European Social Democrats, even if they kept their distance from Marx and his avowed heirs, maintained as an article of faith that capitalism was inherently dysfunctional and that socialism was both morally and economically superior. Where they differed from Communists was in their unwillingness to commit to the inevitability of capitalism’s imminent demise or to the wisdom of hastening that demise by their own political actions. Their task, as they had come to understand it in the course of decades of Depression, division and dictatorship, was to use the resources of the state to eliminate the social pathologies attendant on capitalist forms of production and the unrestricted workings of a market economy: to build not economic utopias but good societies.” Judt, op. cit., p. 361, 362-363. * The most sophisticated and complex organization of Social Democracy, creating a vast increase in state power, turned out to be supranational: the European Union, composed in the beginning of the six Benelux countries, but now (in 2017) encompassing twenty-seven states (excluding Britain, which voted to leave in 2016). One of the many motivations for the creation of the European Union was peace; as David Reynolds puts it, the formation of the EU’s predecessor, the European Economic Community in 1957 was “effectively a peace settlement for Western Europe”. Reynolds, The Long Shadow. The Great War and the Twentieth Century, London: Simon & Schuster, 2014. Many intellectuals in the early post-war generations believed that yet another war among the nations of Europe could be prevented only by uniting them in a new supra-nation. This, according to Michael McManus, was the motivation of Sir Edward Heath, the Prime Minister of Great Britain, who took his country into the Union in 1973. Heath “had first-hand experience of a Nuremburg rally in 1937, of the Spanish Civil War in 1938, and of combat in the Second World war itself. His greatest fear was of a resurgence of nationalism in Europe and of another ruinous war. European unity was, for him, first and foremost, the necessary key to peace. “This was the predominant view within the Conservative Party from the mid-1950s until the mid-1980s including most of Margaret Thatcher’s premiership. After the Berlin Wall came down in 1989, however, she recognised a new reality and was fearful of a united Germany. But Sir Edward’s needle had got stuck…” McManus, “European dream that belonged to a different era”, The Sunday Telegraph Review, July 3, 2016, p. 19. But was it really the European project that kept the peace in Europe? Hardly… The real causes of the preservation of peace in Europe were mutual exhaustion, the common threat of the Red Army just over the Elbe – and the consequent felt need for the formation of NATO in 1949. In fact, the real cause of peace was the American army, the core army of NATO, together with other American institutions in Europe. It was they that both defended the West against the Soviets and constantly cajoled the Europeans, especially the French, into working together for the common good. The man usually credited with creating the EU, Jean Monnet, worked for much of his life in America and has been considered by many as almost an American spy. “It was Monnet,” write Lynn Picknett and Clive Prince, “who had secured the Allies’ backing for General de Gaulle against Roosevelt’s opposition, and in return, de Gaulle gave him responsibility for rebuilding the French economy and industry – a position he used to achieve his great dream, laying the foundations for the EEC. “The ‘Schuman Declaration’ was the result of intrigue, trickery and subterfuge by Monnet, his most audacious trick being to get French and West German governments to set up a supranational organisation to co-ordinate their industries without realising exactly what they had signed up to. This radical new concept, of an organisation with control over individual nations’ industries but with its own, outside autonomy, laid the foundation for all that came after. Unsurprisingly, Monnet became president of the new body, called – with a chillingly Orwellian tone – the High Authority. [Former French Foreign Minister Robert] Schuman became the first president of the European Parliament in 1958.” Picknett and Prince, “Synarchy: The Hidden Hand behind the European Union”, New Dawn, Special Issue 18, http://www.newdawnmagazine.com/articles/synarchy-the-hidden-hand-behind-the-european-union. See Alan Sked, “How A Secretive Elite Created The EU To Build A World Government”, Sunday Times Style Magazine, 28 November, 2015. http://www.zerohedge.com/news/2015-11-28/how-secretive-elite-created-eu-build-world-government. “The Schuman Declaration” took place on May 9, 1950, and marks the real birthday of the EU. What Schuman proposed (and realized through Monnet’s “audacious trickery”) was the creation of the European Coal and Steel Community (ECSC) with an embryonic supranational administration and court of justice located in Brussels. As Yanis Varoufakis points out, the ECSC was in fact a cartel, and therefore “a remarkable departure from American principles of governance, which since President Theodore Roosevelt had included a healthy dose of cartel busting. However, America’s global plan could not fly in Europe unless it made its peace with the Mitteleuropa-Paneuropa ideology intimately associated with Central Europe’s cartels. “Making their peace with Central European corporatism, American policymakers had to swallow not only the idea of building the new Europe on a cartel of big business but also the unsavoury political agenda that went with it. Corporatists like Robert Schuman and Jean Monnet were bent on constructing the Brussels-based bureaucracy as a democracy-free zone. Count Coudenhove-Kalergi put it succinctly in one of his speeches when he declared his ambition for Europe to ‘supersede democracy and for it to be replaced by a ‘social aristocracy of the spirit’. As always happens when a technocracy harbouring a deep Platonic contempt for democracy attains inordinate power, we end up with an antisocial, dispirited, mindless autocracy. “Europeans recognize this in today’s Brussels-based bureaucracy. Every survey of European public opinion finds large majorities with no trust in the EU’s institutions. While it is true that citizens around the world – for example, in Britain, the United States or India – are highly critical of their state’s institutions, the discontent with Brussels is qualitatively different. Take Britain for instance. The British state evolved as a set of institutions whose function was to regulate the struggle between different social groups and classes. The tussle between the king and the barons gave rise to Magna Carta, a deal the essence of which was to limit the king’s power. After the merchant class acquired economic power disproportionate to its social and political rank, the state evolved further to accommodate its interests with those of the aristocracy, especially after the 1688 Glorious Revolution. The Industrial Revolution brought new social strata into the mix (industrialists, trade unions, local communities made up of former peasants), extending the franchise and refining the state’s apparatus. “Meanwhile, on the other side of the Atlantic a similar process was spawning the American constitution. The United States government and bureaucracy also emerged at a time of intense conflict between vested interests and social classes. Slave-owning landowners, mainly in the South, clashed with East Coast traders and manufacturers in Illinois, Boston and Wisconsin. The Louisiana Purchase triggered a variety of new tussles between multiple interest groups. A brutal civil was proved impossible to avert and facilitated America’s consolidation. Later on, the rise of the labour unions and the military industrial complex signalled fresh rivalries. To bring the nation together and to homogenize its institutions so as to deal with the political, social and financial crises that these tensions threw up, Congress had to play a central equilibrating role. Indeed, no authority in the United States can defy Congress or ignore it. Whatever demerits American democracy may have, there can be no doubt that the democratic process is essential to keeping the nation together. “By contrast, the European Union’s institutions did not evolve in response to social conflicts. National parliaments and institutions did all the heavy lifting in terms of ameliorating social conflicts while the Brussels bureaucracy was devised for the purpose of managing the affairs an industrial cartel made up of Central European heavy industry. Lacking a Demos – a ‘We the people…’ – to keep them in line, and indeed to legitimize their activities, Brussels bureaucrats both disdained democracy and were shielded from its checks and balances. While the cartel they administered was doing well under the auspices of the American-designed global financial system, the European Union’s institutions enjoyed widespread acceptance. However, unlike America’s Congress-centric system, the European Union lacked the democratic process necessary to fall back on in times of trouble. “From the viewpoint of its official ideology, the European Union sounded very similar to the United States, even to liberal Britain. Free-market liberalism seemed to be the order of the day, and a single market free of state patronage the union’s objective. And yet, remarkably, the European Union began life as a cartel of coal and steel producers which, openly and legally, controlled prices and output by means of a multinational bureaucracy vested with legal and political powers superseding national parliaments and democratic processes. Indeed, the inaugural task of the Brussels bureaucracy was to fix the price of steel and coal products and remove all restrictions on their movement and trading among the cartel’s member states. Curiously perhaps, this made perfect sense: what would be the point of cross-border cartel if its products were stopped at the borders, taxed and generally impeded by national government officials? The equivalent in the United States would have been a Washington bureaucracy, operating without a Senate or a House of Representatives to keep the bureaucrats in check, able to overrule state governments on almost anything and bent on fixing prices at levels higher than the market would have selected. “The next step was obvious too: once tariffs on coal and steel were removed, it made sense to remove all tariffs. Except that French farmers, who always exerted exceptional influence on France’s political system, did not like the idea of untrammelled competition from imported milk, cheese and wine. So to co-opt French farmers, the so-called Common Agricultural Policy was established. Its purpose? To secure the farmers’ consent to a European free trade zone by handing over to them a chunk of the cartel’s monopoly profits. “By the end of the 1950s a fully-fledged European Union (then known as the European Economic Community) which had evolved from the European Coal and Steel Community) had sprung from the multinational heavy industry cartel and its political incarnation in Brussels. Dollarized by the United States, it soon began to create large surpluses, which funded postwar Central European prosperity in the stable world environment provided by the Bretton Woods system, which was itself constantly stabilized by a United States ready and willing to recycle to Europe a large chunk of America’s surpluses. A golden age dawned, brimming with high growth, non-existent unemployment and low inflation, spawning a new Europe of shared prosperity. It was an American triumph that Europe’s elites were determined to portray as their own…” Varoufakis, And the Weak Suffer What They Must? London: Vintage, 2017, pp. 58-60. Ambrose Evans-Pritchard confirms Varoufakis’ important conclusion: “The European Union was always an American project. “It was Washington that drove European integration in the late 1940s, and funded it covertly under the Truman, Eisenhower, Kennedy, Johnson, and Nixon administrations. “While irritated at times, the US has relied on the EU ever since as the anchor to American regional interests alongside NATO. “There has never been a divide-and-rule strategy… “The Schuman Declaration that set the tone of Franco-German reconciliation - and would lead by stages to the European Community - was cooked up by the US Secretary of State Dean Acheson at a meeting in Foggy Bottom. ‘It all began in Washington,’ said Robert Schuman's chief of staff.  “It was the Truman administration that browbeat the French to reach a modus vivendi with Germany in the early post-War years, even threatening to cut off US Marshall aid at a furious meeting with recalcitrant French leaders they resisted in September 1950.  “Truman's motive was obvious. The Yalta settlement with the Soviet Union was breaking down. He wanted a united front to deter the Kremlin from further aggrandizement after Stalin gobbled up Czechoslovakia, doubly so after Communist North Korea crossed the 38th Parallel and invaded the South. “For British eurosceptics, Jean Monnet looms large in the federalist pantheon, the eminence grise of supranational villainy. Few are aware that he spent much of his life in America, and served as war-time eyes and ears of Franklin Roosevelt.  “General Charles de Gaulle thought him an American agent, as indeed he was in a loose sense. Eric Roussel's biography of Monnet reveals how he worked hand in glove with successive administrations. “General Charles de Gaulle was always deeply suspicious of American motives…  “Nor are many aware of declassified documents from the State Department archives showing that US intelligence funded the European movement secretly for decades, and worked aggressively behind the scenes to push Britain into the project.  “As this newspaper first reported when the treasure became available, one memorandum dated July 26, 1950, reveals a campaign to promote a full-fledged European parliament. It is signed by Gen William J. Donovan, head of the American wartime Office of Strategic Services, precursor of the Central Intelligence Agency.  “The key CIA front was the American Committee for a United Europe (ACUE), chaired by Donovan. Another document shows that it provided 53.5 per cent of the European movement’s funds in 1958. The board included Walter Bedell Smith and Allen Dulles, CIA directors in the Fifties, and a caste of ex-OSS officials who moved in and out of the CIA. “Bill Donovan, legendary head of the war-time OSS, was later in charge of orchestrating the EU project… “There is nothing particularly wicked about this. The US acted astutely in the context of the Cold War. The political reconstruction of Europe was a roaring success…” Ambrose Evans-Pritchard, “The European Union always was a CIA Project, as Brexiteers Discover”, The Daily Telegraph, business section, http://www.telegraph.co.uk/business/2016/04/27/the-european-union-always-was-a-cia-project-as-brexiteers-discover/  In spite of the enormous debt the European Union owes to America, anti-Americanism has been a defining sentiment of European leaders almost from the beginning. The ungrateful and ultimately self-defeating desire to undermine American leadership in the western world has manifested itself in many ways: in France’s withdrawal from NATO, in the efforts to undermine the Bretton Woods Agreement, which led to the “Nixon Shock” of 1971, in Germany’s Ost-Politik at the height of the Cold War, in the refusal to pay its share of Europe’s own defence. Earlier this year Angela Merkel complained that Britain and the United States were withdrawing from Europe - and this in spite of the fact that America pays 4% of its GDP to NATO, Britain – 2%, and Germany – only 1.2%! Merkel then went on to say that Europe should “go it alone” in its defence. Of course, Europe has long wanted to have its own army, the one attribute of a truly sovereign state (apart from its unprotected borders) that it does not yet have. But in view of the Europeans’ refusal to pay for their own defence, a European army could only be built at the expense of withdrawing forces from NATO, thereby undermining European security at a critical moment of history. It is likely that Europe’s anti-Americanism will cost it dear in the future… * A memo dated June 11, 1965 from the French Foreign Minister Giscard d’Estaing instructed the vice-president of the European Community to pursue monetary union by stealth, suppressing debate until the “adoption of such proposals would become virtually inescapable”. Since monetary union, as Alan Greenspan reminded the world when the disastrous common currency was in fact introduced decades later, cannot function properly without a unitary state, this typically stealthy instruction brings us to the real goal of the EU’s founders: the suppression of national sovereignties and the creation of political union in the form of a Superstate. This state, needless to say, would not be a democracy. This was not part of the Americans’ plan for Europe in the 1950s. But it had been in the Europeans’ plan from the beginning. For, as Jean Monnet put it as early as 1952: “The nations of Europe must be guided towards a Superstate without their peoples understanding what is happening. This can be carried out in successive stages, each camouflaged as having an economic goal, but which will end up by leading them irreversibly into a federation.” Monnet’s words were prophetic: during the course of the twentieth century as the European Superstate’s powers increased inexorably, being sanctified through a series of treaties signed by the heads of the Union’s national governments, including the Treaty of Rome in 1957, the Single European Act of 1985, the Maastricht Treaty of 1992, the introduction of the single currency in 1999 and the Lisbon Treaty of 2007. But these acquisitions of power by the supranational Union were not democratically debated or ratified in any real sense; and the lack of democratic consensus and of sustained economic growth in later decades has caused serious problems, leading to Britain’s decision to withdraw from the Union in 2016. As the present writer commented in 1995, “Stealthily, unnoticed even by the great majority of its own citizens, a totalitarian monster has been born in the heart of Western Europe. Although this monster, the European Union is the creation of a group of democratic states and is situated in the heartland of modern democracy, it has already to a large extent superseded the process of democratic decision-making in the member states and replaced it by an unelected body, the European Commission, which, together with the equally unelected European Court, has the power to issue directives that override all national legislation and which is steadily penetrating every nook and cranny of the political, economic, social and religious life of the member states, from the permitted shape of cucumbers to the date of Pascha. Moreover, the Maastricht treaty of 1992 legislated that by 1997 a single European Currency would be created run by a single (again unelected) European Bank – an institution the creation of which, in the opinion of the president of the American Federal Reserve Bank, Alan Greenspan, must necessarily be accompanied by irreversible political union and the creation of a single European state. “When national sovereignty has gone and national parliaments become emasculated talking shops (a process that is already far advanced), only the European Parliament may perhaps have the power to withstand the power of the Commission-Politburo. However, all the indications are that the European Parliament, like the Soviet Central Committee, will be a toothless institution populated by people who have already imbibed the socialist spirit of the European institutions and enthusiastically accepted the ideology of the European super-state. The only real function of the European parliament, according to the well-known Anglo-French industrialist and politician, Sir James Goldsmith, ‘is to provide cover for the Commission’; and he argues that ‘at the moment the work of the European Parliament is overwhelmingly either a waste of time or downright destructive.’ “Like all socialist revolutions, the modern European revolution claims to be democratic while actually working against the people and in secret from it. Thus Goldsmith writes: ‘The European Union was built in secret: not through carelessness or casualness, but in a deliberately planned and skilfully executed manner. Claude Cheysson, the former French Minister of Foreign Affairs and a member of the European Commission from 1985 to 1989, described the mechanism in an interview in Le Figaro on 7 May 1994. He explained proudly that the European Union could only have been constructed in the absence of democracy, and he went on to suggest that the present problems were the result of having mistakenly allowed a public debate on the merits of the Treaty of Maastricht. “’The British newspaper The Guardian lodged a case before the European Court of Justice in Luxembourg complaining of the secrecy in which European decisions were taken. Lawyers for the European Council of Ministers responded by stating to the judges that “there is no principle of community law which gives citizens the right to EU documents.” They went on to make the astounding claim that although heads of government had repeatedly called for more openness in EU affairs, their declarations “were of an eminently political nature and not binding on the community institutions”. So they asked the judges to ignore the repeated declarations at EU summit meetings in the past two years in favour of greater openness. Statements by the twelve heads of government were no more than “policy orientations” and had no binding effect. “’This belief that the nomenklatura knows best and that the public is no more than a hindrance explains why there now exists a profound and dangerous divorce between European societies and their governing elites.’” V. Moss, “The European Union: A New Totalitarianism?”, Orthodox Life, vol. 45, № 2, March-April, 1995; translated into Russian in Pravoslavnaia Tver’, №№ 5-6, May-June, 1995. So what is the European Union? Robert Skidelsky described it well as “diluting both the democratic and the national principles in the interest of a wide union of people.” Skidelsky, New Statesman, 26 January, 2004, p. 20. In other words, it is a disguised empire masquerading as a democracy but with despotic and anti-national tendencies. The success of the European Superstate (at least until the beginning of this century) has been guaranteed by the fact that its totalitarian essence has been masked by the gradualness and non-violence of its rise, by contrast with the violence of the Soviet and Nazi Superstates of the first half of the century. Moreover, it has managed to preserve for its citizens a high level of material comfort – always the most important attraction in the Age of Mammon. This has enabled it to hide from the majority of its citizens the gradual loss of many freedoms, and the enormous power of the atheist State (there is no mention of God in the Constitution, in spite of pleas from the Pope) over almost every aspect of their lives from the cradle to the grave. Only a few nations on the periphery of the Union have shown any serious sign of discontent: Britain, because of its attachment to real democracy and national sovereignty, Greece, because its economy has been destroyed by the Franco-German Politburo, and Poland, because its Christian feelings have been deeply offended by enforced immigration and Islamization. It remains to be seen what will now (this was written in 2017) come first: the final closing of the door on the last vestiges of national sovereignty (this is what the Brexit negotiations are all about), and the pulling up of the drawbridge on Fortress Europe, or disintegration and the twilight of the gods as the barbarian hordes (not only from ISIS and the like, but also from Putin’s Russia) finally overwhelm this last, most sophisticated attempt to build the Tower of Babel. July 7/20, 2017.