On
25th June 2016, shortly after Britain’s Brexit referendum, I wrote an article for The Duran in which I pointed
out that the British vote for Brexit was a symptom of growing disaffection
across Europe with an EU project which has evolved into something very
different from the community of European nation states which it had initially
been.
The problem is less that the EU is evolving into some sort of
pan-European superstate – in my opinion the EU is far too dysfunctional for
that ever to happen – but that since the end of the Cold War the EU has become
alongside NATO a vehicle of US control of Europe, and has therefore come
increasingly to serve US geopolitical interests rather than the interests of
the people of Europe
John Laughland in a recent RT Crosstalk called the EU more
accurately a cartel of governments who conspire behind the scenes with each
other to pass legislation without the need to consult with their democratically
elected parliaments. Whilst that is closer to the truth, it is not the whole truth. Rather the EU, at least as it
has become over the last decade, is best understood as a cabal of three
governments, primarily those of the US and Germany, with France treated by the
Germans (though not by the US) as a sort of junior partner, which make the
decisions in secret that are binding on all the rest.
I appreciate that this
description of the EU will meet with strong objections in some quarters,
especially as by far the most powerful of these governments is that of the US
which is not a member of the EU. However what I say is well known by all
the relevant insiders. Indeed the facts speak for themselves and are
hardly even concealed. On key issues EU policy is nowadays decided in
private bilateral discussions between the US and the Germans, often involving
the US President and the German Chancellor, with the Germans then telling the
other Europeans what they should do…..
In the same article I pointed out that this
repeatedly results in policies being followed which whilst they serve US
geopolitical interests European electorates have never agreed to and in many
cases do not want.
I gave two examples, the issue of internal migration within the
EU and the Eurozone crisis, where US geopolitical interests have both created
the crises and prevented solutions to them
Take the issue that more than any other crystallised anti-EU
sentiment in Britain during the Brexit referendum: the EU’s policy of
unrestricted internal migration, which has resulted in large numbers of East
European migrant workers coming to Britain.
Freedom of movement within the EU has always been a core principle
of the EU. It was never an issue within the EU until the EU was expanded to
include the much poorer countries of Eastern Europe. That expansion – as everyone
knows – was driven not by European needs but first and foremost by US
geopolitical strategies, being intended to anchor Eastern Europe in the US-led
Western alliance system.
To that end the East European states were admitted into the EU
long before their economic situations justified doing so. In order to seal the deal their
elites were won over by promises of a seat at the EU top table. Huge sums
were paid over to them principally by Germany through the so-called EU
structural funds (originally conceived to foster development in the EU’s poorer
regions but increasingly used in Eastern and Southern Europe as a form of
legalised bribery to bind local elites). Lastly, their young people were
won over with the promise of visa free access to the rest of Europe – thus
creating the migrant situation that has been the cause of so much anger in
Britain.
The implications were never thought through or discussed within
Europe because EU expansion ultimately followed a US geopolitical agenda rather
than a European one. The result is that despite increasing alarm across Europe at the
consequences of the policy the EU bureaucracy continues to pursue the same
policy towards other states the US wants to bring into the system like Turkey
and Ukraine.
Or take another issue: the Eurozone crisis. The idea of European monetary
union was originally conceived in the 1970s and was already firmly on the
agenda by the late 1980s. Margaret Thatcher fell from power because she opposed it. The idea it was conceived
following the fall of the Berlin Wall is wrong.
What has made the Eurozone crisis so intractable is its well-known
structural problems – the fact a single currency was created to cover very
different economies without a single treasury or tax system behind it – but
also the contradiction between the US geopolitical ambitions that increasingly
drive the EU and European needs if the Eurozone is to be managed
properly.
Economic conditions in southern Europe – in Greece especially –
point clearly to the need for at least some of these countries to exit the
Eurozone, a fact that is well-understood within the German government. Yet that option is ruled out
not just because of opposition within Europe itself but because again it goes
against the geopolitical interest of the US, which is to keep these countries
locked within the euro system, which in turn binds them to the Western alliance
and therefore ultimately to the US itself. Thus at the height of the
Grexit crisis last year German Chancellor Merkel abruptly reversed a previously
agreed German position to support Grexit following a call from President Obama
of the US who told her not to. The result is that instead of the Greek crisis being resolved once
and for all in Europe’s and Greece’s interests – as German Finance Minister
Schauble said it should be – it has instead been left to fester indefinitely.
To these two example I would add a third, the refugee crisis
which hit Europe in the autumn of 2015, and which is the direct catalyst for
the recent votes for anti-Brussels anti-immigration parties in the recent
elections in Germany, Austria and the Czech Republic.
Though the decision – taken practically without consultation –
to let in hundreds of thousands of refugees from the Middle East is generally
blamed on German Chancellor Angela Merkel, in reality there is little doubt
that she acted in the way she did because she knew that the US would be happy
with the way she was acting in that way.
The refugee exodus was after all the direct product of the US’s
regime change wars in the Middle East and in Syria especially. By acting
to admit the refugees Merkel was acting to relieve a humanitarian crisis that
US policies had created, saving the US embarrassment and the problems this
crisis was causing for the US with its Middle East allies, especially Jordan
and Turkey.
Merkel for her part was at the time especially anxious to please
the US in order to repair the damage done to her reputation by her brutal
handling of the Greek crisis earlier that year. She therefore did
something which she knew the US would approve of without thinking the
consequences through.
This is what inevitably happens when political leaders become
less concerned with pleasing their own electorates than with pleasing the
distant overlord across the ocean.
It is this attitude more than any other which has led to the
collapse of political authority and credibility across Europe. I spoke
about it in my article of 25th
June 2016
In such a situation, where a political leader’s chances of
survival and ability to get things done depends so much on staying on the right
side of the EU’s leadership – and ultimately of the US – rather than their own
country’s voters, it is unsurprising that the quality of Europe’s political
leadership has declined to so great a degree. In place of people like De
Gaulle, Adenauer, Brandt and Thatcher, European political leaders today
increasingly come over as colourless technicians distant from their own voters
because the system allows for nothing else.
In light of this it is completely unsurprisingly that political
parties that have become simply cheerleaders for the EU project – which is to
say for the crypto-imperialist US project which is what the EU has become –
have lost credibility and support across Europe, and are now in what
increasingly looks like terminal decline.
This has happened in France to the Socialists, in Britain to the
Liberal Democrats, in Germany to the SPD, in Austria to the Social Democrats,
and it has now happened most catastrophically of all in the Czech Republic with
the collapse of the two establishment parties – the Social Democrats and the
Christian Democrats – following yesterday’s elections
there. .
Even Merkel’s once mighty CDU is not immune, obtaining in the
recent parliamentary elections a vote share of just 33%, its lowest since 1949,
whilst France’s Emmanuel Macron – elected just a few months ago in a grossly
manipulated election on a platform of “more Europe” – is seeing his popularity
collapse.
In saying this I should make it clear that I strongly doubt that
the elections in Austria and the Czech Republic will change anything at the
broader European level.
By way of example, both the Austrian Freedom Party and Babiš are
(inevitably) being referred to in the establishment media as “pro-Russian”.
In the case of the Austrian Freedom Party this contains a grain
of truth. As I witnessed for myself during a trip to Vienna in 2015,
there is little hostility to Russia in Austria. No doubt pathological
Russophobes are to be found there as elsewhere, but by comparison with the US
or Britain or even Germany the Austrian political spectrum seems remarkably
free of them.
Possibly that is because Austria’s economy is too heavily
involved in trade with Russia for Russophobia to be a sustainable or popular
position. By way of example, I noticed whilst I was there that one of
Vienna’s most splendid private buildings has now become the European
headquarters of the Russian oil giant Lukoil, whilst in Russia Austria’s
Raiffeisen bank has a big and very visible presence.
No doubt the Austrian Freedom Party is more Russophile than some
of Austria’s other parties (it has had contacts for example with Putin’s United
Russia Party), but my impression is that it is only a matter of degree.
As for the Czech Republic, this western Slav country has
traditionally been very close and friendly with Russia, though relations no
doubt took a turn for the worse – at least at the popular level – following the
Soviet invasion of 1968. Most Czechs however seem to have put those
events behind them.
Though the winner of the election – the businessman
Andrej Babiš, who is a former member of the Communist Party of
Czechoslovakia and is the son of a prominent Czech Communist official – is
inevitably being accused of being a former Soviet agent and a Russian “agent of
influence”, any friendly sentiments he may have Russia are unlikely to be far
out of line with those of most Czechs, including those of Miloš Zeman, the
Czech Republic’s strongly Russophile President, or Václav Klaus, Zeman’s
equally Russophile predecessor.
However as a wealthy businessman Babiš hardly seems cut out to
act as a serious challenger to the EU establishment. Besides the
reality is that both Austria and the Czech Republic are small countries, which
have essentially become economic satellites of Germany. Their ability to
influence broader EU policy – for example on the subject of the sanctions the
EU has imposed on Russia – is strictly limited.
The one thing Austria’s and the Czech Republic’s new governments
may have it in their power to do is to strengthen German opposition to Emmanuel
Macron’s “more Europe” reform proposals. However realistically, following
the German elections, those proposals were dead in the
water anyway.
I doubt therefore that the recent elections in Austria and the
Czech Republic, or indeed those in Germany (where the AfD made a significant
advance, but is nowhere close to a breakthrough) threaten a crisis in the EU
system. Perhaps a victory in Italy in the coming parliamentary elections
of Beppe Grillo’s Five Star Movement may do so. However in last June’s
regional elections it actually lost support.
In some ways this is the worst outcome of all. A genuine
crisis in the EU system might force upon the EU the changes it needs, not just
to ensure its own survival, but much more importantly the future well-being of
the people of Europe.
Instead what we are likely to get is paralysis, with the EU
continuing much as it is now, going neither forward nor backward, as the
situation in Europe goes gradually from bad to worse.
Here is what I said about this in my article of 25th June 2016. Nothing
which has happened since has caused me to revise this view, which remains the
same today
The EU leaders still have the time and political space to turn
things round. Doing so however will require a degree of courage, intelligence
and political imagination that in recent years has been in disastrously short
supply. Above all what is needed is a renegotiation of Europe’s
relationship with the US, changing it from a relationship of subservience into
one of genuine equality and partnership.
The alternative is probably not the imminent disintegration of the
EU. The economic and political bonds that hold it together make that
unlikely. Rather it is one of an EU wracked by disagreement and crisis, with
its population increasingly sullen and disaffected, and with its economy going
nowhere.
In some respects that would be an even worse outcome – and
betrayal of the people of Europe – than the EU’s disintegration, which would at
least offer the possibility of a fresh start. As a European I devoutly hope
it will not come to that. As a realist I have no conviction that it won’t.
Nothing
which has happened in the year since I wrote those words has caused me to
revise this view, which remains the same today
