United States of Europe
By William F. Jasper
|
Source: The New American, April 10, 1989
Will once great nations sacrifice their sovereignty? |
1992.
In the minds of most Americans, the year probably holds no significance
beyond being another presidential election year, and the occasion of
another Olympic Games. Increasingly though, Americans will begin to
realize that fast-approaching year carries far greater political and
economic significance.
Readers of business publications and
economic journals have already seen a surge of articles heralding 1992
as the year of the "European market," as a benchmark period during
which a host of trade barriers and other restrictions among the 12
countries of the European Community, or Common Market, will come
tumbling down. Nineteen ninety-two is the year that the Single European
Act (SEA) goes into effect. That act, agreed to by the 12 member states
in 1986, calls for the establishment of "an area without internal
frontiers, in which the free movement of goods, persons, services, and
capital is ensured."
"With progress toward a single market,
European industry will be able to achieve greater economies of scale,"
said Deputy Secretary of the Treasury M. Peter McPherson in an address
to the Institute for International Economics in 1988. "The demands of
competition will spur technological innovation and greater
productivity. The program can help stimulate growth and employment,
reduce consumer prices, and raise standards of living throughout
Europe." McPherson added: "The force that will drive this
transformation is opportunity -- the opportunity to compete in a larger
and freer marketplace. European manufacturers today face a myriad of
obstacles to trade with other member states, ranging from profound
differences in regulatory and tax systems to varying national technical
standards. For example, an electronics company in the Netherlands now
has to meet 12 separate sets of technical standards to be able to sell
throughout the Community."
Free Market Rhetoric
Dr.
Ron Paul, the former Republican congressman from Texas and recent
candidate for U.S. President on the Libertarian Party ticket, is one of
those who sees that approaching milestone very differently. Long an
ardent champion of free market economics, he warns that the movement
toward European "union" and "integration" is a statist scheme cloaked
in free-market rhetoric that is likely to "produce a monster."
"International statists have long dreamed of a world currency and a
world central bank," wrote Dr. Paul in the October 1988 issue of The
Free Market, published by the Ludwig Von Mises Institute. "Now it looks
as if their dream may come true."
In his essay, "The Coming World Central Bank," Paul commented:
European
governments have targeted 1992 for abolishing individual European
currencies and replacing them with the European Currency Unit, the Ecu.
Next they plan to set up a European central bank. The next step is the
merger of the Federal Reserve, the European central bank and the Bank
of Japan into one world central bank....
The European central
bank (ECB) will be modeled after the Federal Reserve. Like the Fed in
1913, it will have the institutional appearance of decentralization,
but also like the Fed it will be run by a cartel of big bankers in
collusion with politicians at the expense of the public.
Of
course, the much-touted "free-market reforms" are really only bait laid
out to entice Europeans into the trap of an (eventually) all-powerful
supranational government. Many of the coming reforms are laudable in
and of themselves and will indeed bring genuine market benefits to the
people of Common Market countries. The British Broadcasting Corporation
(BBC), for instance, will lose its monopoly on television broadcasting,
which will both allow viewers in the U.K. access to foreign programming
and encourage the growth of domestic private sector television
stations. Financial services will be revolutionized by the invigorating
winds of competition, as banks and corporations are given freer rein to
operate across national borders. Powerful national unions will lose
their strangleholds on vital economic sectors. Air travel should become
more affordable as the European air carrier industry is opened to free
competition.
Short-Lived Reforms
However, these
reforms, if they do come about, will likely be short-lived. The reason
is that the Single European Act has committed the 12 member nations to
increased political and monetary integration, meaning an increased
shift of sovereign powers from national capitals to the Common Market
institutions in Brussels, Luxembourg, and Strasbourg. These
institutions are controlled by Keynesian interventionists, socialists,
and internationalists.
In the European Parliament, where the 518
elected deputies sit in political, not national, groupings, the
Socialist Group is by far the largest force, with 165 members. It is
followed by the European People's Party Group (114 members), the
European Democratic Group (66 members), the Communist and Allies Group
(48 members), the Liberal Democratic and Reformist Group (44 members),
the Group of the European Democratic Alliance (29 members), the Group
of the European Right (16 members), and the Non-Attached (15).
The
makeup of the European Community Commission and the Council of
Ministers, the institutions with the real legislative and executive
power, is no better. They are dominated by men like Commission
President Jacques Delors, a former French Finance Minister who is
leading the push for a European central bank, as well as other assaults
on national sovereignty; Commissioner Willy de Clercq, a member of
David Rockefeller's Trilateral Commission and, as the Common Market's
trade minister, a leading proponent of Western financial and
technological assistance to the Communist bloc; Commissioner Karl-Heinz
Narjes, who also is a Trilateralist; Italian Socialist Carlo Ripa di
Meana, the Commissioner now in charge of "environment and nuclear
security"; and German Foreign Minister Hans-Dietrich Genscher, who
urges Europeans "to take Mr. Gorbachev seriously, to take him at his
word," passes out "I like Gorby" buttons, and champions unilateral
Western disarmament.
Formally known as the European Community,
the Common Market is the direct creation of individuals and
organizations that have been involved in various utopian and
conspiratorial schemes to establish a world government, a "New World
Order," for the better part of this century.
In the aftermath of
World War I, world leaders met in Paris in 1919 to settle war claims,
redraw the face of Europe, and hammer out what became the Treaty of
Versailles. President Woodrow Wilson came to the Peace Conference with
his famous "fourteen points," the spring-board that helped launch the
League of Nations. Among those who accompanied Wilson to the Conference
were his ever-present advisor and mentor Colonel Edward M. House and
three young men who were destined to play key roles in the forming of a
United Europe: John Foster Dulles, Allen W. Dulles, and Christian A.
Herter -- Mr. Wilson's "Brain Trust."
According to Wilson and
House biographers, it was the mysterious Colonel House (an advocate of
"Socialism as dreamed of by Karl Marx") who actually drew up the
"fourteen points," drafted the Covenant of the League of Nations,
assembled the "Brain Trust," and imbued Wilson with the vision of a
socialist one-world government. Be that as it may, the Wilson-House
dream of the League as a nascent world superstate came to naught when
the U.S. Senate rejected the treaty as a dangerous assault on our
Constitution and our national sovereignty.
The Council on Foreign Relations
Realizing
that the American public and the U.S. Congress were not sufficiently
"internationalist-minded," and that such "outdated" concepts as the
nation-state, patriotism, inalienable personal rights,
constitutionally-limited government, and a foreign policy with "no
entangling alliances" were still widely and tenaciously adhered to,
Colonel House and his fellow internationalists set about to change the
American consciousness. In 1921 they established the Council on Foreign
Relations (CFR) in New York as a "study group" on foreign relations.
Drawing together influential one-world-minded men from high finance,
industry, the news media, politics, and academe, the CFR soon became
the dominant force directing American foreign policy and promoting
centralized government planning and socialism at home and abroad. Men
like Rockefeller, Morgan, Aldrich, Baruch, Warburg, and Lippmann
provided financial backing, prestige, and political clout to the new
organization dedicated to building "international order."
A
sister organization of similar purpose, and comprised of an equally
impressive array of monied and titled persons, the Royal Institute of
International Affairs (RIIA, also known as Chatham House) was
established in Britain. Both of these powerful, dynastic groups grew
out of a dinner at the Hotel Majestic in Paris attended by European and
American internationalists at the Versailles Conference in 1919. They
set up additional branch organizations in other European, and then
Asian, countries to spread the gospel of world government.
With
the failure of the Senate to ratify U.S. entry into the League of
Nations, the CFR-RIIA establishment threw support to (and, indeed,
initiated) efforts to unify the war-ravaged nations of Europe under a
supranational, regional government as an interim arrangement on the way
toward a completed world government. The arguments in favor of a United
Europe were the same as those advanced for the League: that the chief
cause of the just-concluded Great War was "rampant nationalism," and
that the only solution was the surrender of certain prerogatives of
national sovereignty to a higher international authority. In truth, the
causes of the war had far less to do with the unrestrained appetites of
nation-states than with the conspiratorial machinations of the same
internationalist insiders who were planning and advocating an "end to
nationhood."
European heads of state and heads of government
gathered in solemn ceremony at the Pantheon in Paris on November 9,
1988 to inter the remains of Jean Monnet, the French internationalist
who is often called "the Father of Europe." The ceremony marking the
centennial of his birth high-lighted the numerous tributes to the
principal architect of the Common Market.
Jean Omar Marie
Gabriel Monnet was born in Cognac, the son of a brandy merchant. In
1910, at the age of 20, he was sent to Canada by his father to open new
markets for the family business. Hooking up with the Hudson Bay Company
and the Lazard Brothers banking house, two of the most eminent
Establishment companies, the parvenu Frenchman was given entrée into
the high British circles of power and soon became the protégé of the
Anglo-American insiders. Thus began the mercurial rise of Jean Monnet,
who -- though lacking even the equivalent of a high school diploma --
was to become a renowned wizard of high finance, a political
mastermind, and a confidant and advisor to presidents and prime
ministers.
Monnet's Mercurial Rise
Through the
influence of French Foreign Minister Etienne Clementel, Monnet gained
an exclusive and very lucrative contract for shipping vital matériels
from Canada to France during the First World War. Following that
conflagration, he was appointed to a seat on the Allied Supreme
Economic Council, made an advisor to the committee preparing the Treaty
of Versailles, and introduced to that closed group around Colonel House
that was preparing the way for the emerging League of Nations. In 1919,
he became an international figure at the age of 29, with his
appointment as Deputy Secretary-General of the League. Biographers
Merry and Serge Bromberger write: "Behind the scenes he helped to
arrange the appointment of the French Socialist Albert Thomas as head
of the International Labor Organization." They also record Monnet as
boasting: "I've always voted Socialist, except on one occasion." That
single exception was in the 1965 presidential election, when he
publicly supported Jean Lecanuet, who championed a federated Europe.
In
1925 Monnet moved to America to accept a partnership with the Blair
Foreign Corporation, a New York bank that had done bonanza business in
the "war effort." From there he went on to become vice president of
Transamerica, the giant San Francisco holding company that owned Bank
of America.
Coudenhove's Pan Europa
At that time
there were many campaigns underway to create a United States of Europe.
In 1923, Count Richard N. Coudenhove-Kalergi of Austria published his
book, Pan Europa; three years later he organized his first Pan European
Congress in Vienna. By the end of the 1920s, branches of the Pan
European Union were operating throughout the continent and Britain.
In
his piercing critique of Coudenhove's Pan European idea (How Can Europe
Survive, New York: Van Nostrand, 1955), the eminent free-market
economist Hans F. Sennholz observed that there is no getting around
"the fact that his plan is a scheme for the attainment of wholesale
socialism in Europe." (Emphasis in the original) Nevertheless, it
received the support and patronage of many of Europe's leading
statesmen and men of letters, not to mention that of the Anglo-American
Establishment.
One of Count Coudenhove's most important
disciples was Aristide Briand, who between 1909 and 1930 was Socialist
Premier of France 11 times and Minister of Foreign Affairs 12 times.
Briand, in 1930, unveiled a plan for "European Union" that provided for
a regional supranational union within the League of Nations. It failed
not because of antipathy to the idea, but largely because of
differences of opinion among the various socialist and integrationist
factions on the best means to accomplish the shared goal. That same
year, another important apostle of Coudenhove's Pan Europa, Sir Winston
Churchill, wrote an essay titled, "The United States of Europe," that
was aimed at winning support for the idea from the American public. It
was published in the February 15th issue of The Saturday Evening Post.
Coudenhove
spent the devastating years of World War II in the United States. "In
seeking to persuade America, once she becomes a belligerent, to adopt
European unity as one of her war aims," says the Count's colleague and
hagiographer, Arnold J. Zurcher, in The Struggle to Unite Europe,
1940-1958, "Count Coudenhove enlisted the cooperation of certain
leading American citizens whom he had interested in his movement some
years prior to his enforced wartime sojourn." These "leading citizens"
-- all CFR heavies -- were: Nicholas Murray Butler, president of both
Columbia University and the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace;
Dr. Stephen Duggan, founder and first president of the International
Institute of Education, a CFR-controlled internationalist propaganda
operation; and William C. Bullitt, ambassador to the U.S.S.R. and to
France.
With the help of these high-powered patrons, Coudenhove
and Zurcher obtained positions at New York University, where, for the
remainder of the war years, they held graduate seminars devoted
exclusively to the problems of European federation. Their CFR contacts
aided greatly in obtaining favorable media coverage. "The New York
press, for example, was wholly sympathetic," wrote Zurcher, "both major
morning dailies, the New York Times and the New York Herald Tribune,
having given generous space to reporting the Count's occasional public
utterances and to the efforts of the New York University seminar on
federation." Due to the academic respectability conferred by the NYU
seminars and the popular dissemination of their ideas by a friendly
press, said Zurcher, "For the first time in the twentieth century, the
slogan 'United States of Europe' had become something more than a label
for hortatory idealism."
Monnet Pushes Lend-Lease
While
Coudenhove-Kalergi and sidekick Zurcher labored among the
intelligentsia and the captains and kings of industry in New York,
Citizen Monnet was shuttling back and forth among Washington, Paris,
and London on transatlantic diplomatic missions for French Premier
Edouard Daladier, President Roosevelt, Prime Minister Churchill, and
General De Gaulle. It was Monnet who gave Roosevelt the slogan that he
was later to use in one of his fireside chats: "America will be the
great arsenal of democracy." "Monnet was above all a public relations
man," say biographers Merry and Serge Bromberger. "He was particularly
close to Harry Hopkins, Roosevelt's right-hand man. Through Hopkins he
became President Roosevelt's personal advisor on Europe."
The
Roosevelt-Hopkins relationship has often been compared to that between
Wilson and House, one of almost total dependence of the President upon
a mysterious, shadowy advisor. Hopkins, like House, admired Communism
and played a key role in formulating many of the pro-Soviet policies of
the Roosevelt Administration that proved so disastrous for the United
States and the Free World. He and Monnet worked together famously. Mr.
Bloch-Morhange, writing in the authoritative Information Et Conjectures
of March 1957, summed up the French internationalist's pro-Communist
record thusly: "Never in his long career has Jean Monnet a single time
criticized the Soviet Union publicly." According to the Brombergers,
"behind the scenes Monnet played an important role in the negotiations
that prepared the ground for lend-lease," the operation that funneled
to the USSR massive infusions of war matériel and money, as well as the
blueprints and nuclear materials that enabled the Soviets to develop
the atomic bomb. The lend-lease program was supervised by Harry Hopkins.
Clarence
Streit, a Rhodes scholar and correspondent for the New York Times,
published his book, Union Now, in 1939, on the eve of World War II. In
it, he advocated immediate political union among the U.S., Britain,
Canada, and other Atlantic "democracies," and then, finally, world
union. It was avidly praised in the CFR-dominated press, and by 1949
had been translated into several languages, selling more than 300,000
copies. Union Now and Union Now With Britain, published in 1941, gave
rise to a sizable Federal Union movement (which later changed its name
to Atlantic Union Committee and still later to the Atlantic Council of
the United States), the leadership of which has always been top-heavy
with CFR members. In 1941, Streit's Federal Union proposed the adoption
of a joint resolution by Congress favoring immediate union with the
aforementioned Atlantic states. The resolution had been written by John
Foster Dulles (CFR), who was later to become Eisenhower's Secretary of
State and a key player in the formation of Monnet's united Europe.
One
of the most ambitious visionary schemes of this period was put forth in
a book titled Plan for a Permanent Peace, by Hans Heymann, a German
economist and refugee with a research and teaching post at Rutgers
University. Funded by the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, a
major pillar of the CFR establishment, the book asserted: "Nations have
created international disharmony in the vain belief that harmony in our
society can be achieved on a national basis .... This narrow-minded
attitude has left us one strong hope, namely, that this fallacious
concept may hold only during a transitional period .... After the
debacle [World War II] an international organization will be imperative
for the well-being of society as a whole." Herr Heymann proceeded then
to unveil his detailed scheme for a global superstate headed by a
Federal World Authority, a Bank of Nations (with three branches: the
Hemisphere Bank, the Europa Bank, and the Oriental Bank) and a World
Army, Navy, and Air Force. Plan for a Permanent Peace includes several
impressive fold-out maps and diagrams detailing the monstrous
bureaucracy that would regiment the hapless citizens of the proposed
planetary union.
An End to Nationhood
At the
conclusion of World War II, the myriad of organizations, individuals,
movements, and publications advocating various models of global
governance all coalesced in a concerted crusade to insure U.S. adoption
of the United Nations charter. Once that was accomplished, however,
they returned to campaigning for what Walt W. Rostow (CFR) endorsed as
"an end to nationhood," since the United Nations could never become a
genuine world government as long as member nations retained any vestige
of sovereignty and autonomy.
Winston Churchill and his
son-in-law, Duncan Sandys, led the United Europe Movement, which
convened a Congress of Europe at The Hague from May 7 to 10, 1948.
While world attention focused on the glittering assembly of current and
former heads of state -- Churchill, Leon Blum, Aicide de Gasperi, Paul
Henri Spaak, et al -- it was Jean Monnet and the mysterious Polish
socialist, Joseph Retinger, bon vivant and globe-trotting master of
political intrigue, who ran the show. One of the accomplishments of The
Hague Congress was the adoption of seven Resolutions on Political
Union. Resolution number seven stated: "The creation of a United Europe
must be regarded as an essential step towards the creation of a United
World."
General George C. Marshall, then Truman's Secretary of
State, delivered a speech at Harvard University on June 5, 1947 that
detailed the suffering and privation of war-ravaged Europe and called
for an American response. Thus was launched the European Recovery
Program (ERP), better known as the Marshall Plan -- a massive foreign
aid program intended to reconstruct Europe along "cooperative," i.e.,
internationalist and socialist, lines.
The ERP, however, did not
originate with General Marshall, but rather with Jean Monnet and the
Council on Foreign Relations. The Brombergers write that, prior to the
Harvard speech, Marshall sent assistants H.G. Clayton and George F.
Kennan (CFR) to confer with Monnet, and that Marshall himself conferred
at length with Monnet at the Paris Peace Conference. Laurence Shoup and
William Minter reported in their study of the CFR, Imperial Brain
Trust: "In 1946-1947 lawyer Charles M. Spofford headed a [CFR study]
group, with banker David Rockefeller as secretary, on Reconstruction in
Western Europe: in 1947-1948 that body was retitled the Marshall Plan."
David Rockefeller would go on to head Chase Manhattan Bank, serve as
Chairman of the Board of the CFR from 1970-1985, launch the Trilateral
Commission, and in numerous other ways promote global "interdependence."
Selling the Marshall Plan
The
immediate problem of the Marshall Planners was to sell the idea to
Congress. Considerable opposition to the scheme was being aroused, led
principally by Senator Robert Taft of Ohio, former President Herbert
Hoover, and free-market economist and commentator for Newsweek, Henry
Hazlitt. Taft, et al, argued that the proposed program would force U.S.
taxpayers to subsidize the socialist policies of European governments
-- nationalizing of industries, central planning, wage and price
controls, excessive taxation, trade restrictions, burdensome
regulation, currency devaluation -- just the opposite of what was
needed to help Europe recover from the war's devastation. They argued
instead in favor of a program that would unleash private enterprise to
solve Europe's economic problems.
The establishment responded by
organizing an impressive assemblage of notables to campaign for the
ERP. "The leadership of this group," says Michael J. Hogan, professor
of history at Ohio State University and editor of Diplomatic History,
"came largely from academic circles, from the major American trade
unions, and from such business organizations as the Council on Foreign
Relations (CFR), the Business Advisory Council (BAC), the Committee for
Economic Development (CED) and the National Planning Association
(NPA)." They believed in the "New Deal synthesis" and accepted the need
for greater economic planning and for Keynesian strategies of fiscal
and monetary management. These four organizations, says Hogan, "played
an important role in shaping and promoting the ERP":
They
published briefs on behalf of the program. Their spokesmen testified
before relevant congressional committees. They served on the
President's Committee on Foreign Aid, on the Harriman Committee, and on
the Committee for the Marshall Plan to Aid European Recovery, a
private, nonpartisan organization composed of labor, farm, and business
leaders who worked closely with government officials to mobilize
support behind the ERP. The result was something like a coordinated
campaign mounted by an interlocking directorate of public and private
figures. Of the nineteen people on the executive board of the Marshall
Plan Committee, eight were members of the CFR and two of these eight
were also members of the BAC, CED, or NPA. Included in this list were
Allen W. Dulles, president of the CFR, and Philip Reed, chairman of the
board of General Electric. Former Secretaries of War Henry L. Stimson
and Robert P. Patterson, along with former Secretary of State Dean
Acheson, also served on the executive board....
Anti-Communist Rhetoric
However,
even with this massive, well-orchestrated campaign, the ERP advocates
did not have it easy. They had originally packaged the plan as a
humanitarian operation to alleviate the suffering, starvation, and
devastation caused by the war. But Congress was not so willing to
accept that Europe's economic woes could be solved by American
taxpayers' dollars. So the Insiders changed to a different tack: They
said U.S. aid was urgently needed to protect Western Europe from the
threat of Communism. "People sat up and listened when the Soviet threat
was mentioned," said John J. McCloy (president of the CFR from
1953-1970). McCloy, who served as U.S. High Commissioner to Germany
after the war and as a central figure in the ERP effort never
demonstrated any antipathy towards Communism, said that this taught him
a valuable lesson: "One way to assure that a viewpoint gets noticed is
to cast it in terms of resisting the spread of Communism." President
Truman also admitted to paying lip-service to anti-Communism in order
to win support for his aid plan. When Secretary of State Marshall
cabled Truman, concerned that the president's "Truman Doctrine" speech
was too anti-Communist in tone, "The reply came back from Truman:
without the rhetoric, Congress would not approve of the money."
The
deception worked, and Congress did indeed approve the money: some $13
billion dollars for the Marshall Plan, and tens of billions more
through various other reconstruction programs. From the close of World
War II through 1953, the United States Government poured more than 43
billion dollars into Europe. Professor Hans Sennholz describes it as a
"windfall for socialism" and in How Can Europe Survive details the
myriad of destructive government programs and wasteful state-owned
monopolies that swallowed up these enormous funds while thwarting real
economic growth and progress.
In the ERP, European socialists
and one-worlders had hit on a veritable bonanza, and American
Establishment Insiders had hit on a scheme that gave them the leverage
they needed to push independent-minded European governments in a
"cooperative" direction. "American officials interfered with foreign
governments which endeavored to abolish controls and return to sounder
principles of government," says Dr. Sennholz. "American Fair-Deal
officials repeatedly exerted pressure on the Belgian and German
governments to inflate their national currencies at a greater degree
and create more credit through simple expansion. Fortunately for these
nations, their governments usually resisted this Fair-Deal pressure."
Through
American aid, says Professor Hogan, "and particularly through the use
of counterpart funds, Marshall Planners tried to underwrite industrial
modernization projects, promote Keynesian strategies of aggregate
economic management ... encourage progressive tax policies, low cost
housing programs, and other measures of economic and social reform."
From its very inception, the ERP's main purpose was to destroy the
European nation states by merging them into a regional government.
The
early planning for the program was carried out by a special agency
under the direction of George Kennan, called the State-War-Navy
Coordinating Committee (SWNCC). One of the concerns of the agency, says
Hogan, was "to consider how national sovereignties might be
transcended." As Joseph Jones, who attended the meetings, recalled, the
State Department's economic officers encouraged committee members to
think of Europe as a whole and to administer aid so as to foster
economic unification.
The Fulbright Resolution
Of
course, not everyone advocating the abolition of Europe's sovereign
governments was so subtle. Some took a head-on approach. On March 21,
1947, before Marshall had made his Harvard speech, Senators William
Fulbright and Elbert D. Thomas submitted to Congress the following
concurrent resolution: "Resolved by the Senate (the House of
Representatives concurring) that Congress favors the creation of a
United States of Europe." The CFR-Insider press sprang forth to
champion the incredibly arrogant Fulbright resolution. According to the
March 17, 1947 issue of Life magazine (whose publisher, Henry Luce, was
a leading CFR member), "our policy should be to help the nations of
Europe federate as our states federated in 1787." "Europe desperately
needs some effective form of political and economic federation," wrote
Sumner Welles (CFR) in the Washington Post, owned by Eugene Meyer
(CFR). The Christian Science Monitor (long a CFR mouthpiece) of April
28, 1947 advised: "For its part, the US could hardly impose federation
on Europe, but it could counsel .... It could mold its leading and
occupational policies toward upbuilding a single continental economy."
The New York Times (the CFR's most influential organization) of April
18, 1947 editerialized: "But it is only too true ... that Europe must
federate or perish." The St. Louis Post Dispatch of March 16, 1947
declared that "for Europe it is a case of join -- or die."
Cooler
heads among the "brain trust," however, realized that any attempt at
openly forcing a European federation would stir nationalist resistance
and resentment in Europe, and would rightly be viewed as American
imperialism. They had to make it appear that the call for a United
States of Europe was coming from "the people" of Europe themselves.
The
most informative account of the role of America's Insider Establishment
in organizing the movement for a United Europe can be found in a
six-part report on the Common Market that appeared in installments in
the authoritative H. du B. Reports during 1972 and 1973. Written by the
distinguished Hilaire du Berrier, who has been publishing his highly
respected intelligence reports from Europe for more than 30 years, the
"Story of the Common Market" series detailed the intrigues of the
American CFR-Atlantic Council-Bilderberger-Trilateral Commission
coterie and their European accomplices in their campaign for a
supranational European government. In part five of his series, du
Berrier related a story from the diary of Joseph Retinger that
illustrates how the CFR's agents built the movement for European
merger. Retinger was seeking more funds for the European Movement,
which was headed at the time by Belgian Prime Minister Paul Henri
Spaak, who was known as "Mr. Socialist":
Retinger
and Duncan Sandys, the British Eurocrat, went to see John J. McCloy,
who in 1947 was American High Commissioner to Germany. McCloy, we learn
from Retinger's diary, embraced the idea at once. Sheppard Stone, who
was on McCloy's staff, and Robert Murphy, the U.S. ambassador to
Belgium, whom Retinger called one of the European Movement's best
supporters, joined McCloy in raiding the huge reserve of European
currencies called "counter-part funds" which had piled up as a result
of Marshall Plan aid .... McCloy, Stone and Murphy "promptly and
unhesitatingly put ample funds at the disposal of Paul Henri Spaak,"
Retinger recorded.
It was the same Joseph Retinger who
recruited Prince Bernhard of the Netherlands to host the meeting at the
Hotel Bilderberg in Oosterbeck, Holland in May 1954, that launched the
annual secretive Bilderberg conclaves, at which the international
ruling elite meet to scheme and palaver.
The Merger Begins
The
first concrete step forward in the plan for abolition of the European
nation-states came in 1951 with the signing of the treaty creating the
European Coal and Steel Community (ECSC). "This was a truly
revolutionary organization," wrote Carroll Quigley, the Insiders' own
inside historian, "since it had sovereign powers, including the
authority to raise funds outside any existing state's power." The ECSC
treaty, which went into force in July 1952, merged the coal and steel
industries of six countries (West Germany, France, Italy, Belgium, the
Netherlands, and Luxembourg) under a single high Authority. "This
'supranational' body," observed Professor Quigley in his Tragedy and
Hope, "had the right to control prices, channel investment, raise
funds, allocate coal and steel .... Its power to raise funds for its
own use by taxing each ton produced made it independent of governments.
Moreover, its decisions were binding, and could be reached by majority
vote without the unanimity required in most international organizations
of sovereign states."
The proposal for the ECSC was introduced,
amidst great fanfare, in May 1950, as the "Schuman Plan." Although
devised by Monsieur Monnet, who was then head of France's General
Planning Commission, Monnet thought it expedient to name it for his
comrade Robert Schuman, the Socialist French Foreign Minister (and,
later, Prime Minister). The American Insiders leapt to praise the
Schuman Plan. John Foster Dulles called it "brilliantly creative." Dean
Acheson termed it a "major contribution toward resolution of the
pressing political and economic problems of Europe." President Truman
called it "an act of constructive statesmanship." The Carnegie
Foundation awarded Monnet its Wateler Peace Prize of two million francs
"in recognition of the international spirit which he had shown in
conceiving the Coal and Steel Community .... "Monnet, whom columnist
Joseph Alsop (CFR) dubbed "the good, gray wizard of Western European
union," was appointed the first president of the powerful new ECSC.
Monnet
knew full well just how powerful and revolutionary his new creation
was. The Brombergers report in Jean Monnet and the United States of
Europe that, when Monnet and his "brain trust" had outlined the basics
of the ECSC proposal, they called in legal expert Maurice Lagrange to
take care of the detail work:
Lagrange was stunned. An
idea of revolutionary daring had been launched and was being acclaimed
by the Six and the United States -- a minerals and metals superstate....
The
brain trust worked feverishly from ten o'clock in the morning until
midnight, without taking Sundays or holidays off, not even Christmas
day. Even the secretaries and the office boys were infected by the
general excitement, by the feeling that they were part of a fantastic
undertaking.
The Brombergers, who are ardent admirers of Monnet, admit the totalitarian mindset of their hero:
Gradually,
it was thought, the supranational authorities, supervised by the
European Council of Ministers at Brussels and the Assembly in
Strasbourg, would administer all the activities of the Continent. A day
would come when governments would be forced to admit that an integrated
Europe was an accomplished fact, without their having had a say in the
establishment of its underlying principles. All they would have to do
was to merge all these autonomous institutions into a single federal
administration and then proclaim a United States of Europe.
Actually,
the founders of the Coal and Steel Community would have to obtain from
the various national governments -- justifiably reputed to be incapable
of making sacrifices for the sake of a federation -- a whole series of
concessions in regard to their sovereign rights until, having been
finally stripped, they committed hara-kiri by accepting the merger.
Realizing
that some nations might at some point rebel against the "new order,"
the "good gray wizard" and his Eurocrats sought to establish their own
army, which they dubbed the European Defense Community (EDC). After
clamoring for national disarmament, the Eurocrat pacifists were now
demanding that an independent armed forces, complete with nuclear
weapons, be put under their command. The EDC treaty was signed by the
six ECSC nations in 1952, but plans for the supranational army fell
apart, when, after two years of bitter debate, the treaty was rejected
by the French Parliament.
The Treaties of Rome
The
next nail in the coffin of national sovereignty came on March 25, 1957
with the signing by the six ECSC nations of the two Treaties of Rome.
These created the European Economic Community (EEC, or Common Market)
and the European Atomic Energy Community (Euratom), which greatly
furthered the merging of the economic and energy sectors of the member
states. (The ECSC, Euratom, and EEC are now collectively referred to as
the European Community or EC.) "The EEC Treaty," said Carroll Quigley,
"with 572 articles over almost 400 pages ... looked forward to eventual
political union in Europe, and sought economic integration as an
essential step on the way." But the merger architects settled on an
approach of "patient gradualism"; what Richard N. Gardner (CFR) would
later call "an end run around national sovereignty, eroding it piece by
piece." According to the late Professor Quigley, "This whole process
was to be achieved by stages over many years."
The next stages
involved bringing the rest of Western Europe into the fold. In 1973,
after more than two decades of resisting, the United Kingdom came in,
along with Ireland and Denmark. Greece joined in 1981, bringing the
number of member states to ten. Spain and Portugal became the 11th and
12th members in 1986.
"The CFR," wrote du Berrier in January
1973, "saw the Common Market from the first as a regional government to
which more and more nations would be added until the world government
which [the] UN had failed to bring about would be realized. At a
favorable point in the Common Market's development America would be
brought in. But the American public had to be softened first and
leaders groomed for the change-over."
The CFR spared no expense
in aiding its European co-conspirators, especially Jean Monnet, to
establish their dreamed-of Brave New World. A very enlightening source
on this phenomenon is Insider Ernst H. van der Beugel, Honorary
Secretary General of the Bilderberger Group, Vice Chairman of the
Netherlands Institute for Foreign Affairs (a CFR affiliate), Harvard
lecturer, etc. In his book From Marshall Aid to Atlantic Partnership,
van der Beugel explained:
Not only has Monnet been the
auctor intellectualis of many steps on the road to European
unification, he has also been a driving force in the execution of
existing plans.
His most remarkable capacity has been his great influence on the formulation of United States policy towards Europe.
He
exercised this influence through a network of close friendships and
relationships, some of them going back to the pre-war period.
Diplomatic Bludgeoning
Explaining
further the workings of the Monnet-CFR symbiosis, van der Beugel cites
examples of the diplomatic bludgeoning of those officials who balked at
administering national "hara-kiri." For instance, he reported how
Monnet's Action Committee, which was "supported by funds from United
States foundations," ramrodded the negotiations for the Rome Treaties:
Monnet
and his Action Committee were unofficially supervising the negotiations
and as soon as obstacles appeared, the United States diplomatic
machinery was alerted, mostly through Ambassador Bruce... who had
immediate access to the top echelon of the State Department....
At
that time, it was usual that if Monnet thought that a particular
country made difficulties in the negotiations, the American diplomatic
representative in that country approached the Foreign Ministry in order
to communicate the opinion of the American Government which, in
practically all cases, coincided with Monnet's point of view.
Monnet's
high-level friends, who assisted him in these strong-arm tactics,
included President Eisenhower, Dulles, McCloy, Bruce, George Ball, and
C. Douglas Dillon.
In his editorial column for April
10, 1976, New York Times publisher C.L. Sulzberger (CFR, Trilateralist,
Bilderberger) waxed rhapsodic concerning the emerging European union:
"The continent's most splendid dream following World War II has been
the European Economic Community or Common Market, which was designed to
lead nations that had lost their global influence into a political
confederation based on joint trading and financial interests."
Sulzberger's paean notwithstanding, the Common Market was clearly
designed to lead nations into a suicidal merger.
That design is
coming to fruition at a frightening pace. The Single European Act is
intended as the measure that will make political and economic union
irreversible. Citizens of the Common Market are finding their lives and
livelihoods increasingly controlled by Eurocrats in Brussels, even as
national governments find their sovereign rights sacrificed under such
deliberately vague and ambiguous rubrics as "cooperation," "union,"
"integration," "convergence," and "harmonization." The SEA will soon
make it impossible for member states to block policies that go against
national interests. EC Commissioner Willy De Clercq, in a 1987 speech,
boasted that the SEA should make it possible for two-thirds of the EC
decisions to be made by a qualified majority, in contrast to the 90
percent that previously required unanimous consent.
The
principal assaults underway now include the campaigns for a European
central bank, led by French President François Mitterrand, and the
unified value added tax (VAT) being pushed by Jacques Delors. The major
opposition to both schemes has come from Britain's Margaret Thatcher.
"A European Central Bank, in the only true meaning of the term, means
surrendering your economic policy to that banking system," said the
British Prime Minister in October of 1988. "I neither want nor expect
ever to see such a bank in my lifetime -- nor, if I am twanging a harp
-- for quite a long time afterwards."
But there are indications
that the "Iron Lady" may have weakened on this matter. Du Berrier, in a
recent telephone interview with THE NEW AMERICAN, expressed grave
concern over rumors that Mrs. Thatcher "may have cut some sort of deal
with Mitterrand on the issues of a central bank and a common currency"
during her visit with the French socialist president in Paris at the
end of February.
World Union of Socialist Republics
Another
dangerous development that has been incubating for several years and is
now fast approaching is the admission of European Communist-bloc
countries into the EC. "Communist Hungary will probably be the first,
or perhaps, East Germany," du Berrier believes. "Since January 1987,
the European Parliament has had a permanent delegation, headed by
Madame Deputy Anne-Marie Lizia, a Belgian socialist, negotiating with
Moscow and other Communist capitals on the subject of Common Market
membership. It is now being openly advocated." This coincides with the
increasing trade and economic covergence between the Common Market and
the Soviet-led trading bloc, Comecon (comprising the USSR, East
Germany, Hungary, Romania, Bulgaria, Poland, Czechoslavakia, Mongolia,
Vietnam and Cuba).
In 1936 the official program of the Communist
International, issued in Moscow, declared that "dictatorship can be
established only by a victory of socialism in different countries or
groups of countries, after which the proletarian republics would unite
on federal lines with those already in existence and this system of
federal unions would expand ... at length forming the World Union of
Soviet Socialist Republics."
The plans of the
CFR-Trilateral-Bilderberger elite for "world order" more and more
converge with those laid down by Stalin's Communist International more
than 50 years ago.
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