A Final(?) Letter To Valery Giscard d'Estaing
Debate Between Patrick Martin & John Martin
Thwarted By A Surge Of Democracy
Bringing Europe Closer Together?
France pulps copies of EU treaty
French pressure dilutes services directive
The European Union was founded in the context of the division of Europe by the United Nations and the rise of a new form of politics in Western Europe after 1945, the Christian Democracy. Both of those conditions ceased to exist during the 1990s, with the result that the EU has been floundering for years.
The Christian Democracy was destroyed in Italy and Germany by use of the methods by which the Irish Times (as an agency of the British state) tried to destroy Fianna Fail—and succeeded in reducing it to a wan shadow of itself. And the division of Europe, caused by the antagonism within the United Nations Powers which defeated Germany in 1945, ceased to exist when the Soviet Union collapsed in 1990.
The United Nations itself was an accidental, and entirely unprincipled, alliance of incompatible states brought about by the catastrophic chain of events set in motion by the British Empire in 1939, when it launched a war which it was not prepared to fight. The enemy on which it declared war, Germany, was defeated by a greater enemy, Soviet Russia. From January 1942 the alliance of UK, US, and USSR called itself the United Nations. In the moment of victory in 1945, this alliance set itself up as a world authority, and set up a subordinate body, the General Assembly, in which other states were enrolled as second-class members (with France and China being included in the dominant group). The antagonism between the USSR and the UK became operative immediately Germany was defeated. Churchill would, if he could, have continued the war against the ally who had defeated Germany, but he lacked the means, and he soon lost office. He looked to the United States to do what he could not, but by the time Washington was ready to go, the Soviet Union had produced the atomic bomb and stalemate set in.
The European Union was constructed within the stalemate. Its founders were also the founders of the Christian Democracy political movement, which was incomprehensible to British politicians and baffled British foreign policy during the generation when Britain, as an Occupying Power in Germany, might have been expected to exercise a determining influence on European developments.
The draconian punishment intended for Germany had to be abandoned in order to enlist public opinion in the Western Occupation Zones in the Cold War against the Soviet East. Adenauer availed of this opportunity to reassert German independence within a few years under Christian-Democratic hegemony, marginalising the Anglophile Social Democrats. The "social market" is a Christian Democratic concept derived from Papal Encyclicals. Adenauer, like De Gaspari, the Christian Democrat leader in Italy, had an impeccable anti-Fascist record, and direct experience of British conduct towards Europe during the Great War and after. And both had held aloof from what might be called the democratic nationalism of their respective countries. De Gaspari, in Northern Italy, accepted the Hapsburg state as an adequate framework for democratic social development, and he played no part in the irredentist nationalism with which Britain lured Italy into the War in 1915 (with Mussolini as an ally). And Adenauer in 1919-20 was willing to co-operate with France into re-structuring Germany into two states—a project which was vetoed by Britain.
The European Union was the product of a form of European politics. Without the Christian Democracy, which existed beyond the various nationalisms, there could have been no European Union—as there could have been no British Union if there had not been a Whig political movement in Scotland as well as England.
The constant object of British policy has been to keep Europe divided. It was for this purpose that Britain established Belgium as a state in 1830 in defiance of the accepted rules of the time. But the Christian Democracy changed all of that, and Brussels became a by-word for European unity.
Europe escaped from Britain during the 1950s and 1960s. Britain could not retard its development from outside. It eventually managed to get in, and it has been working steadily from within for thirty years to break it up—assisted by Ireland ever since Haughey was ousted. The Taoiseach is now angry with Blair over the Common Agricultural Policy and calls him dishonest, but it has been evident for years that this was the way things were heading.
The indefinite extension of the EU is the effective dissolution of the EU. It was not in the first instance a mere compromise between nationalisms, and there is little prospect that it will flourish when it is reduced to that and the number of nationalisms increases.
President McAleese made a speech on Europe in Westminster Cathedral on 20th April. In the days before she became a multi-denominational Christian she might have been expected to understand something of the real history of the EU. But now that she is all things to all men she can only utter platitudes on the subject—the sort of thing that makes the mind dizzy with its vacuous idealism. But she also expresses the vacuousness of the foreign policy of the state.