(A skunk by any other name would smell as sweet)
Dateline 7th April 2006
Germany wants to have the EU constitution ratified across the EU by 2009, suggesting a change in the name of the charter to “Basic Treaty for Europe,” according to Die Welt (reports EUObserver).
It was Peter Cook the late British comic actor, wit and founder of Private Eye who said that “when Germany says it is going into Europe it means something different”. And when Germany talks of what “Europe” must do it always means what Germany wants – but which its hideous nationalistic and imperialist past forces it to wrap in “European” clothes.
So it is with the European Union Constitution, which even by EU standards is one of the most objectionable pieces of supranational law ever conceived. It is obnoxious because, like the whole of the EU’s history since the1951 Coal and Steel Community it seeks to disguise the mailed fist of Super-State power behind weasel words on friendship, trade and international cooperation.
Helpfully for the Germans Peter Mandelson provides the platitudes for the disguise- “As we enlarge Europe then we have to create rules, we have to create institutions that accommodate a growing population and a growing number of member states”. It is of course the very enlargement which creates the “problems” which the EU then exploits to create more controls and more centralised, undemocratic and unaccountable power.
So it is for instance with EU energy markets. The French, the Germans and other state owned or manipulated energy corporations break the rules of international trade (and the “European common market” which claims to have existed for 40 years). This drives up energy prices in Britain where free trade exists (to the massive benefit of French electricity and German Gas companies). Then the EU bureaucracy, always with an eye to expansion of its imperial power, says the “market is not working” and proposes a complete EU take-over of energy markets – with the aim of owning and controling all energy stocks as effectively as it controls all fish stocks (80% of both belong to Britain)! Thus does imperial success follow deliberate rule breaking. There is no greater boost to imperial power than a crisis and no greater contributor to a new crisis than the Franco German axis.
The EU Constitution coordinates all the existing losses of democratic sovereignty since 1957 (Treaty of Rome) into one document. But then it goes much further than ever before since it states that not only does EU law override national law (that is already clear on a case by case basis) but it states that the EU Constitution overrides national law. In other words there will be for the Courts and indeed for international legal purposes only ONE constitution in Europe. There will therefore be de jure no national constitutions and therefore no nation states. This is further embedded by the Constitution’s declaration that the EU is to have “legal personality” in international affairs.
The basic steps in the constitutional destruction of the nation states of Europe therefore consist of:
– repealing the existing EU and EC treaties and thereby abolishing the existing European Union and Community (and potentially its existing safeguards and opt outs) (Article IV-437) ;
– establishing in their place what would constitutionally and politically be quite a new European Union, based like any State upon its own Constitution (Article I-1);
– asserting the primacy of this Constitution and laws made under it over the Constitutions and laws of its Member States (Article I-6);
– giving this new Union legal personality for the first time so that it may conduct itself as a State amongst the international community of States (Article I-7).
Needless to say it is precisely the old fascist powers – Germany, Austria, Spain, Croatia, Slovakia and Italy which have rushed – mostly without any referendum of the true sovereigns (the electorate!) to “ratify” the EU Constitution. France and Holland famously rejected it by significant majorities. (Interesting historical comparison: British appeasers of Hitler proposed in 1940 that Hitler’s Germany could keep the rest of Europe if France and the Netherlands could remain, with Britain, free of the Reich!)
But even the Germans are nervous about having another go at passing the constitution of the new Reich. Economic conditions, they know, are going to get a lot worse so even with no votes for Germans (who might well also reject the EU Constitution if Germany were a democracy and they were allowed to vote) the Dutch and French are unlikely to be in the mood to change their minds. And of course the EU’s prime agent in Britain, Blair, is soon to retire – unless his party kicks him out first!
