It all began as a simple “Coal and Steel Community” between six European nations after World War II. The scheme was supposed to help prevent further war, or at least that is what its proponents claimed. In the decades since 1952, however, the first real supranational body has morphed into an emerging super-state that will eventually obliterate national sovereignty, and inevitably individual liberty, if left unchecked.
Today, 28 of Europe’s formerly sovereign national governments are rushing full speed toward the imposition of a federal regime — an unaccountable transnational entity seeking to regulate and control virtually everything. There is already a flag and an anthem. The plan is so far along that the European Union’s top leadership and national political leaders across the continent openly boast that the so-called member states will inevitably be bound together under a federal system run from Brussels. The timeline: as early as 2014.
EU Chiefs Seek Federal Government
Reiterating previous statements made over the years, former Maoist revolutionary and current European Commission President José Manuel Barroso declared in early May that a federal Europe would be a “reality within a few years.” Whether the formerly sovereign member states use the controversial single euro currency or not, Barroso announced, all of the 28 EU governments will be ensnared in the project. According to Barroso and his cohorts, it is all inevitable at this point.
Last year, during his “state of the union” speech, Barroso was explicit in outlining where all of this was going. “We will need to move toward a federation of nation states. This is our political horizon,” he declared, adding that “unavoidable” changes to European treaties had to be made. “This is what must guide our work in the years to come.”
While acknowledging more recently that today, at least, the idea of a federal regime ruling over Europe may seem like “political science fiction” to many, the commission chief echoed his previous predictions that a “federation” was all but inescapable — and coming soon. In the announcement, the former communist said plans for the federalization of the continent would be unveiled by next spring, prior to the 2014 elections for the so-called European Parliament.
The process is already well under way, Barroso explained, pointing to the emerging Eurozone “fiscal union” that he claimed would lead to “intensified political union” between all of the formerly independent nations. “This is about the economic and monetary union but for the EU as a whole,” the EC chief said in a speech.
“The Commission will, therefore, set out its views and explicit ideas for treaty change in order for them to be debated before the European elections,” Barroso continued. “We want to put all the elements on the table, in a clear and consistent way, even if some of them may sound like political science fiction today. They will be reality in a few years’ time.” What purpose the supposed “debate” will serve if the outcome is already pre-determined was not made clear.
According to Barroso and other anti-sovereignty extremists plotting to foist an all-powerful regime on Europe, the Eurozone’s adoption of a federal system in fiscal and economic matters will eventually require complementary political structures. So-called political union, the argument goes, would ultimately ensnare every member state, regardless of whether or not it uses the euro, because that is the end result of “economic integration.”
“Further economic integration would transcend the limits of the intergovernmental method of running the EU and the Eurozone in particular,” Barroso explained in some of the most explicit comments about the scheme yet. “We must remember that the present configuration of the euro area is only temporary, since all member states but two [the U.K. and Denmark, which have opt-outs] are destined to become full members of the Economic and Monetary Union [EMU] under the Treaties.”
Speaking during the opening speech at the “Conference on the Blueprint for a Deep and Genuine EMU,” Barroso spent some time with the obligatory nod to “democracy” and “accountability.” However, despite claiming to care about what people think and harping on the need to have a “debate,” the commission chief all but demanded that European nations give up all power and authority to Brussels as soon as possible.
“Fiscal union, banking union and political union; all three need to move forward together,” Barroso demanded, adding that the people essentially would have to be brought along as well. “Europe’s economic interdependence — so strikingly highlighted by the financial crisis — calls for increased political integration. We will not get away with half-hearted solutions anymore, and half-integrated institutions will no longer do.”
“Member State” Leaders Agree
EU chiefs are not the only ones pushing for the abolition of sovereignty via economic, monetary, and political union. Indeed, some of the most fervent advocates of the plot are actually national political leaders — politicians who would seemingly have the most to lose as authority continues flowing away from Europe’s capitals and toward Brussels. At this rate, the EU is on the fast track to collecting more power than even the U.S. federal government has amassed, yet most of Europe’s national leaders are celebrating it.
In October of last year, for example, supposedly “conservative” German Chancellor Angela Merkel — currently under fire after a new book exposed her previous work as a propagandist for the communist regime ruling East Germany — announced a push to give Brussels veto power over national governments’ budgets. “We have made good progress on strengthening fiscal discipline with the fiscal pact but we are of the opinion, and I speak for the whole German government on this, that we could go a step further by giving Europe real rights of intervention in national budgets,” she told the Bundestag lower house.
Merkel’s plan, supported by more than a few European leaders, was announced shortly after Barroso declared last year that Europe needed to move toward a full-blown “federation.” Socialist French President François Hollande, meanwhile, also claimed there was “no choice” but to “march toward a unified Europe.” According to Hollande, at least, the destruction of national sovereignty is “destiny.” Among the bloc’s political establishment, the sentiment is widespread.
The EU Today
Already, according to differing methods of calculation in the various EU member states, from six percent to 84 percent of the “laws” governing Europe come from unelected bureaucrats in Brussels, according to estimates cited by political leaders. In 2011, the EU’s budget was more than $150 billion. Between 2007 and 2013, Brussels spent well over $1 trillion, with expenditures increasing each year. While the economic crisis has temporarily put the brakes on ballooning spending, analysts expect the behemoth to continue growing as soon as eurocrats believe people will tolerate it.
Right now, most of the funds flowing to the EU come from taxpayers via the EU-mandated value added tax (VAT) and import duties collected by “member states.” The EU, however, is seeking ways to start directly confiscating wealth from citizens, too — everything from a “carbon tax” to a “financial-transaction tax” has been pushed, and it appears as though Brussels will not rest until its bureaucrats are able to seize money straight from citizens without pesky national-government middlemen.
So where does all that money go? Tens of billions are spent every year on international wealth redistribution to meet EU “convergence objectives.” Essentially, taxes are confiscated from people in richer countries to provide “investments” in poorer ones, such as Romania and Bulgaria. More than $50 billion, meanwhile, goes to agricultural subsidies every year through the “Common Agricultural Policy,” which purchases loyalty from farmers but causes countless market distortions. (As an example, we could cite the “butter mountain” of unwanted butter caused by EU subsidies to dairy farmers.)
In 2011, the latest year for which data is available from the European Commission, the EU spent almost $70 billion on what it calls “sustainable growth.” That includes spending on everything from “social policy agenda” and economic intervention to spending on “convergence objectives.”
Other expenditures include $10 billion on “administration”; huge sums on pro-EU propaganda; grants to agencies, national and local governments, and universities; and subsidies to “non-governmental organizations” (NGOs) and “media” outlets that serve as attack dogs against EU critics. As for “security,” Europe also has a fledgling law-enforcement agency known as Europol and a 60,000-strong military “rapid reaction force” dubbed Eurocorps.
In terms of raw EU power exercised over formerly sovereign governments and peoples, two recent examples illustrate the situation well.
Last spring, the EU came under fire from across the political spectrum when the European Commission began pushing “reforms” to “food-safety laws” that would regulate all “plant reproductive material” within the bloc. In essence, under the original scheme, analysts said every seed variety on the continent — from those raised by home gardeners to seed stocks used by farmers — would have been declared illegal unless it was “certified” and “registered” by the EU.
More recently, after two years of failed “discussions” between London and Brussels over U.K. restrictions on welfare to immigrants, the EU announced that it was hauling British authorities to the Luxembourg-based European Court of Justice (which purported to allow bans on criticism of the EU in 2001) to enforce its decrees. U.K. taxpayers must pay welfare to immigrants, Brussels claims. Virtually all analysts — even among the fiercest critics of “integration” — expect the EU to prevail in its own “court.”
How It Happened
For decades, the European “project” was sold as just a “common market” aimed at increasing trade and prosperity. Everyone who suggested that something bigger might be in the pipeline was immediately attacked as a “conspiracy theorist,” fearmonger, or worse. In recent years, perhaps convinced that there is no turning back at this point, EU officials and even national leaders have been far more brazen about the agenda to smash national sovereignty.
Not everybody was surprised by recent developments, though. The New American magazine and its predecessor publications have been warning for decades that the so-called European Project was eventually aimed at abolishing national sovereignty on the continent — ideas that were long blasted as mere “conspiracy theories” by the very same forces that were quietly working to build a federal Europe.
In 1989, three years before the EU was officially born, TNA’s William Jasper wrote a detailed exposé entitled “United States of Europe.” That remarkably prescient article highlighted the signs — long ignored or downplayed by the establishment media on both sides of the Atlantic — of what was to come. Today, in mid-2013, after many decades of scheming, the “dream” of a Europe unified under a single authority is virtually a reality.
The current EU super-state, long sought by prominent internationalists at the Council on Foreign Relations and its affiliates, took its first major leap forward in 1952 with the birth of the European Coal and Steel Community. A powerful supranational entity, the ECSC helped lay the foundations for what was to come. In 1957, the six members of the “community” signed the Treaty of Rome, creating the European Economic Community — a scheme to use economic integration as a step on the road to eventual political union.
Over the next three decades, other national governments were gradually brought on board with lofty promises of peace, security, and prosperity. Then, in 1992, the Maastricht Treaty was signed by the 12 EEC member states, creating the European Union and building the groundwork for the single euro currency and the European Central Bank (ECB). A decade later, euro coins and bills went into circulation in a dozen countries, leaving complete control over monetary policy in the hands of the ECB.
In 2004, as Jasper’s 1989 article foresaw, former communist countries began to join the EU, too — Poland, the Czech Republic, Estonia, Hungary, Latvia, Lithuania, and more. By 2007, Romania and Bulgaria had joined as well. Today, there are 28 member states, and the EU is still seeking to expand the number of countries under its yoke.
By 2004, when “former” communist nations were joining en masse, the real agenda started coming out in the open when the then-25 member governments signed the European Constitution. All but seven eventually ratified the deeply controversial document, which aimed to replace all of the treaties with a single document empowering the EU while making it far easier for the super-state to impose its wishes on the peoples of Europe.
In 2005, however, French and Dutch voters overwhelming rejected the scheme. That should have been the end of it. Of course, it was not. As has become typical with the EU, the wishes of citizens proved to be no match for proponents of ever-closer “union.” In 2007, as this writer reported for The New American in 2009, the establishment unveiled its new strategy — an approach that would not require approval from most of the peoples of Europe.
Lisbon Treaty = Constitution
Enter the Lisbon Treaty, a repackaged version of the constitution, giving the “new and improved” EU virtually unlimited powers in every field of life. “The Treaty of Lisbon is the same as the rejected constitution,” boasted Valéry Giscard d’Estaing, the former French president and the president of the Constitutional Convention, in an open letter to several European newspapers in 2007. “Only the format has been changed to avoid referendums.” Everybody knew voters would never accept it.
While purporting to grant citizens “rights” to healthcare, “a high level of consumer protection,” welfare, “gender equality,” “education,” and security, the “Charter of Fundamental Rights of the European Union” all but obliterates traditional notions of individual, property, and parental rights. Allegiance to the United Nations Charter and “sustainable development” is explicit.
“The Lisbon Treaty is an attempt to construct a highly centralized European Federation artificially, from the top down, out of Europe’s many nations, peoples and States, without their free consent and knowledge,” writes Professor Anthony Coughlan in an analysis of the document for the Brussels Journal, entitled “These Boots Are Gonna Walk All Over You.” “The peoples of Europe do not want this kind of highly centralized Federal European Union whose most striking feature is that it is run virtually entirely by committees of politicians, bureaucrats and judges, none of whom are directly elected by the people.”
Only Ireland held a referendum on the repackaged constitution. Unsurprisingly, with polls showing that Europeans did not favor surrendering more power to the EU but instead wanted strict limits, the Irish voted no. Within 16 months, following a brazen pro-EU campaign waged with a combination of propaganda and scaremongering amid a brutal economic crisis, Ireland was forced to hold another vote. This time, the globalists succeeded. Just one man was left in the way: Czech President Václav Klaus. Eventually, he was forced to sign, too.
Lisbon, which analysts estimate retained more than 95 percent of the failed constitution, went into effect in December 2009. Now, as Barroso made clear, the EU wants even more: more power, more money, more government, and more Europe. Whether or not the people want it — they don’t, as recent polls made perfectly clear — matters little.
U.S. Role, Bilderberg, CFR, Atlantic Community
While Europeans have been spoon-fed propaganda about the “integration” process for decades, with countless citizens naively believing that the EU would help “counter-balance American influence,” the reality is that the U.S. government has been supporting the development of the union from the start. Major American tax-exempt foundations helped fund the effort, too.
Also key were establishment fronts such as the Council on Foreign Relations and the Bilderberg conference, as Jasper’s 1989 article documented extensively. More recently, former EU “Commissioner for Industry” and Bilderberg chair Étienne Davignon admitted in a March 2009 interview with the EU Observer that Bilderberg helped to create the single euro currency. All along, the real goal was to bring the world closer toward centralized rule.
The U.S. government, long dominated by CFR types, was important as well. After World War II, the Marshall Plan, for example, played a major role in foisting today’s regime on the peoples of Europe. Back in a 1947 speech, then-U.S. Secretary of State George Marshall (CFR) strongly suggested that European economic cooperation was a precondition for desperately needed American aid after World War II.
The Committee of European Economic Cooperation, chaired by then-British Foreign Secretary Ernest Bevin, officially responded with a major report that was ultimately transmitted approvingly by the State Department to President Harry Truman. Signed by government representatives from Austria, Belgium, Denmark, France, Greece, Iceland, Italy, Luxembourg, the Netherlands, Norway, Portugal, Sweden, the United Kingdom, and more, the committee outlined efforts to create a customs union that could eventually lead to even further cooperation. U.S. officials were pleased.
Members of Congress, especially Rep. Walter Judd (R-Minn.), tried to get language in the statement of purpose for the original Marshall Plan bill of 1948 explicitly declaring that it was the policy of the United States to encourage the economic unification and the political federation of Europe. In the end, language calling for the development of economic cooperation was included instead.
The next year, the “political federation” amendment was pursued again, with the result being the addition of the sentence: “It is further declared to be the policy of the people of the United States to encourage the unification of Europe.” By 1951, Congress finally came out and said it openly, with a clause included in the 1951 Mutual Security Act stating: “to further encourage the economic unification and the political federation of Europe.”
The goals of U.S. government support for European integration were explained in part decades ago, though largely ignored, by top U.S. officials. On September 20, 1966, for example, then-Under Secretary of State George Ball (CFR) testified before Congress on the State Department’s view on forming an “Atlantic Community,” essentially merging the United States with Europe.
“I find little evidence of any strong interest among Europeans for any immediate move toward greater political unity with the United States,” he explained. “They fear the overwhelming weight of U.S. power and influence in our common councils…. We believe that so long as Europe remains merely a continent of medium- and small-sized states there are definite limits to the degree of political unity we can achieve across the ocean.” (Emphasis added.)
In a letter sent to Congress by the State Department the next year, Assistant Secretary for Congressional Relations William Macomber (CFR) reiterated the administration’s position. According to the congressional record, the State Department “wished to encourage our European allies to continue to seek common solutions to their problems through European integration.”
“A number of subsequent events have demonstrated the advantages of pursuing the policy which they outlined, that of seeking intensified cooperation in NATO while supporting a stronger and more unified Europe,” Macomber explained. “Recent actions by the European Economic Community to consolidate and advance economic integration have brought into sight the completion of a single economic system at the center of Europe.”
Even today, the U.S. government continues to push European integration whether the people want it or not. Consider the Obama administration’s outrageous statements surrounding the increasingly likely possibility of British secession from the EU, with the U.S. president warning that Britain would suffer severe economic losses if voters decide to withdraw from the union. Among the threats: less trade, loss of jobs, and more.
Before that, Federal Reserve boss Ben Bernanke was demanding closer European integration, too, calling for the creation of a central regime with power over taxing and spending. “If Europe had a single fiscal authority, that would put them in a much closer situation relative to the United States,” Bernanke said during an August 2012 “town hall” meeting in Washington. “That would probably address many of the concerns, many of the problems that they had.”
Further Expansion
Ironically, critics of the EU point out, if the EU applied to join itself, it would not qualify due to its undemocratic structure. Still, putting more formerly sovereign nations under the EU regime remains a high priority, with some powerful figures even seeking to expand EU rule well beyond Europe’s borders.
The most recent member to surrender its sovereignty is Croatia, where a tax-funded propaganda and scaremongering campaign threatening people’s pensions resulted in voters opting to join early last year. Other nations from the former Yugoslavia are expected to join in the coming years.
Eventually, more than a few pro-EU expansionists hope to add Islamic Turkey, a small piece of which is on the European continent. After that, there are prominent voices calling for the union to expand into Africa, the Middle East, and even Russia. In 2007, for example, then-U.K. Foreign Secretary David Miliband proposed a “version of the European Free Trade Association that could gradually bring the countries of the Mahgreb, the Middle East and Eastern Europe in line with the single market, not as an alternative to membership, but potentially as a step towards it.”
In the upper echelons of power within the EU and Russia, there are also efforts under way to bring the Russian government into the fold amid the march toward “global governance.” During a meeting late last year between Russian and EU leaders, Bilderberg-selected European “President” Herman Van Rompuy said: “By working together, the EU and Russia can make a decisive contribution to global governance and regional conflict resolution, to global economic governance in the G8 and G20, and to a broad range of international and regional issues.” Russian heavyweights have also started publicly calling for “integration” — including political — between the EU and Russia.
Of course, the EU is not the only transnational entity at work usurping national sovereignty on the continent. Founded in 1949, another prominent and increasingly influential body, known as the Council of Europe, has ensnared almost 50 national governments and 800 million people — virtually every country in Europe. The Strasbourg-based entity already has its own “court,” dubbed the “European Court of Human Rights,” that imposes its controversial social-engineering schemes on member states while doing little to uphold genuine human rights. Among the members: Russia, Turkey, Ukraine, Moldova, and more.
Where It Is Going
With the brutal economic crisis wreaking havoc across Europe, anti-sovereignty extremists have seized the opportunity to accelerate the “integration” process with promises of “financial stability.” Some of the most stunning developments include the erection of a so-called “banking union”; the creation of a perpetual bailout mechanism with virtually unlimited ability to extract wealth from Europeans, dubbed a “financial dictatorship” by critics; the replacement of elected national leaders in countries such as Italy and Greece by EU-establishment stooges; and more. What former Soviet dictator Mikhail Gorbachev approvingly described as “the new European Soviet” during a 2000 visit to Britain appears to be coming into view, according to analysts.
Even prominent officials are openly discussing the future of Europe as a bloc where unaccountable Brussels makes the decisions. “The Euro currency is stable again. But the crisis has not gone away completely, of course, and we have to continue to follow these new rules if we want to ensure that it does not return,” announced European Commission Vice-President for Inter-institutional Affairs and Administration Maroš Šefcovic in a speech to Lithuanian lawmakers, adding that eurocrats will now be approving member states’ budgets. “Pooling sovereignty in this way would have been unthinkable a few years ago, and yet now it is likely to be the model for future development of the economic and monetary union.”
Not everybody in the EU sees the “new model” as a viable scheme, however. Firebrand U.K. Independence Party (UKIP) chief Nigel Farage, a member of the rubber-stamp European Parliament, regularly attacks the EU as an illegitimate regime filled with “former” communists and criminals. In his view, the so-called “European Project” is destined for inevitable failure, and possibly violence if EU leaders do not cease and desist in their efforts to abolish national sovereignty and self-government.
“Like Communism, this has all gone badly wrong, and the EU Titanic has now hit the iceberg,” MEP Farage said in an impassioned plea before Parliament last year. “It is a European Union of economic failure, of mass unemployment, of low growth; but worst of all, it’s an EU with the economic prison of the euro…. This now poses huge dangers to the continent. We face the prospect of mass civil unrest, possibly even revolution in some countries that have been driven to total and utter desperation.”
Whether the EU will descend into violence and more severe chaos remains to be seen. What is clear, however, is that the forces seeking to build global government view European integration as a key stepping stone on the path to world order — and they are not likely to abandon their grandiose dream without a fight. The planet is quietly being divided up into regional blocs ruled by an unelected and unaccountable cabal, and with the destruction of national sovereignty in Europe almost complete, the only serious force left that can stop the scheme appears to be the American people.
The above article is part of our special report “How the Free Trade Agenda Is Knocking Down America.” This report warns that the free trade agenda is a dangerous and deceptive bait and switch. The intent is not to create genuine free trade but to transfer economic and political power to regional arrangements on the road to global governance. Because of what is at stake, we encourage you to read the entire special report (click here for the PDF) and to become involved.
