On February 12, 2013, the Council on Foreign Relations (CFR) hosted a speaker program entitled The G-20: Prospects and Challenges for Global Governance. The program, which was video-recorded and is available for viewing on the CFR website (www.cfr.org), featured a lineup of top-drawer talent from the CFR brain trust. It also yielded a number of revealing statements by the panel participants. But an admission by Eurasia Group President Ian Bremmer is especially noteworthy, in that it once again publicly confirms what critics of the European Union have been saying for decades, but which CFR globalists such as Bremmer have usually denied. Bremmer admitted — with apparent approval — that “there’s real subversion of sovereignty by the EU.”
The sponsoring organization and the participants in the above-noted event are significant and worth mentioning, as they have been providing key political and intellectual leadership for the ongoing phenomenon of regionalization.
The CFR panel included:
• Nicolas Berggruen, chairman of the Berggruen Institute on Governance and coauthor of Intelligent Governance for the 21st Century: A Middle Way Between West and East;
• Ian Bremmer, president, Eurasia Group;
• Stewart M. Patrick, senior fellow and director of the International Institutions and Global Governance Program at the CFR; and
• Anne-Marie Slaughter, Bert G. Kerstetter Professor of Politics and International Affairs at Princeton University, and recently the director of Policy Planning for the Obama State Department under Hillary Clinton.
Professor Slaughter, who served as the presider of the CFR panel discussion, has taught at the University of Chicago and Harvard University, and is a former president of the American Society of International Law. She has also authored some of the most blatant appeals — for the CFR journal Foreign Affairs and other establishment periodicals — in favor of subverting national sovereignty with regional schemes of “transnational governance.”
But we digress; let us return to the Bremmer subversion quote referred to above. His outburst came amidst the venting of frustration by the panelists over what they see as the “ineffectiveness” of the G20 process. Professor Slaughter and Berggruen, particularly, argued that the G20 needed to be given actual powers that would enable it to do more to effect global governance. According to the CFR panelists, national sovereignty and national interests get in the way of this desired goal. Thus, Bremmer commented: “The EU is much more significant. There’s real subversion of sovereignty by the EU that works.”
The New American has pointed out for many years that the designers of the European Union intended from the very start of the EU — which began in the 1950s as the six-member European Coal and Steel Community (ECSC) — that it would gradually develop into a supranational regional government, eventually subverting the sovereignty of, and usurping legislative, executive, and judicial powers of, its member states. This plan of intentional subversion has been documented from many sources, including the personal correspondence, diaries, and memoirs of many of the EU architects, as well as official papers, many of which had been hidden under a cloak of secrecy for decades.
We also have pointed out that it was key CFR members in the Truman and Eisenhower administrations who provided the indispensable aid — political, diplomatic, and economic — in post-World War II Europe that guaranteed the Eurofederalists would be ascendant. Utilizing Marshall Plan funds and America’s new power on the war-ravaged continent, the CFR globalists running the U.S. State and Treasury departments — Dean Acheson, John Foster Dulles, Christian Herter, David Bruce, John J. McCloy, C. Douglas Dillon, George Ball, et al. — raised to power those who championed an amalgamated, “integrated” Europe, and cast down those who clung to “outmoded” notions of national sovereignty and independence.
One of the most astute observers and chroniclers of this subversive process over the course of five decades was the late Hilaire du Berrier, publisher of the authoritative, Monaco-based HduB Reports. Du Berrier was also a longtime contributing editor to The New American (and to its predecessors, American Opinion and The Review of the News), “The CFR,” wrote du Berrier in the January 1973 issue of HduB Reports, “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.”
Stealth and Deception
The American and European co-conspirators in this subversive restructuring of the continent did not, of course, openly admit to the people of Europe how revolutionary their plans were and how radical and extensive the integration process would be. To the contrary, the leaders of the Eurofication movement repeatedly assured concerned citizens and skeptical political opponents that they had nothing to fear; the Common Market would never morph into an actual government that would in any way override national and local authority.
One of the most infamous false assurances in this regard was promulgated by British prime minister and Conservative Party leader Edward Heath, when he led Britain into the European Economic Community (as the EU was then known) in 1973. “There are some in this country who fear that in going into Europe we shall in some way sacrifice independence and sovereignty,” Heath stated in a prime ministerial TV broadcast in January 1973. “These fears, I need hardly say, are completely unjustified.”
Official British papers released decades later confirmed what many people already knew: that Heath had lied, that he knew full well he was taking Britain into a sovereignty-destroying arrangement, and that he colluded with Labor Party leaders to deliver the combined votes needed to cinch this national suicide. Heath was following the lead of the CFR’s sister organization in England, the Royal Institute of International Affairs (RIIA, also known as Chatham House). One of the RIIA’s most famous members, and a key player in promoting the EU, was Arnold J. Toynbee, who stated in an address to his colleagues:
I will merely repeat that we are at present working, discreetly but with all our might, to wrest this mysterious political force called sovereignty out of the clutches of the local national states of our world. And all the time we are denying with our lips what we are doing with our hands.
Heath was not alone; many other European politicians followed Toynbee’s advice of “denying with our lips what we are doing with our hands.” The Peterson Institute for International Economics, one of the CFR’s most important adjunct think tanks, approvingly refers to this ongoing deception in the EU process as “integration by stealth.”
Gradually, the new rulers of Europe have dropped hints and made statements validating the worst fears expressed by critics and opponents of the EU. In July 1988, former European Commission President Jacques Delors shocked many with the prediction that within 10 years 80 percent of economic legislation, and perhaps also fiscal and social legislation, would come not from national parliaments, but from the European Parliament, the European Commission, and other EU institutions. Various studies using differing methods of calculation have produced widely disparate estimates of the extent to which EU laws and regulations are influencing and overriding national legislation. A study in 2010 by the British House of Commons reported:
In the UK data suggest that from 1997 to 2009 6.8% of primary legislation (Statutes) and 14.1% of secondary legislation (Statutory Instruments) had a role in implementing EU obligations, although the degree of involvement varied from passing reference to explicit implementation. Estimates of the proportion of national laws based on EU laws in other EU Member States vary widely, ranging from around 6% to 84%.
In the past few years since the 2008 financial crisis, the power of the Eurocrats in Brussels has dramatically increased. It may not yet have attained the sway that Delors predicted, but the trajectory is still in that direction.
The EU integration process is referred to as “deepening and widening”: The “deepening” refers to the steady usurpation of more and more powers by the EU’s supranational institutions over more and more of the domestic functions of national and local governments; the “widening” refers to the adding of new member nation states.
One-worlders readily acknowledge that regional governance, as exemplified by the European Union’s subversive process and steady growth, is the path that will most successfully lead to eventual world government.
The UN-appointed Commission on Global Governance, for instance, declares in its seminal 1995 report, Our Global Neighborhood:
The UN must gear itself for a time when regionalism becomes more ascendant worldwide and assist the process in advance of that time. Regional co-operation and integration should be seen as an important and integral part of a balanced system of global governance.
Zbigniew Brzezinski, President Carter’s national security advisor, a longtime CFR member, and a founder of David Rockefeller’s Trilateral Commission, told world leaders at Mikhail Gorbachev’s 1995 State of the World Forum:
We cannot leap into world government in one quick step. [It] requires a process of gradually expanding the range of democratic cooperation as well as the range of personal and national security, a widening, step by step, stone by stone, [of] existing relatively narrow zones of stability in the world of security and cooperation. In brief, the precondition for eventual globalization — genuine globalization — is progressive regionalization, because thereby we move toward larger, more stable, more cooperative units.
In a July 13, 2000 interview with the Italian newspaper La Stampa, Italian Prime Minister Giuliano Amato made some startlingly candid remarks about the deception utilized by the EU. Amato would shortly after this interview go on to become the vice-president of the EU Constitutional Convention, where, along with Giscard d’Estaing, he employed the very same deceptive practices he had described. Here are excerpts of his La Stampa interview:
One must act “as if” in Europe: as if one wanted only very few things, in order to obtain a great deal. As if nations were to remain sovereign, in order to convince them to surrender their sovereignty. The Commission in Brussels, for example, must act as if it were a technical organism, in order to operate like a government … and so on, camouflaging and toning down. The sovereignty lost at national level does not pass to any new subject. It is entrusted to a faceless entity: NATO, the UN and eventually the EU. The Union is the vanguard of this changing world: it indicates a future of Princes without sovereignty. The new entity is faceless and those who are in command can neither be pinned down nor elected…. That is the way Europe was made too: by creating communitarian organisms without giving the organisms presided over by national governments the impression that they were being subjected to a higher power….
I don’t think it is a good idea to replace this slow and effective method — which keeps national States free from anxiety while they are being stripped of power — with great institutional leaps. Therefore I prefer to go slowly, to crumble pieces of sovereignty up little by little, avoiding brusque transitions from national to [EU] federal power.
Comrades in Collectivism
Supporters of the EU’s regional approach to governance scoff at critics who see a totalitarian design emerging from the shadows in Brussels. However, the constant centralizing of power and steady erosion of the remaining vestiges of national sovereignty point toward more, not less, despotic rule. It should be of more than passing interest then to note that the EU program fits well within the model of regional unification outlined by top communist leaders such as Stalin, Lenin, and Trotsky.
Stalin’s 1936 official program of the Communist International declared:
This world dictatorship can be established only when the victory of socialism has been achieved in certain countries or groups of countries, when the newly established proletarian republics enter into a federative union with the already existing proletarian republics … [and] when these federations of republics have finally grown into a World Union of Soviet Socialist Republics uniting the whole of mankind under the hegemony of the international proletariat organized as a state.
V.I. Lenin’s Thesis on the National and Colonial Questions, which was adopted by the Second Comintern Congress, 28 July 1920, declared: “Federation is a transitional form towards the complete union … of all nations”
“The Soviet United States of Europe,” said Leon Trotsky, in The Bulletin of the Opposition, 1930, “is the only correct slogan pointing the way out from European disunity, a disunity which threatens not only Germany but the whole of Europe with complete structural and cultural decline.”
Less well known than the above-mentioned communist leaders, but perhaps more influential in helping to put their plans into practice, was Alexander Kojeve: philosopher, intellectual gadfly, and confidant to European presidents and prime ministers. Kojeve, it turns out, was also a longtime KGB mole, serving the Soviet Union. Keith Patchen at the National Observer, who has dug out a tremendous amount of detail on Kojeve’s activities, has noted that as early as the 1950s Kojeve “wrote to [political philosopher] Leo Strauss that a world socialist state might be realized through the gradual expansion of the European integration across the globe.”
Kojeve, Stalin, Lenin, and Trotsky would heartily approve of the EU-style regionalism that has been spreading across the globe under the guise of free trade agreements.
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.
