Bernard ConnollyBernard Connolly, Chief Global Strategist and Head
of Research, The Rotten Heart of Europe: The Dirty War for
Europe's Money Let us think the unthinkable: Bernard Connolly, a notorious opponent of the monetary union, even argues that the debt ratio will explode upwards, given the low inflation Italy needs and the declining potential rate of growth that Italy also has Circle of Barbed Wire The EU "constitution" has been put forward by a body known, in a deliberate and rather disgusting parody of the Philadelphia Constitutional Convention, as the European Convention. Its chairman was Valéry Giscard d'Estaing, a former French president so ineffectual that he was easily defeated in 1981 by Francois Mitterrand. Giscard was one of the two men primarily responsible for that Doomsday Machine, the ERM, a mechanism both economically perverse and politically perverted, in 1978. And, together with its other progenitor, Helmut Schmidt, he had never cloaked his ambitions. When the two men visited Aachen, seat of the empire of Charlemagne, and set the seal on their personal agreement on the ERM, Giscard remarked, "Perhaps when we discussed monetary problems, the spirit of Charlemagne brooded over us." The appeal to French élites of a technocratic, Franco-German economic cooperation, aimed at defeating what was seen as the threat of American hegemony, had been evident throughout the interwar years as well as during the Vichy period. From the inspiring work of Michael Novak, the preeminent American Catholic neo-conservative political philosopher. In his 1991 book, The Spirit Of Democratic Capitalism, published just after the fall of Communism, he wrote that Don’t throw away freedom to a
Euro-superstate Interpellation 2000/01:315
Euro-court outlaws
criticism of EU Don’t throw away freedom to a
Euro-superstate Bernard Connolly is a former senior official in the EU Commission and author of The Rotten Heart of Europe which argued against the euro project. So here they come, those bits of paper adorned with fictional bridges (what a splendid reminder of the roads and bridges from nowhere to nowhere on which EU taxpayers’ money is so shamefully and shamelessly wasted). You’d better not try to forge them, for that would be a federal offence, and come 2004 the eurocops will come and get you, literally, and there would be nothing the Irish courts could do to protect you: no habeas corpus, no presumption of innocence, no evidence required before you are whisked off to the Continent for unlimited “investigative detention”, no trial by jury. The euro is a part of the design to extinguish freedom in a European empire. The introduction of euro notes and coins has practically no economic significance. But its psychological importance will be considerable. It will bring home to the Irish people that the Rubicon was crossed nine years ago when they were led blindfold into the Maastricht referendum trap, beguiled by the Yes campaign’s siren song of “six billion pounds”. Ireland really did sell its birthright for a mess of pottage. It sold itself into euro-slavery that day. Now the euro notes, tokens of bondage, are here. It’s ironic that this final humiliation should come just a few days after Argentina was reduced to riots, 27 deaths, debt default and a state of siege. What Argentina is suffering now, Ireland will very likely suffer over the next two or three years. Argentina in effect did in 1991 what Ireland has done. It gave up an independent currency (admittedly a hyperinflationary one, an excuse that the Irish government did not have), locking the peso one-to-one with the dollar. In the early years of this regime, the dollar was falling, making Argentina’s exports competitive, and US interest rates were low, boosting Argentine spending. This created several years of boom and allowed the country’s public debt to fall to levels lower than, for instance, Ireland’s. But when the dollar turned around from 1995 onwards as the US began strong, technology-driven growth, the Argentine economy, which had practically nothing in common with the US, began to suffer horribly. Three-and-a-half years of recession and ballooning debt preceded financial collapse, social distress and political upheaval. Why could Argentina not simply devalue its currency, as Ireland did so successfully in 1993? Because most Argentine firms and families had taken out loans in dollars. Devaluing the peso would make it much harder for them to repay those loans, bankrupting many. From January 1st, 2002, even the blindest will be able to see that Ireland has no way out. Because its economy behaves so differently from the continental economies, sharing a currency and monetary policy with them will, after creating an uncontrollable boom and rising inflation over the past few years, now bring bust, rising unemployment, deflation, falling house prices and bankruptcy. Even the Commission has just admitted this in its Annual Economic Review. But even if the lawyers were to say that Ireland could leave the single currency and allow a new Irish pound to depreciate, everyone’s debts would be in euros. Monetary union in Europe makes potential Argentinas of all the small eurozone countries; those that, unlike Germany and France, do not have the political clout to get the ECB to set monetary policy for their benefit. Romano Prodi spilt the beans a couple of weeks ago: the euro would create a crisis that would allow the EU to grab a whole set of economic policy weapons that it has so far been politically unacceptable to advocate. Forget about the Irish people’s rejection of Nice: the EU behaves as though that treaty were ratified. After all, it is only Ireland that has said No, and Ireland can be disregarded. And in any case the 2004 treaty will simply leapfrog Nice. It will create a European superstate. That superstate of course, will not be a federation. Blair, France and, though not openly, Germany all favour an intergovernmental political union. In such a union policies are decided for the whole of the EU by the big three, with a locally-powerful vassal role as local colonial administrators for compliant politicians from the small countries and no place for democracy anywhere. There is nothing new in this. The autocratic Charles de Gaulle proposed it in the early 1960s. Germany accepted it; so - enthusiastically - did Macmillan, who had just applied for membership of “Europe” as, he thought, the only way of recovering the privileges of Great Power status for the members of his class. But the Netherlands vetoed the plan, knowing that an intergovernmental union would mean that the country would again be bossed around by the big boys. At that time, the Dutch government was run by people who remembered what it was like to have your country ruled by outsiders. Just think, the decisions on EU arrest warrants will mean that by 2004 Irish citizens will be subject to the laws of every other EU country (and that could include several “former” communist regimes), laws that their own parliament had no hand in making. Irish freedom was hard-won. It has lasted only 80 years. It is now being thrown away, in defiance of the will of the people expressed in the Nice referendum, so that politicians and bureaucrats can have a share, however tiny, in the intoxicating power of empire. NOW IT’S BLASPHEMY TO MOCK EUROPE
The EU is going to extraordinary lengths to protect itself against criticism, writes Ambrose Evans-Pritchard, and at Nice next month will seek new ways of eroding our freedoms This article is blasphemous. It contains irreverential criticism of the European Union. It brings the European Court of Justice into disrepute, or tries to. It subjects Señor Damaso Ruiz-Jarabo Colomer, the Court’s Spanish advocate-general, to particular ridicule, and does so mischievously in the knowledge that he has a very thin skin. On the Richter scale of disrespect it is a seven or an eight, and undoubtedly falls under the European Court’s emerging blasphemy doctrine. This deems that political criticism of the European Union and its leading figures can be akin to the most extreme forms of religious blasphemy. It can therefore be suppressed — and punished — without violating protected freedom of speech. Ruiz-Jarabo Colomer ventured into blasphemy law in an opinion delivered on 19 October in a landmark free-speech case — number C-274/99 P. It involves a British economist, Bernard Connolly, who argues that he was unlawfully sacked from the European Commission for writing The Rotten Heart of Europe. |