In 1946, ex-British war PM, Sir Winston Churchill delivered his famous Zurich speech calling for the establishment of the United States of Europe. However, his idea of a united (Western) Europe excluded his native country – the UK. At that time, he envisaged West Europe as composed of independent, free, and sovereign states that would rise from the ashes of WWII and reach for a destiny of unprecedented harmony and democracy.
Neutral Switzerland, with its centuries-old harmonious co-existence of four languages and cultures (and international money laundering banks), was to be the blueprint for a multilingual and multicultural Europe that would never again see maniac dictators and supra-national demagogues bent on imposing their will on member nations.
Initially, W. Churchill’s vision seemed to be advancing according to the plan. Former Nazi Germany and fascist Italy decentralized political power and became parliamentary democracies. Nazism and fascism became discredited throughout Europe like Communism in its western part.
However, soon, the events took a different turn. The Schuman plan of 1950 proposed the supra-national pooling of the French and German coal and steel industries as a means of forging European economic unity (the 1951 ECSC by the Treaty of Paris). The two economies were interwoven to such an extent that a new war between these traditional enemies became virtually impossible.
The European Economic Union (the EEC), established in 1957 by the Treaty of Rome, brought Italy and the three Benelux countries into the closer union with France and Germany but represented a further step towards a pan-European economy by tying economic development to the city of Rome.[i] Significantly, the Treaty of Rome also gave Europe a sense of supranational religious unity and the Roman Catholic Church protection against the existent threat of the spreading of Communism outside of East-Central Europe.
Nevertheless, in the same 1962, year, some Western technocrats recognized the EEC as a project that is already much behind simply and economically united Europe with the comments that fascism in Europe is about to be reborn in respectable business attire, and the 1957 Treaty of Rome will finally be implemented to its fullest extent. Some of them shared the opinion that the dream of a medieval Holy Roman Empire of the German Nation (962−1806 – the HREGM) is returning to power to dominate and direct the so-called forces of the Christian mankind of the Western world. Simply, such an idea was not dead yet but still stalks through the antechambers of every national capital of continental Western Europe, in the determination of the leaders in the common market to restore the Holy Roman Empire of the German Nation with all that means.[ii]
Surely, West Germany, constrained in its international role and influence after 1945, saw European unification as a very convenient international platform to pursue its own foreign policy.
Nevertheless, the word “economic” was ominously dropped from the official title of the community in 1967 in favor of the description of it just as the European Community (the EC) meaning that the integration process is now directed toward political direction what was clearly seen in 1979 when the first direct elections to the European Parliament in Strasbourg have been organized. Even the former European Assembly was renamed into the European Parliament in order to stress a clear direction toward the creation of a supranational political entity–state.
The policy of enlargement continued with Greece joining in 1981, and Spain and Portugal in 1986, when in the same year the Single European Act was signed to prepare the EC for the transformation into the EU – a higher level of economic, financial, social, legal, legislative, and above all political integration with the German leadership. In other words, the Single European Act meant the gradual transfer of executive, legislative, and judicial powers from the Member States to the central authorities of the EC and since 1993 of the EU (the HREGN). Consequently, the EU could make ever-increasing political inroads into the national sovereignty of the Member States and the London-Dublin conspiracy attempted to force the British people of Northern Ireland by stealth and terror towards a united Ireland under European rule, while arrogant and spineless politicians in Westminster continued politely to play the enemy’s game, or, as Dr. Paisley once put it metaphorically, to “feed the brute instead of slaughtering it”.
When the (in)famous Maastricht Treaty on the European (political) Union was signed in February 1992 (to come into force in November 1993) with the ultimate aim of transforming the EC into a federal superstate – now significantly redesigned as the European Union (EU) – many of the politicians elected to Brussels, including those from Great Britain, fell for the confidence trick within the ideological framework of the HREGN. Today, when Great Britany as a focal US colony in Europe left the EU, a real perspective for Berlin and Vatican to transform the EU into a virtual HREGN is on the tangible agenda.
Dr. Vladislav B. Sotirović is a Former university professor in Vilnius, Lithuania. He is a Research Fellow at the Center for Geostrategic Studies. He is a regular contributor to Global Research.