United States of Europe
By William F. Jasper The New American, April 10, 1989
Will once great nations sacrifice their sovereignty?
1992. In the minds of most Americans, the year probably holds no significance beyond being another presidential election year, and the occasion of another Olympic Games. Increasingly though, Americans will begin to realize that fast-approaching year carries far greater political and economic significance. Readers of business publications and economic journals have already seen a surge of articles heralding 1992 as the year of the "European market," as a benchmark period during which a host of trade barriers and other restrictions among the 12 countries of the European Community, or Common Market, will come tumbling down. Nineteen ninety-two is the year that the Single European Act (SEA) goes into effect. That act, agreed to by the 12 member states in 1986, calls for the establishment of "an area without internal frontiers, in which the free movement of goods, persons, services, and capital is ensured." "With progress toward a single market, European industry will be able to achieve greater economies of scale," said Deputy Secretary of the Treasury M. Peter McPherson in an address to the Institute for International Economics in 1988. "The demands of competition will spur technological innovation and greater productivity. The program can help stimulate growth and employment, reduce consumer prices, and raise standards of living throughout Europe." McPherson added: "The force that will drive this transformation is opportunity -- the opportunity to compete in a larger and freer marketplace. European manufacturers today face a myriad of obstacles to trade with other member states, ranging from profound differences in regulatory and tax systems to varying national technical standards. For example, an electronics company in the Netherlands now has to meet 12 separate sets of technical standards to be able to sell throughout the Community."
Free Market Rhetoric
Dr. Ron Paul, the former Republican congressman from Texas and recent candidate for U.S. President on the Libertarian Party ticket, is one of those who sees that approaching milestone very differently. Long an ardent champion of free market economics, he warns that the movement toward European "union" and "integration" is a statist scheme cloaked in free-market rhetoric that is likely to "produce a monster." "International statists have long dreamed of a world currency and a world central bank," wrote Dr. Paul in the October 1988 issue of The Free Market, published by the Ludwig Von Mises Institute. "Now it looks as if their dream may come true." In his essay, "The Coming World Central Bank," Paul commented:
European governments have targeted 1992 for abolishing individual European currencies and replacing them with the European Currency Unit, the Ecu. Next they plan to set up a European central bank. The next step is the merger of the Federal Reserve, the European central bank and the Bank of Japan into one world central bank.... The European central bank (ECB) will be modeled after the Federal Reserve. Like the Fed in 1913, it will have the institutional appearance of decentralization, but also like the Fed it will be run by a cartel of big bankers in collusion with politicians at the expense of the public.
Of course, the much-touted "free-market reforms" are really only bait laid out to entice Europeans into the trap of an (eventually) all-powerful supranational government. Many of the coming reforms are laudable in and of themselves and will indeed bring genuine market benefits to the people of Common Market countries. The British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC), for instance, will lose its monopoly on television broadcasting, which will both allow viewers in the U.K. access to foreign programming and encourage the growth of domestic private sector television stations. Financial services will be revolutionized by the invigorating winds of competition, as banks and corporations are given freer rein to operate across national borders. Powerful national unions will lose their strangleholds on vital economic sectors. Air travel should become more affordable as the European air carrier industry is opened to free competition.
Short-Lived Reforms
However, these reforms, if they do come about, will likely be short-lived. The reason is that the Single European Act has committed the 12 member nations to increased political and monetary integration, meaning an increased shift of sovereign powers from national capitals to the Common Market institutions in Brussels, Luxembourg, and Strasbourg. These institutions are controlled by Keynesian interventionists, socialists, and internationalists. In the European Parliament, where the 518 elected deputies sit in political, not national, groupings, the Socialist Group is by far the largest force, with 165 members. It is followed by the European People's Party Group (114 members), the European Democratic Group (66 members), the Communist and Allies Group (48 members), the Liberal Democratic and Reformist Group (44 members), the Group of the European Democratic Alliance (29 members), the Group of the European Right (16 members), and the Non-Attached (15). The makeup of the European Community Commission and the Council of Ministers, the institutions with the real legislative and executive power, is no better. They are dominated by men like Commission President Jacques Delors, a former French Finance Minister who is leading the push for a European central bank, as well as other assaults on national sovereignty; Commissioner Willy de Clercq, a member of David Rockefeller's Trilateral Commission and, as the Common Market's trade minister, a leading proponent of Western financial and technological assistance to the Communist bloc; Commissioner Karl-Heinz Narjes, who also is a Trilateralist; Italian Socialist Carlo Ripa di Meana, the Commissioner now in charge of "environment and nuclear security"; and German Foreign Minister Hans-Dietrich Genscher, who urges Europeans "to take Mr. Gorbachev seriously, to take him at his word," passes out "I like Gorby" buttons, and champions unilateral Western disarmament. Formally known as the European Community, the Common Market is the direct creation of individuals and organizations that have been involved in various utopian and conspiratorial schemes to establish a world government, a "New World Order," for the better part of this century. In the aftermath of World War I, world leaders met in Paris in 1919 to settle war claims, redraw the face of Europe, and hammer out what became the Treaty of Versailles. President Woodrow Wilson came to the Peace Conference with his famous "fourteen points," the spring-board that helped launch the League of Nations. Among those who accompanied Wilson to the Conference were his ever-present advisor and mentor Colonel Edward M. House and three young men who were destined to play key roles in the forming of a United Europe: John Foster Dulles, Allen W. Dulles, and Christian A. Herter -- Mr. Wilson's "Brain Trust." According to Wilson and House biographers, it was the mysterious Colonel House (an advocate of "Socialism as dreamed of by Karl Marx") who actually drew up the "fourteen points," drafted the Covenant of the League of Nations, assembled the "Brain Trust," and imbued Wilson with the vision of a socialist one-world government. Be that as it may, the Wilson-House dream of the League as a nascent world superstate came to naught when the U.S. Senate rejected the treaty as a dangerous assault on our Constitution and our national sovereignty.
The Council on Foreign Relations
Realizing that the American public and the U.S. Congress were not sufficiently "internationalist-minded," and that such "outdated" concepts as the nation-state, patriotism, inalienable personal rights, constitutionally-limited government, and a foreign policy with "no entangling alliances" were still widely and tenaciously adhered to, Colonel House and his fellow internationalists set about to change the American consciousness. In 1921 they established the Council on Foreign Relations (CFR) in New York as a "study group" on foreign relations. Drawing together influential one-world-minded men from high finance, industry, the news media, politics, and academe, the CFR soon became the dominant force directing American foreign policy and promoting centralized government planning and socialism at home and abroad. Men like Rockefeller, Morgan, Aldrich, Baruch, Warburg, and Lippmann provided financial backing, prestige, and political clout to the new organization dedicated to building "international order." A sister organization of similar purpose, and comprised of an equally impressive array of monied and titled persons, the Royal Institute of International Affairs (RIIA, also known as Chatham House) was established in Britain. Both of these powerful, dynastic groups grew out of a dinner at the Hotel Majestic in Paris attended by European and American internationalists at the Versailles Conference in 1919. They set up additional branch organizations in other European, and then Asian, countries to spread the gospel of world government. With the failure of the Senate to ratify U.S. entry into the League of Nations, the CFR-RIIA establishment threw support to (and, indeed, initiated) efforts to unify the war-ravaged nations of Europe under a supranational, regional government as an interim arrangement on the way toward a completed world government. The arguments in favor of a United Europe were the same as those advanced for the League: that the chief cause of the just-concluded Great War was "rampant nationalism," and that the only solution was the surrender of certain prerogatives of national sovereignty to a higher international authority. In truth, the causes of the war had far less to do with the unrestrained appetites of nation-states than with the conspiratorial machinations of the same internationalist insiders who were planning and advocating an "end to nationhood." European heads of state and heads of government gathered in solemn ceremony at the Pantheon in Paris on November 9, 1988 to inter the remains of Jean Monnet, the French internationalist who is often called "the Father of Europe." The ceremony marking the centennial of his birth high-lighted the numerous tributes to the principal architect of the Common Market. Jean Omar Marie Gabriel Monnet was born in Cognac, the son of a brandy merchant. In 1910, at the age of 20, he was sent to Canada by his father to open new markets for the family business. Hooking up with the Hudson Bay Company and the Lazard Brothers banking house, two of the most eminent Establishment companies, the parvenu Frenchman was given entrée into the high British circles of power and soon became the protégé of the Anglo-American insiders. Thus began the mercurial rise of Jean Monnet, who -- though lacking even the equivalent of a high school diploma -- was to become a renowned wizard of high finance, a political mastermind, and a confidant and advisor to presidents and prime ministers.
Monnet's Mercurial Rise
Through the influence of French Foreign Minister Etienne Clementel, Monnet gained an exclusive and very lucrative contract for shipping vital matériels from Canada to France during the First World War. Following that conflagration, he was appointed to a seat on the Allied Supreme Economic Council, made an advisor to the committee preparing the Treaty of Versailles, and introduced to that closed group around Colonel House that was preparing the way for the emerging League of Nations. In 1919, he became an international figure at the age of 29, with his appointment as Deputy Secretary-General of the League. Biographers Merry and Serge Bromberger write: "Behind the scenes he helped to arrange the appointment of the French Socialist Albert Thomas as head of the International Labor Organization." They also record Monnet as boasting: "I've always voted Socialist, except on one occasion." That single exception was in the 1965 presidential election, when he publicly supported Jean Lecanuet, who championed a federated Europe. In 1925 Monnet moved to America to accept a partnership with the Blair Foreign Corporation, a New York bank that had done bonanza business in the "war effort." From there he went on to become vice president of Transamerica, the giant San Francisco holding company that owned Bank of America.
Coudenhove's Pan Europa
At that time there were many campaigns underway to create a United States of Europe. In 1923, Count Richard N. Coudenhove-Kalergi of Austria published his book, Pan Europa; three years later he organized his first Pan European Congress in Vienna. By the end of the 1920s, branches of the Pan European Union were operating throughout the continent and Britain. In his piercing critique of Coudenhove's Pan European idea (How Can Europe Survive, New York: Van Nostrand, 1955), the eminent free-market economist Hans F. Sennholz observed that there is no getting around "the fact that his plan is a scheme for the attainment of wholesale socialism in Europe." (Emphasis in the original) Nevertheless, it received the support and patronage of many of Europe's leading statesmen and men of letters, not to mention that of the Anglo-American Establishment. One of Count Coudenhove's most important disciples was Aristide Briand, who between 1909 and 1930 was Socialist Premier of France 11 times and Minister of Foreign Affairs 12 times. Briand, in 1930, unveiled a plan for "European Union" that provided for a regional supranational union within the League of Nations. It failed not because of antipathy to the idea, but largely because of differences of opinion among the various socialist and integrationist factions on the best means to accomplish the shared goal. That same year, another important apostle of Coudenhove's Pan Europa, Sir Winston Churchill, wrote an essay titled, "The United States of Europe," that was aimed at winning support for the idea from the American public. It was published in the February 15th issue of The Saturday Evening Post. Coudenhove spent the devastating years of World War II in the United States. "In seeking to persuade America, once she becomes a belligerent, to adopt European unity as one of her war aims," says the Count's colleague and hagiographer, Arnold J. Zurcher, in The Struggle to Unite Europe, 1940-1958, "Count Coudenhove enlisted the cooperation of certain leading American citizens whom he had interested in his movement some years prior to his enforced wartime sojourn." These "leading citizens" -- all CFR heavies -- were: Nicholas Murray Butler, president of both Columbia University and the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace; Dr. Stephen Duggan, founder and first president of the International Institute of Education, a CFR-controlled internationalist propaganda operation; and William C. Bullitt, ambassador to the U.S.S.R. and to France. With the help of these high-powered patrons, Coudenhove and Zurcher obtained positions at New York University, where, for the remainder of the war years, they held graduate seminars devoted exclusively to the problems of European federation. Their CFR contacts aided greatly in obtaining favorable media coverage. "The New York press, for example, was wholly sympathetic," wrote Zurcher, "both major morning dailies, the New York Times and the New York Herald Tribune, having given generous space to reporting the Count's occasional public utterances and to the efforts of the New York University seminar on federation." Due to the academic respectability conferred by the NYU seminars and the popular dissemination of their ideas by a friendly press, said Zurcher, "For the first time in the twentieth century, the slogan 'United States of Europe' had become something more than a label for hortatory idealism."
Monnet Pushes Lend-Lease
While Coudenhove-Kalergi and sidekick Zurcher labored among the intelligentsia and the captains and kings of industry in New York, Citizen Monnet was shuttling back and forth among Washington, Paris, and London on transatlantic diplomatic missions for French Premier Edouard Daladier, President Roosevelt, Prime Minister Churchill, and General De Gaulle. It was Monnet who gave Roosevelt the slogan that he was later to use in one of his fireside chats: "America will be the great arsenal of democracy." "Monnet was above all a public relations man," say biographers Merry and Serge Bromberger. "He was particularly close to Harry Hopkins, Roosevelt's right-hand man. Through Hopkins he became President Roosevelt's personal advisor on Europe." The Roosevelt-Hopkins relationship has often been compared to that between Wilson and House, one of almost total dependence of the President upon a mysterious, shadowy advisor. Hopkins, like House, admired Communism and played a key role in formulating many of the pro-Soviet policies of the Roosevelt Administration that proved so disastrous for the United States and the Free World. He and Monnet worked together famously. Mr. Bloch-Morhange, writing in the authoritative Information Et Conjectures of March 1957, summed up the French internationalist's pro-Communist record thusly: "Never in his long career has Jean Monnet a single time criticized the Soviet Union publicly." According to the Brombergers, "behind the scenes Monnet played an important role in the negotiations that prepared the ground for lend-lease," the operation that funneled to the USSR massive infusions of war matériel and money, as well as the blueprints and nuclear materials that enabled the Soviets to develop the atomic bomb. The lend-lease program was supervised by Harry Hopkins. Clarence Streit, a Rhodes scholar and correspondent for the New York Times, published his book, Union Now, in 1939, on the eve of World War II. In it, he advocated immediate political union among the U.S., Britain, Canada, and other Atlantic "democracies," and then, finally, world union. It was avidly praised in the CFR-dominated press, and by 1949 had been translated into several languages, selling more than 300,000 copies. Union Now and Union Now With Britain, published in 1941, gave rise to a sizable Federal Union movement (which later changed its name to Atlantic Union Committee and still later to the Atlantic Council of the United States), the leadership of which has always been top-heavy with CFR members. In 1941, Streit's Federal Union proposed the adoption of a joint resolution by Congress favoring immediate union with the aforementioned Atlantic states. The resolution had been written by John Foster Dulles (CFR), who was later to become Eisenhower's Secretary of State and a key player in the formation of Monnet's united Europe. One of the most ambitious visionary schemes of this period was put forth in a book titled Plan for a Permanent Peace, by Hans Heymann, a German economist and refugee with a research and teaching post at Rutgers University. Funded by the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, a major pillar of the CFR establishment, the book asserted: "Nations have created international disharmony in the vain belief that harmony in our society can be achieved on a national basis .... This narrow-minded attitude has left us one strong hope, namely, that this fallacious concept may hold only during a transitional period .... After the debacle [World War II] an international organization will be imperative for the well-being of society as a whole." Herr Heymann proceeded then to unveil his detailed scheme for a global superstate headed by a Federal World Authority, a Bank of Nations (with three branches: the Hemisphere Bank, the Europa Bank, and the Oriental Bank) and a World Army, Navy, and Air Force. Plan for a Permanent Peace includes several impressive fold-out maps and diagrams detailing the monstrous bureaucracy that would regiment the hapless citizens of the proposed planetary union.
An End to Nationhood
At the conclusion of World War II, the myriad of organizations, individuals, movements, and publications advocating various models of global governance all coalesced in a concerted crusade to insure U.S. adoption of the United Nations charter. Once that was accomplished, however, they returned to campaigning for what Walt W. Rostow (CFR) endorsed as "an end to nationhood," since the United Nations could never become a genuine world government as long as member nations retained any vestige of sovereignty and autonomy. Winston Churchill and his son-in-law, Duncan Sandys, led the United Europe Movement, which convened a Congress of Europe at The Hague from May 7 to 10, 1948. While world attention focused on the glittering assembly of current and former heads of state -- Churchill, Leon Blum, Aicide de Gasperi, Paul Henri Spaak, et al -- it was Jean Monnet and the mysterious Polish socialist, Joseph Retinger, bon vivant and globe-trotting master of political intrigue, who ran the show. One of the accomplishments of The Hague Congress was the adoption of seven Resolutions on Political Union. Resolution number seven stated: "The creation of a United Europe must be regarded as an essential step towards the creation of a United World." General George C. Marshall, then Truman's Secretary of State, delivered a speech at Harvard University on June 5, 1947 that detailed the suffering and privation of war-ravaged Europe and called for an American response. Thus was launched the European Recovery Program (ERP), better known as the Marshall Plan -- a massive foreign aid program intended to reconstruct Europe along "cooperative," i.e., internationalist and socialist, lines. The ERP, however, did not originate with General Marshall, but rather with Jean Monnet and the Council on Foreign Relations. The Brombergers write that, prior to the Harvard speech, Marshall sent assistants H.G. Clayton and George F. Kennan (CFR) to confer with Monnet, and that Marshall himself conferred at length with Monnet at the Paris Peace Conference. Laurence Shoup and William Minter reported in their study of the CFR, Imperial Brain Trust: "In 1946-1947 lawyer Charles M. Spofford headed a [CFR study] group, with banker David Rockefeller as secretary, on Reconstruction in Western Europe: in 1947-1948 that body was retitled the Marshall Plan." David Rockefeller would go on to head Chase Manhattan Bank, serve as Chairman of the Board of the CFR from 1970-1985, launch the Trilateral Commission, and in numerous other ways promote global "interdependence."
Selling the Marshall Plan
The immediate problem of the Marshall Planners was to sell the idea to Congress. Considerable opposition to the scheme was being aroused, led principally by Senator Robert Taft of Ohio, former President Herbert Hoover, and free-market economist and commentator for Newsweek, Henry Hazlitt. Taft, et al, argued that the proposed program would force U.S. taxpayers to subsidize the socialist policies of European governments -- nationalizing of industries, central planning, wage and price controls, excessive taxation, trade restrictions, burdensome regulation, currency devaluation -- just the opposite of what was needed to help Europe recover from the war's devastation. They argued instead in favor of a program that would unleash private enterprise to solve Europe's economic problems. The establishment responded by organizing an impressive assemblage of notables to campaign for the ERP. "The leadership of this group," says Michael J. Hogan, professor of history at Ohio State University and editor of Diplomatic History, "came largely from academic circles, from the major American trade unions, and from such business organizations as the Council on Foreign Relations (CFR), the Business Advisory Council (BAC), the Committee for Economic Development (CED) and the National Planning Association (NPA)." They believed in the "New Deal synthesis" and accepted the need for greater economic planning and for Keynesian strategies of fiscal and monetary management. These four organizations, says Hogan, "played an important role in shaping and promoting the ERP":
They published briefs on behalf of the program. Their spokesmen testified before relevant congressional committees. They served on the President's Committee on Foreign Aid, on the Harriman Committee, and on the Committee for the Marshall Plan to Aid European Recovery, a private, nonpartisan organization composed of labor, farm, and business leaders who worked closely with government officials to mobilize support behind the ERP. The result was something like a coordinated campaign mounted by an interlocking directorate of public and private figures. Of the nineteen people on the executive board of the Marshall Plan Committee, eight were members of the CFR and two of these eight were also members of the BAC, CED, or NPA. Included in this list were Allen W. Dulles, president of the CFR, and Philip Reed, chairman of the board of General Electric. Former Secretaries of War Henry L. Stimson and Robert P. Patterson, along with former Secretary of State Dean Acheson, also served on the executive board....
Anti-Communist Rhetoric
However, even with this massive, well-orchestrated campaign, the ERP advocates did not have it easy. They had originally packaged the plan as a humanitarian operation to alleviate the suffering, starvation, and devastation caused by the war. But Congress was not so willing to accept that Europe's economic woes could be solved by American taxpayers' dollars. So the Insiders changed to a different tack: They said U.S. aid was urgently needed to protect Western Europe from the threat of Communism. "People sat up and listened when the Soviet threat was mentioned," said John J. McCloy (president of the CFR from 1953-1970). McCloy, who served as U.S. High Commissioner to Germany after the war and as a central figure in the ERP effort never demonstrated any antipathy towards Communism, said that this taught him a valuable lesson: "One way to assure that a viewpoint gets noticed is to cast it in terms of resisting the spread of Communism." President Truman also admitted to paying lip-service to anti-Communism in order to win support for his aid plan. When Secretary of State Marshall cabled Truman, concerned that the president's "Truman Doctrine" speech was too anti-Communist in tone, "The reply came back from Truman: without the rhetoric, Congress would not approve of the money." The deception worked, and Congress did indeed approve the money: some $13 billion dollars for the Marshall Plan, and tens of billions more through various other reconstruction programs. From the close of World War II through 1953, the United States Government poured more than 43 billion dollars into Europe. Professor Hans Sennholz describes it as a "windfall for socialism" and in How Can Europe Survive details the myriad of destructive government programs and wasteful state-owned monopolies that swallowed up these enormous funds while thwarting real economic growth and progress. In the ERP, European socialists and one-worlders had hit on a veritable bonanza, and American Establishment Insiders had hit on a scheme that gave them the leverage they needed to push independent-minded European governments in a "cooperative" direction. "American officials interfered with foreign governments which endeavored to abolish controls and return to sounder principles of government," says Dr. Sennholz. "American Fair-Deal officials repeatedly exerted pressure on the Belgian and German governments to inflate their national currencies at a greater degree and create more credit through simple expansion. Fortunately for these nations, their governments usually resisted this Fair-Deal pressure." Through American aid, says Professor Hogan, "and particularly through the use of counterpart funds, Marshall Planners tried to underwrite industrial modernization projects, promote Keynesian strategies of aggregate economic management ... encourage progressive tax policies, low cost housing programs, and other measures of economic and social reform." From its very inception, the ERP's main purpose was to destroy the European nation states by merging them into a regional government. The early planning for the program was carried out by a special agency under the direction of George Kennan, called the State-War-Navy Coordinating Committee (SWNCC). One of the concerns of the agency, says Hogan, was "to consider how national sovereignties might be transcended." As Joseph Jones, who attended the meetings, recalled, the State Department's economic officers encouraged committee members to think of Europe as a whole and to administer aid so as to foster economic unification.
The Fulbright Resolution
Of course, not everyone advocating the abolition of Europe's sovereign governments was so subtle. Some took a head-on approach. On March 21, 1947, before Marshall had made his Harvard speech, Senators William Fulbright and Elbert D. Thomas submitted to Congress the following concurrent resolution: "Resolved by the Senate (the House of Representatives concurring) that Congress favors the creation of a United States of Europe." The CFR-Insider press sprang forth to champion the incredibly arrogant Fulbright resolution. According to the March 17, 1947 issue of Life magazine (whose publisher, Henry Luce, was a leading CFR member), "our policy should be to help the nations of Europe federate as our states federated in 1787." "Europe desperately needs some effective form of political and economic federation," wrote Sumner Welles (CFR) in the Washington Post, owned by Eugene Meyer (CFR). The Christian Science Monitor (long a CFR mouthpiece) of April 28, 1947 advised: "For its part, the US could hardly impose federation on Europe, but it could counsel .... It could mold its leading and occupational policies toward upbuilding a single continental economy." The New York Times (the CFR's most influential organization) of April 18, 1947 editerialized: "But it is only too true ... that Europe must federate or perish." The St. Louis Post Dispatch of March 16, 1947 declared that "for Europe it is a case of join -- or die." Cooler heads among the "brain trust," however, realized that any attempt at openly forcing a European federation would stir nationalist resistance and resentment in Europe, and would rightly be viewed as American imperialism. They had to make it appear that the call for a United States of Europe was coming from "the people" of Europe themselves. The most informative account of the role of America's Insider Establishment in organizing the movement for a United Europe can be found in a six-part report on the Common Market that appeared in installments in the authoritative H. du B. Reports during 1972 and 1973. Written by the distinguished Hilaire du Berrier, who has been publishing his highly respected intelligence reports from Europe for more than 30 years, the "Story of the Common Market" series detailed the intrigues of the American CFR-Atlantic Council-Bilderberger-Trilateral Commission coterie and their European accomplices in their campaign for a supranational European government. In part five of his series, du Berrier related a story from the diary of Joseph Retinger that illustrates how the CFR's agents built the movement for European merger. Retinger was seeking more funds for the European Movement, which was headed at the time by Belgian Prime Minister Paul Henri Spaak, who was known as "Mr. Socialist":
Retinger and Duncan Sandys, the British Eurocrat, went to see John J. McCloy, who in 1947 was American High Commissioner to Germany. McCloy, we learn from Retinger's diary, embraced the idea at once. Sheppard Stone, who was on McCloy's staff, and Robert Murphy, the U.S. ambassador to Belgium, whom Retinger called one of the European Movement's best supporters, joined McCloy in raiding the huge reserve of European currencies called "counter-part funds" which had piled up as a result of Marshall Plan aid .... McCloy, Stone and Murphy "promptly and unhesitatingly put ample funds at the disposal of Paul Henri Spaak," Retinger recorded.
It was the same Joseph Retinger who recruited Prince Bernhard of the Netherlands to host the meeting at the Hotel Bilderberg in Oosterbeck, Holland in May 1954, that launched the annual secretive Bilderberg conclaves, at which the international ruling elite meet to scheme and palaver.
The Merger Begins
The first concrete step forward in the plan for abolition of the European nation-states came in 1951 with the signing of the treaty creating the European Coal and Steel Community (ECSC). "This was a truly revolutionary organization," wrote Carroll Quigley, the Insiders' own inside historian, "since it had sovereign powers, including the authority to raise funds outside any existing state's power." The ECSC treaty, which went into force in July 1952, merged the coal and steel industries of six countries (West Germany, France, Italy, Belgium, the Netherlands, and Luxembourg) under a single high Authority. "This 'supranational' body," observed Professor Quigley in his Tragedy and Hope, "had the right to control prices, channel investment, raise funds, allocate coal and steel .... Its power to raise funds for its own use by taxing each ton produced made it independent of governments. Moreover, its decisions were binding, and could be reached by majority vote without the unanimity required in most international organizations of sovereign states." The proposal for the ECSC was introduced, amidst great fanfare, in May 1950, as the "Schuman Plan." Although devised by Monsieur Monnet, who was then head of France's General Planning Commission, Monnet thought it expedient to name it for his comrade Robert Schuman, the Socialist French Foreign Minister (and, later, Prime Minister). The American Insiders leapt to praise the Schuman Plan. John Foster Dulles called it "brilliantly creative." Dean Acheson termed it a "major contribution toward resolution of the pressing political and economic problems of Europe." President Truman called it "an act of constructive statesmanship." The Carnegie Foundation awarded Monnet its Wateler Peace Prize of two million francs "in recognition of the international spirit which he had shown in conceiving the Coal and Steel Community .... "Monnet, whom columnist Joseph Alsop (CFR) dubbed "the good, gray wizard of Western European union," was appointed the first president of the powerful new ECSC. Monnet knew full well just how powerful and revolutionary his new creation was. The Brombergers report in Jean Monnet and the United States of Europe that, when Monnet and his "brain trust" had outlined the basics of the ECSC proposal, they called in legal expert Maurice Lagrange to take care of the detail work:
Lagrange was stunned. An idea of revolutionary daring had been launched and was being acclaimed by the Six and the United States -- a minerals and metals superstate.... The brain trust worked feverishly from ten o'clock in the morning until midnight, without taking Sundays or holidays off, not even Christmas day. Even the secretaries and the office boys were infected by the general excitement, by the feeling that they were part of a fantastic undertaking. The Brombergers, who are ardent admirers of Monnet, admit the totalitarian mindset of their hero: Gradually, it was thought, the supranational authorities, supervised by the European Council of Ministers at Brussels and the Assembly in Strasbourg, would administer all the activities of the Continent. A day would come when governments would be forced to admit that an integrated Europe was an accomplished fact, without their having had a say in the establishment of its underlying principles. All they would have to do was to merge all these autonomous institutions into a single federal administration and then proclaim a United States of Europe. Actually, the founders of the Coal and Steel Community would have to obtain from the various national governments -- justifiably reputed to be incapable of making sacrifices for the sake of a federation -- a whole series of concessions in regard to their sovereign rights until, having been finally stripped, they committed hara-kiri by accepting the merger.
Realizing that some nations might at some point rebel against the "new order," the "good gray wizard" and his Eurocrats sought to establish their own army, which they dubbed the European Defense Community (EDC). After clamoring for national disarmament, the Eurocrat pacifists were now demanding that an independent armed forces, complete with nuclear weapons, be put under their command. The EDC treaty was signed by the six ECSC nations in 1952, but plans for the supranational army fell apart, when, after two years of bitter debate, the treaty was rejected by the French Parliament.
The Treaties of Rome
The next nail in the coffin of national sovereignty came on March 25, 1957 with the signing by the six ECSC nations of the two Treaties of Rome. These created the European Economic Community (EEC, or Common Market) and the European Atomic Energy Community (Euratom), which greatly furthered the merging of the economic and energy sectors of the member states. (The ECSC, Euratom, and EEC are now collectively referred to as the European Community or EC.) "The EEC Treaty," said Carroll Quigley, "with 572 articles over almost 400 pages ... looked forward to eventual political union in Europe, and sought economic integration as an essential step on the way." But the merger architects settled on an approach of "patient gradualism"; what Richard N. Gardner (CFR) would later call "an end run around national sovereignty, eroding it piece by piece." According to the late Professor Quigley, "This whole process was to be achieved by stages over many years." The next stages involved bringing the rest of Western Europe into the fold. In 1973, after more than two decades of resisting, the United Kingdom came in, along with Ireland and Denmark. Greece joined in 1981, bringing the number of member states to ten. Spain and Portugal became the 11th and 12th members in 1986. "The CFR," wrote du Berrier in January 1973, "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." The CFR spared no expense in aiding its European co-conspirators, especially Jean Monnet, to establish their dreamed-of Brave New World. A very enlightening source on this phenomenon is Insider Ernst H. van der Beugel, Honorary Secretary General of the Bilderberger Group, Vice Chairman of the Netherlands Institute for Foreign Affairs (a CFR affiliate), Harvard lecturer, etc. In his book From Marshall Aid to Atlantic Partnership, van der Beugel explained:
Not only has Monnet been the auctor intellectualis of many steps on the road to European unification, he has also been a driving force in the execution of existing plans. His most remarkable capacity has been his great influence on the formulation of United States policy towards Europe. He exercised this influence through a network of close friendships and relationships, some of them going back to the pre-war period.
Diplomatic Bludgeoning
Explaining further the workings of the Monnet-CFR symbiosis, van der Beugel cites examples of the diplomatic bludgeoning of those officials who balked at administering national "hara-kiri." For instance, he reported how Monnet's Action Committee, which was "supported by funds from United States foundations," ramrodded the negotiations for the Rome Treaties:
Monnet and his Action Committee were unofficially supervising the negotiations and as soon as obstacles appeared, the United States diplomatic machinery was alerted, mostly through Ambassador Bruce... who had immediate access to the top echelon of the State Department.... At that time, it was usual that if Monnet thought that a particular country made difficulties in the negotiations, the American diplomatic representative in that country approached the Foreign Ministry in order to communicate the opinion of the American Government which, in practically all cases, coincided with Monnet's point of view. Monnet's high-level friends, who assisted him in these strong-arm tactics, included President Eisenhower, Dulles, McCloy, Bruce, George Ball, and C. Douglas Dillon.
In his editorial column for April 10, 1976, New York Times publisher C.L. Sulzberger (CFR, Trilateralist, Bilderberger) waxed rhapsodic concerning the emerging European union: "The continent's most splendid dream following World War II has been the European Economic Community or Common Market, which was designed to lead nations that had lost their global influence into a political confederation based on joint trading and financial interests." Sulzberger's paean notwithstanding, the Common Market was clearly designed to lead nations into a suicidal merger. That design is coming to fruition at a frightening pace. The Single European Act is intended as the measure that will make political and economic union irreversible. Citizens of the Common Market are finding their lives and livelihoods increasingly controlled by Eurocrats in Brussels, even as national governments find their sovereign rights sacrificed under such deliberately vague and ambiguous rubrics as "cooperation," "union," "integration," "convergence," and "harmonization." The SEA will soon make it impossible for member states to block policies that go against national interests. EC Commissioner Willy De Clercq, in a 1987 speech, boasted that the SEA should make it possible for two-thirds of the EC decisions to be made by a qualified majority, in contrast to the 90 percent that previously required unanimous consent. The principal assaults underway now include the campaigns for a European central bank, led by French President François Mitterrand, and the unified value added tax (VAT) being pushed by Jacques Delors. The major opposition to both schemes has come from Britain's Margaret Thatcher. "A European Central Bank, in the only true meaning of the term, means surrendering your economic policy to that banking system," said the British Prime Minister in October of 1988. "I neither want nor expect ever to see such a bank in my lifetime -- nor, if I am twanging a harp -- for quite a long time afterwards." But there are indications that the "Iron Lady" may have weakened on this matter. Du Berrier, in a recent telephone interview with THE NEW AMERICAN, expressed grave concern over rumors that Mrs. Thatcher "may have cut some sort of deal with Mitterrand on the issues of a central bank and a common currency" during her visit with the French socialist president in Paris at the end of February.
World Union of Socialist Republics
Another dangerous development that has been incubating for several years and is now fast approaching is the admission of European Communist-bloc countries into the EC. "Communist Hungary will probably be the first, or perhaps, East Germany," du Berrier believes. "Since January 1987, the European Parliament has had a permanent delegation, headed by Madame Deputy Anne-Marie Lizia, a Belgian socialist, negotiating with Moscow and other Communist capitals on the subject of Common Market membership. It is now being openly advocated." This coincides with the increasing trade and economic covergence between the Common Market and the Soviet-led trading bloc, Comecon (comprising the USSR, East Germany, Hungary, Romania, Bulgaria, Poland, Czechoslavakia, Mongolia, Vietnam and Cuba). In 1936 the official program of the Communist International, issued in Moscow, declared that "dictatorship can be established only by a victory of socialism in different countries or groups of countries, after which the proletarian republics would unite on federal lines with those already in existence and this system of federal unions would expand ... at length forming the World Union of Soviet Socialist Republics." The plans of the CFR-Trilateral-Bilderberger elite for "world order" more and more converge with those laid down by Stalin's Communist International more than 50 years ago.
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