This article was first published in New View magazine (Issue 90, Jan-Mar 2019)

Brexit is not only an economic and political issue; it is also a spiritual issue, a cultural issue of our time, because the EU is a construct that contradicts the essential spiritual impulses of the modern age, which began in the 15th century. Britain, for good and ill, has played a major role in shaping this modern age, in which, according to Rudolf Steiner, the British people and the other English-speaking peoples who proceeded from them play a vanguard role.¹ However, the failure of the British elite to be able to enforce its will in the Suez crisis of 1956 was the final sign of the end of Britain’s first phase of activity in this modern age. It was a phase of assertive commercial expansion and of aggressive empire that began in the reign of James I (1603-1625) despite that most unwarlike monarch’s own fervent desire for peace. With the exception of pirates in the decades of British piracy, from c.1560-1730, it was not the British people but the British elite – the wealthy landowning class and their allies, the rich merchants of the City of London – that forced its will upon the world from 1600-1900 and pushed and dragged the common people of Britain to fight its wars and conquer and occupy foreign lands, just as the common people of England had in earlier centuries been pushed and dragged into centuries of war on the Continent of Europe by their overlords, the feudal aristocracy of England. In the English Civil Wars (1642-53), many English people felt that enough was enough; they wanted a new dispensation, an end to the age-long tyranny of monarchs and lords, most of whom had never been English in any case but whose origins were Norman or French. In the famous Putney Debates between soldiers of the New Model Army of October-November 1647, in the speeches and writings of Col. Thomas Rainsborough and John Lilley, and in the tracts and deeds of radical groups such as the Levellers, Diggers and Quakers could be heard and read the new spirit, the new will of individuals in England for freedom. It was a will that stemmed from the impulse of what Steiner called the Consciousness Soul, the impulse of the individual to take responsibility for his or her own life, to become autonomous and conscious of what was going on in his thinking, feeling and willing, to find his or own path to the divine and to realise him/herself as a spiritual being and with other such individuals to create a new community, a commonwealth.

England’s loss of nerve

The English people managed to overthrow their king who had waged war against them, and they established the first English Republic, the Commonwealth, but then they rapidly lost first their way in the political troubles of the new state and then their nerve when the Commonwealth’s dictatorial leader, Oliver Cromwell, died in 1658, only nine years after the execution of King Charles I. At that critical point occurred something which has been obscured and largely forgotten in British history ever since. A single man, George Monck (below), who was the only general in the country at the head of a strong army, having conducted secret negotiations with the exiled Prince Charles, the son of Charles I, decided to overthrow the Republic.²

Monck had marched his army down from Scotland to London, all the time concealing his intentions. In London he took control, and recalled the pro-monarchist MPs to Parliament, who promptly invited Prince Charles to return, which he gratefully did. The British people have forgotten the treason of General Monck who re-saddled upon them the entire Establishment of monarchy, lords and the Church of England. Why have they forgotten? Because the men with whom Prince Charles did his deal in 1660 were the same kind of men – just seven of them this time – who did another deal with ‘a prince over the water’, the Protestant Dutchman, William of Orange and his English wife Mary, daughter of the reigning monarch James II. The deal was that William should invade England and become king in place of his wife’s father, James, but that William and Mary were only to reign not to rule. Real power would be exercised by the lords, landowners, City merchants and financiers who supported the invasion and who controlled Parliament. Such men, through their academic allies in the universities of Oxford and Cambridge in subsequent decades and centuries, would also control the narrative of history and ensure that the usurpation of the Republic and of the Constitution through the machinations of a few wealthy individuals would be presented to the people as wondrous triumphs – the “Return of the King” in 1660, the “Glorious Revolution” of 1688 when William of Orange did indeed invade England and was crowned King in 1689. The key role of General Monck – who was made a Duke and an Admiral by a grateful Charles II  -– was forgotten. But by these events in 1660 and 1688, a sinister element of concealment entered into British public life. From this time onwards real power in Britain was no longer exercised by the monarch nor in Parliament, but around tables in the offices of the East India Company, in the City of London, and in the grand country houses of the landed aristocracy. This element of concealment is very much at work in the current debate over Britain’s future. There are those working more or less covertly to ensure that Britain does not leave the European Union and thus to frustrate and reverse the referendum vote of 23.6.2016, just as there are other, more chauvinist secretive groups which want Britain to leave the EU and then to move ever closer to the USA and the other English-speaking countries.³ Neither of these two agendas is truly in the evolutionary interests of the British people. The modern age is one in which we move beyond machinations by secretive elites to a world in which   autonomous individuals openly create new social arrangements through cooperation.

Two streams

The men who seized power by deception in 1660 and 1688  and those like them who have retained it ever since despite the emergence of ‘democracy’ in the interim were certainly individuals of a kind, and often very ‘enterprising’ individuals,  but their prime concern was for wealth, property, reputation and power rather than for freedom, truth and real community. And though such men acquired especial power in Britain, they were of course not to be found only in that country but across Europe and America. Rudolf Steiner said of them on 25.11.1917⁴: “In the main, there are two camps in opposition to one another: the representatives of the principle that had been overcome by the end of the 18th century, and the representatives of the present time…  [i.e. of the Consciousness Soul age  - TB] These are the forces that confront one another, the ones that are really doing battle in the world today. Rooted in the West there is the principle of the 18th, 17th, 16th centuries, which makes itself invisible by clothing itself in the phrases of the Revolution, the phrases of democracy, the principle which dons this mask and is striving to gain as much power as possible.” [emphasis – TB] The former American President, George Herbert Walker Bush, who died on 30 November, this year, 2018, was a man of many such phrases; on 11 September 1990, in the run-up to the first Gulf War, he declared the arrival of the “New World Order” in a speech before the US Congress. After his death, the mainstream media was full of obsequious homilies to him, but he was in fact a mass murderer whose government was responsible for the deaths of tens of thousands of foreigners in wars and coups, and he was also, like his father before him, a member of Yale University’s influential  secret society ‘Skull and Bones’ (founded 1833), which had provided a number of Presidents and other powerful Americans since the mid-19th century. A former CIA Director (1976-77), Bush’s membership of Skull and Bones was only drawn to public attention seven years after the end of his Presidency. His family also attempted to create, through his sons George and Jeb, a new Presidential dynasty based on blood and connections, in the old aristocratic style.

Since the 19th century there have been two elitist streams working more or less behind the scenes to bring about a single European state. Both of them look back to the Roman Empire, one directly, the other indirectly. Since the fall of the Roman Empire there have been powerful men in Europe who in one form or another have sought to revive the spirit of Empire as a centralising principle of order from above; they have included: Charlemagne, Popes Innocent III and Boniface VIII, the Holy Roman Emperor Charles V, Louis XIV, Napoleon Bonaparte, Cecil Rhodes, Lord Alfred Milner, Count Richard Coudenhove-Kalergi, Adolf Hitler, Winston Churchill and Otto von Habsburg. Napoleon in exile said of his attempt to dominate Europe: “I wished to found a European system, a European Code of Laws, a European judiciary: there would be but one people in Europe… Europe thus divided into nationalities freely formed and free internally, peace between States would have become easier: the United States of Europe would become a possibility.”⁵  All this under the leadership of France, of course. In three significant speeches in 1946 (Zurich), ’47 (London) and ’48 (The Hague) Churchill envisaged a United States of Europe (USE) under the effective guidance of Britain and America. Coudenhove-Kalergi and Otto von Habsburg, the first and second Presidents of the Paneuropa Union (founded 1923) imagined and campaigned for a united Europe that would exclude Britain and Russia and would be guided by the spiritual traditions of the Roman Catholic Church, which of course reaches directly back to the time of the Roman Empire.⁶

In the English-speaking world, since the time of Cecil Rhodes (1853-1902 )and Alfred Milner (1854-1925), there have been elitists who see themselves as the indirect inheritors of the mantle of Rome. The British ‘public schoolboys’ (i.e. elite boarding school boys at Eton, Harrow and others), trained to administer the Empire, were brought up on the Greek and Roman classics; they were accustomed to see the Roman Empire as the source of light and order in the ancient world and Britain and the British Empire as the source of light and order in their own era. For example, Philip Kerr (1882-1940), 11th Marquess of Lothian and a key figure in the Milner Round table group wrote to another member of the group, South African general and twice Prime Minister of S. Africa, Jan Smuts, on 6 June 1939: “There have only been two long periods of peace in history. One was created by the Roman Empire. The other was the great Pax of the 19th century which was created by the British navy. That is why I have always believed that the only foundation for world peace was close cooperation between the British Commonwealth and the United States for the restoration of the nineteenth century British system operated not only by Britain alone but the whole English-speaking world.”⁷ Quite apart from the historical inaccuracies of Kerr’s statements here – there was no great ‘Pax’ (N.b. Roman word) in the 19th century; all he means is that Britain, after the defeat of Napoleon, was not involved in any major European war, and he forgets the Anglo-French invasion of the Crimea in 1854 – what Kerr envisaged is something like what we now have in the “Five Eyes” – the military and intelligence collaboration between the five English-speaking countries (US, UK, Canada, Australia, New Zealand) – that spy on the rest of the world and share intelligence only with each other. Frank Ashton-Gwatkin (1889-1976), a British diplomat (Eton, Balliol College Oxford) imagined in the 1930s the economic system of the future: “the future seems to be developing along the lines of large preferential groups [i.e. trade groups – TB]… If this is so, our consolation must be that our own particular group [i.e. British Empire Free Trade – TB] is the richest and most powerful. If we add the USA as our associate, then its future economic and even political influence will be the decisive factor in the 20th century.”⁸

Cecil Rhodes not only wanted the English-speaking people to reunite in a single state or political entity that would dominate the world for at least 200 years, as is clear from his last will and testament, he also wanted a secret society, modelled after the Jesuit Order of his day, to bring this about. This society eventually emerged as the Round Table group, founded by Rhodes’s chosen successor, Alfred Milner, in 1909. From this society came two sister organisations, two elite-run, extra-parliamentary, foreign policy think tanks that have guided British and American foreign policy since the 1920s – the Royal Institute of International Affairs (a.k.a. Chatham House) in London (1920) and the Council On Foreign Relations (CFR) in New York (1921). In America the CFR was long dominated by the Rockefeller family, which in 1939, as war was approaching, set up and funded (to the tune of $350,000) a group under CFR auspices called the War and Peace Studies project, the aim of which was to determine the nature of the post-war world and what America’s role in it would be. This private project was then taken under the wing of the State Department. After the end of the war, prominent Anglophile members of the American elite⁹ created the institutions and systems of the “international rules-based world order”, the informal ‘American Empire’ which all westerners have been living under since that time.

The USA and the United States of Europe

A key feature of this new American world order, already prognosticated by the War and Peace Studies project, was the plan to create a United States of Europe on the US model. In 1946 a CFR study team led by David Rockefeller produced a paper titled The Reconstruction of Europe. The following year, Senators Fullbright and Thomas pushed a resolution through the US Congress (both houses) that ‘This Congress favours the creation of a United States of Europe’. In March 1947 Life magazine, owned by CFR member Henry Luce, declared that “our policy should be to help the nations of Europe federate as our states federated in 1787.” On 18.4.1947 the most influential US media organ, the New York Times, carried an editorial titled: “Europe Must Federate or Perish”.

Such a united Europe under American auspices and control would, amongst other things, ensure that Europe would be a compliant market for American exports after the war. This was the prime reason for the much-touted ‘generosity’ of the Marshall Plan, an American aid programme initiated in 1948 and lasting four years ostensibly rebuild western Europe after the Second World War. To bolster its control over the half of the now divided Europe (between East and West) that it dominated, the US created NATO, a military alliance with various countries in Europe, in 1949. As  the American political news website Politico has correctly stated: “The US has relied upon the EU as the political and economic arm of its permanent military presence in Europe (NATO)”¹⁰. The aims of NATO were, in the infamous words of its first Secretary-General of NATO, the Briton, Gen. Sir Lionel Ismay Hastings, to “keep the Soviet Union out, the Americans in, and the Germans down”. In the late 1940s the newly-founded CIA, headed by Allen Dulles, poured a great deal of money into the fledgling ‘European Movement’ which was intended to promote the idea of a ‘United Europe’, especially among the young. The American elite looked to their favourite Frenchman to bring this United Europe about  -  Jean Monnet (1888-1979; see pic below)¹¹, who had had deep connections with the British since before the First World War when he was a very young cognac merchant in Canada selling his family’s cognac to the Hudson Bay Company.

The men he met from the company would open doors for him in London during the First World War, and his contacts there introduced him to their elite American friends, including Allen Dulles. Monnet’s rise was so rapid in elite Anglo-American circles that in 1919 he was appointed Deputy Secretary General of the new League of Nations¹² at the age of only 31 on the prompting of none other than the French wartime premier George Clemenceau and the British Foreign Secretary Arthur Balfour. At the League in Geneva, Monnet worked closely with Arthur Salter, a very talented British civil servant whom he had worked with on allied maritime supply systems in London during the war. The two men saw eye to eye on many things, including on centralised, technocratic control of economic systems. In 1930, at the peak of Coudenhove-Kalergi’s Paneuropa movement, which had been endorsed by the French Prime Minister Briand, Salter, who was close to the Milner Round table group, wrote a book titled The United States of Europe in which he advocated a system of European government copied from the League of Nations, with a “High Authority” subject to a Common Assembly, and a Council of Ministers and Court of Justice. It would be this model, drawn from Salter’s book, that Monnet would use for the European Coal and Steel Community (ECSC) in 1950, which he intended would be the first step towards a federal United States of Europe, as indeed it turned out to be. Even today, British politicians such as Dominic Grieve (Conservative, and a supporter of Britain remaining in the EU) maintain that until the Treaty of Maastricht in 1991 the EU was a purely economic arrangement and only then became a political project. But when one looks into the facts of what Jean Monnet and his American friends in the US elite and government actually said and did, it is obvious that right from the beginning in 1950 their intention was always to create a single European state, a United States of Europe closely bound to the USA – and this fact has been hidden from the British people all this time. It was hardly or not at all mentioned in the two referenda of 1975 and 2016. This has been a tremendous decades-long deception, far greater and more significant than the mendacious statements by some of the pro-Brexit camp during the 2016 referendum.

Seven years after the founding of the ECSC, the first phase of the project, Monnet and his continental allies, with help from his American friends, such as the Dulles brothers – Foster and Allen were now Secretary of State and Director of the CIA respectively – brought about the European Economic Community (EEC) through the Treaty of Rome, signed on 25  March 1957 in a Renaissance palace in the very heart of the ancient Roman Capitol. In the context of great fears over nuclear war with the Korean War looming, Monnet managed to get the ECSC approved in a devious fashion by presenting the plan for it, which had been drawn up entirely by him and his co-workers, to the French Foreign Minister Robert Schuman and getting Schuman to present the plan to the Cabinet as his own. To this day it is still known as the Schuman Plan when in fact it should be called the Monnet Plan. But Monnet always preferred to work behind the scenes, away from the limelight.

Richard J. Aldrich of the University of Nottingham (UK) showed in 1997 how “over  three  million  dollars between  1949  and 1960,   mostly  from  US government  sources,  was  central  to  efforts  to drum  up  mass support  for  the  Schuman  Plan,  the  European  Defence Community  and  a  European  Assembly  with  sovereign  powers.  This covert   contribution   never   formed   less   than   half   the   European Movement’s budget and, after 1952, probably two-thirds.  Simultaneously they sought to undermine the staunch resistance of the British Labour government to federalist ideas.”¹³ Aldrich also notes the close involvement of US intelligence circles (CIA) in US backing for the European Movement fronted by Churchill and his son-in-law Duncan Sandys and for Monnet’s Action Committee for the United States of Europe: “The conduit for American assistance was the American Committee on United Europe (ACUE), directed by senior figures from the American intelligence community. This body was organized in the early summer of 1948 by Allen Welsh Dulles, then heading a committee reviewing the organization of the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) on behalf of the National Security Council (NSC), and also by William J. Donovan, former head of the wartime Office of Strategic Services (OSS). They were responding to separate requests for assistance from Count Richard Coudenhove-Kalergi, a veteran Pan-European campaigner from Austria, and from Churchill. ACUE worked closely with US government officials, particularly those in the Economic Cooperation Administration (ECA) and also with the National Committee for a Free Europe. […] the most striking aspect of the work of the American Committee On United Europe work is the extent to which officials working for European reconstruction and unification shared the experience of wartime intelligence, special operations and resistance. It is also particularly striking that the same small band of senior officials, many of them from the Western intelligence community, were central in supporting the three most important transnational elite groups emerging in the 1950s: the European Movement, the Bilderberg Group and Jean Monnet’s Action Committee for a United States of Europe.”¹⁴American money from the Ford and Rockefeller Foundations was funnelled to ACUE and then “discreetly by the CIA on to …. organizations supporting European federalism such as the Council of Europe, the European Coal and Steel Community, and the proposed European Defence Community (by the mid-1950s, ACUE was receiving roughly US$1,000,000 per year)”.¹⁵

An article in The Daily Telegraph on 19 Sept. 2000 was one of the very few  media reports in the UK on this secretive American dimension to the development of the EU project, a dimension that was never referred to during the EU referendum campaign by prominent supporters of either Leave or Remain: “The State Department also played a role. A memo from the European section, dated June 11, 1965, advises the vice-president of the European Economic Community, Robert Marjolin [a close partner of Monnet – TB], to pursue monetary union by stealth. It recommends suppressing debate until the point at which ‘adoption of such proposals would become virtually inescapable’.”¹⁶ A study of Monnet’s autobiography makes perfectly clear that he was no democrat but a technocratic man of the elite: “I have never believed that one fine day Europe would be created by some great political mutation and I thought it wrong to consult the peoples of Europe about the structure of a Community of which they had no practical experience.”¹⁷ He placed no faith in individuals but only in institutions which, he said, shape mens’ minds and behaviour. In 1966 he wrote a kind of personal “credo”; here are some of its principles: “1.Liberty means civilisation 2. Civilisation means rules and institutions. And all that because the essential objective is to develop mankind, not to proclaim a fatherland. 5. We must maintain our civilisation, which is so much ahead of the rest of the world. 7. We must organise the collective action of our civilisation. How can that be done? Only by uniting in collective action Europe and America, which together have the greatest resources in the world, which share the same civilisation, and which conduct their public affairs in the same democratic manner.” 8. This organisation, while seeking a state of coexistence with the East, will create a new world order and at the same time make possible the necessary and unconditional aid and support that our civilisation [i.e. USA/USE], which must be preserved, will bring to the rest of the world.”¹⁸

On the question of member states leaving his European project, Monnet wrote in a press release on 3 July 1950: “The withdrawal of a State which has committed itself to the Community should be possible only if all the others agree to such withdrawal and to the conditions in which it takes place. This rule in itself sums up the fundamental transformation which the French proposal seeks to achieve. Over and above coal and steel, it is laying the foundation of a European federation. In a federation, no State can secede by its own unilateral decision [cf. American Civil War 1861-1865 - TB]. Similarly, there can be no Community except among nations which commit themselves to it with no limit in time and no looking back.”¹⁹ The Eurocrats’ attitude had not changed 40 years later. Jacques Attali, adviser to French President Mitterand and one of the drafters of the Maastricht Treaty [1991] said on 24.1.2011: “All those such as myself who had the privilege of holding the pen to write the first version of the Maastricht Treaty had really committed ourselves to ensuring that an exit would not be possible. We carefully forgot to write the Article that would allow a [member state] to secede. That’s not very democratic but it was a great guarantee for making things more difficult, so that we would be forced to move forward”.²⁰

Superstate?

The deeper one looks into the EU project, the more one realises that it has nothing to do with democracy and everything to do with the machinations of secretive elites and their obsession with the realisation of their dream of a single European state. Whereas Napoleon’s dream was of a French Europe, the Eurocrats’ dream is of an American Europe, the kind of Europe enthusiastically imagined by a close collaborator with Cecil Rhodes in the 1890s, the English radical journalist William Thomas Stead (1849-1912), whose book The United States of Europe was published in 1899 and his The Americanisation of the World (see below left) appeared in 1902, the year of Rhodes’ death and the year of the founding of the Pilgrims’ Society, the most prestigious Anglo-American elite club. Despite all the  talk of ‘diversity’ these days, Europe over the past several decades, indeed, over the past century, has steadily become ever more Americanised, ever more ‘one-patterned’ in music, food, fashion, business, the arts and architecture. Steiner was already noticing it in his day, commenting on the ‘American’ atmosphere of cities like Hamburg and Berlin.

This article has focused on the drive towards the EU coming from the West, from Britain and America, and especially from the economic forces in those countries. But there has also been a drive to the EU coming from a Roman, traditionalist and authoritarian direction, i.e. the more direct Roman heritage mentioned earlier. This involves, besides Coudenhove-Kalergi’s Paneuropa Union, groups such as the Synarchists, the Bilderberg Group, and Le Cercle²¹. (My article in the Spring 2019 issue of New View will discuss these). The Anglo-American elites sidelined Coudenhove-Kalergi after 1945 in favour of Jean Monnet, not only because they knew Monnet better, for nearly three decades already, and because his more modest, business-like and charming approach was easier to get on with than Coudenhove-Kalergi’s loftier, more aristocratic manner, but also because Monnet was a man of business who understood economic life. In that sense, he certainly was more a man of the modern age, for, as Steiner stated, we live in this Age of the Consciousness Soul, this 5th Post-Atlantean epoch (1413-3573²²), and in this epoch it is the economic aspect of social life that is the prime focus. In the previous age, the 4th Post-Atlantean epoch, the Greco-Roman time (747 BC -1413 AD), it was the political sphere, the age of kings and warriors, and before that, the 3rd Post-Atlantean epoch, the Egypto-Chaldean epoch (2907 BC -747 BC), the age of the cultural/spiritual sphere, was the age of priesthoods and god-kings. In our epoch today, economic life is seeking to become independent of political life, and this process is still far from over. Coudenhove-Kalergi was no businessman; he was more a man of the previous (4th) epoch, a man of politics and culture. To his organisation, the Paneuropa Union, was left the task of organising the Council of Europe and of producing the symbols and signs of the emerging European superstate – the flag with its single colour and its single ring of identical stars, the anthem, the tasteless appropriation of Beethoven’s Ode to Joy theme from his 9th Symphony (we can recall Beethoven’s distaste for Napoleon’s Europe!). But in our epoch, the nature of economic life is the main problem: how to make economic life ethical, moral – fraternal and cooperative, based pre-eminently on service, serving people’s needs and not on the political principle of the 4th epoch (equality/inequality) or the cultural/spiritual focus of the 3rd epoch, which in our epoch, as with Wycliffe, Hus and Luther (14th-16th centuries), manifested in the demand for spiritual liberty – the freedom to worship as one determines for oneself. Steiner insisted, however, that only when the cultural sphere – for example, teaching and academic research -  was truly free from domination by the economic sphere would it be able to use its conscious knowledge and insights to help the economic sphere find its proper basis.

As presently constituted, the EU combines old political thinking with a drive to link up with the modern economic power of the West, of America. The EU’s old political thinking is that of the unitary nation state, in which the national political class, through its bureaucratic, technocratic systems, claims the right to determine both a people’s economic life, although we live in an age of global economic activity, and to determine a people’s cultural development through control of the education system. This is 18th/19th century thinking and a hangover from the age of absolutist monarchs and governments. This combination of politics and economics, now on a continental scale, and which is now aimed at creating a European super-‘nation’ state, is what dragged Europe into the disasters of the two world wars of the 20th century. In those wars, for the sake of economic interests (often dressed up as political interests of rights, survival etc.), the unitary nation state forced its people into war against other peoples. If we are not careful, we are going to repeat those colossal errors if we allow Europe to be identified with the pseudo-nation state of the EU and to be conjoined with the USA and dragged by the USA, whether by Trump or some other US President, into conflict with the East, with the nuclear armed states of Russia and/or China. Europeans have already been dragged into America’s conflict in Afghanistan and have now also been involved (since 2014) in the Anglo-American ‘strategy of tension’ with regard to Russia.

In 1930, the year when the French Prime Minister Briand publicly declared his support for Paneuropa, Ludwig Polzer-Hoditz (pic above), one of Steiner’s closest esoteric pupils, wrote: “Today Europe stands between America and Asia as Middle Europe stood between the western states [England and France] and Russia in 1914… . Pan-Europa, in the way it has been conceived, can at best become the image of a superstate, an organised theatre of war for a mighty conflict between America and Asia. It remains in debt to America and thereby has become an organ of American will²³ … America lets Europe play with national questions for a while like children, but in terms of economics, it has Europe, and especially the new small states [of eastern Europe] which behave so foolishly, within its power. The way in which England used to treat states in the pursuit of its own politics, America now repeats with continents. Soon the moment will come when it will line up all these militarily against Asia, under the well-known phrases of the Wilsonian variety or perhaps even on behalf of a Christianity that does not yet actually exist. Everything national will then be cleared away and sterotyped by America in a false manner with a demonic technical brutality. That is how the healing expected from America will actually look.”²⁴ [emphasis – LPH]

Everything that Polzer-Hoditz says here has happened. He was talking about the world of 1930 yet he could just as well be speaking of today, and of course he was not talking about the American people but about the American state, and the American elite that control it. Today Europe still stands between America and Asia, and there is a great danger of war because Europe is not truly between the two in such a way as to serve as a bridge and intermediary, but is standing with America against Russia and gradually, also against China. We thus have a new binary in world affairs and not a threefold picture. The EU has become the image of a superstate. Macron’s and Merkel’s recent call for an EU army – which Monnet tried to establish in 1954 already but was defeated by French resistance – is only the latest step on the road to this superstate. Europe remains in debt to America: the dollar is still the main reserve currency for global trade, and America demands that Europeans pay more to NATO for their own defence. Europe has become an organ of American will – in the Middle East, in Afghanistan, and now on the Russian border. The smaller eastern European countries – Poles, Lithuanians, Czechs, Bulgarians, Estonians and Romanians – are allowed to play with national questions, but when push comes to shove, America will demand they play their role in NATO against Russia. America has been dealing with Europe as a continent since the 1950s in the pursuit of its own politics. It is lining up European countries against Russia, placing missiles in some of them. Fine-sounding phrases about US foreign policy have issued from the mouths of Hillary Clinton, Barack Obama, and Nikki Haley, the US ambassador at the UN. European national concerns are dismissed and stereotyped in Anglo-American media as delusional, populist, dangerous, Far Right, Fascist, while the Internet, in both its hardware and software almost entirely US-controlled, can exercise a “demonic technical brutality” in both personal relations in social media, and in fake news and state propaganda against other countries.

In November 1921 at a time of tension between America and Japan over the size of their navies, Steiner spoke of how a great war would break out between the West and Asia if the West insisted on creating relationships with Asia that were grounded only in the western concept of economics, which is based on the profit and greed of the individual. The West would have to relate to Asia in such a way that would speak to Asia’s ancient, and decadent but still surviving spiritual life. If the West could bring a new social impulse grounded in a modern spirituality that Asia can recognise from its ancient culture then there could be chance for harmony between East and West, he said; otherwise there would be war. Twenty years later, the truth of his words was borne out when Japan and the USA went to war.²⁵

Mercurial Middle

The Central European Rosicrucians of the early 17th century knew that the true way forward was the mercurial way of the Middle: mercury between salt and sulphur. Despite two world wars, Europeans have still not learned this lesson, for they are not in the Middle today; they have lined up on one side of a binary, the salty side. Or rather, their transatlanticist elites have lined them up on that side of the binary. A few spats between the EU and American administrations over trade or GMOs or Israel do not and will not change that fact.

In the Age of the Consciousness Soul, we are challenged to become as conscious as possible in our thinking, feeling and willing. It is only fully possible to become conscious in our thinking in this epoch of human development, though some people, such as those involved in martial arts, sports, dance and eurythmy can, with great practice, become much more conscious in their will than the rest of us. To be conscious in our thinking we have to beware, Steiner warns us, of ‘ghosts’ of past eras that may be present in our thinking – old thought forms brought over from previous lives or picked up in this one, unconscious nostalgia for ancient times – the ghost of ancient Egypt or the Roman Empire, for example. Such ghosts would seem to be moving in the thinking of the dreamers of the EU, which is a great artificial Pied Piper that will lead us all to disaster if we continue to follow it. Such a construct as the European Union cannot be ‘reformed’ as some fondly imagine, for the project itself is to create a superstate, a ‘new’ unitary nation state – that is, the very thing, the historical retrograde, that Steiner frequently said ought not to continue in the modern age and is contrary to the evolution of humanity.²⁶ The EU is a 19th century customs union, a protectionist club that is trying to exist in this age of global economy. Those in Britain who want the country to remain in it seem to have forgotten the bitter experience and economic hardship of their fellow Europeans in Spain, Italy and Greece – victims of the hubris of their own and other EU members’ elites who foisted the Euro onto those southern countries and bolted together in an artificial and political way economies that were widely divergent.

The EU, then, is not only the wrong choice for Britain; it is the wrong choice for the whole of Europe, including Britain. By contrast, social threefolding (see above, and the threefolding section of www.threeman.org), the 100th anniversary of Steiner’s public presentation of which comes next year, 2019, and which has been discussed many times in New View, is the right way forward for Europe, a continent which is itself, in its linguistic, religious, and historical experience, as well as its very geography – narrow in the west, expansive in the east and mixed in the middle – a threefold entity. The right choice is a threefold form of European association that allows Europeans to relate to the rest of the world freely in economic terms and in cultural terms but maintains national sovereignty in the political sphere, respecting each country’s historical experience. Brexit is therefore not just an economic question to be tackled on the basis of individuals’ economic self-interest but a spiritual/cultural and political question that concerns the next phase in the long history of Britain and its peoples. The British people have to decide whether they want to live in fear and be pushed around by fears projected by so-called political and media ‘clairvoyants’ who all seem to know exactly what the future is going to be like over the next 10-20 years if, for example, Britain exits the EU on 29 March 2019 without a deal arranged with the EU – hell, catastrophe, suicide, disaster, chaos etc. – or whether they will be courageous enough to realise that after 46 years of addiction to a certain drug, suddenly ceasing to take that drug may well be painful for a while at first, but is the surest way out of addiction and that when they come through any hardship that occurs, they will not only be able to stand on their own feet, autonomous, conscious, and ready to help other fellow Europeans do the same, but they also may well find their way to a better form of community through the cathartic crisis they have shared together.

In 1956 Britain’s imperial phase came to an end. Unsure of its new direction and lacking self-confidence, the country staggered, pushed by its deceptive elite, into the European Economic Community (today the EU). In 2016, after 4 decades of membership of this club, many Britons had experienced enough and decided in a referendum by a small majority (4%, 17.4 million) that they wanted out. The large minority that voted to remain (15.1 million) may possibly have been much smaller if those people had been well-informed by the media, the government or themselves about the deceptive origins and intentions of the EU, but they were not. Over the coming months, it is to be hoped that the people of Britain do not lose their nerve as they did in 1660, when they allowed the elite to drag them back into the old Establishment of Crown, Lords and Church, and instead, take the resolute step, not into but across the seeming abyss, which may yet prove to be no abyss at all, and then find a new role for the country in helping our old continent to play its proper part in this epoch, no longer as an imperial oppressor and commercial exploiter but as a mercurial intermediary between East and West.

Endnotes
1. See, amongst many other statements by Steiner on this subject, his 1918 lecture cycle From Symptom to Reality in Modern History (GA 185).
2. George Monck, created 1st Duke of Albemarle by Charles II, (1608-1670) and given many other honours by that king. He began as a Royalist officer then changed sides to the Parliamentarians, before reverting to the service of the Crown in 1660.
3.  The first group ranges from the barely visible Bilderberg Group and many other such transatlanticist elite groups, to the slightly more visible Best for Britain Group, headed by Eloise Todd and funded by George Soros, amongst others. The second group, more right-wing in nature, includes besides Nigel Farage, Conservative Party politicians like John Redwood, Boris Johnson, Liam Fox, Michael Gove, William Hague and the American conservative organisations that they are close to, such as the Heritage Foundation and the American Enterprise Institute.
4.   See lec. of 25.11.1917 in R. Steiner, Secret Brotherhoods and the Mystery of the Human Double (2004), p. 193.
5.  https://www.napoleon-series.org/research/napoleon/c_unification.html
6.  See: D. Gusejnova, European Elites and Ideas of Empire 1917-1957 (CUP) 2016,pp. 71-97. From 1921-1926 Coudenhove-Kalergi was also an active Freemason, a member of the Humanitas Lodge in Vienna.
7. M. Osterrieder, Der Welt im Umbruch – Nationalitätenfrage, Ordnungspläne und Rudolf Steiners Haltung im Erstern Weltkrieg (2014), p. 1632.
8.  Osterrieder, p. 1608.
9. For example, Dean Acheson, Secretary of State 1949-53; John J. McCloy, whose ties with the Rockefellers went back to his days at Harvard): president of the World Bank 1947-49, U.S. High Commissioner for Germany 1949-52, chairman of Chase Manhattan Bank 1953-60, and chairman of the CFR 1954-70; R.A. Lovett, Under-Secretary of State 1947-49, Secretary of Defence 1951-53; and the Dulles brothers: John Foster Dulles, Secretary of State 1953-59 and Allen Welsh Dulles, Director of the CIA, 1953-61.
10.  https://www.politico.eu/article/europe-dependence-on-the-us-was-all-part-of-the-plan-donald-trump-nato/
11. On Monnet, see: J. Monnet, Memoirs (1978); F. Duchene, Jean Monnet: The First Statesman of Interdependence (1994); R.C. Mowat, Creating The European Community (1973); C. Booker & R. North, The Great Deception 2nd ed. (2016); M. & S. Bromberger, Jean Monnet and the United States of Europe (1969).
12. The League of Nations was founded in Jan. 1920 in Paris. Mainly a British conception, but strongly backed by US President Woodrow Wilson, its principal architects were Lord Robert Cecil and Gen. Jan Smuts, both of whom had close ties to the Milner Round Table group. From Nov. 1920 it met in Geneva. It was rejected by the US Congress in 1920 and proved ineffective in        dealing with international crises in the 1930s. Terminated in April 1946, its successor, also created by the same Anglo-American elite circles, was the United Nations, from October 1945.
13. R. J. Aldrich, ‘OSS, CIA and European unity: The American committee on  United Europe, 1948-60′,(1997) in Diplomacy & Statecraft, 8:1,184 — 227.
14.  See n. 11.
15. See n. 11.
16. https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/europe/1356047/Euro-federalists-financed-by-US-spy-chiefs.html
17. J. Monnet, Memoirs (1978).
18. J. Monnet, Memoirs (1978).
19. J. Monnet, Memoirs (1978).
20.https://www.observatoiredeleurope.com/On-a-soigneusement-oublie-d-ecrire-l-article-qui-permet-de-sortir–c-etait-peut-etre-pas-tres-democratique-evidemment_a1632.html
21. For details on these groups, see: www.isgp-studies.com
22. Steiner dates these epochs following the destruction of Atlantis by the antediluvian flood. His dating system is ‘anchored’ in the year 747 BC, when Nabonassar became king of Babylonia, and accurate historical and astronomical records began.
23. T. H. Meyer, Ludwig Polzer-Hoditz – A European (2014), p.268.
24. Meyer, p. 197. By ‘national’ here, Polzer-Hoditz meant national cultures rather than unitary nation states.
25. See lectures by R. Steiner of 6.11.1921 (GA 208) and 24.11.1921 (GA 209).
26. See R. Steiner lecture 7.12.1918 in The Challenge of The Times (GA 186) and chaps. 5 and 6 in The Social Future (GA 332a).

Terry Boardman