This article first appeared in New View magazine Spring 2011

As 2011 draws to a close we are being told from all sides of the corporate-controlled media that if Europe’s politicians  – and by this is usually meant in particular Chancellor Angela Merkel of Germany, Europe’s strongest economy – do not do ‘the right thing’ within the next few days before the upcoming EU Summit in Paris (8-9 Dec.), which will be the 5th on the subject of European debt since the Greek crisis broke out last year 2010 and which is being billed as ‘crucial’, ‘critical’, vital’, ‘make-or-break’ etc., then the economy of the EU will implode, the EU itself may well  disintegrate  and drag down the entire global economy, plunging us all into a 1930s-style depression or even worse. Almost everywhere you look in the media, you see the same message being repeated: the only solution is ‘closer fiscal integration’ or even ‘fiscal union’. Indeed, it would appear that this is in fact the ‘intended solution’ to what some have felt has increasingly come to seem like an engineered and long spun-out crisis. The dramatic deflation in 2008 of the triumphalist rhetoric that had prevailed for years about the Anglo-American or ‘Anglo-saxon’ economic ‘philosophy’ or way of business has been all but forgotten. The relentless focus now is on Europe, its governments and its banks, which were so profligate in the boom years, recklessly buying up packages of American debt. The most unremitting pressure is on Germany to agree to help bail out Greece and other chronically debt-burdened Eurozone countries. At the time of writing, the most recent example of this pressure was the threat by the American ratings agency Standard and Poors to downgrade the AAA credit ratings of 15 EU countries, including those of France and Germany, if the summit did not produce the changes deemed necessary. Here we saw Standard and Poors, representing those elusive and shadowy forces known in the media as “the markets”, firing a strong warning shot across the bows of EU politicians Merkel and Sarkozy, who had just optimistically concluded a bilateral meeting in Paris in which they had declared their resolution on tough action for tighter fiscal discipline, action that would require the renegotiation of EU treaties. “The markets” now appeared to be signalling that they expected Sarkozy and Merkel to ‘deliver’ the desired fiscal integration of the EU.

Churchill

Behind all this is the ongoing drive to complete the construction of a United States of Europe. On 19 September 1946 in Zurich Winston Churchill gave the first of what would be three key speeches in which he made dramatic calls for European unity. On that day he said:

“What is the Sovereign remedy? It is to recreate the European Family, or as much of it as we can, and provide it with a structure under which it can dwell in peace, in safety and in freedom. We must build a kind of United States of Europe. In this way only will hundreds of millions of toilers be able to regain the simple joys and hopes which make life worth living.”(1)

Only a year after the agonies of the bitter Franco-German conflict and occupation had ended, he proposed that France and Germany should take the leading role in the construction of this United Europe; they still appear to be doing so today.

“If we are to form the United States of Europe or whatever name or form it may take,” he said, “we must begin now….Our constant aim must be to build and fortify the strength of UNO. Under and within that world concept, we must re-create the European family in a regional structure called, it may be, the United States of Europe. The first step is to form a Council of Europe. If at first all the States of Europe are not willing or able to join the Union, we must nevertheless proceed to assemble those who will and those who can.” (2)

Here we see, enunciated by a leading statesman of the Anglo-American world who regarded himself and his country as solidly ensconced within the transatlantic relationship (his own mother was American, furthermore), some of the guiding parameters of the European project that have remained firm to this day: a federal European structure built patiently and gradually step by step but always subordinate to the UN, and the readiness to accept new members to the Union as and when circumstances permit. Today, the EU has 27 members, and many would argue that, in the heady atmosphere of Euro-idealism that prevailed in the early 1990s after the end of Communism and the division of Europe, the Union was expanded too rapidly. But today we see the richer countries mulling the de facto expulsion of Greece and other financially challenged states from the central Eurozone club of the Union and the temporary acceptance of a two-tier Europe – in effect a north-south divide. This will no doubt be tolerated for a while, but always with the intention that the southern states be allowed back into the Eurozone when their finances are ‘in order’ (“If at first all… are not willing or able to join…., we must nevertheless proceed to assemble those who will and those who can.”)

In his second United Europe speech,  held at a cross-party ‘United Europe meeting’ at the Albert Hall, London on 14th May 1947, Churchill made even more revealing statements:

It is not our task or wish to draw frontier lines but rather to smooth them away. Our aim is to bring about the unity of all nations of all Europe. …”Europe must federate or perish”, said the present Prime Minster, Mr. Attlee, before the late terrible war. He said that, and I have no reason to suppose that he will abandon that prescient declaration at a time when the vindication of his words is at hand…We do not of course pretend that the United Europe provides the final and complete solution to all the problems of international relationship. The creation of an authoritative, all-powerful world order is the ultimate aim towards which we must strive. Unless some effective World-Super-Government can be set up and brought quickly into action, the prospects for peace and human progress are dark and doubtful. But let there be no mistake upon the main issue.  Without a United Europe there is no sure prospect of world government. It is the urgent and indispensable step towards the realisation of that ideal. (3)

We ought to keep this statement firmly in mind in the context of the present ‘European financial crisis’. Many people are currently expecting that the financial crisis will bring about the collapse of the Euro and the entire EU, and are enthusiastically looking forward to that, but the architects and builders of the European project have over the past nearly 70 years invested so much energy in this project, as their “indispensable step towards the realisation” of world government, that they are highly unlikely to allow any such collapse to happen. On the contrary, they will seek to sustain and develop the European Union no matter what the consequences. For, like Churchill, they see it as one of the fundamental pillars of their New World Order, also referred to as the New International Order or simply, ‘global governance’. One only has to look back through the speeches of such men as Jean Monnet, Jacques Delors, current EU Commission president José Manuel Barroso and current EU Council president Herman van Rompuy 2009 global governance] to see this.

Churchill was already straddling two differing approaches to European unity, which can be summed up in the two words ‘federalism’ and ‘functionalism’. The first referred to the desire to recreate in Europe a sovereign superstate on the American model but “in the tradition of Rome, the Holy Roman Empire and Napoleonic Europe”.(4) [The Intermarium: Wilson, Madison, & East Central European Federalism By Jonathan Levy p.36] This could be seen as a ‘Big Bang political approach’ – the dream, going back to the 17th and 18th centuries (to such men as Henry IV of France, William Penn, Immanuel Kant), of the dramatic emergence of a sovereign mega-state in Europe that would not be dominated by one country or one family.

Federalists and Functionalists 

In the 20th century this aim received new impetus in the angst-ridden period of the post-World War One era when many had sought solutions to the problem of 19th century nationalism that had culminated in the catastrophe of the Great War.Functionalism, on the other hand, referred to the ‘incrementalist’ (i.e. gradualist), more economics-based and institutions-based approach to the same goal of European unity. This proceeded in a more patient and systematic manner, a more veiled and disguised fashion of slowly building common European institutions -  centred on economic imperatives -  which would be knit together over time and gradually led into ever tighter coordination and eventual union. This gradualist approach was adopted for two reasons: 1) it was in the context of the Cold War, and the aim was not to unduly upset the USSR with notions of an emerging  sovereign United States of Europe allied to the United States of America; 2) it was seen as necessary in the context of democratic societies, to disguise the eventual political goal by the creation of all kinds of economic institutions and bureaucratic instruments so as to persuade conservative and patriotic forces in European countries that their nation States were not going to lose their sovereignty, although the intention all along was to indeed deprive them of this sovereignty and replace it with a common European ‘sovereignty’, which, it was intended, would in fact mean subordination to the UN and other transatlantic bodies and organisations guided by shadowy and only semi-visible elite coordinating groups such as the Bilderberg Group (founded 1954) (5)

While the federalist approach had dominated debate in the interwar years, the functionalist approach was the method that won out, as the French cognac seller, international financier and technocrat Jean Monnet took control of events, a man who was consummately at home in operating behind the scenes. It was Monnet’s manoeuvres that would result in the Robert Schumann Plan of 1950, two years after the last of Churchill’s triad of United Europe speeches. This Plan created the ECSC, the European Coal and Steel Community. The ECSC was the institution that set the ball rolling towards the founding of the European Economic Community (EEC) in 1957, the subsequent European Community in 1993 (following the Treaty of Maastricht). Schumann was merely the front man who was allowed to take the credit for Monnet’s ingenious, economically-based plan that sought to weld together German steel and French coal. (6)  Monnet himself, however, who had kept his own key role out of the limelight, later went on to create the Action Committee for the United States of Europe (ACUSE) in 1955, which was funded by the CIA. The title clearly indicated that the gradualist and functionalist Monnet also aimed at the eventual creation of a federal superstate, and indeed, the operations of ACUSE played a major part in the emergence of the EEC in 1957. In August 1943 Monnet had outlined his ideas for European cooperation for the French Government-in-exile in Algiers:

The countries of Europe are too small to guarantee their peoples the necessary prosperity and social development. The European states must constitute themselves into a federation…

Like Churchill, Monnet was at heart no real democrat. His attitude was that of a patrician who saw himself as responsible for organising the destiny of Europe and indeed the western world, since he sought an ultimate Union of North America and Europe. It was institutions that were important for him, not individuals. Institutional planning and change, he believed, was the key to power. He and his continental assistants and his allies in London and Washington therefore worked consistently and carefully to unfold their ‘grand design’. It emerged in approximately 7-year phases following Monnet’s initial discussions in Algeria in 1943:

1950 – the founding of the ECSC
1957 – Treaty of Rome established the EEC and Euratom (the European
           nuclear power agency)
1964 – Common Agricultural Market established
1971 – 1st stage of the Werner Plan for a 3-stage unification of economic
           policies; creation of monetary organisation leading towards eventual
           economic and monetary union (EMU) [Nb in this same year Nixon
           floated the US dollar]
1978 -  European Council preparing  the European Monetary System, which
           emerged in March 1979, together with the European Currency Unit
           (ECU).
1985 – European Commission begins process of developing the Single Internal
          Market, aims to be in place by 1992.
1992 – Treaty of Maastricht replaces the EEC by the European Union and
          prepares for the emergence of the Euro in 1999.

1999 -The common European currency is now established. Monetary union has
          now been achieved, but fiscal union is still ahead.
2006 -  By this time the European Constitution (2004) was to have been
           adopted and ratified by all EU members. However, opposition by the
           people of France and the Netherlands in 2005 meant that there had to
           be a delay and another disguise. In the end, no full Constitution was
           adopted; its provisions were simply introduced in disguised form by  
           the Treaty of Lisbon (2007) which the people of Ireland at first refused
           to ratify in 2008 but a second referendum was eventually forced upon
           them through the financial crisis in 2009 and they then voted for
           ratification. (7)

In 2013 we shall have arrived at the 10th stage in the unfolding of this 7-year phased project and we shall be 63 years on from the achievement of the first institutional phase (the ECSC) in 1950. The long-planned ‘United States of Europe’ now has: a flag (a variant of the flag of the Pan Europa movement – for which, see below), an anthem (Beethoven’s Ode to Joy theme from his 9th Symphony), a currency (the Euro), a Parliament (in Strasbourg), a government (the Commission in Brussels), a President (Herman van Rompuy), a ‘Foreign Minister’ (Baroness Catherine Ashton) a judiciary (the European Court of Justice, Luxemburg) and the Court of Human Rights, Strasbourg), a central bank (the European Central Bank in Frankfurt), and a de facto army with nuclear weapons (NATO forces) that has  already been engaged in fighting in Central Asia and Libya! The final stage of integration requires a Ministry of Finance that can enforce a centralised taxation and budgetary policy. This will effectively remove from national states control over their own taxation policies. The pretence of national sovereignty will no longer be able to be maintained. It is this ‘Ministry of Finance’ which is now about to emerge from the present European financial crisis. Of course, it is unlikely that such a bald move will be made as to announce the formation of a Ministry of Finance. Rather, the terms ‘fiscal integration’ or ‘fiscal union’ have been and will be used in a further effort to disguise from those citizens of EU countries who are not particularly interested in such matters the fact that their ‘independent’ nation states in effect now no longer exist.

Moulding Opinion

Some 250 years ago the Scottish sceptical philosopher David Hume, in discussing the first principles of government, perceptively noted that there was “nothing more surprising” than “to see the easiness with which the many are governed by the few; and to observe the implicit submission with which men resign their own sentiments and passions to those of their rulers. When we enquire by what means this wonder is brought about, we shall find, that as Force is always on the side of the governed, the governors have nothing to support them but opinion. `Tis therefore, on opinion only that government is founded; and this maxim extends to the most despotic and most military governments, as well as to the most free and most popular.” (8)

Hume was in effect here talking about a form of mind control; through a society’s media organs, he was saying, the rulers of society put into the minds of the many the ideas they want the many to believe and that it is only through this acceptance of these ideas that the few are able to govern the many. An example of how this works has been the way the wool has been pulled over the eyes of British citizens since the 1960s when the British government first began to try to persuade the British people that joining the EEC would be in Britain’s interests because it would make Britain richer, more prosperous; it was presented as merely an ‘economic club’, and the British have long been inclined to club membership and more recently, ‘clubbing’. If the British people had been told from the beginning that the goal of the EEC was to do away with Britain’s national sovereignty and to incorporate Britain as a mere member state of a centralised federal union, they would never have allowed their politicians to lead them into such a ‘club’. But that – for Winston Churchill, for Jean Monnet, for US statesman Dean Acheson, for President John F. Kennedy, for former Prime Minister Edward Heath (who took Britain into the EEC) and many other prominent transatlantic figures -  was in fact always the goal.

Let us look at a recent  example of how this particular wool is pulled. In June (23rd) The Economist  magazine, which has long been a party to and supporter of the whole project of European and indeed transatlantic integration,  carried a leader about the Greek financial crisis titled “If Greece Goes….” and concluded that the only effective solution to the crisis and Europe’s consequent woes was ‘greater political union and a debate about the institutions Europe would then need’. This obviously pointed in the direction of ‘fiscal integration’. Then, in August, at the time of the US budget crisis in Congress, global financier George Soros was interviewed on BBC Radio 4′s flagship current affairs programme “Today” and asked for his views about the US crisis and the Greek crisis. He announced confidently that he was unconcerned about the US crisis; it was just “political theater” that would soon be sorted out (and indeed so it turned out soon afterwards) but he said he was very concerned about the Greek crisis because the ‘contagion’  could spread to other weak economies in Europe and threaten the whole Eurozone and possibly the world economy itself. The interviewer accepted this without comment. The next day, Tuesday, the BBC’s business editor Stephanie Flanders in her analysis of the Greek situation on the same programme repeated almost verbatim what Soros had said the day before. The following day, Wednesday, two of the main anchormen on the same programme, Justin Webb and Evan Davies, repeated  what Flanders had said the day before, and then, to top it all, on the Thursday the British Chancellor of the Exchequer, George Osborne, a Conservative, who would normally be expected to hold his  nose at the prospect of deeper European integration, also publicly stated that “Crucially, my European colleagues need to accept the remorseless logic of monetary union that leads from a single currency to greater fiscal integration”. This “remorseless” message has been given to Europe’s political leaders consistently and at an ever shrill volume throughout the second half of this year to the point where they have been painted into a corner by ‘the markets’, culminating in actions such as those of Standard and Poors which threatened to downgrade Eurozone countries’ credit rating unless they accepted this “remorseless logic”. This was the economic sphere dictating to the political sphere how it should act. Again and again the mainstream media have been reinforcing the message that the so-called ‘markets’, the movers and shakers of the economic sphere, who are, after all, undemocratic and entirely unelected, know what is best and that the ignorant and feckless politicians should do what ‘the markets’ tell them. These ‘markets’ and economic movers and shakers are of course the very same kind of people who brought us the economic crisis in the first place. Since the bank bailouts of 2008-2009 we have seen one prime example after another, from bank bailouts to lobbying scandals, of the economic sphere attempting to dictate to the political sphere in complete contradiction of what Rudolf Steiner said should happen in a healthy, socially threefolded society in which the three spheres (culture, politics, economics) would not interfere with one another anymore than the three systems of the human organism (nervous system, rhythmic system and metabolic system) interfere with one another (9). It is because we allow these three systems to interfere with one another in modern society that we have such a sick society in so many respects – and the situation has only got worse since he died in 1925.

Money and Banks

As former employees of a single company, Goldman Sachs, are parachuted with increasing frequency as technocratic ‘fixers’ into the governments of countries in financial trouble, it would be easy to think and claim, as many do, that the present financial mess is all because of the bankers (sometimes dubbed ‘the banksters’) trying to take over the world for the sake of their own greed and power. The problem, claim the critics, is that governments are unable to issue their nation’s own money. Since the founding of the privately-owned Bank of England in 1694, money, which is not actually a commodity but merely a means of exchange, an ancillary function of the circulation of goods and thus analogous to the circulatory system in the human body, has been controlled not by the democratic political sphere, which ought to control it, but by private interests in the economic sphere. These self-centred interests have made of money an instrument of debt through the usurious application of interest to loans.

Due to their creation of money out of nothing (the so-called fractional reserve banking system whereby banks apply an inverted pyramid principle, using a small amount of gold or reserves to justify the enormous multiplication of loans of paper or digital money supposedly ‘based’ on this real gold money or ‘reserves’), the banks’ ever-expanding growth of debt-based money  has led to the present situation in which millions of people throughout the capitalist world are trapped in a web of increasing bank loan debt from which they can escape only with great difficulty.

“…created deposits [bank loans] were a creation of money out of nothing, although bankers usually refused to express their actions, either note issuing or deposit lending, in these terms. William Paterson, however, on obtaining the charter of the Bank of England in 1694, to use the moneys he had won in privateering, said, “The Bank hath benefit of interest on all moneys which it creates out of nothing.” This was repeated by Sir Edward Holden, founder of the Midland Bank, on December 18, 1907, and is, of course, generally admitted today.”(10)

Private banks then, literally began to create money out of nothing, ‘getting something from nothing’, once they were able to persuade someone to come to them for a loan. This led inexorably to bankers becoming fixated on financial manipulations. It is because the bankers became more and more addicted to mere monetary manipulation and speculation instead of relating money to actual goods (the real economy of goods created from the bounty of Nature) that there developed the so-called ‘casino capitalism’ of recent decades when various exotic financial instruments were devised to generate ever greater profits from purely financial manipulations. In 1933 in the USA the Glass-Steagall Act was passed to prevent commercial bankers from using depositors’ savings to dabble in such risky operations, traditionally the preserve of merchant bankers (investment bankers in the USA), who were accustomed to dealing with governments and large businesses. However, in 1999 Federal Reserve Chairman Alan Greenspan and his allies in the banking world, after years of effort, finally prevailed upon the Democratic administration of President Clinton to repeal the Glass-Steagall Act, and a succession of ‘bubbles’ soon followed.

“….clearly, money and goods are not the same thing but are, on the contrary, exactly opposite things. Most confusion in economic thinking arises from failure to recognize this fact. Goods are wealth which you have, while money is a claim on wealth which you do not have. Thus goods are an asset; money is a debt. [Goods and money] always behave in opposite ways, just as they usually move in opposite directions. If the value of one goes up, the value of the other goes down, and in the same proportion. The value of goods, expressed in money, is called “prices,” while the value of money, expressed in goods, is called “value.”(11)

A root cause of this situation, the divorce between money and goods and the  separation of the real economy from the financial economy, is that since the destruction 700 years ago (1307-1314) of the Order of the Knights Templar, the first really international European bankers, who operated within a Christian ethic (no Templar was allowed to own any money personally; all belonged to the Order, and usury was not allowed), European banking fell into the hands of family banks (in chronological order these were, pre-eminently, Italians, Germans, Dutch, Jews, English) that looked to their own family’s self-interest rather than the interests of society as a whole; hence the emergence of private banking interests that sought merely to maximise their monetary profits and ultimately to control the finances of an entire nation through the manipulation of central banks.

The influence of financial capitalism and of the international bankers who created it was exercised both on business and on governments, but could have done neither if it had not been able to persuade both these to accept two “axioms” of its own ideology. Both of these were based on the assumption that politicians were too weak and too subject to temporary popular pressures to be trusted with control of the money system; accordingly, the sanctity of all values and the soundness of money must be protected in two ways: by basing the value of money on gold and by allowing bankers to control the supply of money. To do this it was necessary to conceal, or even to mislead, both governments and people about the nature of money and its methods of operation. .”(12)

When financial ethics had sunk to this level of deception, it was a slippery slope to even worse motivations:

The powers of financial capitalism had another far-reaching aim, nothing less than to create a world system of financial control in private hands able to dominate the political system of each country and the economy of the world as a whole. This system was to be controlled in a feudalist fashion by the central banks of the world acting in concert, by secret agreements arrived at in frequent private meetings and conferences. The apex of the system was to be the Bank for International Settlements [founded 1929] in Basle, Switzerland, a private bank owned and controlled by the world’s central banks which were themselves private corporations. (13)

The lure of ancient models – the ‘Olympians’

However, there is more to all this than just bankers, even if bankers and the financial sector have increasingly tended to rule the roost in the capitalist world over the last 150 years. 100 years ago in 1909 ex-Prime Minister Arthur Balfour wrote a letter to ex-US President Theodore Roosevelt, urging him to work for the establishment of an ‘Anglo-saxon confederation’ that would dictate peace to the world through the use of military (naval) might and “permanently upset the balance of power”. It would mean the establishment of a New World Order, a new kind of Roman Empire in which the English-speaking peoples were seen as the torch-bearers of light and civilisation, the new ‘Chosen People’ in fact. Carroll Quigley documented the development of this idea through his studies of the networks of individuals and organisations that were dedicated to achieving this goal. The men who worked for this goal were of course, almost entirely men of the elite of the English-speaking world. One of the believers in this far-reaching aim was Winston Churchill.

“We must do our best,” he said in his third key United Europe speech, in The Hague on 7th May 1948, “to create and combine the great regional units which it is in our power to influence, and we must endeavour by patient and faithful service to prepare for the day when there will be an effective world government resting upon the main groupings of mankind. Thus for us and for all who share  our civilisation and our desire for peace and world government, there is only one duty and watchword [again the call to uniformity – only ONE!] persevere along all the main lines that have been made clear and imprinted upon us by the bitter experiences through which we have passed. Persevere toward those objectives which are lighted for us by all the wisdom and inspiration of the past”.

The thinking of these men was above all based on the models of ancient Greece and Rome that informed the classical world they had been reared upon at home and at school. The Anglo-American Churchill, scion of an old aristocratic line himself, was at the time of his United Europe speeches in close touch with an aristocrat of even more ancient and complex European pedigree on his Austrian father’s side and with a Japanese mother, the daughter of an oil tycoon. This very European and Eurasian aristocrat was Count Richard Nikolaus Eijiro von Coudenhove-Kalergi, who Churchill hailed in his Zurich speech of 19th September 1946 as a pioneer in the cause of European unity. The Count’s family originally hailed from Brabant in Flanders – his ancestor had fought for the Catholic Habsburgs in the Dutch War of Independence  – and also from Crete but had relocated to Austria during the wars of the French Revolution (1789-1799).  His background was so complex that a wit once remarked that he was “practically a Pan-European organisation himself” (14). Influenced by his family and upbringing, and inspired by Woodrow Wilson’s 14 Points and then fashionable ideas of Pan-American Union, the Count, a Freemason since the early 1920s, (Vienna lodges ‘Humanitas’ and ‘Socrates’) had founded the Pan-Europa movement for European Union in 1922 in Vienna. He tried, unsuccessfully, to interest first Czech politician Thomas Masaryk and then Benito Mussolini in becoming the leaders of his crusade, writing to Mussolini:

“A dismembered Europe would be defenceless against American competition and Russian expansionism. As the heir to Marius and Caesar, you sir, have the power to postpone this new upheaval for many centuries.” (15)

Eventually, the Count had to become the leader himself and together with Otto von Habsburg, heir to the defunct Austro-Hungarian Empire, he founded the Pan-Europa Union in 1923 and published his manifesto for European unity, Pan-Europa. It is noteworthy to observe that in this year 1923 Rudolf Steiner was travelling around Europe assisting at the founding of national branches of the Anthroposophical Society (of which he was himself not yet a member) in the hope that thereby, the global anthroposophical movement would achieve unity not through a monolithic uniformity, but through diversity.

Coudenhove-Kalergi’s goal, by contrast, was for a united European state that would exclude both Britain and Russia and would be guided by Roman Catholic spirituality under the leadership of the Vatican. During this period Rudolf Steiner was speaking at the West-East Congress in Vienna in 1922 on the basis on his ideas about social threefolding. Steiner hoped for a threefold association of European nations that would themselves be threefold societies in which the cultural, legal-political and economic spheres would be clearly separated yet inter-related, his diagnosis being that Europe’s ills were caused by the interference of the three spheres with one another: business seeking to dominate the political State and the State seeking to dominate the cultural life (e.g. education). For the European level, Steiner looked forward to a common European economic life, a common supranational European cultural life but to the maintenance of national values and traditions in the sphere of rights and law. This was very different from Coudenhove-Kalergi’s more conventional ideas about a unitary European State. But Coudenhove-Kalergi had very influential friends and allies. His cause was taken up by, amongst others, the French statesman and Prime Minister Aristide Briand in 1929, but it was overwhelmed in the crisis of the Great Crash, the subsequent Depression and the rise of Nazism in Germany. During World War II, like Jean Monnet, the eventual godfather of what would become today’s EU, Coudenhove-Kalergi spent much time in the USA, where, like Monnet,  he got to know leading members of the American elite. After the war, he sought, with the help of Churchill, who had argued for such a Council since 1943, to unite Europe on the basis of culture and politics, via the Council of Europe, founded in London May 1949 by the Treaty of London.

Men like Coudenhove-Kalergi, Balfour and Churchill regarded themselves as ‘Olympians’. This is clear from Churchill’s third United Europe speech in The Hague, 7 May 1948 where he said that he hoped that only a few potent people would represent the United Europe at the UN, “as it were on a mountain top where all was cool and quiet and calm and from which the wide vision of the world would be presented with all things in their due proportion. As the poet [William] Blake wrote:

Above Time’s troubled fountains
On the great Atlantic mountains
In my golden house on high.

Churchill saw himself as a patriarch doing his best for all “the toilers”, “the hard-working families”, “the millions of humble homes”. He wanted a uniform peace dictated by a global military power that would render the lower orders quiescent and contented, in their place. He asked:

What is it that all these wage-earners, skilled artisans, soldiers and tillers of the soil require, deserve, and may be led to demand? Is it not a fair chance to make a home, to reap the fruits of their toil, to cherish their wives, to bring up their children in a decent manner and to dwell in peace and safety, without fear or bullying or monstrous burdens or exploitation, however this may be imposed upon them? That is their heart’s desire. That is what we mean to win for them.

Churchill was right – those were indeed the things that millions yearned for, but they were not to be allowed to seek for them in their own way, democratically. They were to be led and induced to want or accept what the Olympians felt would best satisfy the yearnings of the many – a United States of Europe that would be ‘little sister’ to the USA’s ‘Big Brother’. This is the fundamental inequality at the root of the present financial crisis – the feeling, the hoary old feeling on the part of a very small section of society that they are simply better than the majority and must be left to make the destiny-laden decisions for them. But this is the feeling that is meeting with a spirit of rising rejection by the modern, increasingly wakeful and independent-minded man and woman, the increasingly conscious soul.

NOTES

(1)    The Cause of A United Europe, Conservative Group for Europe pamphlet, 1996
(2)    see note 1
(3)    see note 1
(4)    Jonathan Levy, The Intermarium: Wilson, Madison, & East Central European Federalism p.36
(5)    The Bilderberg Group was founded in the Netherlands in 1954 by the Pole Josef Retinger and Prince Bernhard of the Netherlands to bind together the elites of western Europe and the USA and coordinate their actions in the face of the alleged threat from the USSR. It has continued to meet annually amidst great secrecy yet at taxpayers’ expense for security cover, and only in recent years have the mainstream media been forced by alternative investigative reporting to acknowledge its meetings and influence.
(6)    See François Duchêne, Jean Monnet – First Statesman of Interdependence (1994)
(7)    Adapted from Editorial, Shoreline magazine, No.2, 1989
(8)    Hume, On The First Principles of Government  (http://socserv.mcmaster.ca/econ/ugcm/3ll3/hume/firstpri.hme)
(9)   See Rudolf Steiner, Towards Social Renewal (Rudolf Steiner Press, 1999) and Steiner, Riddles of the Soul (Mercury Press, 1996) p.131 ff.
(10)    See Carroll Quigley, Tragedy and Hope, (1966) Chapter 5
(11)    See Carroll Quigley, Tragedy and Hope, (1966) Chapter 5
(12)    See Carroll Quigley, Tragedy and Hope, (1966) Chapter 5
(13)    See Carroll Quigley, Tragedy and Hope, (1966) Chapter 5
(14)    wikipedia entry for Count Richard Coudenhove-Kalergi
(15)    See n. 4, p.38