This article was first published in New View magazine ‘No. 79 Apr – June 2016

2016 looks to be a momentous year in British history, when the nation makes its choice in the referendum on 23rd June on whether to remain in the European Union  or leave it. This could affect Britain’s direction for decades, if not centuries. In the world of science Professor Stephen Hawking (74), who seems to be regarded by the media as something of a British scientific ‘cardinal’ in the contemporary western world’s modern ‘religion’ of natural science, gave the prestigious annual Reith lectures for the BBC on his specialist subject of black holes in January and early February. And then, with immaculate timing – was it perhaps prearranged? -  on 11 February came news that both his and Albert Einstein’s work had been vindicated by the American discovery of gravitational waves – the existence of which Einstein had predicted – caused by the collision and ‘merger’ of two black holes, thus allegedly providing ‘concrete’ proof of the existence of black holes. But this year Europeans will commemorate the centenary of two ‘black holes’ of the human kind created here on Earth 100 years ago  – the titanic Battles of Verdun and the Somme which raged through eleven and five months of 1916 at a cost of approximately 1 million casualties each; some 300,000 died altogether in each battle, Germans, French and British.

While Verdun, in which the British did not take part, was an existential event for France – defeat would likely have meant national surrender to Germany, for the second time in 45 years(1), the Somme, a mainly British vs Germans battle, was  more of a psychic shock, a national body-blow for the British, from which, arguably, the country never really recovered for the rest of the century. Not only did between 19-20,000 men die on the very first day of the battle (1 July) when a literal walkover victory had been expected, followed by another 75,000 British deaths until the battle was called off in November, but most of those killed were the enthusiastic volunteers of 1914-1915, the old professional army having been more or less wiped out by the spring of 1915. Villages, suburbs, schools, universities, factories saw entire groups of their men  – the so-called Pals’ battalions (friends who joined up together) decimated on the Somme. For five months endless lists of the dead, the missing and the wounded appeared in the Press. The buoyant, naïve, exuberant patriotism and enthusiasm for the war disappeared in Britain after the Somme and was replaced by a grim and resigned determination. Many commentators have noted that a long-term consequence of the Somme was that the British elite lost their often ruthless determination to impose their will on the country and the Empire in subsequent decades, which contributed greatly to the eventual end of the Empire in the decades after World War Two. The sheer scale of the suffering, both at the front and at home, also did much to begin to undermine faith, religion, morality and all traditional values, which subsequent horrors such as the Battle of Passchendaele the following year only intensified. The Somme was in this sense really a historical watershed for Britain and its Empire.

Vikings
Goethe once observed that “He who cannot draw on 3000 years is living from hand to mouth” in other words, one really has to be able to survey the past 3000 years to understand the present.  If we start more modestly with 1000 years, we can say that the last millennium  (which happens to be 30 cycles of the lifetime of Jesus Christ – 30 x 33.33 years) since the year 1016, when King Cnut’s Danish Vikings conquered England, has seen this island of Britain grow from a spot, a point in the ocean to a vast world-spanning imperial periphery by 1916 and then in the hundred years since then, shrink from that global periphery back to a point, or rather, to a point and a bit, since part of the Island of Ireland still belongs to the British Crown(2). Invasion of Britain by Cnut’s ‘direct’ Vikings’ from Denmark was followed by invasion by William’s ‘indirect’ Vikings from Normandy in 1066 (3); the ‘Normans’ had themselves arrived in Normandy from Denmark in 911. For some 200 years the Vikings had raided, settled in and then tried to conquer Britain outright, and in 1016 and 1066 they finally succeeded. Having conquered, they replaced England’s Anglo-saxon elite with their own. Their invasion was so ruthless that after 20 years there was no more significant English resistance – a  fact worth pondering. That fact can be compared with the 746 year-long resistance of the Irish to the Viking/Norman-led “English” invasions of Ireland which culminated in the Easter Rising of 1916 and then the subsequent achievement of independence (4) for most of Ireland in 1921, due in no small part to Britain’s post-1916 war-weariness.

After the Viking-Norman invasions of the eleventh century, England’s new foreign, French-speaking elite gradually began to expand its horizons, attempting conquests of Ireland, Wales, Scotland and ultimately France. In retrospect, it can be seen that the 500 years from Cnut’s invasion in 1016 to Thomas More’s publication of his famous novel Utopia (1516) during the reign of King Henry VIII (1509-1547) were a time of preparation for the expansion of England. When Henry VIII came to the throne in 1509 his navy had just 5 ships. By 1516 it had about 30; this was the beginning of the Royal Navy. From the reign of Henry VIII to that of James I (1603-1625) there was a hiatus for about 100 years  – the pause before the take-off, one could say, and during that period, for just 49 years (1558-1607), England possessed no overseas territories beyond the British Isles.

During most of that period, England’s greatest artist and, arguably, philosopher, William Shakespeare, lived his life (1564-1616).   With the formation of the East India Company in 1600, the planting of the first colony in North America in 1607 (Jamestown, Virginia) and the first trading ‘factory’ in India (Surat) in 1615, the expansion of what would eventually become the British Empire began. India, of course, would become the lynchpin main focus of Britain’s overseas possessions.  The Empire lasted until Britain effectively ceased to be a truly sovereign state in 1915/16, when it could no longer afford to wage the First World War without American assistance. There followed 100 years of contraction, during which the Empire all but vanished, to the point where we are now, 1000 years after the Danish Viking invasion. To sum up:

500 years of “preparation” for global expansion          1016 – c.1516
100 years of pre-imperial “breathing space”(as an island) c.1516 – c.1616
300 years of global expansion and empire-building    c.1616   -  1916
100 years of post-imperial decline                               1916   –  2016

The Empire continued after 1916 until the Cold War years, but the First World War really heralded the end for British imperial rule, even if it did not happen immediately. The Irish were the first overseas people to be invaded by the English and the first to free themselves from the English (1921) – a significant symptom; the Irish independence movement was soon followed by others (e.g. Indian, Burmese, Malay). After the First World War financial power moved from the City of London to New York, the US Navy outgrew the British, and the First World War also saw the inexorable rise of American cultural ‘soft power’ (ragtime, jazz, Hollywood, ‘iconic’ brand products etc). Clearly, Britain has played a large part, for good and for ill, in the creation of a global consciousness. And also, for good or ill, English is now the global language because of US dominance since 1916, and the USA itself was ‘birthed’ out of Britain.

Anglo-America and United Europe
The two decades before the First World War saw the beginning of ‘the bonding process’ between the British and American elites, which would culminate in the sharing of military intelligence information during and after the Second World War when the Office of Strategic Studies (OSS) was created and effectively trained by the British secret services. Out of that experience came the CIA (1947). From the 1870s onwards, rich American heiresses had married into financially challenged British aristocratic families, elite Anglo-American think-tanks mushroomed, the two navies collaborated, British and American bankers and financiers worked together. Further symptoms of this Anglo-American elite ‘intimacy’ were the parentage of Winston Churchill and the relationship between King Edward VIII (1936) and the American divorcee Mrs Wallace Simpson.

After 1945 the USA needed a non-communist western Europe back on its feet as soon as possible to function as a market for US goods and services and as a defence barrier against the USSR and the expansion of communism. This was masked by glowing beneficent and emollient propaganda about “creating peace in Europe after the horrors of two terrible wars” and “America’s generosity to Europe in the Marshall Plan”. The Anglo-American Winston Churchill, now again out of office, gave three great speeches on the need for a “united Europe” or a “United States of Europe” in 1946, 47 and 48. A French Foreign Minister, Robert Schuman, was selected to front phase one of the united Europe project in 1950 – the European Coal and Steel Community (ECSE). It was called the Schuman Plan, but just as the infamous Balfour Declaration of 1917 (5) was not conceived or drafted by Sir Arthur Balfour but by Lord Alfred Milner, so the Schuman Plan was not conceived, devised or organised by Robert Schuman but by Jean Monnet, originally a wine salesman from Cognac in France with very deep connections to the British and American elites going back to 1914 and his work during the Great War helping to organise Allied economic collaboration. Monnet needed the politician Schuman as a front man because Monnet himself did not like to work  in the limelight; he was a behind-the-scenes operator. His organisation and activities were funded by the American Committee on United Europe (ACUE, founded 1948) which received its money from the Rockefeller and Ford Foundations. The first chairman of ACUE was William Donovan, head of the OSS. In the mid-1950s ACUE was receiving $1 million a year which it channelled to pro-united Europe organisations such as the ECSE, the Council of Europe, the European Youth Campaign, and Monnet’s own Action Committee for the United States of Europe.

From the outset, the Monnet Committee set out to ‘make the Messina resolution of 2 June [1956; it created the European Economic Community or EEC] into a real step towards the United States of Europe … It would not content itself with mere cooperation between governments. It was essential that States should delegate some of their powers to European federal bodies …’ On 18 January 1956, at its constituent meeting, the Action Committee for the United States of Europe issued a declaration calling on the governments of the Six to create a new supranational community for the development of atomic energy along similar lines to the ECSC. … Although it had only about 100 members, the Committee enjoyed considerable influence, which it used to promote European revival and, more particularly, the Euratom initiative, which Monnet considered to be the priority, its objectives being clearer and closer to the interests of France.(6) From the outset- a supranational United States of Europe focused on nuclear power. Such an entity would have to be highly centralised, not least because nuclear power requires a high degree of centralised command and control.

The Anglo-American elites headed by Lord Milner and Lord Robert Cecil, Balfour and others who had devised the League of Nations during and after the First World War sought to establish a world authority that would be essentially controlled by the English-speaking powers. The League was not a success because the American Congress refused to allow the USA to join; the Anglo-American elites were not yet at the acme of their powers. This came at the end of the Second World War when the United Nations was the second effort by the very same circles (plus some fellow travellers) to establish the kind of global control for the English-speaking peoples of which  Cecil Rhodes had dreamed. Those behind the League and the UN always intended it should have a military force to impose its will, or rather the will of the dominant elites of Britain and America. Their model, and also the model for the ‘United States of Europe’ was really the post-1865, centralised version of federalism of the heavily Washington-dominant USA, after victory in the Civil War. This was essentially the model of the unitary nation state, only now on a continent-wide basis as in the US. So what has been emerging since 1950 en route to what Eurocrats like to call “ever closer union” is a nation state called ‘Europe’ with all the trappings of a centralised nation state (flag, anthem etc), a cabinet government (today the European Commission in Brussels, ‘assisted’ by the European Council, the meetings of heads of EU member states, which take place twice every six months), a bicameral parliament or Congress (today the European Parliament in Strasbourg and the Council of the European Union in Brussels, not to be confused with the European Council!), and a Supreme Court (the European Court of Justice in Luxemburg; not to be confused with the European Court of Human Rights, which has nothing to do with the EU and includes Turkey and Russia). This entire arrangement stems essentially from 18th and 19th century political thinking based on the notion of the unitary nation state in which the three organs of the State – the executive, the legislature and the judiciary, are supposed to counterbalance one another but are actually often at loggerheads with one another. It is essentially a political and not an economic or a cultural project, although it was advanced, especially in the early decades, under the cover of economic cooperation. This was Monnet’s key contribution.

The United States of Europe and a ‘World State’
In the post-1945 scenario, the project for a United States of Europe fitted right into the wider Anglo-American plans for global domination. In a lecture titled “I Am a European”(!) Churchill declared in London’s Albert Hall on 14 May 1947: “The creation of an authoritative, all-powerful world order is the ultimate aim towards which we must strive….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.” This has always been the case as the European project has unfolded over the subsequent decades, taking a new step forward every six or seven years with an unremitting and implacable intentionality. Europa is seen as the little sister under the big umbrella of Big Brother or Big Uncle Sam. Having Europe as one entity makes it much easier for Washington, Wall St and major US corporations and other multinationals to ‘negotiate’ with. Meanwhile, the armed forces of this emerging United States of Europe have increasingly, since the end of the USSR, become NATO, to which almost all EU countries belong, while furtive and secretive plans are proceeding apace, due for completion in 2019-2020, to begin merging the economies of the USA and the EU under the cover of the Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership (TTIP). The process unfolding here resembles the economic cover given to the European Project by Jean Monnet in the 1950s and backed by Dean Acheson of the US State Department and Alan Dulles of the CIA.

In case some readers might think that Churchill’s words about a United Europe in 1947 represented a truly disinterested concern to create a “World Super Government” that was open to all peoples and not an instrument of Anglo-American control, one should reflect that an ‘anonymous’ article written in September 1915 in the Milnerite Round Table journal by Philip Kerr, one of Lord Milner’s chief lieutenants and later secretary to Lloyd George (7), the following was written about the “World State”, which the Round Table group around Milner was already conceiving at that time for the new post-war order:

“Such a state must override all others. Indeed, it will be the only state. […] Beneath it there may be an indefinite number of national units as at present, but the supreme law will be the world law, overriding national law where it conflicts with it and binding on all the inhabitants of the globe.”(8)

Such had also been the feelings of Cecil Rhodes: the English-speaking peoples needed to establish a kind of religious order, like the Jesuit Society, but which would have its spiritual centre at Oxford not Rome and it would coordinate the Anglo-American imperial mission to bring ‘peace and order’ to the world under a new Pax Britannica. Such notions were widespread throughout elite Anglo-American circles from the 1880s onwards. In 1898 the Anglo-American archaeologist Charles Waldstein gave a speech at the London Imperial Institute in the presence of Lord Rosebery in which he said:

“An English-Speaking Brotherhood will, after all, only be a step towards and link in the general alliance of civilised peoples… These ideals are the same to the people of Great Britain and of the United States, and that is at once the highest and the most lasting bond of union. Here thoughts and feelings and faith of a religious order force themselves upon us. We feel that we are justified in pushing on, and there is no need of casuistry in our patriotism. For we know that what we ultimately desire is right, not only in the eyes of the present English or Americans, or a class of them, nor even for present man and mankind – but in the eyes of the lasting embodiment of all highest good as man can think it and feel it and love it, that is, God”.(9) (emphasis -  TB)

This was hubris of an exalted degree indeed. Two months later, the young Winston Churchill (24) fought at the Battle of Omdurman in the Sudan. British forces in this ‘splendid imperial victory’ that was due to the use of Maxim machine guns and expanding (dum-dum) bullets (12,000 Sudanese were killed and 47 British!) were commanded by General Sir Herbert Kitchener who was ennobled for his exploit, became a national hero and was Secretary of War 1914-1916. It was his face on the famous British recruitment posters in those two years: “(Kitchener) wants YOU!”. But Kitchener was killed in June 1916 when the ship on which he was travelling to Russia hit a mine. Churchill’s generation of young upper class men were brought up on such ‘ideals’ as those of Waldstein and they idolised men like KItchener. Philip Kerr, eight years younger than Churchill, wrote in that ‘anonymous’ article in the Round Table about who would direct the future “world state”:

“On one hand, the direction of world affairs would have to be in the hands of the most civilized peoples, for the progress of the world would not be assisted by transferring power from responsible to irresponsible hands. On the other hand, to deprive the intermediate peoples of the responsibility of self-government would be to set back the hands of the clock of progress. It would seem, therefore, that their external relations, and such of their internal acts as affect the rest of mankind, would have to be controlled from above until such time as they were fit to be admitted to a share in the responsibility for world policy.”(10)

However, the Milner Group, which was intimately involved in the establishment of the League of Nation and the UN, was always very vague about when power would be transferred to the “intermediate peoples”. Sir William Wiseman, head of the British secret service in the USA during the First World War reported to his superiors in London that President Woodrow Wilson thought of the League of Nations

“as a forum where representatives of all the nations could meet and express their views; but at the back of his mind was the idea that the decisions could be made in private conference between the American and the British representatives and that, when the rest of the world had finished talking, these decisions could be announced. The reason for this was that he believed that English Liberal thought was substantially his way of thinking.”(11)

Wiseman and the Milner Group played an important role (12)  in helping to push the USA into the First World War on the Allied side, but that would not have been possible if there had been an armistice in December  1916, when the Germans made their most significant peace offer (12 Dec.1916) and President Wilson offered a kind of mediation between the two sides (18 Dec.1916).

The ‘coup’ of December 1916
Peace was thwarted, however, shouted down (bebrüllt) as Rudolf Steiner described it, by a sinister and underhand event that happened in London on 6-7 December when the Prime Minister Herbert H. Asquith was forced out of his post in a devious procedure and replaced by Lloyd George who instituted a new 5-man War Cabinet, ‘led’ by himself, which would really run the war. This ‘a very British coup’ was organised by the Milner Group and its allies. The new 5-man inner cabinet included Milner himself, his allies Lord Curzon and Andrew Bonar Law, the leader of the Conservative Party, and another former leader of the Conservative Party, Sir Arthur Balfour, who became Foreign Secretary. Milner brought in one his right hand men, Philip Kerr, to be Lloyd George’s personal secretary. It was in effect a Milner Group cabinet with Lloyd George as figurehead and rhetorical trumpet. The purpose of this rather sordid coup was not only to split the Liberal Party, which it achieved  – the Liberals did split and were not again in government as a united party until 2010 – but also to refuse any German peace offers and fight the war on to the bitter end – unconditional surrender by Germany and her allies. A campaigning group had been formed for this very purpose in late 1915 – the Fight for Right movement. The group included a number of significant individuals such as Philip Kerr on its Executive Committee. The composer Sir Hubert Parry was asked by a member of this movement to write a tune as a setting for the famous words “And did those feet…?” by William Blake; this was to be the group’s campaign anthem. What Parry came up with was the tune that became known as “Jerusalem”. Instantly successful, the music has remained much-loved until today. The stated purpose of the Fight for Right movement was to “(a) refuse all temptations, however insidious, to the conclusion of a premature peace, and (b) accept with cheerfulness the great sacrifices which every citizen must face if the war is to be carried through to a decisive victory.” (emphasis -TB)

One should keep in mind what the consequences of this rejection of peace in December 1916 were in the following years : the two Russian Revolutions and the spread of communism, the entry of the USA into the war, the utter financial indebtedness of the UK to the USA and the loss of Britain’s status as the world’s main creditor, the British government’s Balfour Declaration promising Palestine as a national homeland to the Zionists (2.11.1917), the destruction of Austria-Hungary, and thus of central European stability, the economic ruination of Germany, the growth of fascism, the rearrangement of the Middle East to suit the interests of Britain and France – all in all, some of the worst  of the bad seed of the 20th century. Of course, those on the allied side who rejected peace in December 1916 could not have been expected to know all that was coming, though they actually already intended some of it. The US entry into the war against Germany, for example, had been a goal for many years. One major clue to their intentions was contained in a speech by the Foreign Secretary Arthur Balfour at a dinner of the elite Anglo-American Pilgrims Society in 1917:

“We both spring from the same root…Are we not bound together forever? Will not our descendants, when they come to look back on this unique episode in the history of the world, say that among the incalculable circumstances  which it produced, the most beneficent and the most permanent is perhaps, that we are brought together and united for one common purpose in one common understanding – the two great branches of the English-speaking race?….This is a theme which absorbs my thoughts day and night. It is a theme which moves me more, I think, than anything connected with public affairs in all my long experience”. (13) (emphasis – TB)

This had been the dream of Cecil Rhodes since he first wrote it down in his first will and testament in 1877 and the intention of his successor Lord Milner since Rhodes’ death in 1902, the year of the founding of the Pilgrims Society. The decisions made in December 1916 by the new War Cabinet subtly controlled by Lord Milner have seriously affected not only this country for a hundred years but the world.

Britain and the EU
Nothing was done democratically in that December ‘coup’ and of course, there was no democratic referendum about whether to enter peace negotiations or not. For Britain to leave the EU would risk what is misleadingly called ‘contagion’  -as though the exercise of the people’s will in a vote for national independence is a disease – for other European countries might decide to follow suit and the whole EU construct might then eventually crumble within a decade or so. This would be a nightmare for the Anglo-American elites who have seen their century-long dreams of a transatlantic community or union now finally approaching reality. The ‘European project’ has been an essential component in the realisation of this dream. They will surely do all they can to keep Britain in the EU, hence the so-called “Project Fear” in which all the elite spokesmen, both British and foreign, have been using the mainstream media to outline all the negative things that will or might happen if Britain leaves. The League of Nations and the UN were false dreams that the Anglo-American elites managed to turn into false ‘realities’. They appealed to many people because they contained an element of something that was in tune with modern times, and that is the spirit of cosmopolitanism, or at least internationalism. They were false dreams because they were nevertheless based on national egoisms. The USSR was another false ‘reality’; without US financial assistance, it could not have survived or turned itself into an industrial power (14). By 1941 the USSR had killed far more people than Hitler’s regime but the Anglo-American elites chose to aid Soviet Russia 1941-45 and without their aid, Stalin’s regime would not have survived the Nazi onslaught.  By 1930 the USSR had seemed like a fully functioning system and was approved for its cosmopolitan ideology (“Workers of the world unite!”)  and as a ‘modern’, ‘rational’ and ‘scientific’ society by many western intellectuals. But where it is today? It collapsed after 70 years, as Rudolf Steiner predicted it would (15); it did so because it was not in tune with the spirit of the age. Like fascism, it sought to suppress the individual and created a centralised state system ruled by a dictator and a pliant bureaucracy. Social systems that contradict the spirit of the modern age may survive for a time but as inherently unsound and unhealthy organisms, they will eventually wither. What was Rudolf Steiner’s view of the League of Nations, the dream that was turned into a pseudo-reality by the circle around Lord Milner and their American allies around President Woodrow Wilson?

“With the Wilsonian League of Nations institutions are created which are bound to lead to mischief and constant suffering, when abstract human desires are imposed on facts; with regard to what touches the whole being of Central and Eastern European peoples, one does not create such institutions, but rather, when one frees up something that is free it must lead to peaceful development; if it is unfree, it must lead to warlike conflicts. One cannot create the future condition of humanity through institutions, as Wilson and the Entente want to do; it will arise when one frees up the facts through which it can emerge.” (16)

“The liberated human being alone would be able to lay the foundation for the ideas, feelings and acts of will which have to be operative in a modern League of Nations.”(17) (Bern, 11. March 1919)

Rudolf Steiner did not change his view of the League of Nations. He did not later come to think that perhaps it can be reformed from the inside. That which is founded on false, unsound principles which are fundamentally out of tune with what the times require can only lead to eventual disaster. The same is true of the EU, which is an over-centralised, excessively bureaucratic attempt to create a new federal nation state called (the United States of) “Europe” that will do the bidding of the USA and the economic and military forces that dominate the USA. The peoples of Europe should withdraw from this ‘mixed king’ of the EU and then seek new, organic  ways to work together for the sake of Europe that are truly in tune with the deeper needs of the times. The year after 1916, Rudolf Steiner presented in his thoughts about the ‘threefold social organism’ what those organic ways and deeper needs were. As the thinking behind the EU shows no essential change from the conventional unitarian nation state thinking of a hundred years ago, when the law and the state sought to control cultural and economic life, while the economic life sought to influence and direct the political life (cf. TTIP today, in which major corporations try to impose their will on national law and custom), the need for a threefold social organism is greater, indeed more urgent than it was in 1919-1921. At that time, the threefold movement inspired by Rudolf Steiner failed, because the power of pre-war habits of thinking was still too great, despite the shock and turmoil of the war. Today, our crises – ecological, economic, technological, political, cultural and ethical -  have all become so pressing, and are recognised as such, that we sorely need radical new thinking.

The EU, the goal of a United States of Europe has for 66 years now been an essential part of the “World State” that Anglo-American elitists have been labouring to construct since they first conceived it over a century ago. When Britons consider their options in the EU referendum on 23rd June this year they ought to reflect that this decision is not just about the jobs, pensions, business and migration opportunities of the present generation  or about Britain’s ‘influence’ in the world; it is about the very direction the country may take for decades and even centuries. For 800 years the ruling, originally Viking-Norman elite of England led the country in a process of expansion across the world because it was their will to do so (the Anglo-saxons in England by contrast, had never invaded the Continent nor Ireland). The British people can ask themselves today, as they face this significant moment in their long national story, what was that expansion about? The drive to conquer first the Celtic lands of Britain, then to conquer France and then to expand all over the world? What was behind all that? And now that it is over, what kind of part do they wish their country to play in the ongoing world drama? Many Britons seem to have little consciousness of British history before the time of Henry VIII and Elizabeth I, the time when the English sense of separateness from the Continent began to grow significantly, the time when  religion became, with Henry VIII, identified with politics and the national State. But that was only 500 years ago. Before then, Britain had been part of “Europe” in every sense: geologically, geographically, religiously, culturally, dynastically, militarily, economically. Britain was “made” by Europe, because Britain was and is part of Europe.

In this 21st century it is obvious that America and Asia (notably China) are the great powers in the world, America slowly declining, and Asia rapidly rising. America, where the modern forces of self-centred personality are so strong (e.g. Donald Trump!) and Asia where the ancient forces of the self-abnegating collective are still so powerful (e.g. the Chinese Communist Party). Can Europe play a bridging role between these two great entities that still seem to have so little understanding for each other? And in so doing, can it contribute to world peace and prosperity? It is this writer’s contention that an artificial, unitary federal, centralised United States of Europe on the nation state model, increasingly allied to the USA and bound up with it economically, culturally and militarily, will not be able to play such a role. It will simply not be trusted by the peoples of Asia. For their part, can Britons begin to see that it makes no historical sense to reprise their country’s old part in the world drama – the little guy who expands to become a giant ‘buccaneering’ Gulliver, no matter how much David Cameron and other British politicians urge the British to do so? One scene in Britain’s national act within the great world drama is ending, and another one is about to open. Britain is no longer a great naval power nor does it even have much in the way of a merchant marine anymore. Having been ‘out and about’ in the world for 500 years, perhaps in the next scene, with their many abilities and lessons learned during those five centuries, individuals in Britain can return home to ‘mother’ Europe and help their maternal home to play a truly constructive, bridge-building role in our developing global society. It is, however, a role that is unlikely to be sound if played through the artificial construct of the EU.

Notes
(1)The previous defeat was in 1870-1871, in the Franco-Prussian War.
(2) And of course, a few other ‘dots’ here and there in not insignificant places around the globe, such as St Helena, Gibraltar, the Cayman Islands, the Falklands, to name a few.
(3)There was a Saxon interlude from 1042-1066 – the reign of King Edward the Confessor.
(4) The Anglo-Irish Treaty ended Ireland’s war for independence and established the ‘Irish Free State’ as a self-governing dominion within the ‘British Commonwealth of Nations’ (N.b. not the ‘British Empire’). Northern Ireland was enabled by the Treaty to opt out of the Irish Free State. See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anglo-Irish_Treaty
(5) In the Balfour Declaration (2.11.1917) the British government undertook to “facilitate” “the establishment in Palestine of a national home for the Jewish people”.
(6) http://www.cvce.eu/content/publication/2007/3/7/70207515-8598-4e7f-8166-6953532c85cc/publishable_en.pdf
(7) The Round Table No. 20 pp 772-795. In 1930 Kerr became Lord Lothian and in 1939 ambassador to the USA.
(8) Markus Osterrieder, Welt im Umbruch – Nationalitätenfrage, Ordnungspläne und Rudolf Steiners Haltung im Ersten Weltkrieg (2014) p.1395 (transl. TB)
(9) Osterrieder, pp.1214-1215 (transl. TB)
(10 Osterrieder, p.1395 (transl. TB)
(11) Osterrieder,p.1400 (transl. TB)
(12) See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sir_William_Wiseman,_10th_Baronet
(13) Kenneth Young, Arthur James Balfour, (London: Bell, 1963) p.385
(14) See Anthony C.Sutton, Wall Street and the Bolshevik Revolution (1974) and Anthony C. Sutton, Western Technology and Soviet Economic Development,  3 Vols. 1968-1973.
(15) Rudolf Steiner’s Millennium Prophecies, a lecture given June 12, 1995 in Stuttgart by Heinz Herbert Schoeffler, p.14
(16) Osterrieder, p.1402 (transl. TB)
(17) Osterrieder, p.1404 (transl. TB)

RECOMMENDED !

For sober and thought-provoking comment on this same subject of Britain’s EU Referendum, please see the following two essays by ANDY THOMAS:

EU or Not EU: Deciding With the Inner Voice and

EU or Not EU: Reasoning the Issues 

as well as responses to those essays and further thoughts on the EU vote by Andy at his website: 

http://truthagenda.org/2016/06/07/responses-to-articles-and-further-thoughts-on-the-eu-vote/