Spectator's Journal: A Phony Alliance
Hitchens, Peter
EC ramareol soU`re*A by Peter Hitchens A Phony Alliance The U.S. fights for Europe while the E.U. fights America. T he USA has a strange habit of fighting the wrong enemy and ignoring the right...
...Worse, those nations in Europe that are wary of joining this monster get no sympathy from the U.S., which seems rather to like the idea that "Europe" should have one address, supposedly so that it is easier to deal with...
...Will their purpose be to fight an enemy, to defend the frontiers of the E.U., or simply to bring about the final withdrawal of American forces from Europe...
...This has the unintended effect of keeping millions of people permanently unemployed because nobody dares to hire them on account of the difficulty of firing them and the costs of paying for holidays, health, and other compulsory extras...
...They are very hard, the Americans...
...Only two of those alphabets are currently recognized in the European Union, which is an unequal alliance between a resurgent Germany and a declining France, together with their client states and a hesitant and isolated Britain...
...There have been other striking indications of the "European" fear of the United States...
...If he went further in any direction, the problems would be even greater...
...A man who loses his job in Dublin cannot simply sell his house, put all his goods in a U-Haul truck and drive to Athens or Milan...
...It is almost certainly designed to do so, as the new currency will prove unmanageable without far closer integration of taxes and economic policies...
...The E.U...
...It has just set up a rival to the dollar...
...Will London still be in a position to maintain its uniquely friendly military and intelligence links with Washington...
...It seems to be the settled view of the State Department that the E.U., which until recently was supposed to be nothing more than a trading bloc, should be encouraged to solidify into a superstate...
...Francois Mitterrand, the putative Resistance hero who also received a medal from the collaborationist Marshal Petain, said in October 1994: "France does not know it yet but we are at war with America...
...This system has much in common with the stifling autocracies that ruled the continent for most of its history, quite distinct from the English model of parliamentary democracy, common law, free speech, and free market, which has flourished even more in the USA, and which is referred to disparagingly by many E.U...
...If you include the Caucasus region, make that five alphabets...
...They are voracious, they want undivided power in the world...
...also excludes the Slav nations and—no matter what you may hear— is likely to carry on doing so...
...partners" for years, a French publication which specializes in strategic information expressed fears that British relations with the U.S...
...Almost everything is protected, especially jobs...
...Perhaps because they fear a revival of violent extremism, European statesmen believe their way is safer and kinder, despite the waste and idleness which result...
...It has not been a political unit since the fall of the Roman Empire...
...and other English-speaking countries, as well as security treaties between them, meant that the information gleaned from this espionage "threatens the security cooperation of the 15 European Union member states...
...So far, the Europeans have no armed forces to call their own, or even any serious political institutions...
...DEREKCRANE.COM 13EST NEWS SUPPLEMENT ON THE WEB" The American Spectator • July 1999 63...
...And as the historian Timothy Garton Ash has pointed out, Europe has changed its borders more often than Africa in the last hundred years...
...His book The Abolition of Britain will be published this fall by Quartet Books, London...
...a war without deaths but a war to the death...
...The agricultural handouts are so generous (to agri-business) that one year's tax-financed largesse could pay to cover the entire E.U...
...This is a European country, and it is not up to the Americans...
...politicians as "the Anglo-Saxon model...
...The E.U...
...The language, laws, schooling, and culture are so different that he would need to undergo a four-year immersion course to cope when he got there...
...The truth —that the military operations against Serbia have been almost entirely American—has been deliberately obscured by the pretense that it is a joint American-European assault under the NATO flag...
...Yet, having recovered from one foolish mistake, American conservatives moved on to make another...
...Perhaps the lingering memory of the White House in flames in 1813 will always keep British and American conservatives further apart than they ought to be...
...As well as more languages than I can count, Europe has three distinct alphabets...
...Do not imagine that there will beany thanks for the current U.S...
...effort in the Balkans, even if it succeeds...
...This is a multiple fantasy...
...Conservatives, sadly, have not been immune to this, though they have a better record than liberals in learning from their mistakes...
...Even then, its boundaries enclosed only part of the continent, which has no clearly defined limits but is generally thought to extend from the shores of the Atlantic to the disappointingly unspectacular range of hills known as the Ural Mountains...
...Following revelations that the British government has been spying on its "E.U...
...growth and consolidation of a new and resentful rival: the European Union...
...W here will that resentment lead...
...We have to recall everything they have done for the last 30 years against the Concorde ....Their propaganda, their manipulations their lies...
...Other important questions arise, as to who will then inherit control of the nuclear forces of France and Britain, and whether these two countries will surrender their seats on the United Nation's Security Council in favor of a single European state...
...Now, weakened by that cultural revolution, the USA squanders its prestige in futile combat with puny tyrants in the Balkans and the Middle East, while actively encouraging the PETER HITCHENS is a columnist for the London Daily Express...
...Is this really what Americans want...
...land mass in top-quality 62 July 1999 The American Spectator carpet...
...The interesting thing, from an American point of view, is what holds the whole thing together...
...Now the new president of the European Commission, former Italian Prime Minister Romano Prodi, is talking openly of European armed forces...
...and author of The Tainted Source, a study of the origins of the pan-European idea: "Many French politicians say that the euro will stand up to the dollar and thus enable Europe to stand up to the Americans in foreign and trade policy fora ....It is also very common for French politicians to defend the 'European' social model against the perceived social disintegration of the USA...
...But these are coming...
...In the early years of Soviet global power after World War II, many in the U.S...
...Yes, it is a permanent war, a vital war, an economic war, Do not imagine that there will be any thanks for the current U.S...
...Laughland also has an interesting collection of remarks made by Continental politicians in unguarded moments , when they felt free to say what they really thought...
...T his anti-Americanism is especially strong because France has until recently been the senior political partner in the Franco-German pact, to make up for Germany's economic dominance...
...The founding of the euro will force the creation of political mechanisms to control the new European Central Bank...
...T he USA has a strange habit of fighting the wrong enemy and ignoring the right one...
...Much of the recent diplomacy over the Balkans has been designed to encourage the notion that there is a political entity called "Europe" which should learn to police its own problems...
...Shortly, it hopes to become a nuclear power too, presumably absorbing the French and British weapons into a single strike force under "European" control...
...The whole edifice defines itself in opposition to America...
...ludicrously saw Great Britain and her bankrupt empire as a more dangerous rival than Stalin...
...During the long decline of the USSR, they failed to see the power of the cultural revolution that was trashing thought, literature, and morals in the West's universities, churches, and media...
...Almost everything is subsidized, even rabbit-breeding...
...They wanted to send Turks to bombard the Serbs...
...Given the recent events in Serbia, it is interesting to recall that, when the Yugoslav war broke out in June 1991, the then-president of the European Council, Jacques Poos, insisted: "If one problem can be solved by the Europeans, it is the Yugoslav problem...
...Many leading continental politicians, including Helmut Schmidt and Valery Giscard d'Estaing, have stated repeatedly that the whole point of the euro is to help turn the European Union into a single state...
...Without American forces, NATO is a military weakling...
...America's interventions are more likely to lead to resentment than gratitude, just as the French still resent the Anglo-American liberation of their country in 1944...
...This belief is reinforced by a resentment of American culture, especially strong in France, where the language and cuisine are seen to be under threat from Americanisms and hamburgers...
...According to John Laughland, a leading British critic of the E.U...
...The exposure of the real and repellent nature of the Soviet empire, by such writers as Arthur Koestler, together with the struggle for Berlin and the string of coups and takeovers across Eastern Europe, eventually persuaded those on the right that Moscow presented a profound and serious threat not just to American power but to everything America stood for...
...It is interesting to wonder who will decide how, when, and where they are deployed...
...If this project succeeds, it will alter the transatlantic relationship profoundly, and probably for the worse...
...is a socialist superstate in the making, a return to the gradual, non-revolutionary, bureaucratic top-downwards socialism of Europe before Lenin and the Bolsheviks held their 1917 coup d'etat in Petrograd...
...effort in the Balkans, even if it succeeds...
...Within that space run a number of frontiers, some economic, some physical, some linguistic, some religious, all of them making nonsense of the idea that therecan be a United States of Europe as there is a United States of America...
Vol. 32 • July 1999 • No. 7
