Loading...by Patrick J. Buchanan – April 21, 2003
If you would see the model for the World Government that is to rule your grandchildren, look to Europe. For it is rising there.
At the Athens summit of the European Union, where 10 new members were brought into the fold, ex-President Giscard of France, who is drafting the EU constitution, endorsed the idea of a powerful president of Europe who would serve for a five-year term.
A president of Europe who can stand up to the president of the United States is the brainchild of Tony Blair. And Blair’s eyes are on the prize, come 2006. But his dilemma is this: The price of his becoming president of Europe is surrender of his country’s sovereignty.
Unless and until Britain gives up the pound, and accepts the euro as its currency, she cannot be a full member of the new Europe and Blair cannot be president. But before Britain can give up the pound, Blair must call a referendum and persuade his people to give up their currency and, with it, control of their economy. That referendum will pit him against Margaret Thatcher, the Tories and a majority of Britons, who do not wish to give up any more freedom or independence to Europe.
Moreover, if Britain marries Europe, the special relationship with America is over. As the Bible teaches: A man cannot serve two masters. Either he will hate the one and love the other, or love the one and hate the other.
What is happening to Europe is making prophets of those who warned about the hidden agenda of the “free traders.”
Since the early 19th century, classical liberals have preached that free trade leads to free nations and freer peoples. The theory has not survived its collision with reality.
Look at what has happened to Europe as the barriers to trade have come down. As the European Coal and Steel Community of the 1950s evolved into the European Economic Community (“Common Market”), then the European Community, then the EU, the people of Europe have become less free, less independent, less self-governing.
On top of the national governments of Europe has been added a new layer of transnational government. A new and more distant socialist bureaucracy has arisen to be piled on top of the old state bureaucracies. With this difference: These new bureaucrats have no loyalty to any country.
Moreover, as the EU has evolved, it has expanded its powers, intruding in areas formerly the province of parliaments: labor law, social policy, budgets, environmental policy, immigration policy.
Comes now the demand for “harmonization.” This means that all rules, regulations and laws written in Brussels are to be imposed upon all the nation-states of the EU. Parliaments of sovereign nations are becoming as impotent as Rhode Island is to the dictates of the U.S. government and Supreme Court.
What is the driving force behind the New Europe? It is the will to power of politicians and a bureaucratic elite that has no allegiance to any nation, only a driving ambition to dominate, first, Europe, then the world. Like U.N. bureaucrats from ragtag Third World countries, they seek a larger canvas on which to paint.
Why have the peoples of Europe surrendered their independence and sovereignty to bureaucrats over whom they have no control? Because they are being bribed with a promise of cradle-to-grave security. The promise of the new regime is this: We will guarantee you a job, unemployment insurance, medical care, pensions for your old age, and free time to enjoy the bread and circuses of modernity: TV, sex, sports, films, travel.
It is the bargain Jacob offered Esau – a mess of potage in return for his birthright. Though libertarians cannot see it, global free trade is the lure leading us ineluctably into the trap of World Government.
Every free-trade zone ever established – whether by the U.S. Constitution, the customs union of Bismarck or the Common Market – has called into existence a powerful new regime that has displaced the old state governments that entered the zone. As creation of a national economy requires a national government, a transnational economy, as in Europe, requires a transnational government. And a Global Economy means World Government.
In preventing that, patriots of all countries are allies, and the elites of many countries, not excluding our own, are adversaries. Nor is the battle lost as long as this Republic exists. And the elites of globalism know it. To them, we are the enemy.