The European 'dream’ has finally collided with reality

[Pastor Dale Morgan]

Perilous Times

The European 'dream’ has finally collided with reality

The drive towards a European superstate has had its flaws exposed at last, says Christopher Booker.


The collapse of the euro: The most obvious place for disintegration to begin was the single currency

Christopher Booker
By Christopher Booker 9:00PM GMT 20 Nov 2010

Twelve years ago, I stood on the plinth of Nelson’s Column in the pouring rain, addressing a crowd of 10,000 people. We had marched through central London in the biggest ever demonstration against Britain joining the euro, a course then being daily urged on us by the BBC, with the aid of such Euro-zealots as Michael Heseltine, Chris Patten, Kenneth Clarke and Sir Leon Brittan.

At the time, Mayor Ken Livingstone was calling for the removal of the two statues of Victorian generals that stand on each side of Trafalgar Square. I therefore jokingly began by suggesting that, if they were to be replaced, this might be with a very small statue of John Major, for negotiating Britain’s opt-out from the euro at Maastricht, and a much larger statue of Sir James Goldsmith. It was the intervention of his Referendum Party in the 1997 election that prodded all the other parties into promising a referendum, thus stopping hopes of Britain’s entry dead.

It was only when, a few years later, I began work on a comprehensive history of the European “project” that I fully came to see how, for 50 years, it had only ever had one real agenda. As was laid down by its founding genius, Jean Monnet, the sole underlying purpose behind everything it has ever done has been to work stealthily – accreting its powers step by step – towards the creation of an integrated “United States of Europe”, ruled by one supra‑national government.

Monnet realised in the mid-Fifties that the only way to realise his goal was to work towards it gradually, through a series of lesser goals, each of which would serve to focus the energies of his “Europe-builders” until it was time to move on to the next.

The first was to set up the embryonic institutions of his European government by disguising them as necessary for the creation of the Common Market. Once that was achieved, the focus moved on to creating a “Single Market”, as an excuse to take further powers to the centre. The next focus became “Economic and Monetary Union”, complete with that supreme symbol of integration, a single currency. Finally, the Europhiles could move on to the mighty goal – which took them eight years – of giving Europe a “constitution”, thus completing the dream conceived decades before,

When my co-author Richard North and I were compiling our history of how all this had unfolded, The Great Deception, we concluded that the “project” was eventually bound to unravel, simply because it was built on too much deception and self-deception. The most obvious place for disintegration to begin was the single currency. As shrewd observers recognised right from the start, this could never last, because of the essential contradiction between the low interest rates demanded by its stronger economies and the temptation this would give their weaker brethren, such as Greece, Ireland and Spain, to go on a reckless spending spree.

It would be fun for a time – but no longer would they be able to defend themselves from the consequences by allowing their currencies to devalue. The inevitable result would eventually be an almighty bust, which is what we are seeing today: the slow-motion collapse of what was invented as the ultimate symbol of a united Europe. Like all such collapses, it will be extremely painful. But it marks the time when Monnet’s fantasy at last begins to collide with reality.