Europe's Prophetic Plot To Take Over The World
Pastor Dale Morgan
Europe's Prophetic Plot To Take Over The World*
By Gideon Rachman
Financial Times
Published: October 12 2009 03:00 | Last updated: October 12 2009 03:00
At last! Ireland has passed the Lisbon treaty and now the European Union
can move forward with its plan for world domination. Within months, the
EU is likely to appoint a president and a foreign minister. Tony Blair
is limbering up for a run at the top job. A clutch of Swedish, Dutch and
Belgian candidates are jostling for the post of foreign minister.
Fortified by its new foreign-policy structures, the Union is staking a
claim to be taken seriously as a global superpower. David Miliband,
Britain's foreign secretary, says: "It shouldn't be a G2 of the US and
China. There should be a G3 with the European Union."
But what happens in Brussels - or even in trilateral dealings between
the US, China and Europe - is a sideshow. The real key to Europe's
global ambitions is the Group of 20.
Jean Monnet, the founding father of the EU, believed that European unity
was "not an end in itself, but only a stage on the way to the organised
world of tomorrow". His successors in Brussels make no secret of the
fact that they regard the Union's brand of supranational governance as a
global model.
The realisation that the G20 is Europe's Trojan horse struck me at the
G20's last summit in Pittsburgh a couple of weeks ago. The surroundings
and atmosphere were strangely familiar. And then I understood; I was
back in Brussels, and this was just a global version of a European Union
summit.
It was the same drill and format. The leaders' dinner the night before
the summit; a day spent negotiating an impenetrable, jargon-stuffed
communiqué; the setting-up of obscure working groups; the national
briefing rooms for the post-summit press conferences.
All of these procedures are deeply familiar to European leaders - but
rather new to the Asian and American leaders whom the Europeans are
carefully entangling in this new structure. Watching an Indonesian
delegate wandering, apparently carefree, through the conference centre
in Pittsburgh, I felt a stab of pity. "You don't know what you are
getting into," I thought. "You are going to waste the rest of your life
talking about fish quotas." (Or, this being the G20, carbon-emission
quotas.)
The Europeans did not just set the tone at the G20 - they also dominate
proceedings, since they are grossly over-represented. Huge countries
such as Brazil, China, India and the US are represented by one leader
each. The Europeans managed to secure eight slots around the conference
table for Britain, France, Germany, Italy, Spain, the Netherlands, the
president of the European Commission and the president of the European
Council. Most of the key international civil servants present were also
Europeans: Dominique Strauss-Kahn, head of the International Monetary
Fund; Pascal Lamy of the World Trade Organisation; Mario Draghi of the
Financial Stability Board.
As a result, the Europeans seemed much more tuned into what was going on
than some of the other delegations. Puzzling over the new powers given
to the IMF to monitor national economic policies in the Pittsburgh
conclusions, I was interrupted by an old friend from the European
Commission, who recognised the language immediately. "Ah yes," she said,
"the open method of co-ordination."
But does any of this really matter? After all, EU summits and statements
have become a byword for tortuous and ineffective machinations that
often have little real-world effect. The process that gave birth to the
Lisbon treaty started eight years ago. Even after Ireland's Yes vote,
Lisbon could still be derailed by recalcitrant governments in the Czech
Republic or Britain.
However, the saga of Lisbon can be read another way. Once the EU gets
its teeth into an issue, it never really lets go. Processes started at
EU summits - which often seem minor bits of bureaucratic paper-shuffling
- often turn out to have important political implications, years later.
The same could well be true of some of the decisions made in Pittsburgh
- such as the language on tax havens and bankers' bonuses.
From the very start, the EU advanced through small, apparently
technical, steps focusing on economic issues - the so-called "Monnet
method". Monnet himself believed that Europe would be built through "the
common management of common problems". Is this so very different from
President Barack Obama's recent appeal for "global solutions to global
problems"?
Of course, there is still a huge gap between the capabilities of the
modern EU and those of the G20. There is no army of G20 civil servants
to match the bureaucrats of Brussels. There is no body of G20 law and no
G20 court to enforce the group's decisions. Nor is there much immediate
prospect that the US or China - both countries that zealously guard
their sovereignty - will cede any serious powers to a G20 law-making body.
Yet the kernel of something new has been created. To understand its
potential, it is worth going back to the Schuman Declaration of 1950,
which started the process of European integration. "Europe," it said,
"will not be made all at once, or according to a single plan. It will be
built through concrete achievements, which first create a de facto
solidarity."
The G20 now has some achievements and a burgeoning sense of solidarity
between the members of this new, most exclusive, club. Who knows what
comes next?