How long before we have a second Versailles Treaty?

Simon Jenkins: 

The EU refusing Britain's request for a regulatory optout last week – no different from the long indulgence of France's farmers – was a distraction. The summit was supposed to restructure the euro to avert "disorderly collapse", and it failed.

It failed for two reasons.

First, because the summit was not called to restructure the Euro but to gain time and postpone catastrophe by giving the impression of planning to restructure the Euro.

Meanwhile, the pressure builds out at sea, as the tsunami continues to gather strength.

Europe's leaders have no idea what to do, frankly, and neither has anyone else, apart from unbundling the Euro, and there are too many egos invested in it for that to even be on the table. That is what is wrecking Europe's and the world's economy.

They and their predecessors who cobbled together their beloved Euro made (a) a complete hash of it and (b) a rod to beat the backs of, initially, the PIGS and eventually and by accident - oops - the Euro's efficiently-functioning economies, chiefly Europe's primary funder, Germany. Which in due course will be required to 'adopt the position', walk the perp walk and fork over a monstrous fine. (But not until the French presidential election is over.)

Last Thursday we saw a bunch of fantasists desperately hoping to placate the implacable: the realists of the markets whom even President Sarkozy and the mad diehard Marxists of the European Parliament cannot wish out of existence.

Second, the summit failed because there was no possibility of success because that requires Germany voluntarily to destroy its own democratic constitution and hand over to unsociable functionnaires its people's hard earned money and taxes (which someone else will set) for ever. Hell will freeze over before the German people will allow any of that. They will not stand for the grand theft of their savings and permanently high taxes levied by foreigners in order to support undisciplined Euro-peripheral nations.  The Bundesbank and Bundesverfassungsgericht have already said as much and they are more powerful, severally and together, than Merkel's coalition or any other government of Germany.

The desperate, out-of-their depth politicians dining together in Brussels last week hoped to generate sufficient smoke and twinkle a sufficient number of mirrors to con the unconnable markets into believing in fairies by postponing reality until such time as they could bring to birth a new 27-nation Treaty Of Ever-Closer Union. Because that would make everything shiny and new and, er, economically viable.

That 'Treaty' really is one for the fairies. If it is ever drafted, the peoples of Europe's historic nations will reject it, assuming, of course, that their masters tell them the truth which can by no means be assumed.

"Europe's nations should be guided towards the super-state without their people understanding what is happening. This can be accomplished by successive steps each disguised as having an economic purpose, but which will eventually and irreversibly lead to federation."

Thus Jean Monnet, French Founder of the European Movement, at the League of Nations. 30 April 1952.

*** 

"The people must be led slowly and unconsciously into their abandonment of their traditional economic defences..."

Thus Peter Thorneycroft, British Conservative Party Chairman 1975-1981. Chairman of 'Design For Europe' Committee, 1947.

But if the people do know what is being done to them by Europe's political class, they will take to the streets and throw them down. Any national government proposing to abolish its people's right to choose who governs them, forcing them to have unelected, permanently un-sackable, foreign governors, thus abolishing democracy once and for all because of its inherently inconvenient untidiness, will reap an uncontrollable whirlwind.

Speaking of More Equal Pigs (MEPs) the most grotesque among them are debasing themselves by howling in rage at the mere suggestion that they consider the nakedness of the faux-emperor at whose trough they fatten themselves, warmly insulated from the world in privileged luxury of which the Greeks, whom they have made destitute by their arrogance and deceit, can no longer even dream.

But if - IF - the floundering poseurs around last Thursday's Brussels dinner table, abetted by the More Equal Pigs of the EU 'Parliament', should cobble together some new Treaty, it...

... will now be a German-led [Jenkins means a German government-led] "unequal treaty" which will impose a battery of budgetary and fiscal disciplines on Greece, Italy, Spain and possibly France, in the hope of calming markets. This in turn means decisions over budgets, taxes, benefits and transfers taken away from elected national parliaments and put in the hands of ministerial councils and Brussels commissioners. Such decisions would carry no local legitimacy and risk being unenforceable.

Jenkins again:

Already governments in Ireland, Portugal, Greece and Italy that sought outside help and austerity in return have been toppled by their electorates. Under the new "treaty" such disciplines will be doubled and trebled, and blamed on one country, Germany. 

It must be likely that electorates will refuse to submit. Bond markets will seize up, public spending collapse, unemployment and emigration soar and streets descend into chaos. It has already happened in Greece.

Pro-treaty Europeans may regard such alarmism as "swivel-eyed". But such passions in European history should never be taken lightly.

So, when either the Geman or the other peoples of Europe refuse such a prospect,  and France finally turns on Germany seeking retribution - it will not be called that - and offers to 'defend' those small nations whom it will accuse an 'overmighty, inflexible* Germany' of damaging for its own wicked ends... 

And then there will be a Treaty. Signed at Versailles? But will that be before or after the war?

Poor bloody Germany. Poor bloody Europe.

With any luck, I'll be dead before it happens.


Unpick the bloody Euro, you criminally insane bastards, before you and your naive, ahistorical, antidemocratic fantasies drag us all to perdition.