An outsider’s view of the European Union
Recently Young Americans for Liberty, a libertarian organization that I write for, published the second issue of the Foreign Policy Handbook, a magazine on foreign policy written by and for students.
However, the fact that it’s “for students” does not mean that others aren’t encouraged to check it out! (Who says you need to be in school to be a student, anyways?)
My article in this issue, “The European Union: Eurocrats and the Eurosphere,” discusses a few problems that I see with the European Union. The article begins:
During the 19th and early 20th centuries, European governments came under attack for their colonial policies in the African continent. One of the primary claims made by pan-Africanists and other anti-European individuals was that such European policies denied the peoples of Africa the right of self-determination. For example, the Declaration of Rights of the Negro Peoples of the World, drafted at a 1920 convention of the Universal Negro Improvement Association led by Marcus Garby, stated, “We believe in the self-determination of all peoples.” Through policies ranging from direct rule via military force to indirect rule via forced economic dependency, European governments were holding African countries back from determining their own course.
While the modern “third world” certainly is not free from the tethers of traditional western powers, the situation has greatly improved from what it was a hundred years ago. However, the modern European governments now are directly denying the right of self-determination not to the peoples of other continents, but to the peoples of Europe itself. Considering the rhetoric surrounding the European Union, such as a commitment to “sustainable development” and the goals of “peace, prosperity and freedom” for the people of Europe, this is a sad irony indeed.
Other articles in this issue of the FPH include:
- “The War on Terror and Sun Tzu: Is American Strategy Sound?”,
- “Why Conservatives Should Hate Our Foreign Policy,” and
- “Law or Hoax? Disproving Democratic Peace Theory.”
Check out an entire digital copy for free here.
By Elliot Engstrom
Learning from Dogs 
Dear Eliott: With all due respect, your piece is sheer anti-European propaganda. You make a grave accusation against Europe without one single fact supporting it. Just look: protesting Greeks are not burning European flags, instead they are accusing the USA (and Obama!) Everybody in Europe knows that the USA want to keep on going with its predatory financial institutions, the essence of what went wrong with modern finance.
Europe’s business is not just to have no trade barriers (as the EU has with a large part of the planet). Europe is actually not a business, it’s home for more than 500 million people.
Thanks to the EU, these 500 million people all live in democracy, so your outrageous statements exhibit just the violence of basing one’s discourse of the opposite of observed facts. Or maybe what you mean by democracy is the American supported Greek colonels which the EU threw out?
You do not exhibit one fact to support your point of view. You exhibit the all too usual American right wing hatred for Europe, which has led to the USA stabbing France in the back in 1939-1940: the USA supported the Nazis in the war against Poland and France in September 1939 (by sending crucial war supplies, especially anti-knock compounds the Nazis had run out of for their aviation).
The Federal Budget of Europe is 1% of GDP. It’s too small, obviously. In the USA, it’s 17%. Europe is made of independent states, some extremely powerful. Not all are nations, and some have disintegrated, or are disintegrating, as the European Union itself is becoming ever more important. The conversations between the various European entities are very complex.
Everybody serious in France argues that European-wide powers in finance, fiscality and economics have to be augmented considerably, right away. They already were, leaving behind the Lisbon Treaty.
It is unfortunate that young Americans who have not learned the most important notion from WWII are still at what led to the stabbing in the back of democracy by the USA in 1939-1941. Namely the incapacity to distinguish democracy from national-fascism.
“In two years Germany will be manufacturing oil and gas enough out of soft coal for a long war. The Standard Oil of New York is furnishing millions of dollars to help.” (Report from the Commercial Attaché, U.S. Embassy in Berlin, Germany, January 1933, to State Department in Washington, D.C,)
The I.G. Farben files captured at the end of the war confirm the importance of technical transfer of USA technology for the German Wehrmacht:
“Since the beginning of the war we have been in a position. to produce lead tetraethyl solely because, a short time before the outbreak of the war, the Americans had established plants for us ready for production and supplied us with all available experience. In this manner we did not need to perform the difficult work of development because we could start production right away on the basis of all the experience that the Americans had had for years.”
In 1938, just before the outbreak of war in Europe, the German Luftwaffe had an urgent requirement for 500 tons of tetraethyl lead. Ethyl corporation of America was advised by an official of DuPont that such quantities of ethyl would be used by Germany for military purposes. This 500 tons was loaned by the Ethyl Export Corporation of New York to Ethyl G.m.b.H. of Germany, in a transaction arranged by the Reich Air Ministry with I.G. Farben director Mueller-Cunradi. The collateral security was arranged in a letter dated September 21, 1938 through Brown Brothers, Harriman & Co. of New York. In September 1939, as Germany was fighting the desperate Poles in the east and an offensive of 45 French divisions in the west, another 300 tons of tetraethyl lead were requested by the Luftwaffe (which would have had to stop flying otherwise).
I could go on like this. On this Memorial Day, the USA ought to ask itself why it did not support democracy, on the side of Britain and France in 1938, 1939, 1940, and until, or even after Hitler declared war to the USA on December 11, 1941.
Instead, powerful parts of the USA supported the Nazis, to the point the German generals were not sure they should go all out to destroy Hitler, as many of them believed that Hitler was actually supported by the American leadership. That used to make Hitler laugh (especially as the Nazi dictator received American oil as he fought democracy, from 1936 to 1941, a fight he could not have done without said oil).
The path to supremacy leads to wisdom, not propaganda and dirty tricks. Stabbing in the back work only that long.
http://patriceayme.wordpress.com/
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