The origins of the EU – a new booklet by our Chairman

Because of my work, it was the European Common Agricultural Policy which puzzled me from 1972 onwards. The whole thing was so utterly strange in comparison to the common sense system we had before. It was not until 2002 when I received a copy of “European Economic Community”, published in Berlin in 1942, that I really grasped the ideological framework behind it. I translated the introduction and lead papers which form part of this pamphlet.

In 2017 I recorded an interview with Lord Walsingham, who was a Third Secretary in the Foreign Office of 1950 when Britain stayed out of the European project. He revealed that British Intelligence then knew of the hostile intent towards Britain of former fascists and Nazis in the post war French & German governments – their plan of subsidising each other’s heavy industries when in competition with Britain, to weaken our defence capability and assure their eventual ascendancy over the continent of Europe.

Like Lord Walsingham, the perspective of years leads me to the view that today’s EU is not “all a Nazi plot” but that it was heavily influenced from its beginnings  by such authoritarian ideas and that has contributed to  the alien ethos with which British people have never really been at home.

On a recent visit to Greece, I found that all sorts of people blamed Berlin rather than Brussels for the terrible austerity which EU policy has forced upon them. Back home, I wrote about  this to a Greek colleague, a business executive, pointing out the ideas of the German government of 1942 about management of European currencies in the post war era. The exchange rate of the euro gives Germany the export advantage of a currency of relatively low value, compared with  Germany’s highly capitalised, productive economy. For Greece and other “Club Med” countries with smaller, less developed resources, the euro exchange rate is far too high for them to be able to export their way out of their predicament.

My Greek friend replied “It is clear now to many Greeks and Europeans that Germany is responsible for the economic plunder of Greece. What happened to Greece was not an accident but a carefully made plan on the part of the always patient, ruthless and very scholastic Germans. It seems that they learned well their lessons from the two previous World Wars. This time Germany managed to conquer Europe without firing a single shot. Unfortunately Greece now (as it was then too) is suffering more casualties than any other European country….”

That is how things are seen in Greece today.

Edward Spalton

Edward Spalton

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Lost and Found in translation

This letter from our Chairman appeared in the Derby Telegraph

Sir,

Like Percy Brown (7 March), I found a certain humour in the idiocies of the European Common Agricultural Policy which created the wine lakes, beef, butter and grain mountains. Previously we had a very common sense policy which allowed the food of the world to come here without customs duties. Suddenly the taxpayer and the housewife were made to spend far more to make food dear than we had previously spent to keep it cheap.

Nobody could tell me where this strange policy originated and I did not get a definitive answer until 2002 when I received a copy of a German book from the Forties, called “European Economic Community” where the framework and principles were set out concerning the new neighbourly Europe in the making. It was a compilation of papers by very senior people in law, diplomacy, industry, politics and economics.

With great effort, I translated the two key papers – a difficult job because the introduction was in very stiff academic language and the lead paper in a more popular journalistic style.

More recently I met Lord Walsingham, who had been in the German Department of the Foreign Office in 1950 during the Attlee government when the European Coal & Steel Community was formed. I recorded an interview with him. He told me that British Intelligence was well aware that the Community treaty between France & Germany contained secret clauses that each would subsidise the other’s heavy industry to knock out Britain and assume dominance of Europe. It seems to have worked rather well.

The video is linked to an article which you can Google at Edward Spalton Witness to History. Lord Walsingham is the witness. I am merely the scribe. It also links to my translation.

“European Economic Community” was published in Berlin in 1942 and the lead paper was delivered by Reichsminister Walther Funk – Minister for the Economy and Post War Planning.

 

Yours faithfully

 

Edward Spalton

Edward Spalton

Edward Spalton

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Witness to History

LORD WALSINGHAM (now aged 92) was a Third Secretary in the German Department of the British Foreign Office in 1950, when the foundations were being laid for the first stage of what is now the EU. It was then called the European Coal & Steel Community. He was Secretary of the tripartite study group (The UK, USA and France) which  cancelled all denazification to rebuild Germany against communist Russia for the Cold War.

This link is to a youtube video where he recounts his experience (approx 35 minutes)

Whilst the project was ostensibly about securing peace in Europe, British intelligence was well aware that there were secret additional  agreements in the Coal & Steel Treaty between Germany and France to weaken British heavy industry, eventually to undermine Britain’s defence capability so that the European project  would dominate Europe unchallenged in the long term.

Britain did not join the Coal & Steel Community but neither did it make public the ulterior, anti-British intentions of the “Fathers of Europe”. At the time Britain was  heavily indebted to the USA which was backing the EU project and funding the European Movement through the CIA.

The European Coal & Steel Community was intended to lead to a united Franco/German European army but the French National Assembly voted that down. Jean Monnet, Schuman and colleagues decided that they needed to proceed more gradually as the nations of Europe were not then ready to assent to their  dissolution in a single European polity. The European Economic Community was founded on this principle of small, repeated inexorable steps towards “ever closer union”. The process was called “Engrenage” – like a ratchet, it was irreversible. The Treaty of Rome set this up in 1957.

The name “European Economic Community” is highly significant. As a businessman, Monnet well knew the importance of brand loyalty. Every politically aware German of the Nazi era would recognise the  “Europaeische Wirtschaftsgemeinschaft”,  set up to build integration between the countries of Europe after the Nazi victory of 1940 and widely publicised in a collection of papers of the same name, published in Berlin in 1942. Translations of the introduction and main paper are available here. Apart from some descriptions of contemporary events, there is nothing in them which has not come out of the EEC and the EU in the last sixty years. The mindset and geopolitical world outlook are virtually identical.

The post war EU’s biggest project by far, the Common Agricultural Policy, was decided in 1962 but it was based on the clear guidelines, laid down twenty years before in Nazi Berlin (link here).  Now, of course, the Nazi EEC turned out to be mostly propaganda because the pressures of war overtook and destroyed it – but many of its intentions, including dominance over central Europe have been carried into effect under the EU flag , since the fall of the Berlin wall.

The Nazis were adapters rather than inventors of the project, which had been on official German minds for generations. On 9 September 1914, the Imperial Chancellor Bethmann Hollweg wrote:- “Russia must be pushed back as far as possible from Germany’s Eastern frontier and her domination over non-Russian vassal people broken… We must create a Central European Economic Association through common customs treaties to include France, Belgium, Holland, Denmark, Austria-Hungary and perhaps Italy, Sweden and Norway. This association will not have any common constitutional supreme authority and all members will be formally equal but in practice under German leadership and must stabilise Germany’s dominance over central Europe”.

Monnet, Schuman and colleagues added the “common constitutional supreme authority” in the form of the European Commission but the project is still highly congruent with the remarkably stable, long term objectives of Germany’s political class since the 19th century.

In late 2016 the German government allocated 4 million Euros to an investigation into the influence  of Nazi personalities and policies in the post war era.

Edward Spalton

Edward Spalton

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