by Jacques Cheminade

The following statement was issued by Jacques Cheminade, head of the LaRouche movement in France, on March 13.

What is presented to us today under the name of "Europe" is in reality a new financial Sparta. The two pillars of it are: a financial empire guided by a central bank not subjected to the people and a military structure integrated into an Atlantic alliance extended at the scale of the planet. If you don't realize at all what is coming down on us, it is so, for the simple reason it was intended to be so. In July 2007, the vice-president of the European Convention that elaborated the Simplified European Treaty (SET, now named the Lisbon Treaty), Giuliano Amato, declared in London that "They decided that the document should be unreadable--if it is unreadable, it is not constitutional, that was the sort of perception." (BBC News, July 23, 2007).

Besides the declarations of what the Financial Times called "the most anglophile Italian politician," one must take into account the declaration of Luxemburg prime minister Jean-Claude Juncker, who declared in 1999 to the German weekly Der Spiegel (No. 52), that "We decide on something, and then we put it out and wait a while to see if anything happens. And then, if there isn't any big outcry or revolt, because most people don't understand what's been decided, we keep on going, step by step, until there's no turning back"

With that same method, Nicolas Sarkozy forced our parliament to ratify a treaty that they had to adopt or drop, depriving our parliamentarians of their right of amendment or initiative. Why such a hurry? In the context of the current financial disintegration provoked by subprime crises, monoliners, credit derivatives, investment funds (KKR, Blackstone, Carlyle...), the financial oligarchy cannot wait.

Robert Cooper, formerly one of Tony Blair's foreign policy gurus, who now is running directorate E of the Council of the European Union in charge of economic-military affairs, openly fronts for it. Cooper, like Giuliano Amato, is a member of the Ditchley Foundation out to destroy the Europe of the Fatherlands of Charles de Gaulle, and the spirit of the peace of Westphalia that guaranteed peace among nations-states.

All this for the triumph of what Cooper calls "a new kind of [liberal] imperialism, one acceptable to a world of human rights and cosmopolitan values," but in reality based on a principle of "double standards," applying "the law of cooperative security" among members, while applying "the law of the jungle" to the rest.

Amato, for his part, claims the Middle ages are the model, abandoning sovereignty to "faceless entities: NATO, the UN, and finally the EU"... which means to "a future of princes without sovereignty."

Their plan is not to develop the world, but to control it. The comeback of France into the integrated command structure of NATO proposed by the Sarkozy government has to be seen as a key element in this "new order." The Lisbon Treaty stipulates that the EU's clause of mutual military assistance shall be compatible with "those commitments agreed on inside NATO which remain for its member states the foundation of their collective defense and the body of their application."

So why blabber? French Foreign Affairs minister Bernard Kouchner, as reported by Le Monde on March 11, leaves no doubt on the issue: "There is a complementarity among both structures... European defense and Atlantic anchorage are two aspects of one single defense and security policy."

What kind of NATO are we talking about? The "new NATO," which is to be shaped by the issues on the table for the upcoming April Bucharest summit: the "first strike" preventive use of nuclear weapons, the end of decision-making by majority vote, the implied end of right to veto, and the use of force without UN authorization "if a great number of lives are endangered."

In short, this implies that France surrender to an empire using financial and military blackmail. The time is ripe for us to present to France, Europe, and to the World, an alternative project of an alliance for progress among sovereign republics.