Here are two gentle wake-up calls for those foolish enough to believe that the EU Constitution Lisbon Treaty would be the end — for a while — of the EU’s drive to ever-closer union.
Italy is to push for the creation of a European Army after the “new Europe” takes shape at this week’s crucial EU summit following the adoption of the Lisbon Treaty. Franco Frattini, the Italian Foreign Minister, said that the Lisbon Treaty had established “that if some countries want to enter into reinforced co-operation between themselves they can do so”. This was already the case with the euro and the Schengen accords on frontier-free travel, and could now be applied to “common European defence”.
Frattini added this:
If we do not find a common foreign policy, there is the risk that Europe will become irrelevant. We will be bypassed by the G2 of America and China, which is to say the Pacific axis, and the Atlantic axis will be forgotten. We need political will and commitment, otherwise the people of Europe will be disillusioned and disappointed. People expect a great deal of us.
What the people of Europe expected, of course, was a say in their future — and that was never something that the EU’s oligarchs were prepared to give them.
And then (via the Daily Telegraph) there’s this:
Herman Van Rompuy, the man widely expected to be appointed the first President of Europe this week, has called for new eco-taxes and levies on the financial sector to fund a more powerful European Union. Belgium’s prime minister made the controversial proposal, leaked to a Flemish newspaper, during a secret dinner to promote his candidacy hosted by the elite Bilderberg Group. The comments have added to a backlash against Mr Van Rompuy who, while still the favourite, has been identified as a federalist who is being championed as part of a Franco-German “stitch up” ahead a summit dinner that will appoint an EU President in Brussels on Thursday.
Conspiracy theorists will relish the fact that Von Rompuy chose to vent these distinctly sinister ideas at a meeting organized by the Bilderberg group. He is one oligarch with, quite obviously, an exquisite sense of irony.