By Wayne Madsen
Strategic Culture Foundation, May 15, 2011: The history of Europe is one of successive collapsed empires. Some, such as the Roman, Holy Roman, Ottoman, and Austro-Hungarian empires, simply overextended themselves and collapsed due to nationalist uprisings coupled with domestic political and economic inertia. Others, like the German Nazi, Soviet, Italian fascist, Napoleonic French, Spanish, and Portuguese empires collapsed as a result of their military aggression and incessant subterfuge from external forces.
The European Union appears to be suffering from the same symptoms as those experienced by the first category of failed European empires: over-extension, a stagnant and bloated bureaucracy, and economic collapse. As Europe strives to become a more unified and federal union, there has been a backlash from across its member states, with a North-South divide and economic turmoil now threatening to bring down the whole house of cards.
The rise of nationalist political parties in some of the EU’s heretofore staunchest pro-EU member nations and the collapse of some EU national economies due to predatory banking policies and America’s flooding of the global financial system with cheap dollars – a central bankers’ contrivance known as “quantitative easing” -- has created fault lines in Europe that not only threaten to bring down the euro and drive the European Central Bank into extinction but prompt some members to leave the EU altogether.
When Madsen writes:
ReplyDelete"The rise of xenophobic anti-immigration right-wing parties in the EU is not the only political development that threatens the EU..."
he demonstrates a feeble grasp of what is happening in Europe. There's nothing particularly xenophobic or right wing about ordinary working people in countries where unemployment is chronic objecting to the mass inflow of people from the third world which simultaneously drives down wages, drives up housing costs and increases the burden of taxation for new maternity hospitals, schools, roads and every other material need of a fast expanding population imposed on a declining indigenous population.
Further more, now that Strauss-Kahn is out of the race, there is a good possibility that a collapse of the EU begins with the election of anti-immigration candidate, Marine Le Pen, as the next French President. Currently, she leads Sarkozy in opinion polls, and calling her "far-right wing" may not be enough to prevent the French people voting for their own interests rather than the interests of the moneyed elite.
ReplyDelete'Speaking during a visit to the northern city of Lille, Le Pen added that French people were "waking up".
The French want a different kind of politics, they would like to have a proper choice in the second round [of the presidential elections]: the choice between a national project and a global project as represented either by Nicolas Sarkozy, either by Dominique Strauss-Kahn or by Martine Aubry."