EHC4. Germs the ultimate weapon and the European Health Community

Germs have been called the ‘ultimate weapon.’

So when Matthew Pottinger, Deputy National Security Adviser to US President Trump told a global Zoom conference of Parliamentarians that the Coronavirus pandemic originated from the Wuhan virology laboratory, we should take notice. China is using investigations by the World Health Organisation, WHO, as camouflage, he said.

Pottinger was formerly a Reuters and Wall Street Journal correspondent in China. He speaks fluent Mandarin Chinese. His brother is a virologist.

At Wuhan, Shi Zhengli, known as the Batwoman is known to have collected deadly viruses from distant bat caves. The Coronavirus strain in Covid-19 seems to be modified for ‘gain of function‘ that allows it to spread rapidly and genetic modification that requires high technology. In the spring of 2020, Chinese doctors in Wuhan who warned of the coming disaster disappeared or ‘were disappeared‘.

Where did the Chinese learn these high technology and highly dangerous virology techniques?

US agencies were banned from such research at home but then Dr Anthony Fauci of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Disease collaborated with Wuhan on multi-million dollar contracts aimed at bat Coronavirus ‘gain of function‘ research. This makes a virus more infectious for humans and can lead to a pandemic.

War as Fear-mongering

Bio-weapons have an extra attribute compared to other systems — spreading widespread fear and panic across continents. Fear of disease can paralyse societies, lockdown the economy and allow an enemy, who knows the secrets, to gain the supremacy of power, production and prestige.

Bio-weapons are potent. During World War II, atomic weapons killed hundreds of thousands of Japanese. Bioweapons much more. In the Middle Ages, Black Death killed an estimated millions upon millions — an estimated 40 to 60 percent of Europe’s population. If weaponised, such germs would be absolutely devastating.

In today’s world of communications and propaganda, the fear factor can have massive repercussions, far greater than the minimal percentage of extra deaths that may or may not have been involved. Taking into account the psychological warfare causing addictions and suicides, the normal death rates in 2020 may well be below average rates in many countries. In some countries deaths by influenza has disappeared from the ‘official’ statistics. Many ask: why is the West in lockdown?

Of all countries, China has real grounds for concern about biological warfare. It learned from bitter experience about biological attacks last century — as a victim.

This experience may have set that nation’s security goals like no other. The means of defence is a priority. Morale at home must remain high, panic minimised, centralised government firm, and official death rates as low as possible.

Korean War

On 25 June 1950, barely a month after Robert Schuman had announced the French proposal for a European Community, the Korean War broke out.

Allegations were made that biological warfare was being used. By whom?

The Chinese Communists said that the Americans were guilty. Captured airmen confessed, they said. The American authorities riposted that they were victims of ‘brainwashing‘.

The Chinese had good reason to be afraid of biological warfare. And with the USA’s victory over Japan in WW2 and capture of their secrets, they had good reason to suspect the Americans had advanced biowarfare techniques. In WW2 Japan was the foremost power that had developed biological weapons for attack and defensive schemes at home.

In December 1952, when before representatives of European States, French Foreign Minster Robert Schuman proposed the creation of a European Health Community, these allegations were still current.

Schuman’s Purpose

Was the threat of a new wave of biological warfare part of Schuman’s project for a European Community of Health to protect its populations? The battle to get such an idea accepted was formidable but so were the consequences if Europe had no defence against such threats. Such an ambitious project with such a variety of opposers required a steady political hand to navigate it through the waters against nationalism, pharmaceutical cartels, and left-wing propaganda allied to the USSR in Europe and the rising Chinese Communist powers in Asia who threatened French interests in Indochina.

Schuman had suggested the European Defence Community to the French Government in mid-September 1950 just after the outbreak of the Korean War. But the idea provoked heavy opposition, both from Gaullists and Communists, inside and outside Parliament.

Why was such a Defence Community necessary when, in April 1949 western leaders had signed the Treaty of Washington creating NATO, the North Atlantic Treaty Alliance? NATO was the broad picture for defence against the USSR but it did not ensure full European needs and protection of their interests. The EDC attempted to find an efficient, common approach to a common danger by integrating national armies with a European command against a powerful USSR.

Having the necessary political and military infrastructure was of primary importance. But what if the population itself was held hostage by the threat of biological war? How could civilians be protected? If integrating the national units of the army, navy and airforces into European ones was becoming an almost impossible task, how would politicians be able to find a unified policy to deal with complex civilian threats like disease? Without such a policy Europe could easily fall into the chaos caused by the intentional spread of disease exacerbated by undisciplined refugee movements.

The European Health Community seems tailor-made to deal with these life and death issues. A democratically organised defence including even countries outside NATO would provide solidarity against tyrants with bio-weapons.

Schuman, unfortunately, was unable to see the project through to a signed treaty. He was forced out of office in early 1953 by a combination of nationalists, Communists and Gaullists. What he proposed then should be examined to decide what is needed now.

Making war impossible

Mutual defence against biological warfare and outlawing it inside the Community fits in directly with Schuman’s avowed purpose in creating the European Community system. It was designed to cover a number of problems, all within the theme of ‘making war not only unthinkable but materially impossible‘ among its Member States.

Schuman’s Plan for a European Health Community would have resolved not only the major problems of the health of Europeans but provided a mighty shield of protection against biowarfare.

Today it could have resolved Covid-19 problems emanating from the Wuham biosecurity laboratory in China, according to US authorities.

How?

This was the height of the Cold War. The Community drew on the studies that the European population should expect and design defence correspondingly. The properly functioning Community system enables detailed investigation of fact, submitted to intense questioning by interest groups, and the means to take unified action based on a democratic process that engages all strata of societies.

The Community’s purpose was also to provide democratic, transparent and effective defence against chemical and biological warfare, not to mention the health devastation of radiation that might be caused by atomic war.

Ancient biowarfare

In war the population should expect the unexpected. Civil rules are thrown out the window. Romans bathed their swords in excrement or fluid from corpses to infect their enemies with tetanus.

In second century Hatra, near Mosul, the Parthian inhabitants defended their fortress from the attacking Romans by launching pots full of deadly scorpions onto the legionnaires.

And then came an attack with global consequences…

In 1346 the Mongols catapulted diseased bodies into the Italian trading post of Caffa in the Crimea. The Italians fled in the ships and brought the disease to Italy and Europe. The ensuing bubonic plague or Black Death killed between 30 and 60 percent of Europeans.

Spanish ‘Flu, H1N1

In World War 1, Germans tried to cripple the horsepower of the Allies by spreading anthrax or glanders. At the close of the war Spanish Flu wiped out more people than had been killed in battle. It illustrated the debilitating spread of such a disease, a Corona virus. Known as H1N1, it infected 500 million people, a third of the world’s population. Estimates of deaths range from 17 to 100 million. It attacked young people, at first soldiers in crowded barracks. Fear and panic spread worldwide. If the strongest section of society was stricken down so easily, who could escape this disease?

The disease may have been generated from the spread of disease in animals, to fowl and then to humans by the conditions of modern agriculture and the economy. But what if such a disease was artificially produced for military purposes?

Because of these dangers the League of Nations proposed a treaty banning bacteriological weapons. At Geneva on 17 June 1925, 128 nations signed the ‘Protocol for the prohibition in War of Asphyxiating, poisonous and other Gases, and of bacteriological Methods of Warfare.’

That did not solve the problem. Far from it.

Japan’s Plague Polemology

Lieutenant General Shiro Iishi, supremo of Japan’s bacteriological warfare programme.

In Japan it led to a cynical escalation of bio-weapon research. One Japanese officer took a different view to the commonly expressed horror and revulsion at bio-weapons.

Shiro Iishi (later Lt General) argued that if all nations banned such warfare, Japan must do all in its power to create the most virulent germ weapons and investigate the most effective methods for destroying enemies with lethal diseases.

That was the start of the operation known as Unit 731, a hellish atrocity that plumbed greater depths of depravity than the Nazis and Dr Mengele.

Born of a wealthy family, surrounded by servants, Iishi made a world tour studying bio-war research: major institutions across USA, Canada, France, Germany, Italy, Belgium, Poland, Hungary, Scandinavia, the Baltics, USSR, Turkey, Ceylon and Singapore.

In 1931 General Tetsuan Nagata launched a false flag war on China. An explosion ripped into Japanese owned railway property. The military blamed the Chinese and decimated a Chinese military base. It led to the Japanese take-over of mineral-rich Manchuria.

As Japan conquered Manchuria and parts of China, Nagata called on Iishi to begin his experiments on Chinese human beings. Type A research, said Iishi, was attack warfare; type B, defence, could be done in Japan.

Thus began a decade of human experimentation including dissection without anaesthetics, and production of plague, typhoid, cholera and anthrax. Victims included Americans, French, British, Ukrainians, Koreans and Mongolians. Following the systematic kidnapping of some of its citizens in Harbin, the Soviets took aerial photographs of the vast Pingfan installation where they were kept.

Japanese military squadrons released anthrax bombs over China and poisoned waterways. Use against the USSR when war broke out was planned.

Spanish Flu and Swine Flu

Swine Flu was a respiratory disease like Covid-19. It was another form of H1N1. It hit in 2008 and more people were infected than the Spanish Flu but with less lethality (0.01 to 0,03 compared with 2 to 3 % for Spanish Flu.)

The fact that the historic virus of 1919 suddenly raised its lethal head nearly a century later, raised the question about whether it had been experimented with to produce a gain of function of its transmissibility.

About half a million people died, the same sort of figure as seasonal ‘flu. Like Covid-19 it was more infectious than lethal. The obese and those with other health problems are most often the victims.

Figures for mid October 2020 show similar lethality at between 2 and 3%. In September the European death rate for all diseases including Covid-19 were below the average annual death rate. Thus people were living longer! But in October the number of infections started to increase.

Germs and germ warfare

Germs were obviously a main theme of a European Health Community, but what about germ warfare?

There were already well-established health services in all the Member States. A large sector of the population was employed. Many States had their own pharmaceutical firms. Some, like Switzerland and Germany, had extensive international interests that they wished to protect against intrusion.

In the international sphere there were already world organisation like the United Nations and specifically the World Health Organisation, WHO.

WHO and Europe

Should European nations submit entirely to the WHO? Would that help in the needs and interests of Europeans? That is a question that is still relevant today.

To the latter question Paul Ribeyre replied that for Europe, the action of the WHO was too universal to hope to respond to Europe’s specific needs. Besides, he added diplomatically, a Community (composed of nations who were not part of the Soviet bloc) had to deal with their own special characteristics.

The United Nations at this time was the major scene of ideological battling. The Soviet influence inside the UN could seriously interfere with health issues, especially if an agency like WHO was ‘captured’ by the Communists of the Soviet States and its allies.

Ribeyre went further. He said that the Community needed to set up its own form of authority that would deal inside its own European limits. WHO had already proved inadequate to deal with far lesser problems.

An example of UN incoherent policy was that of narcotics. Some countries had an economic interest in the export of narcotics to the detriment of health of others.

It was not possible to gain worldwide consensus. Countries that had a monopoly control of pharmaceuticals or an economically discriminatory policy across borders had a potential tool in the ideological warfare of the time.

Europe had to define its health interests and protect them.

Schuman to the defence

Schuman was at the forefront in creating a defensive structure for France within Europe. He analysed the various means that could be exploited to ignite war across Europe.

After WW2, Europeans reverted to their own forms of nationalism. The military alliances of the war dissolved. The West had combined with the Soviet Union to fight Fascist German and Italy.

In the early postwar years, Europeans faced two major dangers, Schuman said. First was the uncertain future of Germany, presently divided between East and West. Secondly, the Soviet Union, which retained its massive Red Army, was threatening to invade the rest of Europe.

Schuman expanded the Dunkirk Treaty with UK to create with the Benelux countries the Western Union or Brussels Pact. While stressing the preservation of western values such as human rights, it required the means to resist external aggression. Its military committee was the embryo of NATO, the North Atlantic Treaty Organisation.

How should Europeans boost their defence structure and ensure the safety of their citizens?

The European Coal and Steel Community of 1951 had the twin aims of strengthening the means to make arms while overseeing that armament firms did not get into the driver’s seat of government.

The Korean War, required more urgent means to be applied to collective European defence. The invasion of Korea was seen as a dry run for the invasion of Europe by the USSR. However, although the treaty for the European Defence Community was approved in the parliaments of five nations, in France parliament with a combination of communists, nationalists and Gaullists made sure that French approval was suspended. That put the EDC into long-term cold storage.

NATO could provide the defensive umbrella against Soviet aggression. But Europe’s many nations and opposing histories was far different from North America. Europeans had a far more difficult challenge about how to protect themselves in the event of war.

Europeans competed with each other, even wanting to build their own atomic bombs. The question of atomic war was later tackled in the Euratom treaty of 1957.

Germ Wars

But what of Germ Warfare? Protection was evidently something that Europeans had to do for themselves. They could not expect the Americans and Canadians to provide it.

The European Health Community Treaty provides a few possibilities that this could be instigated on a European Community basis with strong Community institutions to safeguard democratic values.

The most obvious gain would be to share expertise and and supplies against all the varied maladies of mankind. Europeans would be stronger and the economy would benefit hugely. But all that could be lost if war broke out or if an enemy tried to infect the population before invasion. So it is logical to surmise that EHC could be the nucleus of means of protection and defence.

Politically this was a very delicate subject. Nations of Western Europe still did not trust each other even though they had fought a war together.

The Democratic Mechanism

How could Europeans get together and trust each other in such a delicate but essential task? The goal to be attained was to create a powerful decisional system but also to find a way to encourage the free cooperation of experts, hospitals, doctors, pharmaceutical firms and people.

While the countries and peoples were different from the first Community of Coal and Steel, the governance was to be the same.

This shows that in the minds of architects of the European Health Community, there was only one model to that had the potential for this. That was the supranational Community and its already know five institutions.

The plans of the structure of the EHC were published in striking detail in 1952. 

EHC3. Sick Europe has lost the plot & Big Picture on Defence

17, November, 2020

Has Europe lost the Plot on Defence? Are Europe’s leaders blind to the Big Picture too? They seem confused about who Europe’s defence should be aimed against.

The plot has been lost for more than half a century! That does not mean the plotting against Europe has stopped. Europe has been under constant deadly attack since the European Community began.

Realistic Defence ‘against external threats’ is not only about classical bullets and tanks, planes and ships, but about preserving western civilisation in the long term– over a span of a century or more to come.

Europeans have failed to see the big picture — which is prerequisite to understanding what the plot is for defence.

Brexit in Defence

The potential rupture of UK and Continental European defence efforts, brought about by Brexit, is just one tear in the larger canvas.

Who gains if UK and EU do not patch things up?

Europe is presently war-wounded and in the sick bed. It is overspending trillions of Euros that will affect its future for a generation or more.

We are presently suffering from the devastation of the Covid-19 plague. The economy has crashed. Major social changes, never considered possible before, have suddenly taken place.

Small firms and workers have lost their livelihood, with often zero chance of regaining a life’s work.

Society has been turned upside down. Some say ‘normal’ will never return.

Families are separated. Old people are isolated. Then, through politicians blind care for national health systems, the same senior citizens are infected in ‘care homes’. The old take by far the biggest death toll.

Normal hospitals, recreation centers, public meetings and churches are closed. What happened to the freedoms that people fought world wars to defend?

Fierce family arguments rage among those that feel the government rules must be adhered to and others who say they are logically incoherent. The rupture of bonds and trust in government may have irreversible consequences for our future.

 

War on Western Society

Disease is war in the human body. It can also be war on society. What have the EU and UK defence agencies done to prevent this disruption, both foreseeing it and presenting policy? The EU has not even tackled properly the security aspects of disease and the cartels in the pharmaceutical industries.

Germs are considered to be the ultimate weapon. But in this case Covid is not a major plague and the death rate is no more than a bad winter. Its effects have, however, been massive.

The Wuhan virus acts as a torpedo of economic destruction bringing with it a wave of seemingly deliberately orchestrated panic and fear. Why is panic out of all proportion to the problem?

To date China, with 1.4 billion people, recorded just 4634 deaths.

Other countries less. Why?

 

Chinese Unrestricted Warfare

Who gains from such devastation of the West? Certainly those who see warfare as multifaceted and a long-term clash for global dominance – a doctrine the Chinese military call ‘Unrestricted Warfare’.

Civilisations like the Chinese think in terms of a centuries-long struggle for mastery of the planet. The ideology predates Mao. They have flexible, opportunistic strategies that use all means to gain it.

The Chinese have moved away from the communist pipe-dreams of Marx, Lenin and Stalin. They are fired up by a new syncretic version that sees world submission to the Middle Kingdom or rather Middle Republic ruled by the dictators of the proletariat.

 

Godless Communism

Soviet communism left the West in an effete state. The West won the arms race but its youth had absorbed Marxism’s poison of materialism. Dialectical materialism was the reason the USSR failed. It is the reason materialistic China will fail. Any society based on materialism will fail.

It was proved false in the Cold War. Why? Because it denies the spiritual world which is the basis for values like freedom of assembly and debate, human rights and sound belief based on the Creator of the physical universe, its mathematical basis and the Originator of all law and moral order. Denial of the moral order brings an inevitable reaction as much as it does in physics.

The Magna Carta and the US Constitution, the European Community, which has brought Europe its longest peace, were not inspired by materialism but directly from our common spiritual heritage.

Atheistic Defeat

The Soviet bloc was shown to be dialectically derelict by Protestants in East Germany, Catholics in Poland and Hungary, and Orthodox and Jews in USSR. The Nazis and the Fascists of Italy suffered the same opposition and the same fate.

Given the lessons of the last century, the West should hopefully begin to understand that it must defend itself against ideologies that have existed for millennia and seek global dominance.

That must include religious ideologies that deny the obvious truths and values of the West. False religious doctrines can be as devastating as false political doctrines.

 

Blackmail of Infidels

Half a century ago the West, especially Europe, suffered devastation as severe as a major war. Its huge global currency reserves were snatched away. Europe was reduced to poverty levels and debt.

The cause? A global cartel applying ideology to change western foreign policy. In this case it was religious. After the failure of Egypt, Syria and its allies to annihilate Israel in the 1973 Yom Kippur war, Islamic oil exporters (AOPEC) placed a total oil embargo on the West. That was the equivalent of a declaration of war.

Why? The European States weren’t involved in any fighting. The Arab States wanted to overturn any pro-Israel policy of the Europeans.

When this jihad stumbled they introduced a four-fold increase of the price of oil. They later quadrupled the price again in 1979.

Europe’s factories closed down.

Motor vehicles ran by horse power not petrol power.

 

Petrodollar Boom and Bust

Has Europe today really recovered from this? Certainly the City of London has taken advantage of the flood of recycled petrodollars picked from millions of European pockets, but for the west it debased and diluted the currencies. It has only resulted in turning the currency into a moth-ridden inflationary rag of what was once solid money.

A dot.com economy based on dot.com imaginary money and bloated stock market graphs will find itself part of a Great Reset.

That monetary illusion makes the west vulnerable to other dangers. Global finance cartels could turn the population into poor slaves. In history it is a well-known technique.

What is the solution? Is it just to make sure that UK and EU retain common defence structures of the EU?

That would hardly be adequate to deal with any of the above assaults on western civilisation.

What is required is an up-to-date Community approach to defence that brings together all democratic interests of all society.

Today foreign and global forces can attack critical aspects of society by using modern means of communications. Defence is no longer just Atomic weapons, hypersonic rockets and airplanes. It is also about money, raw materials, religion, chemicals and disease. It is about space wars and the use of the Moon.

 

Strong Plan

The European Defence Community of the 1950s was agreed in all parliaments except the French (then dominated by Gaullists and Communists). It was foreseen to work in coordination with the Council of Europe and the safeguards of its Convention of Human Rights and Fundamental Freedoms.

That organic link was broken.

How?

Much of the democratic vision that the Community structure offered was attenuated in the Gaullist and nationalist 1960s and 1970s. De Gaulle turned out to be a dupe or a eighteenth century nationalist dreamer.

French Prime Minister Robert Schuman, in contrast, had taken a quite different and highly innovative step to end Europe’s incessant wars and provide a strong common defence.

He said in 1948 that the Community must be based on strong, democratic States that sought the means to end wars between themselves.

He had initiated both the Council of Europe and the Community system with the idea that they should work hand in glove.

Nato was the expansion of the initiative he took in creating the Brussels Treaty Organisation for Continental defence.

He was co-author of the Washington Treaty, in particular article 5.

 

 

USSR won this war

The disinformation battle was won by the Soviet Union.

Eurocommunists, like Altiero Spinelli, sold gullible politicians a fake bill of goods called a federal Europe. It would only be successful, they said, if European political parties abandoned the democratic Community structure and put the Council of Europe and its human rights in the dustbin. What he did not say was written in his earlier wartime manifesto. He wrote that his goal was to ’emancipate the working class’ and abolish private property.

The ‘federalists’ had no idea what institutions to put in place. The only process they knew was ‘dialectical materialism’ and an end to the rich plutocrat classes whoever they were. The self-selecting theorists would be the new ruling class. This federalist fake, starting with the 1986 Single European Act, set back Europe for decades.

The Community system was replaced by the undemocratic EU, run by the closed-door European Council and the secretive Coreper. The powerful EuroGroup, a committee not mentioned in the treaties as an institution, controls the money and hence the lives of many Europeans.

From a defence point of view this is flashing red lights. Lack of real democracy makes Europe vulnerable to outside trouble-makers as well as insidious insiders.

Protecting Democracy

How does that contrast with a democratic Community system?

The European Coal and Steel Community of 1950 provided Europe’s first agency to break international cartels in armaments and other sectors. Coal, steel, arms and banking cartels forced an arms race on indolent governments. That led to World Wars 1 and II. An industrial cartel with major international links to US and other capitalists paid for Hitler.

The later European Atomic Energy Community, Euratom, prevented the outbreak of atomic war amongst its member States.

The European Economic Community / Customs Union provided the means to prevent trade wars among member States and protect all against external threats.

 

The Big Picture

Today we need to regain the big picture.

There is no reason to limit western defence to the present Member States of the EU. The projected European Health Community of 1952 was open to all European States from Turkey to Iceland.

It would have been invaluable in fighting Covid.

Today, Europe’s democratic structure is not fit to provide the debating and deciding mechanism for warfare that might attack on all sides. For example in the UK major parliamentary reform was necessary before the Chinese virus struck. Brexit was the result, not democratic reform of the EU.

For defence strategy and management that indistinct parliamentary voice was stifled by the pandemic. Parliaments and ‘democracy’ became virtual. The press was suppressed.

Democracy defends itself

The needed democratic structure should allow the voices of all people to be heard. They are the ones who can detect early warning signs. Industrialists, trade-unionists and consumers can provide much expert analysis of the threats to Europe. A democratic Europe is its best defence.

The rickety structures of today, shaken by pandemics from China, energy embargoes and extortion from ideological foes, materialism, neo-Marxist propaganda, and arms cartels will not make Europeans feel safe and secure at home.

A return to first principles is urgent.

 

EHC1 Schuman's European Health Community would have saved Europe from Covid-19 Calamity

On 12 December 1952, before representatives of European States, French Foreign Minster Robert Schuman opened a conference on the proposed creation of a European Health Community.

If politicians had listened, Schuman’s Plan for a European Health Community would have solved today’s Covid-19 problems and much more besides.

How?

Robert Schuman, with Health Minister Paul Ribeyre on his right, opens the conference on the European Health Community.

This European Health Community would have given Europeans today a streamlined machine to deal with a broad range of problems.

It was not exclusively for the Europe of the Six. Those invited included Austria and Turkey to Portugal, UK and Iceland in the West.

Today’s Tumult

Today’s virus tumult has already cost untold billions in damage to the economy. It will cost untold billions more.

European top leaders met in an extraordinary five-day European Council in mid-June 2020 to work out a multi-trillion euro plan to rescue the European economy from mortal collapse. The world’s largest trading unit is in danger of falling down as the centre of its historic age of prosperity it had enjoyed since 1950. That’s when the first European Community set Europeans on a path to three-quarters of a century of peace and prosperity.

Today Europe is left with a ramshackle, uneven way for tackling the COVID-19 crisis. The Health Community, in contrast, aimed to provide a democratic and scientific way to reach consensus. It also had safeguards against global politics that today we see wrecking the western economy.

Would it have saved lives?

Yes.

Would the economy have avoided such a costly lockdown?

Yes.

Would it have replaced today’s secretive Councils that extract trillions of extra taxes without taxpayer representation?

Yes. It would have put all financial fiddling under the spotlight of open democratic control.

It would have also tackled the future problems that only some politicians will face Europe in the coming years when most people are closing their eyes.

The Community Thread

The European Community was a revolutionary idea of genius. Instead of war, it brought peace and prosperity. Instead of hatred, it brought trust among nations and cooperation between former foes.

Five short years after WW2, on 9 May 1950, the French Government had proposed a European Coal and Steel Community, ECSC.

What had the Health Community in common with Europe’s first Community?

A lot, it would seem.

Why did Schuman, the Father of Europe, consider that this further Community was required? What have medicine and pills in common with coal, steel, canons and battleships?

Schuman was not motivated by utopian ideas of a Federation of Europe (he denounced it as unrealistic) or by American theories of ‘functionalism‘. He was not interested in adding further bureaucracy, rather the reverse. He was not interested in creating a huge European budget. In contrast to many leaders today, he wished to reduce taxes and make individuals freer and more prosperous.

He worked for one goal.

Stopping War

Stopping the outbreak of a further war in Europe was the key concept behind the ECSC. It succeeded. By 2020 none of the Community’s Member States had had attacked another for three-quarters of a century. No period in Western European history has witnessed such an event.

How did it stop war? Schuman government in July 1948 proposed the formula: a democratic European Assembly — that saw light in Council of Europe and a customs union. The Assembly was instrumental in setting up Europe’s first Court of Justice, the Court that responded to governments’ abuse of power. All States who joined the Council of Europe had to sign up to the Convention of the Human Rights and Fundamental Freedoms. Citizens could take their grievances to the Court, not only to get redress but to stop governments slipping down the slope of autocratic powers against the citizens, like the Nazis and the Fascists.

Armed with this shield to defend democracy, Europeans then benefited from the Coal and Steel Community that outlawed industrial cartels. In the lead up to two world wars industrial cartels had manipulated governments by stoking an arms race. The great national champions of Great Britain, France, Germany, Italy and Russia had been working together with a common design to make the national governments procure more arms, build more ships and exploit their patents for profit.

The European Coal and Steel Community combined with the Council of Europe created three major advances for all Europeans. They

• reinforced Democracy,
• outlawed war between themselves,
• strengthened their common defence against aggressors.

The later European Communities, Euratom and the Economic Community did the same things.

• Euratom outlawed Atomic war between European States,
• The EEC or Common Market outlawed Trade War.

The Council of Europe ensured that citizens’ rights, such as freedom of thought, assembly and religion were respected. And the freedom to criticise their leaders.

That stalwart defence of democratic values and human rights is now clear to all who wish to study European history. But what was behind the European Health Community that Schuman proposed in 1952?

Its Purpose and Compass

French detractors called the Coal and Steel Community Schuman’s ‘Pool‘ as if the only function was to share the resources of coal and steel. The European Health Community was therefore dubbed ‘the White Pool‘ to contrast it with the black pool of coal.

Was the proposed Health Community merely going to share or pool white bandages, garments and pills?

Far more!

If that had been the motive then there was no need for the elaborate draft treaty that had been prepared. It tells the whole story. Disease is as devastating as war. Health is the way to prosperity.

Schuman’s supranational idea of a European Community was focused on two goals:

Primarily his motive was to create a means to stop war. Schuman wrote:

‘We must remove any motive for a war {between Europeans Member States} suppressing it so no one has the temptation to undertake one.’

Secondarily, the peace-enhancing Community would seek out all means to create benefits for all by drawing on a single market, shared contributions and strategic outcomes.

Paul Ribeyre, the Minister for Health who worked on the project with Schuman, declared that the health of citizens was the first consideration of the State, to which all other values must be subordinated. The first duty of the Statesman was to assure the health of citizens because the foundation of the State depended on it.

But there is far more.

The agreement in the Cabinet of the French Government on 24 September 1952 was merely a first step to broadening the domain of better health to a wider geographical boundary. It extended far beyond France, far beyond the Europe of the Six of the black pool of coal and steel.

On 16 September M. Ribeyre presented his plans to the French Cabinet who gave him approval to take it to members of the OEEC, Organisation of European Economic Cooperation. This was the body set up following the US Marshall Plan, now called the OECD, the Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development.

Ribeyre invited Member States to join in this common effort of well-being. Besides the Six, it included Austria, Denmark, Greece, Iceland, Portugal, Sweden, Switzerland, United Kingdom and Turkey. Ireland was the only State to decline.

The broad compass of States indicated the extent and importance of the plan.