1, January, 2021
Half a billion people are denied democracy. How can they fix it?
In December 2020, Brexit reached its multi-thousand page paroxysm. The documents, covering not just trade but identity, travel and nuclear war, have never been seen by Britons or by Continental Europeans. They will dominate our future for years ahead. Nearly every aspect of life will be dictated by these unseen bureaucratic inventions.
Behind this seizure of power by bureaucrats, lie years of deceit and duplicity by European leaders, subverting the most precious aspects of Europe’s newly gained heritage: democracy and peace.
That same month of December, Valéry Giscard d’Estaing, the draftsman the Constitutional Treaty, died at the age of 94 years. After having served as minister of finance under General de Gaulle, he had been, at 48 years, the youngest president of France in the tumultuous 1970s.
Among a life of many political milestones, what should be considered his greatest achievement? What does it tell us about Brexit?
Giscard typifies why Brexit happened. He shows the main problem facing Europeans in 2021. Open Democracy was systematically buried by politicians. They saw themselves as patricians of their own politburo. Taxpayers’ pennies became their personal pocket money. They wanted to net it and spend it as they wished. They wanted to decide how in private. A trillion euros to boot!
Giscard should be remembered as the co-author of the Constitutional Treaty, the antidemocratic forerunner of the Lisbon Treaty. He is also, surprisingly, the Statesman who exposed the hypocrisy and the legal Black Hole of the Lisbon Treaty. The change from a Community system of Robert Schuman to a neo-Gaullist system involved the destruction of fundamental human rights legislation and the ultimate exclusion of the United Kingdom from its secret councils.
It can be called a conspiracy against democracy. Giscard willingly participated and unwittingly exposed the fraud to the public in widely published syndicated press articles.
Post Brexit Pact
The UK-EU 1246 page agreement and its hundreds of ancillary documents actually uncover the fundamental question of European democracy that Giscard tried to hide.
It is deep down there.
What do Europeans mean by Democracy? Schuman designed five institutions to articulate this.
Europeans need to fire them up to work again.
Community System
The aim of the Community system was to stop war. No more, no less. First duty is to identify those people who want to make a profit from war. They shamelessly made money from spilt blood.
Then, secondly, identify the key sector. Schuman had made a deep analysis of coal and steel cartels who were also the Masters of the arms trade. They created an arms race at the turn of the century that led to World War One. They controlled major banks.
These and other international cartels made profits from WW2.
Schuman’s first Community created democratic institutions that brought such maleficent masters of war before criminal justice. It worked. War between Community Member States stopped in 1951 with the approval of the Treaty of Paris.
Further Communities were created to avoid atomic war and trade war.
Key Sectors
Note that the Community system is focused on an economic sector that has these lethal properties. It does not attempt to create a Constitution for Europe. It does not attempt to control people or governments. It provides instruments for the people to stop having internal, fraternal wars.
The positive result is that cross-border trade, innovation and specialisation can flourish. This provides an economic boost to the economy like no other measure.
Note: the Community system:
- deals with one agreed sector at a time,
- provides open, democratic institutions to agree to management.
- It is not a top-down system,
- nor does it create a United States of Europe based on government control. Nation States retain their sovereignty. People boost their freedoms.
Plot to destroy the Community of Europe
Who were its enemies? Who opposed the Community system of democratic cooperation in Europe?
Nationalists who said that no foreigner should influence their glorious national policy.- Gaullists who belong to the above category with the exception that de Gaulle should run the Continent, freed of so-called Anglo-Saxons, as its new Charlemagne.
- Federalists, idealist dreamers, who wanted to create a Federal United States of Europe in spite of centuries of history that showed that the European people would not vote for a new Constitution that replaced all their history and past achievements. Why was there support for the scheme for a European Constitution? Historically many plans were formulated over a millennium or more. All failed. The leaders wanted power. They forgot the people.
- Fourthly were EuroCommunists who wanted to see a victory of the USSR over the USA. They could then set up a dictatorship of the European proletariat. They would be the new elite Politburo who would both rule and set up the new institutions of government. They would exclude both the Community system and the Council of Europe’s Human Rights Court.
Altiero Spinelli was the most vocal euroCommunist activist. Spinelli’s ‘anti-fascist‘ plans have all the attributes of Communist disinformation. They would block Europe’s growth for generations and allow the USSR to catch up. What would the USSR desire most? Remove the economic motor of Europe, the EEC Common Market treaty, and replace it with something that obviously would not work, something that had been proved not to work for centuries. Remove Europe’s defensive mechanism in the Coal and Steel Community and Euratom. Block any criticism of ‘dialectic materialism‘ by reducing the Human Rights Convention to oblivion. Then Communist influence could spread from USSR-occupied East Germany and elsewhere and assert its power across all the Continent. That was Spinelli’s deceitful message. The Federalists were his ‘useful idealists’.
This was the plot for centralising power that was foisted on politicians starting with the 1986 Maastricht treaty. PM Margaret Thatcher later regretted she was fooled by these ideologues. She wanted a broader single market. They wanted top-down control via back-room, non-Community institutions dealing with Home and Foreign policies.
Limits to Delusion
A Constitution for Europe was then cooked up in the 1990s. It appealed to the vanity of many political leaders. The newly minted ‘European Summit‘ conference gave them a role and celebrity they did not have in the Community system. Like moths around a candle, they loved the bright lights of the TV cameras. They wanted to make their Summits permanent.
Many leaders supported some form of ‘United States of Europe’ where they, the leaders, ensconced in a ‘European Council‘, would decide the fate of the Continent.
How would it run? They didn’t know. Valery Giscard d’Estaing was given this dossier.
But such an inflexible constitution for Europe based on turning the people to serfs, obedient to their whims was doomed to fail. Giscard saw that expanding a national Constitution into a European one would not fly. France often changed its constitutions. Each time they had a referendum. But he knew that could not happen for all the Continent simultaneously. No Constitution plan of his would win the approval of all the people.
Hence he tried a different tactic, a treaty. Politicians tried to camouflage it. It was to be a Constitutional Treaty. Giscard was immediate and direct to debunk any illusion about it being a ‘Constitution.’
‘It is a treaty, like other treaties. Constitutional is an adjective.’ he said repeatedly. Legally it was like the Nice and Amsterdam treaties before it. The deception was in the name.
Genius of Schuman
Over a lifetime, Robert Schuman, the greatest political thinker of our time, analysed all these top-down plans. He saw why centuries of previous plans had all failed. They prioritised the means to give the maximum of power to the leaders. Schuman thought the freedom of individuals and their ability to fight corruption of leaders should be the first consideration.
In 1948 his government in France suggested something entirely different — a European Community founded on the rights of individuals and human rights. It reflects the natural law, not power politics.
The foundational document all national governments signed was to affirm that the Community was only open to countries where people were ‘free to choose‘.
That Charter of Interdependence is Europe’s Magna Carta.
He proved he was right in practice.
In the postwar atmosphere where all politicians, think tanks and diplomats thought wars and destruction would continually break Europe again in pieces, he carefully put forward a Plan the like of which the world had never seen before. It allowed two parts of Germany to reunify in peace. It kept the Communists, their fraudulent ‘People’s Democracies‘ and the USSR at arm’s length.
Europe enjoyed its longest period of peace and prosperity — ever.
Unlike all other plans, Schuman started with human rights.
EuroCommunist strategy
That proved the inadequacy of all previous, top-down plans. They were all shown to be impossible. Schuman called them all utopias, after the work of the Sir Thomas More. They assumed the leaders knew the way of peace. But they too were often corrupt and criminal. The rest had self-deceiving ignorance and egotism.
So what did Europe’s enemies do when the European Community not only created a peace system but the greatest prosperity they had seen in history? What happened to the Communists long-laid plans to occupy all of Continent rather than just bite off half of Germany and all of Eastern Europe?
Communists joined with ‘idealists‘ to persuade European politicians to take up a failed scheme that gave them more power. Thus they would expend their energies on a scheme that centuries of history had proved impossible: controlling the excesses of human nature.
The Communist parties in the West decided that if they could frustrate growth in the West and with the Communist capture of East Germany, Poland, Czechoslovakia, Hungary, Bulgaria and Romania they could call on the power of the Soviet Union to do the rest.
Thus they joined forces with the utopian ‘Federalists’ to create a Constitution. After all, isn’t that how all nations asserted themselves on the world scene.
The plan of the EuroCommunists like Altiero Spinelli was designed to distract and diverge this movement in Western European plan to build peace and prosperity, based on Schuman’s European Community system.
Successful Foundation
There were three Communities that dealt with stopping wars:
- European Coal and Steel Community, 1951 that allowed energy and steel resources to be used for legitimate defence and hauled industrial cartels that created the Arms Rings that led to World War One and Two.
- Euratom, 1957, that made an internal atomic war impossible in the Community Member States, and help create energy independence.
- European Economic Community, 1957, that with its Customs Union outlawed a Trade War between Member States.
Communists (the largest party in the French and Italian parliaments) working with nationalists saw that other such Communities were stopped. That included:
- European Agricultural Community
- European Defence Community,
- European Political Community,
- European Health Community.
In spite the success of the first three communities, the federalists and the Communists drew together for support so that they should create something different. Both wanted a top-down approach, a Politburo.
For that they needed an apparatus that froze out the Council of Europe and its Human Rights for the citizens.
Look! No Poliburo!
All the above seven Communities were democratic. They all had one thing in common compared with the perverse plans of Gaullists, nationalists and Communists.
None of the Communities ever had any institution equivalent to a centralising European Council or a secretive conference of Heads of State and Government.
There was good reason why.
Power-hungry politicians saw things differently. They asked: where is the means where I can direct the levers of power according to my plans and my ideology? The Community is based on pragmatism, experimental wisdom. Centralising politicians and federalists want to engineer the population to fit their own preconceived ideology.
At the end of this road was a cul-de-sac called their Constitution.
That road led to both Hitler’s Reich and also the Dictatorship of the Proletariat by the USSR Communist Party. Europeans should have had more sense.
The Laeken Lark
The people should not listen uncritically to the conference communique of government politicians. For free people to allow such self-appointed leaders to claim undefined authority in another sphere is a big mistake.
It was not the way the Communities were fashioned. Goals and means were defined in open debate in the Council of Europe and other European institutions that Schuman had had a hand in forming.
In 2001, the ‘Heads of State and Governments’ — a Gaullist invention — met behind closed doors at Laeken, Belgium. The 75-year old Giscard was chosen by the federalist Belgian Prime Minister Guy Verhofstadt and his colleagues to lead.
Giscard had grand ideas. He was not a popular choice.
Reality eventually dawned on the project framers. A Constitution requires not only a document but public assent. No State was willing to give up its own national powers and subjugate its history to destruction by others. Some were formerly enemies. No State was willing to renounce its own constitution to be a cog in a European one.
Neither the governments nor the peoples were ready for such a move. No one in Europe saw the faintest hope of all the people of Europe assenting to any such document in a public referendum.
The Treaty Fraud
So they changed the target. They created a fraud. They decided to create top-down control by subterfuge. They would use the same method that Schuman had used to obtain the three Communities: treaty negotiation.
Unfortunately for them it was legally and operational unsuitable to create a Constitution. For a start, a Community was subject to the Strasbourg Court of Human Rights. Schuman designed that to protect individual citizens from such political abuse. A treaty requires popular assent.
Giscard was forced to turn the ‘Constitution‘ into a ‘treaty‘. A re-write of the EEC would demolish it and replace it by a take-over text.
Would this pass public scrutiny?
No. The French rejected it. Then the Dutch did the same with more force. The line-up of Member States ending with the UK looked likely to do the same. So the leaders called for a pause in the referendums.
Reaction of the ‘democratic’ leaders?
So what did Giscard think of ‘government of the people by the people and for the people‘?
‘The rejection of the Constitutional treaty by voters in France was a mistake that should be corrected,‘ Giscard declared, in London of all places on 28 February 2006.
He said that a second attempt at forcing it through should be made after the French elections of 2007, disdainful of the fact that other countries had or were about to vote it down. This is a typical Gaullist idea that treats the less-populated countries as ‘children’ needing France’s guidance.
As for countries with larger populations like United Kingdom, should any one let them have a referendum? Everyone knew the result in advance.
The European Council Con
European leaders were not willing to let a further promotion to their power over the people go away. So behind closed doors again, they decided they would keep the condemned ‘Constitutional Treaty‘ but give it another name.
They would also disguise its shape. They presented something that did not look like a Constitution or a Treaty. It was plain gibberish. It was a list of amendments to the already existing EEC treaty. ‘Remove the first sentence in the third paragraph and replace it with the following… etc’
A document that no one could understand! It was a deliberate policy. Those who authored it said so. And there would be no referendums if that could be prevented.
What did the new treaty — the present Lisbon Treaties — look like when it was presented to the public in 2007? It would be a list of disjointed amendments to the existing EEC treaty.
People protested.
It made no difference.
The Irish insisted on a referendum.
Horror of horrors.
They voted NO.
It made no difference.
They were told to vote again until they said Yes.
Other Europeans who were fiercely against it were ignored. Prominent among the Resistance were the British. A referendum for them was ruled out. Why? Giscard knew the answer. Both to why a referendum should be ruled out and what the answer would be if they had one.
The British government tried to clamp down on any decisive public voice on the incomprehensible draft. They had enough of a majority to prevent it going any further. Unlike the Irish, there was no constitutional right to have a referendum if some autocrat wanted to change centuries-old custom and tradition. Parliament dictated the outcome. And independent MPs had now been bridled by the party ‘whips’.
Other Member States used their parliamentary majorities to force the unpopular, undemocratic Lisbon Treaty through without asking the people. The Hungarians, for one, did it so rapidly practically before they had received the treaty in Hungarian.
So the Lisbon Treaty was not only the twin of the Constitutional Treaty that had been rejected but it was forced into being by underhand, undemocratic methods.
That makes it is obvious why the Community system is different. It is democratic. The EU is not. The Community does not have a European Council as part of its institutions.
Imagine, the politicians in the European Council, acting as usual, behind closed doors, deciding that they should bring in a dictatorship of a new de Gaulle or a new Napoleon. Maybe the German government was led by someone who admired Hitler. He had strong-armed the other less powerful States to follow his lead. De Gaulle tried to bring in such a system by changing the European Commission into a political secretariat. His Fouchet Plan failed.
Once politicians agree in private they act like a cartel and spread mischief. As all the government leaders in the European Council must by definition have a majority in their own parliaments, they could get them all to agree to such a proposition. National democrats would be told (as they were in fact), ‘you must pass this because it has been democratically decided in the (secret) European Council, with our other democracies.’
So Europe ends up with a pseudo-democratic dictatorship.
Without such a secret political cartel-like European Council, the European Community was able to deal with the problems of economic cartels. But who knows who was influencing various heads of government? Their party or they themselves might be politically beholden to a lobbyist group, or even a power like Chinese Communists. An economic or financial cartel may control or blackmail the political cartel.
A political cartel is called a Politburo.
No Referendum, Brexit neutralised
Then Giscard let the cat out of the bag.
Giscard admitted that the Constitutional treaty had been written by politicians alone. They came from the European Parliament, national parliaments and governments. No mention of ‘ordinary people‘.
He wrote: ‘The resulting draft constitution was a new text and replaced all previous treaties.‘
That was exactly the aim of the EuroCommunists and other politicians who favoured a top down Politburo to rule Europe, rather than a broad democracy of free people.
But the Constitutional Treaty was brought down by the people. How did this corpse get revived? Giscard was quite frank. It was less the politicians themselves but the bureaucrats, the lick-spittle, unaccountable plotters inside the European Council.
‘For the Treaty of Lisbon the process has been very different. It was the legal experts of the European Council who were charged with drafting the new text. They have taken the original draft constitution, blown it apart into separate elements, and then attached them, one by one, to existing treaties. The treaty of Lisbon is thus a catalogue of amendments.
It is impenetrable for the public.’
He added:
‘There are, however, some differences. Firstly the noun “constitution” and the adjective “constitutional” have been banished from the text, as though they describe something that is inadmissible.’
All mention of the symbols of the EU had been suppressed, including the flag and the European anthem. This was done because the British among others objected that the aim was to create a European State. The effect of this ‘suppression‘ was more theoretical than practical as we can see today.
The Obvious No
Giscard concludes by saying the changes in the Lisbon Treaty and the Constitutional Treaty that he fathered are minimal.
But when the public had a half a chance to give their opinion at the perversion of democratic justice, the treaties were rejected. So Giscard is making a plain admission that the European political class is trying to ‘fool the people.’
Why were no referendums allowed when the Lisbon Treaty was forced through parliaments controlled by these unscrupulous political cartels?
Giscard is also quite frank. It was to stop the United Kingdom having a referendum on the Treaty itself. That would sink the whole project because everyone knew the British with their traditions of democracy would not stomach it. So the British would have to forgo their promised referendum. And so would everyone else (except the irascible Irish who would be told to vote twice or more until they agreed.)
The voice of the people cannot be bottled up for ever. The British never got their referendum on the obnoxious Lisbon Treaty. They got one on something totally different. That was Article 50 of the Treaty. But that is invalid because a referendum cannot be held on article in an illegitimate treaty. The treaty itself requires a referendum to activate it. Without it the treaty cannot be recognized in constitutional law.
The End of Democratic Europe?
Is the exit of the United Kingdom the end of British participation in European democracy?
Not at all. We have just reached the intermediate step, the painful and avoidable intermediate step, foreseen in the book: Don’t Brexit, Fix it! Copies of a version of this book were given to Prime Ministers Theresa May and Boris Johnson as well as the French and German leasers and President von der Leyen of the European Commission.
- Brussels needs to have open government as the treaties actually say.
- The British need to act as democrats when they cross the Channel and not go along with autocratic neo-Gaullism.
Written in 2016 just after the illicit 23 June referendum, the book says that Europeans have two alternative paths. They can enter a long period of ‘Painful Negotiation first‘. Or they can clarify Human Rights issues first. Treaties need to be openly analysed and discussed by the independent Council of Europe. All Community treaties were. Europeans need to reassert their Human Rights and Fundamental Freedoms in the Strasbourg Court of Human Rights.
- Is secret government, installed against the public voice legitimate?
- Are several thousand pages of the post-Brexit pact, dumped on the public on 24 December 2020 legitimate?
- Should the public be able to decide on these papers which will affect not only all trade but every aspect of their lives?
- Who will be the judge and jury of all these thousands of outcomes?
This is precisely the reason Robert Schuman initiated the Council of Europe — to safeguard Europeans from autocrats.
It was a Frenchman, Jacques Abbadie who wrote in 1684:
One can fool some people, or fool all in some places and times, but one cannot fool all people in all places and ages.
