Somebody has leaked to the Associated Press a secret document Van Rompuy was circulating to Merkel, Brown, Sarkozy and the rest. In it the Belgian 'president of Europe' calls for the EU to claw away more economic power from its member states. He wants the EU to take ever more power over planning national policies -- and making sure the EU has the muscle to make sure the EU-directed national policies are carried out. In the document -- which was meant to remain unpublished -- Van Rompuy suggests a new regime of stronger 'economic governance.' As the AP interprets the paper leaked to their reporters, Brussels would have more oversight of how member nations run their economies, 'going far beyond its current authority to supervise budgets.' None of these new powers is included among all the new powers given to the EU institutions in the Lisbon Treaty. However, the Lisbon Treaty gives the EU institutions the means to seize them. Well, of course: the treaty was no final settlement. It was just the latest manoeuvre towards the final goal -- supreme government of member states by the European Union. That is not news to anyone who has followed Lisbon. But this is new: the new shame that not a single head of state or government walked out of the Solvay library in disgust when such proposals were presented. One would not have expected Sarkozy or Merkel to walk out, of course. They announced their support for EU 'economic governance' the week before the summit. The reason they support it is that they reckon France and Germany would be in charge of it. But why didn't the leaders of other, less imperialistically-minded countries -- for example, Sweden, Poland or Finland -- walk out? The shame is total. None of them walked out. Today Reuters has a report out that Greek opposition MPs are demanding the Germans should pay reparations for their Second World War occupation of Greece before criticising the country over its fiscal deficits. 'How does Germany have the cheek to denounce us over our finances when it has still not paid compensation for Greece's war victims?,' one opposition MP told the Athens parliament. 'There are still Greeks weeping for their lost brothers.' Six MPs from a left wing party urged the government to press the Germans for war reparations. Meanwhile, a communist MP said the Germans had no right to criticise Greece for massaging its national accounts in order to get into the euro: 'As if we didn't know that Germany inflated the value of its gold reserves to get into the euro,' he said. Small note: apparently 50 years ago Germany did pay reparations to Greece -- 115m deutschmarks. What these1960 d-marks would be worth in 2010 euros I have no idea, but this amount seems not to have been enough to stop 'Greeks weeping for their lost brothers.' What I do have an idea about is that this attempt by Germany to force some Lutheran work ethic and Frankfurt-style book-keeping on the Greeks is going to be -- except for the financial repercussions -- fun, fun, fun. Means nothing. Still, the press conference afterwards produced a little episode of shame worth noting. Olli Rehn, a Finnish politician who was commissioner for enlargement in the last European Commission, and who has just taken over as monetary affairs commissioner in the new one, happened to muse aloud on the different dates for financial reporting in different countries (the topic had switched to questions about how Eurostat, the commission's statistical office, could keep an eye on off-balance sheet tricks in countries such as Greece -- see my Feb 11 post, 'Did Goldman's help cook up the big fat Greek lie?') Rehn mentioned that 'the country I know best' did its financial reporting at a time that was unusual compared to the practises in most European countries. A minor point -- until you realise the significance of this Finish citizen, this Finish politician, refusing to speak the name of his homeland, 'Finland,' in public. I understand the commissioners are trained up to do this: to avoid any mention of their own countries, ever. The form of words they are told to use if they can't help mentioning their own home is 'the country I know best.' It is as though mentioning one's nationality is a kind of crassness here, something, like an embarrassing personal disease, that ought not to be mentioned in polite society. If so, that wouldn't be the first time that the forced 'Belgianisation' of the Walloon and Flemish peoples into a single, artificial state has resulted in killer chaos. A similar crash occurred in 2001, leaving eight dead. This morning's deaths -- at least 18 dead so far -- show the dispute over languages is not some quaint throwback. Language is how people live, it is who they are. It matters. The Flemish people are determined they will not be overwhelmed by the pressure to lose the identity of their ancient Flanders fatherland. The trains this morning were passing through a Flemish area, so of course the local rail workers were speaking Dutch, not French. God knows the French-speaking ruling classes have tried for long enough to break them of their determination. Take the attempts by Flemish nationalists to fight against the Germans in the Great War. The 5,000-strong officer corps of the Belgian army was made up almost entirely of Walloons, that is, natives of French-speaking Wallonia, the southern area of Belgium along the French border. Yet 80 percent of the enlisted men were Flemish. The officers refused to command the men in Flemish. They humiliated the Flemings and favoured Walloons. Humiliation was indeed a speciality, learned by some high-ranking officers in earlier brutal dealings with the native people of the Congo. According to Paul Belien in his history of Belgium ('A Throne in Brussels'), General Jules Jacques had committed crimes against humanity in the Congo: 'General Jacques was a sadist who in the Congo had aimed, as he put it, for "the absolute submission or the complete extermination of the natives."' An example: 'Private Jules Billiaert, who did not understand a French order, was told that "in Africa even the n****rs understand their orders" and was sentenced to one week in gaol for insubordination.' Language confusion over orders led to deaths among the Flemish soldiers. And on it went, until many disillusioned Flemish soldiers were rounded up and put in prison camps and sent to French penal colonies. Belien has a quote from a doctor sent to inspect one of the prison camps in which Flemings were being held by the Belgian authorities: 'They do not know when they will be released. They live in filth, they do not get half the food ration needed to survive, many suffer from consumption, many go insane. Many die. It is awful. It is a disgrace. Our prisoners of war get better treatment in Germany.' Enthusiasts for the European Union hold up Belgian as an example of the future they see for all of the nations of these islands and of the continent: they want the Belgianisation of Europe. Well, the Flemings have already had the Belgianisation of Flanders, and have suffered because of it -- in the army, in the camps. And on the railways.
19 February 2010 10:51 AM
A shameful absense of disgust
Ein Reich, or the last time Greece enjoyed membership of a united Europe
16 February 2010 2:44 PM
A man without a country
What Belgianisation really means
Sunday, 21 February 2010
Now we know -- instead of just suspect -- why Herman Van Rompuy, the new president of the European Council, had the EU heads of state and government isolated in a wood-panelled room the Solvay library in a Brussels park last week, instead of seated as usual at the council building with all their aides at hand.
Yup, everything always comes back to the Nazis. A thousand years of history and culture, decades of paying hundreds of millions for the EU's agricultural policy and the rest, yet in the end every argument involving Germany comes back to the 12 years of Nazism and invasion.
Today's meeting of the EU Finance Ministers wasn't up to much. About all it did was produce a statement on the Greek deficit that matched the statement last week from the 27 heads of state and government. Boiled down, it said: 'We will support Greece as long as the Athens government pursues more austerity measures -- more spending cuts and more ways to raise tax revenue. But we won't let the markets, or anyone else, know what kind of support we mean, or when we will give it, or what will happen if Greece doesn't pursue the policies we want to see in place.'
By first reports the deadly head-on train crash this morning outside Brussels may have been the result of a language problem between Belgian French-speaking and Belgian Dutch-speaking rail workers.
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