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Mary Ellen Synon's blog - Declan Ganley

09 January 2012 8:00 AM

Bizarre: the anti-Lisbon campaigner wants a United States of Europe

This is my column in today’s Irish Daily Mail. It is a response to a proposal written by the Irish businessman Declan Ganley, one of the leaders of the No to Lisbon campaign during the Irish referenda, and Brendan Simms, another Irishman who is professor of the history of European international relations at Cambridge. Mr Ganley says he is preparing to re-enter politics with a new pan-European organisation which will advocate for United States of Europe.

I have been hesitating to comment on Declan Ganley’s new plan for a United States of Europe if only out of embarrassment for the man.

It’s like the moment when you see a woman trip over a kerb and sprawl flat with her dress blown up around her waist -- you look away in embarrassment for her.

Mr Ganley is a good chap, and a man who was courageous in his fight against the Lisbon Treaty. But his desire to see the member states of the European Union turn into a federal union based on the United States is just blush-making

First it is embarrassing because I don’t think Mr Ganley understands the American federal union, and second because there is no taste on the Continent for such an utterly Anglo-Saxon invention.

Therefore it does raise the question of why Mr Ganley has put forward this proposal. But why Mr Ganley might be doing this is something I won’t get into. Motive in this case is irrelevant. I will just deal with what Mr Ganley and his colleague Brendan Simms of Cambridge University wrote yesterday in the Sunday Business Post.

Back to why there is and can never be a taste on the Continent for re-shaping the EU into an American-style federal union: the point from the start of the EU was that it would be nothing like America. It was to be the anti-US, the non-America. Europeans have always seen America as the supreme product of the Anglo-Saxon political philosophy, which is the opposite of the Continental political philosophy.

That is why America was and is a place despised by the euro-elite.

Right from the start, and I mean right from the 1920s, when the idea of a European union first appeared, the idea was that any ‘United States of Europe’ would be an entirely new form of government, not like America at all.

According to The Great Deception by Christopher Booker and Richard North (probably the best book tracing the roots of the EU), the two men who first conceived this ‘dream’ in the 1920s of a United States of Europe were Jean Monnet, a French former brandy salesman, and his close friend, an Englishman now largely forgotten, Arthur Salter. What these two wanted to see created in Europe was a government that was ‘supra-national,’ that is, beyond the control of national governments, politicians – or electorates.

So look at the powers which have already been shifted to the EU institutions by the Lisbon Treaty, and then at the even greater powers which are now being seized on the pretext of ‘saving the euro’ – centralised control of national budgets in particular -- and ask yourself how the move towards the Monnet-Salter supra-national dream is going. Answer: it is moving along at a cracking pace.

Third, the Europeans are not intellectually or philosophically up to building a union such as the one framed in the 1787 US Constitution. They do not have the same foundation in a common legal history that the 13 original States had, they do not share a common history sprung from the English constitution, they have nothing like the common law tradition from which to draw.

Booker and North note that the US Constitution of 1797 contained just seven articles, with ten short amendments being added as a Bill of Rights. The first draft of the 2004 European Constitution, the one produced out of the constitutional convention led by former French president Giscard and which eventually had its name changed to the Lisbon Treaty, had 465 articles. Limited federal government is not, and never has been, where the ‘European project’ intends to go.

Fourth, a centralised European state would increase the probability that the Continent would be ripped up by war again. I will get back to that in a moment.

Fifth, Mr Ganley is holding up Alexander Hamilton, one of the Framers of the US Constitution and the first US secretary of the treasury, as the model for what the EU should do with its vast debts: which is, a new central government should assume all the debts of the member states and with them assume new powers taken from the member states.

Which means in Europe today: hand over control of your debts to a new central EU power, and at the same time hand over every fundamental power of your own national parliament.

This was no doubt the sort of power coup Hamilton had in mind when he pulled over the debt-assumption deal for the early US federal government.

Here was a man who wanted the new American president hold the office for life, and for all the members of the senate to form what was in effect a House of Lords.

Yet Mr Ganley imagines the EU should seek inspiration from Hamilton. He proposes that following the ideas of Hamilton and the other Framers of the US Constitution would ensure a ‘democratic’ Europe.

The fact is that the Framers rarely mentioned democracy. When they did it was as a warning against the dangers of mob rule. It is intellectually dishonest for Mr Ganley and his colleague Prof Simms to use these great men an excuse to establish European ‘democracy.’ In 1787, a complete democracy was regarded throughout the 13 former colonies as a threat to law and order.

Here is Hamilton in 1787: ‘The voice of the people has been said to be the voice of God and however generally this maxim has been quoted and believed, it is not true to fact. The people are turbulent and changing, they seldom judge or determine right.’

And again in 1788, when he said it may therefore be doubted whether the people ‘possess the discernment and stability necessary for systematic government.’

Which I may add are exactly the kind of sentiments now being expressed among the euro-elite who are drafting the new eurozone treaty. One of the goals in the negotiations is to structure the treaty so that the euro-elites’ collaborators in the Irish government can ensure that the Irish people will have no vote on it. They feel the Irish people do not ‘possess the discernment and stability necessary’ to make a judgement on the matter, so the power to vote Yes or No in a referendum must be taken away from them.

What Mr Ganley proposes in the end is that the EU now throws out the Lisbon Treaty and creates a new treaty ‘by the people for the people.’

At which point I want to slide off my chair in despair, and not only because there is no such thing as a ‘European people,’ anymore than there ever was a ‘Soviet people.’ So I do have to wonder what ‘people’ it is Mr Ganley is talking about.

Worse, I despair because Mr Ganley is quoting Abraham Lincoln in that line, the man who more than any other seized the US Constitution and destroyed it in his thirst to destroy the powers of the sovereign States.

If ever there was a warning about the dangers of pushing towards a European federal union, it is the fate of the 1787 US Constitution under Lincoln.

He destroyed the Constitution when he declared war on the sovereign States of the South in 1861 rather then let them leave the union.

Mr Ganley says his idea for a new EU constitution will include the ‘automatic right of secession for any member states.’ He seems not to know the same right for every sovereign state of the United States was guaranteed under the Constitution.

Yet when the States tried to exercise that right, the Northern states refused to let go of their foreign earnings milch cow: 80 percent of US foreign earnings came from exports from the vastly-rich Southern States. The Yankees, having earlier grown rich off the South by shipping slaves into Southern markets – Boston was the first slave port in the New World – were now determined to hold onto the revenue of the vast Southern agricultural output. (Please don’t even imagine it was about ‘freeing the slaves,’ but that is for another column.)

So Lincoln launched a war which, if an American president tried it today, would have him landed in an international tribunal as a war criminal.

His excuse for the butchery was: ‘The union can and must be preserved!’ Think about that

next time the EU takes over yet more of our national sovereignty with the cry that the euro can and must be preserved.

The 20th century French philosopher Bertrand de Jouvenel called the War Between the States ‘a war such as Europe had never yet seen.’ Indeed it was. It left the remains of the 1787 Constitution drowned in a sea of blood.

I regret that a man such as Mr Ganley has a plan which could lead the states of Europe to the same end.

PS After I filed this I was in touch with an American history buff who tells me I should add that the first thing Hamilton did after becoming secretary of the treasury was to propose a Bank of the United States. Yet the establishment of such a bank was not among the enumerated powers given to the Federal government in the Constitution. President Washington was uneasy about it; Thomas Jefferson and James Madison opposed it as unconstitutional, which it clearly was. The bank was established, but the charter later expired.

Good point. I’d say we can expect the same disregard for any constitution establishing a United States of Europe from the EU elite, except their power grabs will be more permanent.

As for Hamilton the man, his affair with a married woman while he was in office allowed him to be blackmailed by her and her husband. His attempts to smear the reputation of Jefferson’s vice-president, Aaron Burr, led to Hamilton being called out and killed in a duel.

Altogether one can understand John Adams’ description of Hamilton, and it had more to it than just a literal description of the circumstances of his birth: ‘a bastard brat of a Scots pedlar.’