WHATS IN THE SWINE FLU H1N1 VACCINE

OBAMAS SCAM MAY FINALLY BE UP,WE WILL SEE.1 MILLION SPENT BY OBAMA TO KEEP SECRET.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=w7KO2bUOb4k&feature=player_embedded
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=G_7sXEt4zQ8&feature=player_embedded

http://www.infowars.com/purported-kenyan-obama-birth-certificate-surfaces/
Purported Kenyan Obama Birth Certificate Surfaces
Kurt Nimmo Infowars August 2, 2009

A certification of birth document has surfaced placing the birth of Barack Obama in the Coast General Hospital in Mombasa, Kenya, not Hawaii as the Obama administration insists. In the last week, the corporate media has launched an especially vicious attack and dismissed the issue as a fabrication devised by birthers who are said to be racists and rightwing extremists.The latest document was released by Orly Taitz, a California attorney who has filed a several lawsuits demanding proof of Barack Obama’s eligibility to serve as president. The Kenyan document lists Obama’s parents as Barack Hussein Obama and Stanley Ann Obama, formerly Stanley Ann Dunham. Although there is not a signature by a doctor, the document is signed by the deputy registrar of Coast Province, Joshua Simon Oduya.The birth certificate is part of a federal lawsuit initiated by former presidential candidate and ambassador Alan Keyes, filed on August 1, 2009, in the U.S. District Court for the Central District of California. Taitz’s motion requests the document be preserved from destruction, asks for permission to legally request documents from Kenya, and demands a subpoena for deposition from Secretary of State Hillary Clinton.The Kenyan birth certification lists Obama’s parents as Barack Hussein Obama and Stanley Ann Obama, formerly Stanley Ann Dunham.Last week, state officials in Hawaii said they checked and confirmed that Barack Obama was born in Hawaii and is a natural-born American citizen and therefore meets a key constitutional requirement for being president. Article 2, Section 1 of the Constitution states, No Person except a natural born Citizen, or a Citizen of the United States, at the time of the Adoption of this Constitution, shall be eligible to the Office of President.The Annenberg Political Factsheet claims to have examined the original document and says it is legitimate (see Born in the U.S.A., The truth about Obama’s birth certificate).Recently FactCheck representatives got a chance to spend some time with the birth certificate, and we can attest to the fact that it is real and three-dimensional and resides at the Obama headquarters in Chicago. We can assure readers that the certificate does bear a raised seal, and that it’s stamped on the back by Hawaii state registrar Alvin T. Onaka.Annenberg is a less than credible source considering Obama was chairman of the Annenberg Challenge in Chicago. One of his cohorts in that position was none other than the terrorist Bill Ayers.As World Net Daily reports today, there is a suspicious lack of documents on Obama, including his kindergarten records, his Punahou school records, his Occidental College records, his Columbia University records, his Columbia thesis, his Harvard Law School records, his Harvard Law Review articles, his scholarly articles from the University of Chicago, his passport, his medical records, his files from his years as an Illinois state senator, his Illinois State Bar Association records, any baptism records, and his adoption records.

Obama supporters and liberals are determined to shut down the birther movement. On Saturday, the liberal comedian Bill Maher said the birthers must be stopped. This is not a case of Democrats vs. Republicans. It’s sentient beings vs. the Lizard People, he said, dismissing the fact the Obama administration refuses to release the original document.Appearing on the Alex Jones Show this afternoon, attorney and former deputy attorney general of Pennsylvania Philip J. Berg, who initially filed a complaint in federal district court on August 21, 2008, against then presidential nominee Senator Barack Obama, said the new document must be carefully examined to establish its validity.Berg noted the document is not classified as a birth certificate but rather a registration of birth. The document contains conflicting dates and signatures. In addition, the birth registration purports to be an official document entered at the District Registry Office in Kenya on August 9, 1961. Kenya did not gain independence until December 12, 1963.Alex said the document may indeed be a forgery intended to further discredit the movement to establish Barack Obama’s place of birth.

Congress proposed implanting airport workers with RFID chips
Infowars August 3, 2009
http://www.infowars.com/congress-proposed-implanting-airport-workers-with-rfid-chips/
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Keo2TR1Zouw&feature=player_embedded
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ar2gZiT5dDM&feature=player_embedded

A news report from May 2007 reveals high level discussions, including debate in Congress, to require all airport employees to be subject to greater security measures–including a serious discussion of imposing implantable RFID chips into workers or subjecting them to biometric identification systems.Such proposals have already been introduced in various contexts throughout the world, and their acceptance paves the way for more widespread use of such measures. As Steve Watson reported in 2007:

Government workers in Mexico are being forced to take the chip or lose their job. Staff of Mexico’s attorney general had to take the chip in order to access secure areas.In February, a Cincinnati surveillance equipment company became the first U.S. business to use this application when a handful of employees voluntarily got implants to allow them to enter secure rooms. News reports in May 2007 identified the possibility that mandatory requirements for biometrics and even implanted RFID chips could be imposed on airport employees– anyone from restaurant employees to airline mechanics:Congress is moving quickly to put into motion measures that will ensure airport employees are subjected to stricter security checks. Everyone from Restaurant employees to airline mechanics could soon be forced to provide biometric finger and iris scans and may even face the possibility of being implanted with a microchip. Currently all airport employees must pass a police and FBI background check, however this may soon be upgraded to include credit checks, routine searches of bags and property and the use of biometric readers with the possibility of microchip implants on the table

The measures are still under Congressional discussion.

Discussion of such monitoring of airport employees continues. A June 2008 edition of ID blog focuses on the issue of vetting and tracking the wide array of airport workers.An ASIS program director admits that one of its aims involves looking to implement biometric assess control, a goal identified since shortly after 9/11, and discusses the possibility of mandated biometric identification programs.
Check out audio statement at about 7:00 minutes [ mp3]Entrusting TSA screeners and related database operators with sensitive biometrics data, potentially including iris scans, fingerprints and even subcutaneous implanted RFID chips, is a frightening concept- not only because of the prima facie invasion of privacy and guilty-until-proven-innocent mentality- but because the TSA has proved to be an untrustworthy security agency. The Electronic Frontier Foundation covered in depth the revelation that the TSA lied & covered up in Congressional testimony about its taking passenger data from airlines for use under the CAPPS II passenger-profiling program.Similarly, an Arkansas prison has recently announced its intentions to track its employees through RFID and biometric identification systems.Airports are the proving ground for testing and implementing RFID chips and biometric identification with the general public. Because of its association with the 9/11 terror attacks, airports have been turned over to the lawless TSA agency in spite of protections guaranteed by the 4th amendment and warnings from leaders as age-old as Ben Franklin not to put so-called security before liberty.Subways, as in New York, have followed airports in implementing checkpoints, just as other employers can be expected to follow in practice the biometric and RFID policies tested in airports. As the RFID and biometrics industries seek to expand, they can be expected to sell their services to companies as well as on behalf of public institutions, venues and events, especially those with obvious security concerns.

Thus, what is allowed under the fear of terrorism and pressure to control travel, is likely spread to other areas of our lives.The chip has already been implanted under the skin of various members of the Army, government and other employees who work in sensitive and/or secure areas.While the RFID may never be forced outright, a scenario is foreseeable where it would be required for many or most areas of access, employment, travel and commerce– in other words, the Beast scenario predicted in the Book of Revelation could prove (WILL PROVE) true where individuals not cleared and verified are barred from buying or selling.Such plans to monitor airport employees as well as passengers date back to at least 2002 when then Governor of New York, George Pataki, and then Governor of New Jersey, James McGreevey.Obviously, the potential use of RFID implants for airline workers could/would likely be sold on the merits fast track” programs which promise to decreased delays for trust traveler and especially employees and airline crew members.VeriPax complements ARINC’s Identity Management System (IdMS) which uses biographical and biometric information to help create fast-lanes for pre-registered passengers, and invaluable checks on employees and crew members.Already, programs have been implemented on a voluntary basis for passengers to move through airline checkpoints with fast track status using an RFID pass which tracks passengers throughout the airport. Logan Airport in Boston instituted one such pilot program in May 2006 to track both baggage and passengers during all points of travel. Air France began a similar program in March 2009 using ’smart’ cards carrying RFID identification numbers, digital fingerprints, a photo and travel information.
Literally more shocking is a video showing plans to place a Taser bracelet on all passengers in the name of security which would shock and debilitate any passenger deemed to be a threat either while inside the airport or even on the flight. See video below:While these plans have not been implemented on a mandatory basis, the proposal and implementation on a voluntary basis threatens to take already outrageous security measures even further.TSA has now implemented secondary screening at many airports to inspect passengers and their belongings on a random and/or selective basis– who have already been fully screened once by TSA checkpoints– at flight gates.

Netanyahu: We uprooted citizens from Gaza, and now it is a terror base
Sunday, 02 August 2009 13:20 News from Jerusalem

Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu remarked on the four-year anniversary of Israel's withdrawal from Gaza. At the weekly cabinet meeting, Netanyahu said that Israel uprooted 10,000 of its citizens from their homes and Gaza has turned into a terror base under the control of Hamas, and sponsored by Iran.I want to stress the fact that we are committed to the full rehabilitation of those uprooted, and the cabinet will discuss the matter next week,Netanyahu added.We will not put up with rocket fire [from Gaza] into our communities. We will decisively respond to every attack, the prime minister went on to declare.Peace will once again be based on reciprocation.

Israel expects the Palestinians to recognize Israel as a Jewish state, it expects that the refugee issue be resolved outside of Israel and the implementation of effective security solutions with international guarantees - all these are conditions for the advancement of a sustainable and stable peace agreement,Netanyahu explained.

The prime minister said furthermore that Israel was ready to relaunch peace negotiations with the Palestinian Authority, with Syria and with any other Arab nation with no preconditions.Anyone who insists on preconditions is standing in the way of peace talks,he said.Infrastructure Minister Uzi Landau said that the establishment of a Palestinian state would not be just,explaining that Fatah, the moderate faction headed by Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas, was planning to hold talks with Iran.We made a big mistake when the prime minister went too far in his speech at Bar Ilan, promising the establishment of a Palestinian state before the Palestinians agreed to anything,Landau said.haaretz

Pray for the peace of Jerusalem Sunday, 02 August 2009 03:45 News from Jerusalem Haredi Riots in Jerusalem

Something deep within me stirred when I first entered Jerusalem more than 60 years ago. I didn't know what to call it then; I don't know what to call it now.I first set eyes on Jerusalem as the bus snaked its way up the tortuous, twisting gorges of the Judean Hills at the end of a day, when the lowering sun illuminates a sky aflame with scarlet and crimson. My Manchester eyes, attuned to cloud and rain, had never seen such a sky, and as we came near the city center, the masonry seemed to suck up the hues, giving the walls a translucent, golden appearance, like an old masterpiece whose simplicity veils immense sophistication. And like great music, its composition -the ancient and the modern, the religious and the secular, the Jews, the Muslims, the Christians, and their multiple tones and variations - all somehow merged into an incongruous harmony.But then came Shabbat, and Jerusalem went suddenly mad in the afternoon. Black-garbed, black-hatted youngsters threw stones at passing vehicles, yelling Shabbos! Shabbos! while their adult betters in Sabbath finery, resplendent in the styles and furs of late-medieval Poland, with womenfolk in the most modest of attire, stood by watching.This was my introduction to the most conservative school of Judaism - the haredim. And the more I got to know about them, the more I understood that here was a sect that never wavered, never vacillated in its resistance to the imposition of modern civic society and Zionist policies.BELIEVING THAT the return of Jews to Zion must come about through divine not human intervention, they have defied Zionism with the obdurate passion of a Jacob wrestling an angel - as recent disorders in Jerusalem have shown, and as the historical record proves.

A casual perusal of archives led me to Ronald Storrs' diary entry of December 21, 1917. Ronald Storrs was Britain's first Military Governor of Jerusalem, and on that date he wrote: "I held my first meeting with the anti-Zionist ultra-Orthodox Ashkenazi rabbis. Some twenty of them received me with much ceremony in the municipal council chamber, a long commonplace room and quite unworthy of the Rembrandtesque fur-gowned, fur-hatted, ringleted rabbis on either side of me down a long deal table. The only tongue they all understood was an ultra-German Yiddish.I left this remarkable and powerful Synod after about an hour, and I do believe that, in it, I witnessed the first confrontation under British rule between the Orthodox Jews and the Zionist Jews. It was most disconcerting that the veteran Orthodox Jews would not speak to the modern Zionist Jews. In my personal effort to bring them together I am roundly defeated.Three days later this remarkable and powerful Synod took a decisive step in its dispute with Jerusalem's Zionists. They set up their own Ashkenazi community council, forerunner to the Eda Haredit.ON MAY 12, 1918, the influential head of the World Zionist Organization, Dr. Chaim Weizmann, normally a man of immense sophistication who rubbed shoulders with kings and premiers, made an ox of himself when he naively promised funds to Jerusalem's ultra-Orthodox leaders if only they would introduce a more modern curriculum into their yeshivas. A Rabbi Avraham Aharon Prague promptly marked him with the brand of Cain when, speaking in the name of all yeshiva heads, he thundered with righteous indignation: We have been entrusted by God with the souls of our students. Are we to violate our sacred trust for the sake of our personal welfare? We will continue to guard that trust to our last breath. And if we are fated to die of hunger, then let us die as courageous men and not sell our souls for money.I'm not sure about the money part, but assuredly the haredi yeshiva world continues to guard that trust with an obdurate independence.

Then, on July 7, 1937, a Royal Commission of Inquiry headed by one Lord Peel proposed that the solution to the Jewish-Arab conflict lay in partitioning the country into a Jewish and an Arab state, just as the United Nations was to do 10 years later. An outraged delegation of haredim - among them the venerable Dr. Moshe Wallach, legendary founder of Jerusalem's Shaare Zedek Hospital - testified before the Commission against Jewish sovereignty. They approved one aspect of the plan, however: the retention of Jerusalem under British control. This inspired the revered haredi leader, Rabbi Moshe Blau, to write in the ultra-Orthodox newspaper Kol Yisrael on July 4, 1937: Those who refuse to acknowledge the formation of any secular Jewish state in any shape or form feel that Jerusalem must be spared the fate of falling into the hands of a secular Jewish government. The Royal Commission's proposition [on Jerusalem] is providential, as it saves the Holy City from the clutches of Jews who refuse to recognize Torah authority.But then came November 29, 1947, and the United Nations passed a partition resolution causing the lines of cleavage between ultra-Orthodoxy and Zionism to plunge into a no-exit confrontation. Israel's War of Independence began. Jerusalem was besieged. Britain's deadline for its final pull-out was midnight, May 14. And on April 9, hardly a month before Jewish independence on May 15, a three-man haredi delegation called on a senior British representative in utter despair. The delegation comprised Dr. Yerachmiel Vechsler, Rabbi Raphael Katzenellenbogen and Dr. Moshe Wallach.

THIS IS HOW the official British report of that meeting reads:

2. They opened by saying they were speaking in the name of the Orthodox Jews of Jerusalem; that their views were held by all the 200,000 Jews of Orthodox Jewry in Palestine; and despite the unfortunate fact that the Orthodox were not, in these days, accorded as much recognition by Government as had been the case in the past, they remained absolutely loyal to the Administration and to Britain.

3. They were the original Jews of Palestine, they said. They were anxious to support Government, and were content to do whatever Government should or might order. They hated and feared the [Jewish] Agency and its atmosphere and politics; the Agency was responsible for encouraging Zionism, for bringing undesirable Jews into Palestine, and for condoning and even fostering the Jewish violence and disregard of law and of human suffering now prevalent.

4. The purpose of their visit was to press for peace in Palestine. They had heard Sir Alan's appeal [Sir Alan Cunningham, the High Commissioner]. There was a very large body of opinion in the country, Arab as well as Jew, which felt that the present strife was leading only to misery and ruin. The difficulty was to make the views of these people heard in the councils of world powers.

5. Rabbi Katzenellenbogen had organized in the Mea Shearim quarter a demonstration in favor of peace. The demonstration had been broken up by the Haganah, and the participants beaten.

6. The Orthodox Jews had been deprived of their fair share of food by the Haganah. It was of no use for them to protest to the Agency; they had to suffer.

7. For themselves, they had two main requests: 'Food. Might they be allowed to buy from Government or Army stocks say 20 tons of potatoes? They were willing to pay for this, and needed it for distribution to their poor. It would be necessary for Government to make it clear to the Haganah that the food was for the Orthodox Jews only.Security. They wanted security between now and the 15th May. After the 15th May, they would need it even more; might they not be treated as British subjects? They had always been loyal to the Crown and had caused no trouble. They felt that such recognition, and the right to protection that goes with it, were due to them.

8. As regards peace generally, they suggested that the High Commissioner might feel able to address an appeal to the Security Council telling it that there were in Palestine thousands of Jews and Arabs who wanted peace above all things; and suggesting that the Security Council address President Truman, appealing to him to stop the flow of American money which was so greatly facilitating the political and military activities of the Zionists.

9. I told them that I feared that the provision of food especially for their community might be difficult, and even if it could be made, was likely to bring down on them reprisals by the Haganah. I said however that Government is doing all that it possibly could to ease the food situation generally.

10. I said I would bring the suggestion in Para. 8 to the notice of higher authority (they asked that it might be shown to H.E.) Naïve as it is, there is a good deal in it.

11. Finally, they said they did not believe that the British administration was shortly to cease in Palestine. When I assured them that it was so, they appeared downcast - beyond, I think, all possibility of simulation. They said that if we left Palestine without assuring their welfare and safety, we should be leaving harmless, well-wishing, and loyal subjects at the mercy of the savage elements which now ruled Jewry, or, as Rabbi Katzenellenbogen put it 100% in the lurch.Shocking as this reads, time was to show that once the dust settled the savage elements were to prove amazingly forbearing: an independent, largely state-sponsored haredi school network, exemption from national service, a subsidized yeshiva system making Israel the largest Torah center in the world, easy mortgages - and all in the service of a haredi community that is burgeoning by leaps and bounds.One can only guess at the purposes of our Creator in fashioning such a complex and Gordian knot as the haredim versus the Zionists. And one can only guess what this portends.Pray for the peace of Jerusalem.The writer's book, The Prime Ministers. An Intimate Portrait of Israeli Leadership(Toby Press) will appear next spring.By YEHUDA AVNER jpost

DISEASES

REVELATION 6:7-8
7 And when he had opened the fourth seal, I heard the voice of the fourth beast say, Come and see.
8 And I looked, and behold a pale horse:(CHLORES GREEN) and his name that sat on him was Death, and Hell followed with him. And power was given unto them over the fourth part of the earth, to kill with sword,(WEAPONS) and with hunger,(FAMINE) and with death,(INCURABLE DISEASES) and with the beasts of the earth.(ANIMAL TO HUMAN DISEASE).

DRUG PUSHERS AND ADDICTS

REVELATION 18:23
23 And the light of a candle shall shine no more at all in thee; and the voice of the bridegroom and of the bride shall be heard no more at all in thee: for thy merchants were the great men of the earth; for by thy sorceries (DRUGS) were all nations deceived.

REVELATION 9:21
21 Neither repented they of their murders, nor of their sorceries (DRUGS), nor of their fornication, nor of their thefts.

OBAMA A FALSE LEADER-VOIGHT
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NXKOotf3B2k&feature=player_embedded
Global warming is the new religion of First World urban elites
http://britanniaradio.blogspot.com/2009/08/httpwww.html#links
THE GREAT EU DECEPTION
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bM2Ql3wOGcU&feature=player_embedded
http://britanniaradio.blogspot.com/2009/08/august-extracts-part-1-great-deception.html#links
Euthanasia and Healthcare
http://britanniaradio.blogspot.com/2009/08/john-loeffler-steel-on-steel-euthanasia.html#links
LIBERTY COUNCIL
http://lc.org/
HEALTHCARE MURDERS
http://lc.org/index.cfm?PID=14102&AlertID=1015
Petition Opposing Anti-Faith Hate Crimes And Hate Speech Laws
http://www.libertyaction.org/292/petition.asp?pid=20709064

SAY NO TO THE VACCINES
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EGyCeCiG9Kk&feature=related
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vqMK_yu8APg&feature=related
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ASibLqwVbsk&feature=related
LAB MADE FLU
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zYrlFMFoaDE&eurl=http%3A%2F%2Fbritanniaradio%2Eblogspot%2Ecom%2F&feature=player_embedded
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gj0gs1C83Ec&feature=channel

OBAMA DECEPTION
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eAaQNACwaLw
ENDGAME GLOBAL ENSLAVEMENT
http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=1070329053600562261
OBAMA SCAM
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9V1nmn2zRMc&feature=player_embedded

OH FOR PEOPLE WITH THEIR HEADS IN THE SAND,LOOK AT THE YUMMY MURDER INGEDIENTS THIS VACCINE HAS IN IT.JUST SIT BACK,TAKE A DRINK OF FLORIDE WATER,DREAM OF THIS KILLER SHOT ENTERING YOUR ENVIROMENTAL FRIENDLY,NEW AGE OCCULT BODY.JUST MAKING FUN OF THESE LUNATICS BUT THERES LOTS OF THEM OUT IN THE WORLD TODAY.

FLU PANDEMIC VACCINE WARNING - HIGH LEVELS OF SQUALENE (ILLEGAL) IN THE H1N1 VACCINES!!!! Posted by Freedom IS not FREE. on July 31, 2009 at 2:29pm View Freedom IS not FREE.'s blog

Print these flyers immediately! For more information visit: http://www.pandemicfluonline.com KNOW YOUR RIGHTS - DON'T GET YOUR FEMA BRACELET!!!

Flyer:
http://www.pandemicfluonline.com/wp-content/uploads/2009/07/EducateYourself_Flyer_Proof_16.pdf

The Truth about the Flu Shot
1.What’s in the regular flu shot? Egg protein and avian contaminant viruses, Thimerosal(mercury): in multi-dose vials,Polysorbate 80:allergen; infertility in mice
Formaldehyde: carcinogen,Triton X100: detergent,Sucrose: table sugar,Resin: known allergen,Gentamycin: antibiotic,Gelatin: known allergen.

2. Do flu shots work?
Not in healthy babies: A review of 51 studies involving more than 294,000 children it was found there was no evidence that injecting children 6-24 months of age with a flu shot was any more effective than placebo. In children over 2 yrs, it was only effective 33% of the time in preventing the flu. Reference: Vaccines for preventing influenza in healthy children.The Cochrane Database of Systematic Reviews. 2 (2008).
Not in children with asthma: A study 800 children with asthma, half were vaccinated and the other half did not receive the influenza vaccine. The two groups were compared with respect to clinic visits, emergency department (ED) visits, and hospitalizations for asthma. CONCLUSION: This study failed to provide evidence that the influenza vaccine prevents pediatric asthma exacerbations. Reference: Effectiveness of influenza vaccine for the prevention of asthma exacerbations. Christly, C. et al. Arch Dis Child. 2004 Aug;89(8):734-5.Not in children with asthma (2): The inactivated flu vaccine does not prevent influenza-related hospitalizations in children, especially the ones with asthma…In fact, children who get the flu vaccine are three times more at risk for hospitalization than children who do not get the vaccine.Reference: The American Thoracic Society’s 105th International Conference, May 15-20, 2009, San Diego.Not in adults: In a review of 48 reports (more than 66,000 adults),Vaccination of healthy adults only reduced risk of influenza by 6%and reduced the number of missed work days by less than one day (0.16) days. It did not change the number of people needing to go to hospital or take time off work. Reference: Vaccines for preventing influenza in healthy adults.The Cochrane Database of Systematic Reviews. 1 (2006).Not in the Elderly: In a review of 64 studies over 98 flu seasons of elderly living in nursing homes, flu shots were non-significant for preventing the flu. For elderly living in the community, vaccines were not (significantly) effective against influenza, ILI or pneumonia. Reference: Vaccines for preventing influenza in the elderly.The Cochrane Database of Systematic Reviews. 3(2006).

3. What about the new Swine Flu vaccine?
Some of the new H1N1 (swine flu) vaccines are going to be made by Novartis. These shots will probably be made in PER.C6 cells (human retina cells) and contain MF59, a potentially debilitating adjuvant. MF-59 is an oil-based adjuvant primarily composed of squalene.All rats injected with squalene (oil) adjuvants developed a disease that left them crippled, dragging their paralyzed hindquarters across their cages. Injected squalene can cause severe arthritis (3 on scale of 4) and severe immune responses, such as autoimmune arthritis and lupus.Reference (1): Kenney, RT. Edleman, R. Survey of human-use adjuvants.Expert Review of Vaccines. 2 (2003) p171. Reference (2): Matsumoto, Gary. Vaccine A: The Covert Government Experiment That’s Killing Our Soldiers and Why GI’s Are Only the First Victims of this Vaccine. New York: Basic Books. p54.Federal health officials are starting to recommend that most Americans get three flu shots this fall: one regular flu shot and two doses of the vaccine made against the new swine flu strain. School children who have never had a flu shot are targeted for four shots in the fall - twice for seasonal flu, twice for pandemic swine flu. (July 15, 2009 news)HHS Secretary Kathleen Sebelius has been talking to school superintendents around the country, urging them to make plans to use buildings for mass vaccinations and for vaccinating kids first. (CBS News, June 12, 2009.)

4. What can you do? You can't do it all, but you can do something! Give this information to everyone you know and love, especially church members, social groups, school teachers and administrators, and first responders (EMTs, Paramedics, Firemen, etc). Contact your local police, sheriff, city council members, county commissioners and chamber of commerce. Discuss your concerns about forced vaccinations. Their support is important to maintain your right to refuse.Email or fax this information to local TV and radio stations. Call or fax to your State and National political representatives.Connect with other activist organizations – those who support 2nd amendment issues, the environment and animal rights. Help spread the word about their passion and get them involved with yours.Write a small article for LOCAL, community newspapers. Watch for samples on www.PandemicFluOnline.com Check out www.oathkeepers.org. Share this with your local law and military folks. A pdf for easy printing is available on www.DrTenpenny.com.Have at least 3 weeks of food and water on hand; be prepared to voluntarily self-quarantine.Stock up on Vitamin D3 (3000IU per person), Vitamin A, Vitamin C, fish oil, and zinc.As stated years ago by Margaret Mead, Never doubt that a small group of thoughtful committed citizens can change the world; indeed it is the only thing that ever has.For more daily updates and information www.VacLib.org www.PandemicFluOnline.com www.DrTenpenny.com

If you are seen at a MILITARY CHECKPOINT without a FEMA bracelet - YOU WILL BE HAULED OFF TO A QUARANTINE CENTER (FEMA CAMP)!!! KNOW YOUR RIGHTS! THAT MEANS A POLICE STATE - MARTIAL LAW. Stock food, lock doors, self-quarantine, and load your weapons.

Flu scare a boon to body-bag sales KEITH BEATY/TORONTO STAR

George Sittlinger at work with a body bag at Trevor Owen, the Toronto company that's seen an upswing in orders for pandemic-ready cadaver pouches.As concerns grow of a possible flu pandemic onslaught this autumn, alert authorities worldwide have been stockpiling emergency supplies. Masks, gloves and anti-viral medications are on the list. And body bags.Demand for the latter is prompting a surge of interest in the wares of a small Toronto custom bag manufacturer named Trevor Owen Ltd. Inquiries about its pandemic body bags are pouring in from as far away as the Sultanate of Oman on the Arabian Peninsula. TREVOR OWEN recently shipped several thousand of the thick plastic bags – sewn in its Scarborough factory and touted for their ability to prevent leakage and seepage of bodily fluids – to Alberta. It is bidding on a contract to supply Ohio with 12,500 of the white woven polyethylene pandemic bags.

Some seniors residences are starting to buy five, 10 or 15 at a time,said Trevor Owen president Pierre Barcik.There are state and provincial governments that are starting to stockpile pandemic body bags ... It's a bad pun, but (the business) is growing.The general fear is that the traditional fall flu season will this time bring a surge in H1N1 swine flu cases – and deaths.Microbiologist Dr. Allison McGeer, director of infection control for Mount Sinai Hospital, recently warned there would be more deaths and infections in the city as a result of the labour disruption at Toronto Public Health.Trevor Owen is not the only supplier thriving because of the fears. Richard Miller, owner of the U.S.-based web portal ToDieFor.Biz that sells a line of body bags, said demand has doubled this year.Although the competition is considerable, Barcik's company appears to have found a niche with its pandemic body bag, which differs from the bag typically used to transport and temporarily store the dead.

WHILE MORGUES and hospitals mostly use bags made of light-duty plastic – glorified garbage bags with a zipper down the middle – the pandemic body bag's material is thicker and stronger, comparable to a light tarp.It is coated on both sides with polyurethane for imperviousness and can be outfitted with six carry handles, an option that allows for the possibility of inexperienced personnel hastily hauling bodies at a time of crisis.It basically lets you handle bigger bodies with less care, said Barcik.I don't suggest we should handle the dead with anything but the utmost care, but if you've got a couple of volunteers moving people around in a pandemic centre, it's a lot different than a morgue situation.HAULING DEATH ISN'T Trevor Owen's stock and trade. Barcik's company makes a variety of bags for everyday functions, from the giant padded envelopes that keep your pizza warm on its delivery route to the heavy-duty duffles in which hockey players like the Ontario Hockey League's Soo Greyhounds tote their gear.Still, Trevor Owen carries a substantial array of body bags; it's a sector that appears to require a diversified product line.

Cindy Maguire, the controller of Centennial Products, a Jacksonville, Fla.-based distributor of body bags whose customers include public health centres in Nova Scotia, said that among coroners and other tenders to the departed, body bags are like a fashion statement, almost.People are very particular about colour, style, the seal of the bag, the zipper.SOME CORONERS are partial to blue bags, which are known to provide a photo-friendly background for making a visual record of autopsies. Fluorescent orange bags are often the choice of urban police personnel who frequently work in darkness. And manufacturers say there is growing demand for extra-large bags, such as the widely used Chinese-made bag known as the Big Girtha in the Trevor Owen catalogue.Where a standard body bag runs about three feet wide and seven feet long, the Big Girtha is close to five feet by nine feet.Said Miller at ToDieFor.Biz: It's for the 600-pounders. Our population is getting bigger. It's made of very, very heavy-duty material.If death, by fat or by flu, is a heavy subject, some in the body-bag trade – the death-care industry, in its gentile parlance – see its lighter side. Maguire's company designs and sells novelty T-shirts that have become popular among customers. One is emblazoned with the company's slogan, You tag it, we bag it.Another cribs a coroner's theoretical lament during an obesity epidemic: I think I need a bigger bag.Said Maguire: The coroners do have a little bit of a morbid sense of humour. But I guess they use that to get through what they do.Barcik, whose company employs about 25 workers in an industrial mall near Eglinton and McCowan, said he expects body bags to remain a small part of his operation – currently about 10 per cent.HE TAKES VISIBLE PRIDE in showing a visitor a custom tote manufactured in Scarborough for paramedics with Toronto Emergency Medical Services. It's a bag, he notes, that could help save a life rather than simply contain the remnants of a lost one.

Not that body bags don't have various uses.

Quite apart from the spectre of the flu pandemic that got his phone ringing, Barcik said he has fielded calls from private citizens shopping for a single body bag for unstated purposes.There's a bunch of nutty folks out there,he said with a chuckle, recalling a summer hire at the plant who was a little bit too goth – he wanted to get in a bag, take one home.It's your party, man. Have a good time.

New Evidence: That The Swine Flu Pandemic Is Man-Made
Satinder SINGH Pakistan Daily Sunday, August 2, 2009

Murder suspects are either convicted or acquitted at trial based on the prosecution’s presentation of EVIDENCE which usually hinges on MOTIVE, OPPORTUNITY, and TIME-LINES combined with physical documents. To gather such hard evidence, detectives and/or federal agents often spend months following leads and interviewing witnesses. In the trial phase, re-creating the sequence of events is essential. I submit this paper will provide more than enough hard evidence to at least result in a series of criminal indictments of charges of MASS MURDER, and CONSPIRACY TO COMMIT WORLD GENOCIDE against Novartis Pharmaceutical principals and agents and others.

PRIMARY MOTIVE

The Primary Motive behind this alleged criminal activity is also the primary cause of most murders in the world today, and that motivation is simply: BIG MONEY. Billions of Dollars of windfall profits from government contracts worldwide, as a matter of fact.I will provide evidence that will show that Novartis Pharmaceuticals of Basel, Switzerland has conspired with corrupt scientists at the U.S. Army Institute of Pathology ­ Ft. Detrick, Maryland, to create a novel strain of weaponized influenza virus by means of reverse engineering the deadly 1918 killer strain ­ which strain was maliciously and surreptitiously released upon the world in March and April of 2009 for the primary purpose of creating a panic-stricken world-wide demand for Novartis vaccine material.The evidence will also clearly show that the Novartis vaccine material is in reality designed to facilitate the further mutation of the pandemic into more lethal waves of increasingly virulent and deadly disease, rather than to curtail and limit the existing outbreak. The evidence will show that Novartis is willingly being used, (and extremely well-paid) to facilitate the edicts of the global elite’s Club of Rome; which edicts clearly call for a massive and sudden depopulation of certain segments of the earth’s human population.

PRIMARY EVIDENCE

To realize such windfall profits on an engineered, global flu pandemic, detailed covert planning must take place of course.Patents protecting the proprietary flu vaccine must be applied for and secured before the pandemic virus is released in order to minimize the competition and maximize the profit potentials. In a biological attack of this nature, timing is extremely critical.Indeed, the evidence is clear ­ Novartis applied for just such a patent on Nov. 4, 2005, and the U.S. Patent Office accepted this application and granted US 20090047353A1 for a Split Influenza Vaccine with Adjuvants on February 19, 2009. (See bottom of page).With this patent now secured, the conspirators were now free to create the demand for their novel split influenza vaccine by releasing a novel split-influenza (combining multiple viruses) pandemic virus from a weapons lab test-tube into unsuspecting human hosts. http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2009/06/17/AR2009061703271.html

The so-called Swine Flu grabbing headlines today is actually a recombinant, or split-influenza virus consisting of A-strain Bird-Flu (H5N1), Swine Flu (H1N1) and multiple strains of human flu (H3N2). Likewise, the 1918 Killer Flu that killed untold millions of people was a recombinant or split-influenza virus composed of Bird flu, Swine Flu, and multiple strains of human flu.

CRIMINAL TIMELINE

The criminal timeline begins in 1997, when Dr. Jeffrey Taubenberger assembled a team of geneticists and microbiologists to analyze the genome structure, and then to REPRODUCE (i.e. reverse engineer) what is arguably one of the most deadly viral structures the world has ever been cursed with ­ the 1918 killer flu virus. According to numerous published stories and reports, Taubenberger and his team utilized super-computers to map the complex RNA and DNA structures of the killer virus, then utilized human plasmids to successfully re-create the 1918 killer. Taubenberger completed his work in early 2005, then immediately left the employ of the U.S. Army at Ft. Detrick to take a much more lucrative position with the National Institutes of Health. His new focus was to create a VACCINE against the very same 1918 killer flu that he and his team had, just months earlier, successfully reverse engineered and created.This researcher is very confident that a focused criminal investigation would likely reveal prima facia evidence that Taubenberger was in reality working for Novartis while employed with the N.I.H. ­ and was quite likely the primary author of Novartis’ Nov. 6, 2005 provisional patent application. On page 2, paragraph 32 of the patent publication we read, quote: The influenza virus [that the invention vaccine is designed to protect against] may be a reassortant strain, and may have been obtained by reverse genetics techniques. Reverse genetics techniques allow influenza viruses with desired genome segments to be prepared in vitro using plasmids.The remnant of the paragraph then goes into very specific detail as to the actual mechanics of how the pandemic virus was actually created by Taubenberger’s Ft. Detrick team. At the very least, the author of the patent application had to have studied Taubenberger’s various published reports on his work at Detrick, for the wording and science is virtually verbatim.Furthermore, this paragraph is even more damning by the words may have been obtained. Who obtained this virus and for what reason was it obtained? Keep in mind the CDC and HHS would have Americans believe that the pandemic viral outbreak is totally a natural occurrence ­ if so then how could Novartis have such an incredible advance knowledge to the point of developing a vaccine with such absolutely PERFECT TIMING???

WHO EXACTLY IS NOVARTIS??

Novartis International AG is simply the world’s largest, multi-national pharmaceutical company with over $53 Billion USD revenue generated in 2008. It’s headquarters is located in Basel, Switzerland, home of the vaunted Swiss Guards who provide all security measures for the Vatican and the Club of Rome. The company logo symbolizes the eternal flame of the Illuminati enlightened ones. Dig into Novartis International AG’s long history, and one finds that it began as a component of the infamous I.G. Farben combine, which in turn was primarily responsible for the rise of Adolph Hitler and the German/Austrian Third Reich.Dig a bit deeper and you find that Novartis also wholly owns a company called Sandoz ­ which was the inventor of LSD and other strong hallucinogenic truth drugs, and was the supplier of LSD to the CIA allowing them to scale new heights with their covert MK ULTRA mind control experiments. Documents released to U.S. Congressional investigators in 1977 show that Sandoz Labs had arranged for certain Nazi scientists to gain new identities in Allen Dulles’ CIA at the conclusion of WWII. This was accomplished under a secret extraction program called Operation Paper Clip.The address listed on the Novartis Patent applications is a P.O. Box in Emeryville, California. Up until the summer of 2005, this Emeryville California address belonged to Chiron Inc. ­ the world’s second-largest INFLUENZA VACCINE MANUFACTURER. Chiron was doing very well, with reported sales of $357 million in fiscal 2002. Chiron’s sales nearly doubled, peaking at a whopping $678 million in 2003 ­ and it was mostly due to the marketing and sale of FLU VACCINE CONTRACTS to the federal government. Novartis, which owned much of Chiron’s stock, was very pleased, until disaster struck in 2004 — the entire year’s stock of flu vaccine was found to be contaminated and was condemned.Stock values plummeted on the news. With the stock at a historic low, Novartis quickly purchased the remainder of Chiron’s stock and began immediately to work on the massive novel pandemic flu vaccine that they somehow knew would soon have worldwide demand ­ especially if they controlled the exclusive patent they could effectively corner the pandemic flu vaccine market!!

OTHER CRIMINAL ACTIVITIES

I would submit that killing tens of thousands of innocent humans via the systemic creation of a pandemic in order to make billions of dollars is vile enough, but there is also evidence that there is an even more heinous hidden agenda at work here, and it is spelled GENOCIDE.It is no mystery that Adolph Hitler advocated the elevation of a Nordic Master Race that would rule the world in a New Order of the Ages called the Third Reich. Sadly, not all of the EUGENIC/GENOCIDAL National Socialists were executed at Nuremburg.In reality, the elite financiers that actually dictated the agenda to Hitler, merely went underground, willing to bide their time until their godless agenda to liquidate BILLIONS of people could be successfully implemented.The evidence that the Novartis-controlled Pandemic Vaccine may well be a tool of mass genocide, is actually quite overwhelming.At this point, some readers may scoff and ask: Why would any company want to kill off their customers? The answer is that these customers control large blocks of assets and equity. As Kissinger’s NSSM-200? report outlines, the spoils of genocide include controlling large tracts of land and mineral assets. This is secondary, of course, to their warped dream of creating a Utopian World Order with only 500 million worthy humans allowed to share in it.

WHAT’S THE EVIDENCE?

While George H.W. Bush was busy saving the world from the evil dictator Saddam Hussein in 1991, pursuant to his U.N. speech to create a new world order an agenda for an Initiative for Eco-92 Earth Charter elitist meeting happened to fall into honest, Christian hands. This agenda basically reiterated the genocide outlined in Henry Kissinger’s infamous NSSM-200 report of 1974, and called for the immediate reduction of world population.The entire report can be downloaded at:My extensive research shows that by 1992, the massive death rate of AIDS had simply not materialized to the Elite’s satisfaction, and a more efficient mass killer had to be engineered in order to fulfill the edicts cut into the Georgia Guidestones.Evidence shows that like the 2009 Novel Flu Virus the HIV virus was also engineered and manufactured in the labs of Ft. Detrick.In 1969, during a House Appropriations Committee hearing, the Defense Department’s Biological Warfare (BW) division at Ft. Detrick requested funds to develop, through complex gene-splicing (i.e. genetic engineering) a novel new disease that would both be resistant to, and break down a victim’s immune system. The Congressional Record reads:Within the next 5 to 10 years it would probably be possible to make a new infective micro-organism which could differ in certain important respects from any known disease-causing organisms. Most important of these is that it might be refractory to the immunological and therapeutic processes upon which we depend to maintain our relative freedom from infectious diseases.The funds for this Dr. Strangelove project were somehow approved. AIDS magically appeared within the requested time frame, and of course, just happens to exhibit the exact characteristics specified by the Ft. Detrick scientists.

Three years later, in 1972, the fledgling World Health Organization (WHO) published a very similar proposal to the one submitted to the U.S. House Appropriations Committee in 1969. The WHO proposed that: An attempt should be made to ascertain whether viruses can in fact exert selective effects on immune function, e.g., by …affecting T cell function as opposed to B cell function. The possibility should also be looked into that the immune response to the virus itself may be impaired if the infecting virus damages more or less selectively the immune cells responding to the viral antigens.(Bulletin of the W.H.O., vol. 47, p 257- 274.) This is a textbook clinical description of the function of the HIV/AIDS virus.The W.H.O. shortly thereafter begins a massive smallpox vaccination program in Africa in 1975. Within two years, millions of smallpox vaccines are provided by Novartis et. al, under U.N.I.C.E.F. funding. A decade later, it is determined by independent journalists in the U.K. that the incidence of AIDS infections’ MAPPED AND GRAPHED EPICENTERS in Africa coincided exactly with the locations of the W.H.O. smallpox vaccination program centers in the mid-1970’s (Source, The London Times, May 11, 1987). Some 14,000 Haitians then on UN ‘humanitarian missions’ to Central Africa were also vaccinated in this campaign, and soon contracted HIV. Personnel actually conducting the vaccinations of the Haitians maintain they had been completely unaware that the vaccine was anything other than a routine shot.In 1987, Dr. Hilleman, head of all vaccine production of Merck Pharmaceuticals stunned the world with his public admissions that the mass vaccination campaigns of the 1950s and ’60s likely caused thousands of cancer deaths each year. This was due to the presence of a cancer-causing virus that contaminated the first polio vaccine, according to Dr. Hilleman. Known as SV40, the virus originated from dead monkeys whose kidney cells were used to culture the first Salk vaccines. Doctors estimate that the virus was injected into tens of millions during the vaccination campaigns, including several million in Canada, before being detected and screened out in 1963. Those born between 1941 and 1961 are thought to be most at risk of having been infected with SV40, and are estimated to have a 300% greater chance of developing cancer. According to Hilleman MERCK KNEW THE VACCINES WERE INFECTED WITH SV40, but distributed them anyway. See http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=edikv0zbAlU

Furthermore, research doctors in New Orleans reported in 1963 that a percentage of the Salk polio vaccines were found to have attenuated, (live) viruses, which actually CAUSED tens of thousands of polio cases during the 1950’s.Following the successful liberation of Kuwait in Operation Desert Storm, hundreds of thousands of victorious American troops are suddenly stricken with a wide variety of auto-immune disorders that doctors named the Gulf War Syndrome, (GWS). After a decade of medical investigation, the culprit is finally determined to be an ingredient in the anthrax vaccinations mandatorily given to the troops. This offending adjuvant is a synthetic material known as squalene ­ aka, oil-in-water adjuvant. Writer and Gulf War correspondent Gary Matsumoto documents this entire, tragic saga in his seminal book, Vaccine-A. See www.vaccine-a.com.Understanding these historical facts is very important for this reason: Those that ignore history are doomed to repeat it. This is doubly true when it comes to blindly accepting a novel mass vaccination for a weaponized, reverse engineered virus.The historical record is very clear ­ attenuated, live viruses in vaccines SPREAD the disease very effectively. When combined with SQUALENE ADJUVANT ­ the virus becomes many times more potent and lethal. When given to CHILDREN IN SCHOOLS, millions of typhoid Matts and Marys will be spreading the disease exponentially.Chillingly, the Novartis patent for the novel pandemic flu declares that African green monkey kidney cells will be used for the viral growth substrate ­ i.e. the carrier medium.(Page 3, paragraph 0037) We also see that oil-in-water squalene-based adjuvants will also be included (page 8 ­ 0098) but most incredible of all, because this is a recombinant and novel split vaccine, it is deemed necessary to include fragments of attenuated viruses (i.e. live pathogens) in the vaccine medium.On July 13, 2009, the W.H.O. sanctioned this lunacy by declaring: In view of the anticipated limited vaccine availability at global level and the potential need to protect against drifted strains of virus, it is recommended that promoting production and use of vaccines such as those that are formulated with oil-in-water adjuvants and live attenuated influenza vaccines is important.In conclusion and summation, it should be evident that the 2009 Swine Flu could just as easily be called the Bird Flu ­ because it is as much H5N1 (bird flu) as H1N1 (pig flu.) Novartis knew this in 2005 when it received hundreds of millions of dollars from Mike Leavitt’s HHS to develop and patent the bird flu vaccine. I publicly charge that Novartis had advance knowledge of this combination because they had been in consultation with Jeffrey Taubenberger for years.It is further evident that Novartis’ patent provides for influenza vaccine kits to be provided to other pharmaceutical manufacturers as well. These kits are the basic raw ingredients needed for the other companies to build their own vaccines under their own label.In 2005, this jobbing of separate ingredients by multiple companies would never have been allowed because of the legal liability issues involved. However, in 2009, all liabilities for death and disability from faulty or contaminated vaccines have been stripped away. Any wrongful death or disability lawsuits against Novartis or any other company will today be summarily dismissed.Novartis today has carte blanche blanket immunity for their actions ­ and any large pharmaceutical company who so desires, can join them at the feeding troughs just by paying millions for their kits.If this isn’t the pinnacle of criminality, then I don’t know what is.Novartis, if this novel split vaccine is so wonderful and safe, why do you require such blanket protection from litigation?

Berlin starts talks over Lisbon treaty law
LISBETH KIRK Today AUG 3,09 @ 09:19 CET

Leading representatives of the German governing parties will meet on Monday (3 August) in Berlin to formulate legislation on how to implement the EU's Lisbon treaty, as requested by the country's constitutional court.A new deal is needed after Germany's highest court on 30 June ruled that the Lisbon treaty can only be ratified if the national parliament's role is first strengthened.The 147 page-long ruling suspended the ratification process of the treaty until the new provisions requested by the court come into force.Time is short for Berlin as the German parliament will soon be dissolved due to general elections on 27 September.On 2 October the Irish are to vote in a second referendum on Lisbon, with German clarity over the treaty seen as important for securing a Yes-majority.Germany's centre-right CDU and CSU parties are expected to work out a deal at a meeting on 21 August, with a first reading in the parliament expected on 26 August. The fast-track plan is to have the law adopted on 8 September.The legislation could then be approved by the German upper chamber, the Bundesrat, on 18 September. Constitutional court judges in Karlsruhe could only then decide if their concerns have been met.The Christian Democratic parties are internally split on how far-reaching powers the German parliament should have over EU lawmaking, with the Bavarian CSU faction of the party being the most keen to curb Brussels.

The constitutional case was brought by CSU MP Peter Gauweiler and the left party, Die Linke. According to German media reports, Mr Gauweiler hs already prepared a new legal complaint if he deems the implementation of the Lisbon treaty into German decision-making structures unsatisfactory.The CSU party has formulated 14 guidelines on how to strengthen the German parliament's influence over EU legislation. The party's support is needed to reach a two-thirds majority in parliament to have the Lisbon deal approved, in reality giving the CSU a veto power.Representatives of the German regions are also to get involved in Monday's talks, but it is no secret that in the end a deal must be reached between chancellor Angela Merkel from the CDU party, the Social Democrat foreign minister Frank-Walter Steinmeier and the Bavarian minister-president Horst Seehofer from the CSU.At the regional level, Hessian Europe minister Hahn representing the liberal FDP party has said Hessen would only approve the package provided the regions' influence on EU law-making is fully secure.

EU arranges anti-gas crisis loan for Ukraine
ANDREW RETTMAN Today AUG 3,09 @ 09:10 CET

EUOBSERVER / BRUSSELS - The European Commission has helped Ukraine to secure international loans to prevent a repetition of last winter's gas cut-off.The European Bank for Reconstruction and Development, the European Investment Bank and the World Bank will together put forward $1.7 billion (€1.2 billion).Three hundred million dollars is to help Ukraine buy Russian gas to fill storage tanks for the coming winter. The rest is to pay for reforms to its distribution network over the next 18 months.The deal is conditional on Ukraine increasing transparency in its state-owned gas distributor Naftogaz, reducing gas waste and bumping up household energy prices to market levels.I believe this agreement should help Ukraine become a more reliable energy partner for the benefit of both the European Union and Ukraine's own people, European Commission president Jose Manuel Barroso said in a statement on Friday (31 July).Russia in January cut off Ukraine's gas in a row over payments, creating massive outages in the EU which gets 20 percent of its gas imports via the country.

The rescue package follows a plea by Russian prime minister Vladimir Putin to Mr Barroso to help find money, with Russian gas supplier Gazprom ill-equipped to face another gas crisis.Any Naftogaz reforms or domestic price hikes could harm Ukraine prime minister Yulia Tymoshenko's bid to be elected as president in January.Naftogaz has in recent years been linked to top-level political corruption cases and is notoriously badly run. The company collected less than half of its bills from industrial clients in the first six months of 2009.The $1.7 billion gas package is to come on top of $16.4 billion of general economic aid from the International Monetary Fund.

Unemployment continues to soar in Europe
RENATA GOLDIROVA Today AUG 3,09 @ 09:25 CET

Jobs in the European Union continued to disappear in June, with unemployment reaching a four-year high and putting extra pressure of the bloc's coffers to help laid-off workers back into employment. According to fresh data released by the EU's statistics office, Eurostat, on Friday (31 July), some 21.5 million people - or 8.9 percent - were out of work in the 27-nation EU in June. The figure was 9.4 percent in the 16-member euro area - the highest in 10 years.Spain, hit hard by the collapse of its construction sector, recorded the highest jobless rates at 18.1 percent, followed by Baltic States, Latvia (17.2 percent) and Estonia (17 percent). On the other hand, labour markets in the Netherlands and Austria seem to be in the best shape. The two countries have just 3.3 percent and 4.4 percent unemployed respectively. The European Commission has tried to put a positive spin on the new unemployment numbers, saying that the pace of job losses in the EU as a whole is slowing down. Compared with May, the number of people unemployed increased by 246,000.This is much less than monthly increases that we recorded in previous months,commission spokesperson Amelia Torres told journalists (31 July).She added that "the peak appeared to had been reached in March" when unemployment went up by 646,000.

Help from EU coffers

As a result, EU governments are more interested in drawing money from the Brussels-managed globalisation fund to finance costly measures in support of laid-off workers.
The European Commission has this year received nine applications concerning 11,872 redundancies and €76.8 million, while it dealt with five applications in 2008. We expect more applications in the course of the year due to the crisis, the spokesperson Katharina von Schnurbein said (31 July). Germany is set to be the latest beneficiary of the funding as more than 1,300 workers were sacked by the mobile phone producer Nokia there. The package of €5.5 million will cover half of costs of envisaged post-redundancy support.Germany successfully showed that there has been a decrease in EU market shares for mobile phones as well as an increase in mobile phone imports into the EU,Ms von Schnurbein said explaining the commission's latest decision.The European globalisation fund, operating with an annual budget of €500 million, was set up in 2006 to help those who have lost jobs after companies shifted their production outside the 27-nation EU.Later, the fund was made part of the bloc's toolbox to fight the economic and labour market crisis and from July this year, it is run under more flexible rules.Brussels has, for example, lowered the limit of people made redundant in one affected company from 1,000 to 500. It will cover up to 65 percent of costs instead of half, while the aid can be spent within 24 months instead of one year.

Turkey marks 50 years as EU suitor
LUCIA KUBOSOVA Today AUG 3,09 @ 09:28 CET

Turkey has marked a sad anniversary of 50 years knocking on Europe's door, with some enthusiasts hoping that the EU's recent deal on the Nabucco gas pipeline could speed up Ankara's membership bid.The Eurasian country of 74 million on Friday (31 July) marked a half century from the first official announcement of its application to join the EU, which was then called the European Economic Community.On the same day in 1959, Turkey's prime minister Adnan Menderes made the first partnership application to join the economic bloc of what was then six countries, Belgium, France, Germany, Italy, Luxembourg and the Netherlands, created only two years before in 1957. Ankara's bid came before several other EU countries now seen as the bloc's heavyweights, such as Britain or Spain, joined the currently 27-member club. But it has proceeded in a death-slow tempo and along with re-emerging doubts about the ultimate goal of the mutual relationship and contacts between Turkey and Europe.

First off, the EEC turned down the country's application. In 1963 however, the two sides adopted an association agreement which did mention the membership prospects for Turkey. But it took almost 40 years for Ankara to acquire a formal candidate status and six more years to kick off the actual talks on the conditions to join the bloc, in 2005.Our country has no longer any tolerance for time wasting and delays, Turkey's chief negotiator with the EU, Egemen Bagis, said in a statement on the anniversary which he said the country remembers but is not a cause for celebration,AFP reported.

We have to learn lessons from past mistakes, fulfil our responsibilities and achieve the goal of full membership as soon as possible,Mr Bagis added, stressing Ankara's determination to continue on the path of reform.After four years of accession talks, Turkey has opened 11 chapters out of 35 policy areas which contain existing rules that need to be transcribed into all candidate countries' national legislation.From the outset, the process of opening and provisionally closing its negotiating chapters has been halted due to disagreements with Cyprus - as all current EU members need to give their formal blessing to any progress in the talks of candidates.The dispute between the two countries dates back to Turkey's invasion of Cyprus in 1974, which took place five days after a brief Greek-inspired coup. Ankara has been present with its troops in the northern part of the island, as the only country recognising the state of Turkish Cypriots.In 2006, the EU decided to block eight negotiating areas from further discussion due to Ankara's failure to meet its commitments regarding Cyprus, notably its refusal to allow Cypriot ships and planes into Turkish ports and airspace.

Nabucco pipeline

Recently, Nicosia refused to give its nod to a closure of Turkey's energy chapter due to Ankara's moves against the Cypriot efforts to exploit the island's energy sources off its southern coast.Ironically, Turkey is viewed as a key ally in future energy co-operation that could help break the bloc's energy dependence on Russia. On 13 July, an intergovernmental agreement between Turkey, Romania, Bulgaria, Hungary and Austria was signed by five prime ministers on the construction of the Nabucco pipeline.The project, supported by both the EU and US, is due to diversify the current natural gas suppliers and delivery routes for Europe, by pumping gas from Erzurum in Turkey to Baumgarten an der March in Austria.Speaking at the signing ceremony in July, the European Commission president Jose Manuel Barroso hinted the pipeline could eventually improve the chances for Turkey's EU bid. I believe that with the arrival of the first gas - and some experts have said this will be as early as 2014 - this agreement will open the door to a new era between the EU and Turkey,Mr Barroso said, adding: Gas pipes may be made of steel, but Nabucco can cement the links between our people.But some Turkish experts warn that similar hopes in Ankara might prove unrealistic.There are many countries with whom the EU trades extensively; however, the EU did not give any hope of EU membership to any of them. I think it would be wrong to build a direct link between Nabucco and the EU,Emre İseri, a professor at Kadir Has University, said, according to Today's Zaman daily.

FEARFUL SIGHTS AND GREAT SIGNS FROM HEAVEN

LUKE 21:11
11 And great earthquakes shall be in divers places, and famines, and pestilences; and fearful sights and great signs shall there be from heaven.

FIRES AND EXPLOSIONS

REVELATION 8:7
7 The first angel sounded, and there followed hail and fire mingled with blood, and they were cast upon the earth: and the third part of trees was burnt up, and all green grass was burnt up.

More Residents Evacuated Due to Terrace Mountain Fire
Caroline Franks Sunday, August 2, 2009

About 25 hundred people near Fintry, British Columbia have now been evacuated due to the Terrace Mountain Forest Fire.That’s up from 12 hundred people who had already been evacuated this weekend.Hot and dry weather is causing the fire to grow.The blaze now covers 46 square kilometres and is 90 per cent contained.Elsewhere in B.C., about 2 thousand residents are on evacuation alert as a forest fire creeps towards Lillooet.

Fires threatening 2 southern B.C. communities grow again; 2,500 evacuated
(CP) – AUG 2,09 9:30PM

FINTRY, B.C. — B.C. fire crews and north Okanagan residents got a taste of nature's capricious power this weekend when a forest fire that was almost completely surrounded broke out of its corral, forcing thousands of newly returned residents to flee again.Firefighters had the three-week-old Terrace Mountain blaze 90 per cent contained when gusty winds sent it surging over the fire guard Saturday evening.The fire rapidly advanced four kilometres, triggering an evacuation order for 2,500 residents of Fintry and other developments along Okanagan Lake.

Another 2,100 people remained on evacuation alert Sunday.

Meanwhile, about 120 residents of Brookmere were ordered to leave as a 200-hectare fire came within five kilometres of buildings in the small community about 40 kilometres south of Merritt, B.C.The Terrace Mountain fire grew by more than a third, to just over 70 square kilometres, Suzanne von der Porten, a fire information officer with the B.C. Forest Service, said Sunday.Winds in the area gusted up to 50 kilometres an hour, which is in part what contributed to the vigorous fire behaviour that afternoon,she said.Crews thought they had a grip on the fire after two days of rain showers July 24-26, just after the first evacuation.But there's been no rain since then and winds drove the flames across the fire guard and into parched forest land up the side of a valley.Once it was fully exposed on the ridge, upper-level winds grew the fire in both intensity and in size,said von der Porten.The shift forced residents into the now-familiar drill of tossing essential belongings into their vehicles and escaping.The problem this time was that the busy holiday long weekend meant there was no room at the inn for evacuees, even as far south as the U.S. border.We had no hotel rooms available in the central Okanagan at all (Saturday),said Bruce Smith, public information officer at the Central Okanagan regional district's emergency operations centre.About 400 residents were registered at an emergency reception centre set up in a Kelowna school. Some 170 people were taken to accommodation at the University of British Columbia's Okanagan campus in Kelowna, while others were put up at a church.There were people who were actually sleeping in vehicles,said Smith.

There were people in RVs and tent trailers who just set up in the (school) parking lot rather than go anywhere else.Smith said a lot of evacuees are summer residents who spend their time vacationing in the area.Many of them may have decided just to go home once the evacuation took place yesterday.Smith said the remainder will be moved into hotel rooms once the weekend holiday crowd checks out.Von der Porten said crews were working Sunday to re-establish the fire guard on the blaze's eastern edge.About 240 firefighters, 16 helicopters and 83 pieces of heavy equipment were working the blaze, which officials say was human-caused.So far the winds have been lighter than they were this time yesterday, so that's good,she said.They're watching the fire's behaviour closely because dry fuels, steep terrain and winds off Okanagan Lake increase the threat.After being almost completely hemmed in, the fire now is only 30 per cent contained.It's hard on crews that have been working on it,said von der Porten. The previous two weeks' efforts did prevent the loss of homes and equipment, she added.Things went as well as they could considering the intensity of the fire burning.Meanwhile, 2,500 residents of Lillooet remained on evacuation alert Sunday as the Mount McLean fire continued to edge towards the village, about 250 kilometres north of Vancouver.The fire, started by lightning on July 22, now is estimated at about 26.5 kilometres. The eastern edge of the blaze, about a kilometre from Lillooet, grew by about 20 hectares overnight.The game plan ... is to continue a holding action on the fire on both fronts, on the eastern front above the town of Lillooet and on the western front along Seton Lake,said fire information officer Gary Horley.The plan would be to do some more burning off on that west flank if conditions present themselves.The threat triggered an evacuation alert for the district of Lillooet, which includes the village and surrounding properties.We are all on an evacuation alert but no notice has been given,said Gerry Sucharyna, a spokesman for the district's emergency operations centre.That order, if it came down, would affect every resident on the west side of the Fraser River.Winds were fairly calm Sunday morning but Sucharyna said that likely wouldn't last.The forecast is for higher winds so we remain on alert and we're very eager to see what's going to happen,he said.

The close-knit community has a well-established evacuation plan, he added.The forest service currently lists 88 active wildfires in the province, some burning since early June.Only a few are so-called interface fires, which threaten homes or other structures.There have been almost 2,100 fires so far this season, scorching about 550 square kilometres of forest. The vast majority were caused by lightning.Much of the province is covered by bans on campfires and other open flames. Premier Gordon Campbell has urged people to avoid going into the backcountry until the fire risk diminishes.2009 The Canadian Press.

STORMS HURRICANES-TORNADOES

LUKE 21:25-26
25 And there shall be signs in the sun, and in the moon, and in the stars; and upon the earth distress of nations, with perplexity;(MASS CONFUSION) the sea and the waves roaring;(FIERCE WINDS)
26 Men’s hearts failing them for fear, and for looking after those things which are coming on the earth: for the powers of heaven shall be shaken.

Little warning before deadly Alberta stage collapse
Last Updated: Sunday, August 2, 2009 | 9:56 PM ET CBC News

The storm rolled in with little warning Saturday, toppling a concert stage at the Big Valley Jamboree in Camrose, Alta. (Submitted by Ken Meintzer)A severe windstorm that toppled a concert stage in Camrose, Alta., killing one person and injuring as many as 75, happened so fast that details of what happened are a blur, the event producer said Sunday.Larry Werner, of Panhandle Productions Ltd., said there was a hub of activity with nearly 100 people on the stage or nearby for the annual Big Valley Jamboree shortly before Saturday's chaos.He said a set change was in the works when the storm struck around 6 p.m. local time. Nashville-based country singer Billy Currington had just wrapped up, while actor and singer Kevin Costner was getting ready to perform with his band, Modern West.All of a sudden, there was sand everywhere, a sandstorm … and you couldn't see anything— Brenda CasperWitnesses said Currington and a band member were bloodied but not seriously hurt. Debris fell around Costner and his manager, Nick Meinama, but both escaped injury.CFCW radio personality Danny Hooper was on the stage preparing to introduce the next act when high winds suddenly started to blow. He was advised to warn the crowd of an approaching storm, but only managed to say a few words before the stage was hit.Werner was also on stage and said he and others worked furiously to get everybody off the stage.We were trying to get everybody down the stairs. It happened so fast you truly can't honestly remember half of it, Werner said.

Winds exceeded 100 km/h
Officials at Sunday's news conference stressed that the storm struck with very little notice, blasting winds that Environment Canada officials estimated at over 100 kilometres per hour.RCMP informed us at 5:55 p.m. about unconfirmed reports that a possible tornado had touched down in the Nisku area [just south of Edmonton], said Camrose police Chief Darrell Kambeitz. We had people on the stage at 5:57 p.m., and the storm struck between 5:57 p.m. and 6 p.m.Thousands of fans screamed and sought cover; some ran to nearby tents and trailers. A 20-year-old man was in a porta-potty when it was knocked over. He had to get 20 stitches across his head.All of a sudden, there was sand everywhere, a sandstorm … and you couldn't see anything, said concertgoer Brenda Casper. When she was able to raise her head the stage was gone, she said.Kambeitz said 21 people were taken to hospitals and two remained in critical condition. More than 50 others were treated for less serious injuries at the scene.

Heavy rain deluged the area for about an hour as emergency crews treated the injured and combed through the wreckage for more victims. Initial estimates put the number of people injured at 15.Police have not disclosed the identity of the dead person, but friends told local media that it was Donna Moore of Lloydminster, and that she was killed when an enormous speaker fell on her.

Organizers criticized
Debbie South, a nurse at Edmonton's Royal Alexandra Hospital who attended the event, said organizers should have halted the concert a lot sooner, instead of just giving fans minutes to react to the severe weather.We think they should have gotten [people] out of there earlier. The storm was coming, everybody knew,she said.The severe windstorm left the Big Valley Jamboree in chaos. (Sumbitted by Brad Saville)Nursing student Jessica Lubemsky leaped into action when the storm hit.It was utter shock. I went running over as fast as I could just because I knew first aid and I knew so many people were on that stage,she said.I had to do some splints for people with broken arms. There were a bunch of people with a bunch of bruises, broken bones.On Sunday, construction cranes could be seen as workers continued to clear debris from the caved-in concert bowl.Members of the Edmonton fire and Camrose fire units worked relentlessly through the night to ensure the area was safe and clear,said Deputy Chief Don Rosland of the Camrose Fire Department.Concert organizers announced Sunday morning the party was officially over and cancelled acts such as headliner Tim McGraw. Area highways clogged with motorhomes and RVs as an estimated 15,000 fans made their way home.With files from The Canadian Press.

Florida Looks at New Ideas for Battling Hurricanes By SIOBHAN MORRISSEY / MIAMI Siobhan Morrissey / Miami – Sun Aug 2, 1:25 am ET

Hurricane season is two months old and not a single named storm has popped onto the radar. If that makes people complacent, it only makes weather watchers worry even more about what is to come. Officials and insurers are concerned about the ramifications of a Big One, and Florida, the most ravaged of states, is looking at several novel approaches to riding out the storms - or even preventing them altogether. (Read a story about whether Florida can survive the Big One.)The most innovative is a proposal from Microsoft founder Bill Gates to redirect or shrink hurricanes by cooling the waters where they are generated. Since hurricanes gather strength over tropical waters such as the Caribbean and the Gulf of Mexico, cooling them would weaken the storms before they made landfall. The plan calls for huge ocean-going tubs that would use waves and turbines to push down the hotter surface water while sucking up the cooler water from below. (See an interactive graphic on the worst natural disasters in U.S. history.)Coastal residents - who suffer under high insurance rates - would be asked to cover the cost, according to an application filed with the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office on July 9. Gates is one of a dozen inventors listed on the application submitted by Searete LLC, a subsidiary of Intellectual Ventures LLC, of Bellevue, Washington.Paul Pablos Holman, an inventor at Intellectual Ventures, says the proposal would be used only as a last resort - as a Plan C.But many experts are skeptical of its practicality. I have a hard time picturing doing this on the magnitude required, but it's an interesting idea,says University of Florida Professor of Geological Sciences Ellen Martin. It may be easier to just dump a bunch of ice cubes out of an airplane, but it will take a lot of those too.

Hugh Willoughby, acknowledged as the guru of hurricane modification and now a professor at Florida International University, dismisses the plan as junk science. The cost and logistics don't add up, he says, estimating that it would take tens of thousands of the giant tubs put in the water within 24 hours of the storm's arrival. Others think the whole idea of trying to dissipate hurricanes before they start is misguided. Bob Atlas, director of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration in Miami, points out that hurricanes, as devastating as they can be, do serve some good, by helping ward off droughts, and that tampering with them could have untold environmental ramifications. If the storms can't be warded off, the state is also looking to ways of responding to them more efficiently. Florida's top emergency manager has floated a novel idea to turn the housing crash into an advantage, by using 250,000 foreclosed homes as temporary hurricane shelters.This option didn't exist two or three years ago before the real-estate market crashed,Ruben Almaguer, interim director of Florida's emergency management division, told the Miami Herald last month following a mock-disaster drill that highlighted the shortage of hurricane shelters in the state.We can't not look at something staring us directly in the face, Almaguer said.It's a solution to a potential problem.But the proposal isn't getting much support. Richard Shuster, a Miami attorney who writes the Florida Foreclosure Defense blog, notes that foreclosed properties are often uninhabitable. Homeowners in foreclosure or thieves after foreclosure often strip homes of appliances, fixtures, air conditioners, and anything else of value, including hurricane shutters,he says. The Federal Emergency Management Agency is not considering such a measure.Under FEMA's mission of sheltering disaster survivors, this is not an option that we would utilize,agency spokesman Clark Stevens says.That leaves the perennial problem of evacuation. Some have proposed reexamining a solution that traffic engineers began looking into in 1990, after Hurricane Floyd prompted massive traffic jams as people in the Carolinas fled their homes. The lanes going in the opposite direction were empty. So road scholars focused on the possibility of making all lanes go in one direction, says Louisiana State University Prof. Chester Wilmont.Florida has had a standby plan for one-way evacuations since 1994, but it has yet to make the idea a priority. Officials prefer to execute staged evacuations, first with tourists and trailer park residents and then with outlying beach communities, so that the evacuation is orderly and traffic continues to flow, says Jennifer Olson, chief operating officer of Florida's Turnpike Enterprise.The standing one-way plan would also require a lot of manpower: an estimated 720 more transportation workers and state troopers to police traffic in the Miami area alone, more than doubling what was required before. Worst of all, traffic would slow where the roadway narrows in Palm Beach County. You'll have traffic jams backed up for miles,says Metropolitan Planning Organization Director Randy Whitfield. If you have an accident, it will totally shut down the evacuation.

The seven terrors of the world AUG 2,09 SUNDAY HERALD

A new report highlights the biggest problems now facing the world. It warns that the environmental crisis is deepening every year. Human consumption is now 30% larger than nature’s capacity to regenerate. By 2015 the number of people suffering climate-related disasters could mushroom to more than 375 million a year. By 2030 as many as 660 million people could be affected, with economic losses rising to $340 billion a year. There are currently 15 wars taking place and the report predicts that 3 billion people will have no access to water by 2025. Exclusive report by environment editor Rob Edward.THE WORLD is facing a series of interlinked crises which threatens billions of people and could cause the collapse of civilisation, according to an international report out this week.Climate pollution, food shortages, diseases, wars, disasters, crime and the recession are all conspiring to ravage the globe and threaten the future of humanity, it warns. Democracy, human rights and press freedom are also suffering.The report, called 2009 State Of The Future, has been compiled by the Millennium Project, an international think-tank based in Washington DC, and involved 2700 experts from 30 countries.Half the world appears vulnerable to social instability and violence, the report says. This is due to rising unemployment and decreasing food, water and energy supplies, coupled with the disruptions caused by global warming and mass migrations.The project has been backed by organisations including United Nations agencies, the Rockefeller Foundation, private companies and governments. It provides invaluable insights into the future for the United Nations, its member states, and civil society,according to the UN Secretary-General, Ban Ki-moon.The report's bleakest warning is on the dangers of the climate chaos being caused by pollution. It also highlights the 15 wars taking place in the world. It further predicts there could be three billion people without access to adequate water by 2025.About half the people in the world are at risk of several endemic diseases, it says. These include HIV/Aids, swine flu, drug-resistant superbugs and a string of new infections.The global income from the proceeds of international crime is reckoned to be around $3 trillion.Democracy and freedom have declined for the third year in a row, and press freedoms declined for the seventh year in a row,the report says. The global recession was caused by too many greedy and deceitful decisions, it argues, but there were now some signs that humanity was growing out of its selfish, self-centred adolescence.

1:Environment The most serious danger is the pollution that is affecting the climate, the report says. Every day the world's oceans absorb 30 million tonnes of carbon dioxide, increasing their acidity.The number of dead zones - areas like La Jolla off the coast of San Diego, which have too little oxygen to support life - has doubled every decade since the 1960s.The oceans are warming about 50% faster than the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change reported in 2007, while the amount of ice flowing out of Greenland last summer was nearly three times more than the previous year. Summer ice in the Arctic could disappear by 2030, the report warns.Over 36 million hectares of primary forest are lost every year,it says.Human consumption is 30% larger than nature's capacity to regenerate, and demand on the planet has more than doubled over the past 45 years.

The strains these changes will put on the world include floods, droughts and storms.

This important report puts climate change up there with the major economic, social and political challenges that the human race faces,said Dr Richard Dixon, director of WWF Scotland. "Whether you are worried about food security, the threat of war or mass migration, climate change is going to make things worse.The Millennium Project report argues that combating climate change requires a 10-year programme by the US and China equivalent to the Apollo moon mission launched in 1961.Other environmental problems are highlighted, including toxic waste dumping. About 70% of the world's 50 million tonnes of annual electronic waste is dumped in developing countries in Asia and Africa, much of it illegally.A quarter of all fish stocks are over-harvested, the report says, and 80% cannot withstand increased fishing.

2:Food and waterA global food crisis may be inevitable, the report warns, because of an obscure fungus called Ug99 which causes stem rust on plants. It is threatening to wipe out more than 80% of the world's wheat crops, and it could take up to 12 years to develop resistant strains of wheat.Food prices rose by 52% between 2007 and 2008, while the cost of fertiliser has nearly doubled in the past year. Meanwhile, 30%-40% of food production is lost in many poor countries because of a lack of adequate storage facilities.Nearly a billion people are undernourished and hungry, while 700 million face water scarcity - this could hit three billion by 2025, the report warns. The world's population is expected to grow from the current 6.8 billion to 9.2 billion by 2050 - and could reach 11 billion.Christian Aid's partners in developing countries are already reporting that water is hard to find, said Claire Aston, acting head of Christian Aid Scotland. The idea that three billion people will be in this position as a result of climate change by 2030 is a frightening prospect.

Water shortages are also being worsened by the growing global consumption of meat. The report predicts demand for meat may rise by 50% by 2025 and double by 2050.

3:DiseaseAbout 17 million people - nine million of them young children - are killed by infectious diseases every year, according to the report.Half of the world's population is at risk from endemic diseases, with TB, malaria and HIV/Aids together causing more than 300 million illnesses and five million deaths a year.The number of people living with HIV/Aids is estimated at between 30 million and 36 million, two-thirds in sub-Saharan Africa.The dangers from other diseases seem to be getting worse, too. Over the past 40 years, 39 infectious diseases have been discovered, and in the last five years more than 1100 epidemics have been verified. There are up to 20new strains of superbugs, such as MRSA, that are difficult to counter, while three-quarters of emerging pathogens have the ability to jump species.Old diseases such as cholera, yellow fever, plague, dengue fever, haemorrhagic fever and diphtheria are re-emerging, not to mention new strains, like the H1N1 swine flu virus.Massive urbanisation, increased encroachment on animal territory, and concentrated livestock production could trigger new pandemics,the report cautions.Climate change is altering insect and disease patterns. Other problems may come from synthetic biology laboratories.

4:Wars and disastersMore than two billion people have been affected by the world's 35 wars and 2500 natural disasters over the last nine years, the report says. By mid-2009, there were 15 conflicts raging around the globe - one more than in 2008. Four wars were taking place in Africa, four in Asia, four in the Middle East, two in the Americas and one, against terrorism, internationally.A pending unknown is whether Iran and North Korea will trigger a nuclear arms race, the report says.Another more distant spectre, but possibly even a greater threat, is that of single individuals acting alone to create and deploy weapons of mass destruction.The Iraq war has left behind an environmental catastrophe of 25 million land mines, hazardous waste, polluted water and depleted uranium contamination. It will take centuries to restore the natural environment of Iraq, said the country's environment minister, Nermeen Othman.The number and intensity of natural disasters is increasing, the report says. In 2008 there were a total of 354 disasters with an estimated 214 million victims, 80%of them in Asia.Increasing climate chaos could exacerbate the damage wrought by natural disasters and see the number of people suffering grow to 375 million a year by 2015 and 660 million by 2030. Economic losses could reach $340 billion a year.The world has moved from a global threat once called the cold war, to what now should be considered the warming war,said Afelee Pita, the UN ambassador from Tuvalu, a small, low-lying island in the Pacific Ocean.The report also reveals the world recently escaped a potentially planet-ending event.In March 2009 an asteroid missed Earth by 77,000 kilometres,it says.If it had hit Earth, it would have wiped out all life on 800square kilometres. No-one knew it was coming.

5:CrimeOrganised crime is very big business, according to the Millennium Project report, with an income of $3 trillion a year. That's twice as much as all the world's military budgets combined. This includes more than $1 trillion paid in bribes to corrupt officials, and maybe another $1 trillion from cybercrime thefts. Counter feiting and piracy could bring in at least $300bn, the global drug trade $321bn, human trafficking $44bn and illegal weapons sales $10bn.Governments can be understood as a series of decision points, with some people in those points vulnerable to very large bribes,the report says.Decisions could be bought and sold like heroin, making democracy an illusion.Shockingly, there are reckoned to be between 14 million and 27 million people still being held in slavery, the vast majority of them in Asia. This is more than at the peak of the African slave trade.The report argues that the world is beginning to wake up to the enormity of the threat of transnational organised crime. The UN Office on Drugs and Crime has called on all states to develop a coherent strategy, but efforts are still piecemeal.The 2009 G8 meeting of justice and home affairs ministers explored anti-crime strategies, and in June the US launched the International Organised Crime Intelligence and Operations Centre.Meanwhile, transnational organised crime continues to expand in the absence of a comprehensive, integrated global counter-strategy,observes the report.

6:Human rightsFreedom and democracy are waning, the report reveals. They have declined for the third year in a row, with press freedoms worsening for the seventh year in a row.In 2008, democracy declined in 34 countries, and only improved in 14. Just 17% of the world's population lives in 70 countries with a free press, while 42% lives in 64 countries with no free press.According to the Economist Intelligence Unit, 14.4% of humanity enjoys full democracy, while 35% live under authoritarian regimes. Democratic forces will have to work harder to make sure that the short-term reversals do not stop the longer-term trend of democratisation, the report says.Women account for more than 40% of the world's workforce but earn less than 25% of the wages and own only 1% of the assets, it found.Many countries still have laws and cultures that deny women basic human rights,the report states.Gender equity is essential for the development of a healthy society and is one of the most effective ways to address all the other global challenges.The human rights organisation Amnesty International warns that the recession is having a devastating impact on the world's poor, driving more and more people into poverty, unemployment and homelessness.The recession is also leading to repression of people who are desperate,said Amnesty's Scottish programme director, John Watson.It is creating new tensions between governments and vulnerable people.

7:Science and technologyThe Millennium Report warns that, due to the staggering rate of technological advances, politicians and the public need a global collective intelligence system to track the effects of such rapid changes. Contingency plans need to be prepared by governments in case the speed of development has a highly negative impact on the human race.Although advances in science and technology are increasing the chances of major breakthroughs in medicine, computing and biotechnology, these breakthroughs come with a health warning as we are unsure what the flipside may be. Some experts speculate that civilisation is heading for a singularity, the report says. This would mean that technological change is so fast and significant that we today are incapable of conceiving what life might be like beyond the year 2025.The electronics company IBM has promised a computer capable of performing 20,000 trillion calculations per second by 2011 - just like Hal, above, from 2001: A Space Odyssey - roughly equivalent to the speed of the human brain.On the upside, the boom in power generated by wind turbines and other renewable sources has been unprecedented. For the first time in 2008 the majority of the increase in electricity production in the US and the European Union came from renewable sources.

Mobile phones, the internet, international trade, language translation and jet planes are giving birth to an interdependent humanity that can create and implement global strategies to improve the prospects for humanity.

DOCTOR DOCTORIAN FROM ANGEL OF GOD
then the angel said, Financial crisis will come to Asia. I will shake the world.

JAMES 5:1-3
1 Go to now, ye rich men, weep and howl for your miseries that shall come upon you.
2 Your riches are corrupted, and your garments are motheaten.
3 Your gold and silver is cankered; and the rust of them shall be a witness against you, and shall eat your flesh as it were fire. Ye have heaped treasure together for the last days.

REVELATION 18:10,17,19
10 Standing afar off for the fear of her torment, saying, Alas, alas that great city Babylon, that mighty city! for in one hour is thy judgment come.
17 For in one hour so great riches is come to nought. And every shipmaster, and all the company in ships, and sailors, and as many as trade by sea, stood afar off,
19 And they cast dust on their heads, and cried, weeping and wailing, saying, Alas, alas that great city, wherein were made rich all that had ships in the sea by reason of her costliness! for in one hour is she made desolate.

EZEKIEL 7:19
19 They shall cast their silver in the streets, and their gold shall be removed: their silver and their gold shall not be able to deliver them in the day of the wrath of the LORD: they shall not satisfy their souls, neither fill their bowels: because it is the stumblingblock of their iniquity.

REVELATION 13:16-18
16 And he(FALSE POPE) causeth all, both small and great, rich and poor, free and bond, to receive a mark in their right hand, or in their foreheads:(CHIP IMPLANT)
17 And that no man might buy or sell, save he that had the mark, or the name of the beast, or the number of his name.
18 Here is wisdom. Let him that hath understanding count the number of the beast: for it is the number of a man; and his number is Six hundred threescore and six.(6-6-6) A NUMBER SYSTEM

WORLD MARKET RESULTS
http://money.cnn.com/data/world_markets/

HALF HOUR DOW RESULTS MON AUG 03,2009

09:30 AM +5.25
10:00 AM +48.30
10:30 AM +84.12
11:00 AM +85.56
11:30 AM +82.46
12:00 PM +80.80
12:30 PM +84.65
01:00 PM +98.93
01:30 PM +105.13
02:00 PM +100.44
02:30 PM +115.56
03:00 PM +102.33
03:30 PM +123.19
04:00 PM +114.95 9286.56

S&P 500 1,002.63 +15.15

NASDAQ 2,008.61 +30.11

GOLD 958.40 +2.60

OIL 71.32 +1.87

TSE 300 (HOLIDAY)

CDNX (HOLIDAY)

S&P/TSX/60 (HOLIDAY)

MORNING,NEWS,STATS

YEAR TO DATE PERFORMANCE
Dow +4.50%
S&P +9.33%
Nasdaq +25.46%
TSX Advances 1,035,declines 492,unchanged 248,Volume 1,781,189,323.
TSX Venture Exchange Advances 506,Declines 325,Unchanged 354,Volume 250,758,177.

Dow +73 points at 4 minutes of trading today.
Dow +5 points at low today.
Dow +115 points at high today so far.
GOLD opens at $961.60.OIL opens at $71.31 today.

AFTERNOON,NEWS,STATS
Dow +5 points at low today so far.
Dow +115 points at high today so far.

DAY TODAY PERFORMANCE - 12:30PM STATS
NYSE Advances 2,712,declines 843,unchanged 87,New Highs 158,New Lows 63.
Volume 2,658,112,906.
NASDAQ Advances 1,598,declines 980,unchanged 126,New highs 81,New Lows 12.
Volume 942,976,525.
TSX Advances 1,036,declines 491,unchanged 248,Volume 1,861,304,677.
TSX Venture Exchange Advances 506,Declines 326,Unchanged 354,Volume 250,780,677.

WRAPUP,NEWS,STATS
Dow +5 points at low today.
Dow +125 points at high today.
Dow +1.25% today Volume 221,688,361.
Nasdaq +1.52% today Volume 2,060,429,250.
S&P 500 +1.53% today Volume N/A

Is America building a purely military economy?
Daniel Tencer Raw Story Monday, August 3, 2009

A recent article in the New York Times, entitled Why a Recovery May Still Feel Like a Recession,has buried in it some startling statistics about the direction of the US economy.Floyd Norris’ article points out that durable-goods shipments — a basic measure of industrial production — fell by more than 20 percent during this recession, and would have declined further were it not for increased production of weapons.The use of the military-industrial complex as a quick, if dubious, way of jump-starting the economy is nothing new, but what is amazing is the divergence between the military economy and the civilian economy, as shown by this New York Times chart.In the past nine years, non-industrial production in the US has declined by some 19 percent. It took about four years for manufacturing to return to levels seen before the 2001 recession — and all those gains were wiped out in the current recession.By contrast, military manufacturing is now 123 percent greater than it was in 2000 — it has more than doubled while the rest of the manufacturing sector has been shrinking.But Norris adds a valuable caveat: The United States remains primarily a civilian economy. The military now takes about 8 percent of all durable goods, up from 3 percent in 2000.While that puts the size of the military economy in perspective, it’s important to note the trajectory — the military economy is nearly three times as large, proportionally to the rest of the economy, as it was at the beginning of the Bush administration. And it is the only manufacturing sector showing any growth. Extrapolate that trend, and what do you get?

The change in leadership in Washington does not appear to be abating that trend. The military budget for 2009, not including the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, is $651 billion, up 11 percent from the $583 billion spent on the military in 2008. (See the Pentagon’s budget report here (PDF)). The Iraq and Afghanistan wars are estimated, separately, to cost $150 billion per year.At his blog on Talking Points Memo, John Taplin argues the rapid militarization of the economy is a clear sign of a civilization in decline. Taplin cites the historian Alfred Toynbee’s analysis of the decline of the Roman empire, as paraphrased at Wikipedia:The Roman Empire produced few exportable goods. Material innovation, whether through entrepreneurialism or technological advancement, all but ended long before the final dissolution of the Empire. Meanwhile the costs of military defense and the pomp of Emperors continued. Financial needs continued to increase, but the means of meeting them steadily eroded. In the end due to economic failure, even the armor of soldiers deteriorated and the weaponry of soldiers became so obsolete to the extent that the enemies of the Empire had better armor and weapons as well as larger forces. The decrepit social order offered so little to its subjects that many saw the barbarian invasion as liberation from onerous obligations to the ruling class.Sound familiar?

DANIEL 7:23-24
23 Thus he said, The fourth beast(THE EU,REVIVED ROME) shall be the fourth kingdom upon earth,(7TH WORLD EMPIRE) which shall be diverse from all kingdoms, and shall devour the whole earth, and shall tread it down, and break it in pieces.(TRADE BLOCKS)
24 And the ten horns out of this kingdom are ten kings that shall arise:(10 NATIONS) and another shall rise after them;(#11 SPAIN) and he shall be diverse from the first, and he shall subdue three kings.(BE HEAD OF 3 KINGS OR NATIONS).

EU CALLS FOR WORLD GOVERNMENT
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=a7D21rPpBrk&eurl=http%3A%2F%2Feuro%2Dmed%2Edk%2F%3Fp%3D1277&feature=player_embedded
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wFs99zBTRO0&feature=related
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kTfv6uOHgqQ&feature=related
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QVeMBNB0cII&feature=related
http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=-4291770489472554607&ei=iaRTSrzHAoqUqQL1gMGqDw&q=EU&hl=en
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QVeMBNB0cII&feature=player_embedded
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aVmtbLc4t6M&eurl=http%3A%2F%2Feuro%2Dmed%2Edk%2F%3Fp%3D1277&feature=player_embedded
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Uv5cqh26CC0&eurl=http%3A%2F%2Feuro%2Dmed%2Edk%2F%3Fp%3D1277&feature=player_embedded
EXCELLENT EU REVIEW - WORLD REGIONS,GLOBAL CURRENCY
http://exposureroom.com/members/cybersilence.aspx/assets/d37a8ebc60694cc98173b8f32cfe898d/
EU-NEW SOVIET UNION
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bM2Ql3wOGcU&feature=player_embedded
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=l6Cj1b-rp1E&feature=player_embedded

JOAN VEON ON TAMAR YONAH 2008 (WORLD GOVERNMENT)
http://britanniaradio.blogspot.com/2009/07/we-are-already-under-global-government.html#links
UNDERSTANDING WORLD GOVERNMENT
http://www.womensgroup.org/
http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=504526035342184251
BANK OF INTERNATIONAL SETTLEMENT PRESS
http://www.bis.org/events/agm2009/pcvideo.htm
HISTORY OF WAR AND THE FEDERAL RESERVE
http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=1874212534444628577&hl=en

EU REFERENDUM
http://www.eureferendum.blogspot.com/
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bM2Ql3wOGcU&feature=player_embedded

THE GREAT DECEPTION A Secret History of the European Union
By Christopher Booker and Richard North

Introduction

The sovereign nations of the past can no longer solve the problems of the present: they cannot ensure their own progress or control their own future.And the Community itself is only a stage on the way to the organised world of tomorrow.Closing words of Jean Monnet’s Memoirs.This book tells the story of the most extraordinary political project in history.From small beginnings, it has developed over many decades to the point where, at the start of the 21st Century, it seems on the brink of bringing together more than two thirds of the nations of Europe under a unique form of government, like nothing the world has seen before.Through most of that time it was not generally obvious that this was where this process was heading, not least because it was a cardinal principle of the project’s founders that, for a long time, its real nature and purpose should not be brought too obviously out into the open.Even now, that system of government is veiled in such labyrinthine complexity that, although it has come to rule over hundreds of millions of people, few have any comprehensive knowledge of how it actually works, how it evolved or what an important part it has come to play in their lives.Only in recent years has the project become so far advanced that its underlying purpose can no longer be hidden.That is why it is now of the highest priority that the peoples of Europe should realise at last what has been and is being done in their name.

It is impossible to understand the true nature of what came to be known as the European project without appreciating how it was set in train by a single guiding idea; an idea which originally crystallised back in the 1920s in the minds of two men. One, eventually to become well-known, was a French former brandy-salesman, Jean Monnet.The other, whose name is now almost wholly forgotten, was his close friend Arthur Salter, an English civil servant.When these two men first conceived their dream of a United States of Europe, absolutely central to it was the prospect of setting up an entirely new form of government: one which was supra-national, beyond the control of national governments, politicians or electorates. Nation states, governments and parliaments could be left in place: but only so that they could gradually become subordinated to a new supranational government which was above them all.Long before there was any realistic prospect of putting such an audacious idea into practice, Salter dropped out of the story.But Monnet’s determination to bring it about never faltered. By the time in the 1940s when he had reached a position of sufficient influence to set their project on its way, he was aware it could never be realised if its true purpose was made too explicit.His ultimate goal could only be achieved if it was worked for by stealth, step by step, over many years, until enough of the machinery of the new form of government was in place for its purpose to be brought fully into the open.Quite independently of Monnet, another man in the 1940s was also dreaming of a future United States of Europe.Languishing in a Fascist prison, an obscure Italian Communist Altiero Spinelli also recognised that, to bring his vision about, it would be necessary to conceal from the peoples of Europe just what was being done in their name until the process was so far advanced that it had become irreversible.Not least because Monnet disliked him, Spinelli was to remain relatively anonymous for many years until, in the last decade of his life, he emerged from the shadows to play a crucially influential role in shepherding the project towards its conclusion.Apart from these three original visionaries, a fourth man, Paul-Henri Spaak, a prime minister of Belgium, also made his own crucial contribution.It was he who urged on his friend Monnet the idea that, initially, the most effective way to disguise their project’s political purpose was to conceal it behind a pretence that it was concerned only with economic co-operation, based on dismantling trade barriers: a common market.Only after many decades was the project finally ready to declare its real intention.On February 26 2002, delegates from 25 countries gathered in the largest complex of office buildings in Europe, the headquarters of the European Parliament in Brussels, for the opening of a convention to draft the constitution for a United Europe.Explicit in many of their minds was a direct parallel between what they were doing and the convention which had gathered in Philadelphia in the summer of 1787 to draw up a constitution for the United States of America.They were only too conscious of the thought that, like their American predecessors, they were present at an extraordinary moment in history: the crowning event in the creation of a new state.

When the 105 appointed delegates, watched by a host of functionaries and observers, took their places in the chamber of the Parliament, the huge glass and steel building in which they sat was named after Paul-Henri Spaak.It was overshadowed from next door by an even vaster office block named after Altiero Spinelli: the man who had first suggested sixty years earlier how drafting a constitution for the United States of Europe should be the final symbolic act in its process of political integration.No more than a handful of delegates had any proper understanding of the part played by these two men in the convoluted process which, over 50 years, had brought them to where they were; any more than did all but an even tinier fraction of the 500 million people across Europe in whose supposed interest all this was taking place.It was also somehow appropriate that the one name not commemorated in the colossal structures where these events were unfolding was that of the man who more than anyone else had set this process on its way half a century before. Even though he had long since been honoured as the Father of Europe, Jean Monnet had always preferred to work behind the scenes, away from the limelight. He knew that, only by operating in the shadows, behind a cloak of obscurity, could he one day realise his dream.What he pulled off, as this book will show, was to amount to a slow-motion coup d’etat: the most spectacular coup d’etat in history.Yet even as this process seemed to be nearing its completion, like the putting into place of the final pieces of some vast and complex jigsaw puzzle, fundamental questions were emerging. After fifty years of slowly and painfully assembling the puzzle, was it possible that the pieces were not in fact going to fit together after all? It was one thing to dream of a continent in which nation states could be persuaded to surrender their power of self-government to a new type of supranational government.But, when it came to the final crunch, was that what their leaders and peoples really wanted? It was one thing to dream of a Europe in which the richer nations of the west could at last be united with poorer nations to the east which for decades had suffered under Communism.But in practice could that effectively be achieved in a way which would leave all the parties feeling they had been fairly treated?

It was one thing to dream of a single government for a Europe of 500 million people of different nationalities, speaking different languages, coming from wholly different cultural and historical traditions.But in practice could such a government in any meaningful sense remain democratic? Indeed, did that matter? It was one thing to dream of a Europe sharing a single political and economic system. But on the evidence of its record to date, what were the prospects of that system actually delivering on the promises that were made for it? As the governments of Europe gathered in the autumn of 2003 to discuss the constitution intended to bind their nations irrevocably together, it was hard not to reflect that the process set in train by Jean Monnet fifty years before had amounted to an immense gamble, one of the most daring political gambles in history.The real question hanging over Europe at this time was: would that gamble come off? And what would happen if it did not? In arriving at an informed answer to these questions, nothing could be more vital than to understand just how this fateful moment in Europe’s collective history had come about.Hence the purpose of this book.

Chapter One The birth of an idea: 1918-1932

Europe is being liquidated, and the League of Nations must be the heir to this great estate.Jan Smuts (1918).[1]The United States of Europe must be a political reality or it cannot be an economic one.Arthur Salter, The United States of Europe (1931).On 11 November 1984, two portly middle-aged men stood holding hands in front of the largest pile of human bones in Europe.One was the President of France, François Mitterrand; the other the Chancellor of Germany, Helmut Kohl.The reason why the two most powerful political leaders in western Europe were staging an act of reconciliation before tens of thousands of graves was that the site of this ceremony was the ossuary at Douaumont, just outside Verdun in eastern France. And if there was one historical event which more than any other inspired what was eventually to become the European Union, it was the battle which had raged around Verdun the First World War.For the British the defining battle of that war was the Somme in the summer of 1916. For France and Germany it was the colossal battle of attrition launched in February the same year, when the French commander, General Philippe Petain, pronounced that the fortresses on the hills over­looking Verdun on the River Meuse were where the advance of German armies into his country would be brought to a halt.His legendary words Ils ne passeront pas’ were endorsed the same day by France’s prime minister, Aristide Briand.For nearly a year, the French and German armies battered each other to destruction in the most intense and prolonged concentration of violence the world had ever seen. French artillery alone fired more than twelve million shells, the German guns considerably more.The number of dead and wounded on both sides exceeded 700,000.The impact of this battle on France was profound.Because of the way in which her citizen soldiers were rotated through the front line, scarcely a town or village in France was untouched by the slaughter.Among the two and a half million Frenchmen who fought in the battle were France’s future President, Charles de Gaulle, and Louis Delors, whose son Jacques would one day be President of the European Commission. Present for several months fighting for the other side was the father of Germany’s future Chancellor, Helmut Kohl.So deep was the wound Verdun inflicted on the psyche of France that the following year her army was brought to mutiny. Its morale would never fully recover. And from this blow were to emerge two abiding lessons.The first was a conviction that such a suicidal clash of national armies must never be repeated.The second was much more specific and immediate.It came from the realisation that the war had been shaped more than anything else by industrial power.As the battle for Verdun had developed into a remorseless artillery duel, trainloads of German shells were arriving at the front still warm from the factories of the Ruhr. The battle, and the war itself, became less a trial of men and human resolve than of two rival industrial systems. And the French system had been found sorely wanting.

Particularly inferior had been the heavy guns, many dating back to the 1870s, able to fire shells at only a seventh the rate of their German counterparts. More and better guns became vital. But, as France’s politicians found to their consternation, manufacturing them and the huge quantities of ammunition needed was beyond the capacity of an industry which compared equally poorly with Germany’s.This had since August 1914, under the inspiration of Walter Rathenau, been put on a fully integrated war footing, under the control of a War Raw Materials Department.[2] In the summer of 1996, therefore, a crisis-stricken French government gave an industrialist, Louis Loucheur, near-dictatorial powers to reform and develop the manufacturing base. Before the war, Loucheur had been one of the early pioneers in the use of reinforced concrete.In a national economy dominated by artisan manufacture, he was one of the few French technocrats familiar with the techniques of mass production.With all the power of the state behind him, Loucheur succeeded in his initial task, even building new factories to make the new guns. But improvements in production precipitated critical shortages of steel and coal, exacerbated by the German seizure in the first weeks of the war of around half France’s industrial base in the north-east of the country.[3]Remedying these shortages required massive imports from Britain, and then from the United States.In turn, this placed considerable demands on shipping.All this required unprecedented economic co-operation between the Western Allies, leading Loucheur to conclude, like Rathenau before him, how far success in modern warfare demanded industrial organisation.Thus, Loucheur came to reflect, industrial organisation was the key to waging war.[4] From this he developed the idea that, if key industries from different countries, above all their coal and steel industries on which modern warfare so much depended, were removed from the control of individual nations and vested in a higher authority, this might be the means of preserving peace.

Building the world anew

When the Great War ended on 11 November 1918, much of the pre-war world which had brought it about had already slipped into history. Four great empires had fallen apart: that of Germany itself, and those of Austria-Hungary, Russia and the Ottoman Turks who had ruled over so much of the Middle East.There followed a general sense that the world must be rebuilt, in a way which might ensure that such a catastrophe could never be repeated.But this determination took two competing forms: one was idealistic, the other vengeful.Post-war idealism was symbolised by US President Woodrow Wilson, whose country’s intervention in the last year of the war had finally tipped the military balance against Germany, bringing about her political collapse. Wilson’s famous Fourteen Point Declaration, supporting the right of peoples to self-determination, guided the post-war settlement agreed at the Paris peace conference in 1919. New nations arose in the former lands of now-defunct empires, their borders supposedly guaranteed by Wilson’s supreme embodi­ment of post-war idealism, the League of Nations.This would keep the peace, by providing a forum for resolving disputes and, if this failed, a mechanism for collective intervention.In the early stages of the post-war era, however, this mood of idealism was undermined by two rude shocks. The first, following opposition from the US Senate and Woodrow Wilson’s succession by President Harding, was the USA’s withdrawal from the League.America’s retreat into isolationism left the new international forum largely a European body, dominated by Britain, France and Italy (neither Germany nor Russia, now locked in the civil war which followed the 1917 Bolshevik revolution, were initially admitted as members). The second was France’s determination to wreak vengeance on Germany, the country held chiefly responsible for the catastrophe, and to ensure that it would never again be strong enough to endanger the peace.Largely as a result of French pressure, therefore, the 1919 Treaty of Versailles imposed on defeated Germany fearsome punishments.She lost more than an eighth of her land area and all her overseas empire. Alsace and Lorraine were returned to France in perpetuity, along with the Saar, rich in coal and iron, pending a plebiscite after fifteen years.The Rhineland was to remain under allied occupation.Germany’s army was limited to 100,000 men and she was prohibited from producing heavy guns, tanks or military aircraft.Most damaging of all, she was required to pay crippling reparations to the Western allies, in money and goods, amounting eventually to £6.6 billion. Germany was to be humiliated and emasculated.In January 1923, the screw was tightened still further. Taking as excuse the late delivery of a small quantity of timber for telegraph poles due under the reparations settlement, followed by a default on deliveries of coal (at a time when coal was in surplus), France and Belgium sent 70,000 armed men to occupy the Ruhr, Germany’s industrial heartland.

The French contingent included a large number of colonial troops who were allowed to run amok.Their activities triggered a widespread campaign of passive resistance, which the French countered by deposing or imprisoning the ringleaders and expelling nearly 150,000 people from the district.These included over 46,000 German officials and their families.Confronted by non-cooperation and episodes of sabotage, the French authorities resorted to hostage-taking and collective fines.They also conducted aggressive house searches, identity checks and summary executions.[5]The effect was catastrophic.Industrial output collapsed, causing mass unemployment.When the German government guaranteed the wages of workers dispossessed by the Franco-Belgian action, hyper-inflation ensued.By November 1923, this had so devalued the currency that a single US dollar could buy 4.2 trillion German marks.This led to widespread unrest and disorder, attempts at revolution, an unsuccessful putsch in Bavaria by Adolf Hitler and his followers, and moves to create a separate Rhineland republic, the latter financed by French agents, using money stolen from German municipalities.Few details of this episode, which sent a wave of shock across the non-French world, survive in modern textbooks on European history.[6] At the time, it was clear that French policy was directed at destabilising the German nation.The French occupation force actively interfered in German civil admin­istration, in violation of Versailles Treaty, and sponsored the deliberate wrecking of Germany’s infrastructure, particularly its railway system. An American academic at the time, Professor Schevill, who held the chair in modern European history at Chicago, observed:France… is the spoiled child of Europe, privileged to indulge her most capricious desire. Her European allies and friendly America may offer a mild remonstrance over unreasonable and wilful actions of which they do not approve, but they lack the heart to be severe. Since 1919 France has therefore had her way.She alone has made the pacification of Europe impossible.[7]Nevertheless, the speed of Germany’s recovery from this catastrophe was one of the miracles of 20th Century history.Its hero was Gustav Stresemann, founder and leader of the German People’s Party, who on 13 August 1924 became Chancellor of a coalition government.Although he held office only until 23November, in those one hundred days he dealt firmly with an insurrection in Saxony, restored order in Bavaria after Hitler’s putsch, ended the passive resistance in the Ruhr, and began the task of stabilising the currency.

On 30 November, the French government agreed to an inquiry, presided over by an American general Charles Dawes, into the whole question of German reparations.Under what became known as the Dawes Plan, not only was Germany’s debt drastically reduced, she was also given a huge foreign loan, raised mainly in the USA.This enabled her to meet her payments (a deal for which in 1925 Dawes was awarded the Nobel peace prize and became US vice-president under Calvin Coolidge).So highly regarded was Stresemann that his successor as German Chancellor in November 1924 chose him as foreign affairs minister, an office he was to hold with distinction under four governments.He established a warm friendship with Aristide Briand, now France’s foreign minister, and with him, in 1925, became co-author of the Locarno Treaty, supported by Britain, Italy and Belgium, which guaranteed mutual security for France and Germany. For this achievement, the two men were awarded the Nobel Peace Prize. Thus did western Europe emerge into what Winston Churchill was to describe as the pale sunlight of Locarno.[8]The following year, 1926, Germany was admitted to the League of Nations.A week later Stresemann and Briand, celebrating over a private lunch, waxed expansive over Stresemann’s favourite theme of Franco-German economic collaboration.[9]It was no accident that both men had become active supporters of a movement which had lately become remarkably fashionable, calling for a United States of Europe.

The age of the utopians

By the mid-1920s there was a heady sense that the shadows of the previous decade had at last receded. Mankind seemed to be moving forward into a new world, in keeping with technological innovations – the radio, the cinema, motor cars, aeroplanes - which were marking out the twentieth century as different from anything seen before.
In America it was Scott Fitzgerald’s Jazz Age, a time of unprecedented prosperity, of soaring skyscrapers, Henry Ford’s Model T, flappers and the Charleston, the first heyday of Hollywood, and on Wall Street the start of the greatest stock boom in history.In the new Soviet Union the triumphant Bolsheviks, having torn down almost every vestige of the old aristocratic, religious autarchy of Tsarist times, seemed to be constructing an extraordinary new society, based on the radiant vision of a Communist Utopia.In Paris a young Swiss architect, Le Corbusier, was gripped by a quite different Utopian vision, but one which was also to have profound influence on the twentieth century.As he argued in Towards A New Architecture (1924) and The City of the Future (1925), the true social revolution would come from having the courage to tear down the dirty, unplanned cities of the past, which were making humanity unhappy and unhealthy, to replace them with the radiant city of the future, planned down to the tiniest detail: gleaming tower blocks standing amid trees and grass, constructed from the building material of the new age, reinforced concrete.Amid this euphoria and idealism, all over western Europe leading politicians, businessmen and intellectuals were also becoming seized by another heady vision: that of building a United States of Europe.In 1918, even before the war had ended, the Italian industrialist, Giovanni Agnelli, founder of the Fiat empire, had published a book entitled European Federation or League of Nations, arguing that the only effective antidote to destructive nationalism was a federal Europe. But the young man who truly caught the mood of the moment was Count Richard Coudenhove Kalergi, born in Tokyo in 1894 to a diplomat in the Austro-Hungarian embassy and a Japanese mother.In 1922, still in his late twenties, he published his book Pan Europa, launching a movement under the same name.His vision, like that of Louis Loucheur, was that, to maintain peace, the German coal and French steel industries should be merged into a single pan-European industry.They would form the basis for a federal United States of Europe on the American model.Two years later he developed this by supporting the suggestion of a French economist, Charles Gide, that Europe should form a customs union.[10] However, Coudenhove was emphatic that the purpose of his federation would not be to eradicate national identities or reduce the sovereignty of its members, but to celebrate the spirit of Europe by providing a framework in which they could co-operate for the common good.The speed with which Coudenhove’s vision attracted the support of many of Europe’s leading figures was remarkable.Among them were Albert Einstein, Pablo Picasso, and French writers such as Paul Valery, Guillaume Apollinaire and St. John Perse.Businessmen and left-wing thinkers joined the cause, including, in Italy, Giovanni Agnelli and Professor Luigi Einaudi, a left-wing lawyer who had formerly edited La Stampa; in Holland Edo Fimmen, chairman of the International Transport Workers’ Federation; and in Germany, Karl Tucholsky, one of the leading left-wing intellectuals of the Weimar Republic.[11]However the most significant headway made by Coudenhove’s campaign was among Europe’s politicians: not only those already in senior positions, but others, such as the mayor of Cologne, Konrad Adenauer, who would play a crucial role in shaping Europe in the future.One influential convert was Gustav Stresemann, co-author of the Locarno Pact, whose party in the same year agreed to adopt support for a ‘United States of Europe as its official policy.Another in France was prime minister Edouard Herriot, who had briefly been munitions minister during Verdun (in 1931 he was to publish a book, The United States of Europe).Another convert later to become prime minister was Leon Blum. But Pan Europa’s most committed supporter was France’s foreign minister, Aristide Briand, who had been France’s prime minister eleven times and who was now with Stresemann the co-author of the Locarno Pact.

It was the sight of these two major figures joining in support of the pan-European vision which, on 24 June 1925, inspired Winston Churchill, then Chancellor of the Exchequer, to tell members of the House of Commons, as he later recalled, how:the aim of ending the thousand-year strife between France and Germany seemed a supreme object.If only we could weave Gaul and Teuton so closely together economically, socially and morally as to prevent the occasion of new quarrels and make old antagonisms die in the realisation of mutual prosperity and interdependence, Europe would rise again.[12] In October 1926, Coudenhove’s vision enjoyed its moment of greatest triumph when, at the age of 32, he staged a European Congress in Vienna, attended by more than 2,000 politicians, academics, businessmen, representatives of the professions and journalists.Among them was Briand, who in 1927 became Pan-Europa’s honorary president.In the same year, as a fervent supporter of the League of Nations, he proposed to the US Secretary of State Kellogg a non-aggression pact, whereby their two countries would renounce war as an instrument of policy forever. Kellogg’s response was to propose what became known as the Kellogg-Briand Pact, under which, in 1929, fifteen nations, including France and Germany, signed up to similar terms.[13] On 7 September that year, following discussions with Stresemann, at which he cited the menace of American economic power as one of the greatest threats Europe now faced, Briand presented the League of Nations with a dramatic new proposal.I think, he said,that among peoples who are geographically grouped together like the peoples of Europe there must exist a kind of federal link… Evidently the association will act mainly in the economic sphere… but I am sure also that from a political point of view, and from a social point of view, the federal link, without infringing the sovereignty of any of the nations taking part, could be beneficial.[14] On 20 May 1930, three days after French troops began their final evacuation of the German Rhineland (under the Young Plan), Briand circulated the governments of Europe with a Memorandum on a European Federal Union.[15] He proposed that, in the interests alike of the peace and of the economic and social well-being of the continent, Europe should be given something in the nature of a federal organisation.This would be implemented within the framework of the League of Nations and would respect national sovereignties.But it would centre on the conception of European political co-operation, subordinating the economic to the political problem, and it should be concerned with co-operation on economic policy, transport, finance, labour, health and intellectual co-operation.Briand’s proposal had already received its warmest welcome from Winston Churchill, now out of office, who told readers of the New York Saturday Evening Post on 13 February 1930:the mass of Europe once united, once federalised or partly federalised, once continentally self-conscious, would constitute an organism beyond compare…But then, as later, Churchill saw no place in such a federation for his own island, with its world-wide empire.Speaking for Britain, his article went on:

We are with Europe but not of it.We are linked but not comprised.We are interested and associated but not absorbed.And should the European statesmen address us in the words which were used of old,Wouldest thou be spoken for to the King, or the captain of the Host?, we should reply with the Shunamite woman.Nay sir, for we dwell among our own people.We must build a kind of United States of Europe.Great Britain, the British Common­wealth of Nations, mighty America must be friends and sponsors of the new Europe.[16]Of the responses eventually received from twenty-six European governments, almost all expressed full agreement with the idea of closer European co-operation’. Only Britain rejected Briand’s proposals outright.All the states except Holland insisted that such an association must be on the plane of absolute sovereignty and of entire political independence.[17] Despite its support, Briand’s initiative failed.By now it was clear that the mood of Europe was changing.The previous autumn, only weeks after the death in October of Briand’s closest ally, Stresemann, the Wall Street crash had heralded the slide of the world’s economies into their greatest slump in history.In Germany’s elections of 14 September 1930, fuelled by soaring unemployment and continuing nationalist resentment at the humiliations of the Versailles Treaty, votes for the National Socialist Party had soared from 810,000 to six and a half million.Hitler won over 100 seats in the Reichstag.The following year the Japanese invasion of Manchuria was to expose the League of Nations as no more than a talking shop.Those brave Utopian dreams of the 1920s were fading rapidly.But all this time a much smaller group of men,watching the events of the 1920s at close quarters, had begun to think that, if the goal of a United States of Europe was ever to be achieved, it would require a different strategy altogether.

Enter the supranationalists

One thing the Utopian visions of the 1920s all had in common, from the League of Nations itself, to Pan Europa and Briand’s European Federal Union, was that they were all based on the idea of nations coming together to co-operate on an intergovernmental basis.This was the road to universal peace: governments should learn how to work willingly together for the common good, but without abandoning their sovereignty.Curiously enough this posed a problem which had already exercised one of the finest minds Europe has ever produced, six centuries earlier.In 1308, exiled from his native Florence, the poet and statesman Dante Alighieri had, in his treatise De Monarchia, addressed the question of how Europe might overcome the endless wars and conflicts produced by a multitude of nations and city states.As an admirer of the Holy Roman Empire, he suggested that there must be one empire above them all, with the power to control their actions in the common interest. Such a power would be supranational.Over the following centuries, many thinkers offered further proposals for the political unification of Europe, from Leibniz, Kant and the Dutch lawyer Grotius, to Rousseau, Jeremy Bentham and Victor Hugo.The French King Henry IV’s minister, Sully, suggested that Europe should be divided into fifteen states, governed by a council, and with a European army of 100,000 men to keep the peace.William Penn, who gave his name to Pennsylvania, proposed an Assembly of the United Europe, taking its decisions by what would later be called qualified majority voting, weighted accorded to national population sizes and economic importance.In the 18th Century, the French Abbe de Saint-Pierre suggested rule by a European Senate, also with a form of qualified majority voting according to size and the power to summon a European army.In the 19th Century the Comte de Saint-Simon proposed a political union of Europe based on the union of England and France, with a bi-cameral parliament, the upper chamber chosen by governments, the lower elected by universal suffrage.The French revolutionary Proudhon, at the end of his life, published The Federal Principle (1863), attacking nationalism as the supreme evil which leads inevitably to war, and arguing not only that nation states should be welded together in a European federation, but that the states themselves should be broken up into regional governments.[18]What all these proposals had in common, with the possible exception of the last, was that they were all ultimately intergovernmental, based on the willing co-operation of sovereign states.The first formal example based on Dante’s principle of an authority which was supranational (apart perhaps from the mediaeval Papacy) was put forward in the 1920s by Louis Loucheur.During the Paris peace conference of 1919, Loucheur acted as chief economic adviser to the French prime minister Clemenceau.Drawing on the lessons of trying to integrate France’s military production during the war, he urged that the key to peace would be to integrate the economies of France and Germany, particularly those industries central to waging war, coal and steel.In the early days of the reparations programme, its secretary-general, a British civil servant Arthur Salter, later recalled how Loucheur and his wartime opposite number Walter Rathenau had tried to use German skilled labour to help rebuild the French economy; only for their efforts to be sabotaged by French industrialists.[19]

Finally in 1925, just when the vogue for intergovernmental European co-operation was reaching its height at Locarno, Loucheur’s vision of integrating Europe’s coal and steel industries was given practical expression, by Emil Mayrisch, head of the giant Luxembourg-based steel combine, ARBED.He brokered an International Steel Agreement, covering the steel industries of France, Germany, Belgium, Luxembourg and the Saar. This was hailed by Gustav Stresemann as a landmark of international economic policy, the importance of which cannot be overestimated,[20] not least because it had the power to reduce over-capacity by imposing production quotas for each member country. It also had a central treasury with power to levy surcharges on members who broke the rules.Loucheur’s steel agreement had created Europe’s first, albeit embryonic supranational authority.Mayrisch hoped it would be a model for similar schemes.It would certainly later be remembered by Konrad Adenauer and others as the model for the European Coal and Steel Community which was to be the embryo of the European Union. Loucheur himself, before his death in 1931, would in 1927 propose at a League of Nations-sponsored conference the setting up of an economic League of Nations based on a customs union or common market.But it was not Loucheur who would one day be remembered as the Father of Europe.That title would be reserved for a younger man who watched what Loucheur was doing in the 1920s, but who alone would crack the secret of how to get that United States of Europe finally launched on its way.

Enter Monsieur Monnet

Among the senior figures in the League of Nations at its foundation were two who were already close friends.One was Arthur Salter, the British civil servant who ran the Reparations Commission.His friend Jean Monnet, younger by seven years but appointed aged only thirty-one to be the League’s deputy-secretary general, was a small, self-effacing Frenchman with a moustache, who decades later would be described as looking like Hercule Poirot.[21]So crucial a part was Monnet to play in this story that it is relevant to know something of his origins.He was born in Cognac in 1888, the son of a wealthy brandy-maker.He left school at sixteen without academic qualifications, to work in his father’s firm, J. G. Monnet.After a short apprenticeship, from 1906 to 1914 he represented the firm abroad, spending more time in North America, England, Scan­dinavia, Russia and Egypt than in France.In 1914, the outbreak of war found Monnet, at the age of twenty-six, back in France, but unfit for military service. What he did then was to set in train a sequence of events which was to change the course of European history.But, as was to become typical of Monnet, the exact circumstances remain obscure.There are two versions, one set down sixty years later in his memoirs, the other reconstructed from other sources.According his memoirs, a month after the start of hostilities the young man realised that the Allied supply system was breaking down.Through his father’s company lawyer, he sought out of the blue an interview with France’s prime minister, René Viviani, meeting him in September 1914 in Bordeaux - to where the French government had fled from the approaching German armies.Monnet proposed a plan to co-ordinate the use of Allied ships bringing supplies to beleaguered France.[22]As a result, he was sent to London to help set up an International Supply Commission, which organised an Anglo-French pool of ships to supply the Allied forces.The alternative version of these events is rather murkier.One of Monnet’s chief pre-war customers had been the Hudson Bay Company of Canada, which bought large quantities of brandy from him, much of which was then sold on to the native Indians, a trade prohibited by law.[23]Monnet was grateful for this, since he found it hard to compete in the legal market with better-known firms such as Hennessy.As the prospect of a European war loomed in 1914, Monnet had discussed with the Hudson Bay Company the vital and potentially lucrative role that could be played by a major international trading concern.According to this version, it was Hudson Bay which arranged through its influential French contacts for the young man to meet France’s prime minister.Certainly when Monnet was sent to London to set up his shipping pool, he arranged a huge £150 million contract for Hudson Bay to ship 13,000,000 tons of goods from Canada to France, on which the company would take one percent commission.Monnet received no payment, but it placed the Hudson Bay Company in his debt, in a way which would later be handsomely repaid.[24]By 1916, the year of Verdun, Monnet was working in Paris as chef de cabinet to France’s economics minister Clementel.Later, he recorded his shock at finding just how disorganised were France’s shipping arrangements, at much the same time as Loucheur was finding similar chaos in her munitions production.The French government had not even managed to acquire powers to requisition ships for the war effort, and Monnet recalls how he became determined to see the organisation of shipping turned into the nerve centre of the Allies economic organisation.[25]In 1917 a number of meetings were arranged in Paris to discuss how this could be achieved, and here Monnet met up again with Arthur Salter.Their first encounter had been in London in 1914 when Salter had been put in charge of requisitioning merchant shipping for the Admiralty.He was later to recall the central part the two of them played in finding a solution, and how the key decision was taken at a small dinner discussion in October 1917.[26] The outcome was the setting up of the Inter-Allied Maritime Transport Council, charged with co-ordinating the use of Allied shipping, relying on the co-operation of the British, French and American governments. Monnet had wanted to go further.Instead of relying on co-operation, he pressed for the creation of an international council with full authority (pleins pouvoirs) to dictate the Allied shipping arrangements. Even though he did not get his way, for the first time in his life he had conceived of a body which was supranational.It was an idea he found particularly appealing.[27]

One of Monnet’s skills throughout his life was to make influential friends.He was a born behind-the-scenes operator, persuading others to help advance projects on which he had set his heart.Salter was one such friend, and when the war was over, and the statesmen and civil servants of the victorious powers gathered in Paris for the peace conference, Monnet made many more who would become useful allies, including a young American lawyer John Foster Dulles.After tireless lobbying, when the new League of Nations was established, the young Frenchman became its deputy-secretary-general, under the British head of its secretariat, Sir Eric Drummond. For three years Monnet worked at the centre of the new organisation.With its Secretariat, its Council, its Assembly and its new Court of International Justice, he was initially highly optimistic that the League could impose its benevolent will on the world by its moral force, by appealing to public opinion and thanks to customs which would ultimately prevail.[28] He admired the internationalist idealism of his colleagues (Drummond had decided from the outset that the Secretariat of the League… was not to consist of national delegates but of international servants whose first loyalty was to the League);[29] and one with whom he worked closely was his old friend Salter, who was now administering German reparations through the League.But increasingly Monnet became frustrated by one particular feature of the League: every member state had the power of veto, so decisions could only be taken unanimously.As he was later to put it the veto is the profound cause and at the same time the symbol of the impossibility of overcoming national egoism.[30] He summed up his feelings:I was impressed with the power of a nation that can say no to an inter­national body that has no supranational power.Goodwill between men, between nations, is not enough.One must also have international laws and institutions (our italics).Except for certain practical but limited activities in which I participated, the League of Nations was a dis­appoint­ment.[31]In 1923, Monnet was prevailed upon by his sister to rescue the family business from a financial crisis.He resigned from the League and called in the favour owed him by the Hudson Bay Company, asking it for a loan.It advanced him two million francs, which he was told he could treat as a gift (he did repay it, seven years later, but in a devalued currency worth less than forty percent of the original loan plus interest).Having restored the family business, Monnet moved to America, to become a partner in the New York merchant bank Blair and Co.There he made a fortune, but lost much of it in the Wall Street crash.To stay solvent, he again relied on the HBC.Sir Robert Kindersley, a former HBC governor, arranged for him a large, unsecured loan from Lazards Bank, which Monnet was able to repay fully only thirty years later. In 1932 his role as banker took him for a year to China, where he arranged finance for the reconstruction of the railways.In the freewheeling and corrupt world of Shanghai in the 1930s, Monnet negotiated substantial loans to influential backers of the Chiang-Kai-Shek government, some of whom were distinctly shady.[32]But as he watched the League of Nations stand impotently by as China slid towards chaos – not least after the Japanese invasion of Manchuria in 1931 - he reaffirmed his conviction that, ultimately, international peace and security could only be guaranteed by supranational institutions. One old friend of like mind whom he had followed to China was Arthur Salter, who had advised its government on reorganising the railways. If Monnet’s mind had for some years been largely on other matters, Salter had become increasingly preoccupied with how a United States of Europe might be established.In 1931 he published a collection of papers under the title The United States of Europe, in which he addressed the possibility of building a federal Europe within the framework of the League of Nations itself. Because the League, had become largely a regional organisation, Salter saw that it might be adapted to provide a framework for a politically united Europe.In an essay entitled The United States of Europe Idea he drew on the model of how Germany had been politically united in the nineteenth century, through establishing a Zollverein, a common market.His United States would work in the same way, raising its funding through a common tariff on all goods imported from outside.This, like Germany, would need a political instrument to determine how the distribution [of those funds] should be made.He went on to say that:

the commercial and tariff policy of European States is so central and crucial a part of their general policy, the receipts from Customs are so central and substantial a part of their revenues, that a common political authority, deciding for all Europe what tariffs should be imposed and how they should be distributed, would be for every country almost as important as, or even more important than, the national Governments, and would in effect reduce the latter to the status of municipal authorities.[33]In other words he went on, the United States of Europe must be a political reality.Its organisation could be based on that of the League of Nations, with a Secretariat, a Council of Ministers, an Assembly and a Court - but with one crucial proviso.The central source of authority in this new body, Salter urged, must be reserved for the Secretariat, the permanent body of international civil servants, loyal to the new organisation, not to the member countries.The problem with giving too much power to a Council was that they would always remain motivated primarily by national interest:In face of a permanent corps of Ministers, meeting in committees and ‘shadow councils’, and in direct contact with their Foreign Office, the Secretariat will necessarily sink in status, in influence, and in the character of its personnel, to clerks responsible only for routine duties.They will cease to be an element of importance in the formation or maintenance of the League’s traditions.[34]
The Secretariat, Salter argued, would be above the power of national ministers, run by people who no longer owed any national loyalty.The new international officer needed for the League’s task he wrote,is something new in the world’s history.[35]What Salter was describing, of course, was precisely the supranational principle by which nearly three decades later Monnet would inspire the setting up of the European Economic Community, deliberately intended as an embryonic United States of Europe. He even envisaged that another way to erode nationalism might be to split up its member states into regions.The only term in Salter’s blueprint which needed changing was Secretariat; and as it happened, in describing reactions to Briand’s proposal in 1930 for a European Federal Union, he was able to record that the League of Nations had already set up a European Commission.[36]By now, however, as Europe plunged into the Great Depression, the shadows were gathering over such dreams: 1932 saw the death of Briand himself, the most distinguished champion a United States of Europe had yet won to its cause.The next year brought the rise to power of Adolf Hitler.His idea of how Europe might be united was very different.

[1] Quoted by Lloyd George, David. (1938), The Truth About The Peace Treaties. London, vol. 1, p. 80.

[2] The New Cambridge Modern History. (1960), The Era Of Violence. Cambridge University Press, Vol XII. p. 509.

[3] Carls, Stephen. Douglas. (1993), Louis Loucheur And The Shaping Of Modern France 1916-1931. Louisiana State University Press, Baton Rouge, p. 33.

[4] Carls, op. cit, p. 264.

[5] Marriott, Sir John. (1941), The Tragedy Of Europe. Blackie and Son Ltd, London, p. 87.

[6] In the later decades of the 20th Century, after the European idea had became the prevailing ideology, it became noticeable how books mentioning the French military occupation of the Rhineland presented only a heavily sanitised version of what had happened.These airbrushed out the more unsavoury details of how aggressively France’s occupying forces behaved, and limited coverage of the episode to little more than cursory acknowledgement that the occupation had taken place.

[7] Street, C. J. C. (1924), The Treachery Of France. The Sidney Press, Bedford, p. 159.

[8] Churchill, W. S. (1948), The Second World War, Vol. 1, The Gathering Storm. Cassell, London, p. 63.

[9] New Cambridge Modern History, op. cit, p. 467.

[10] In the same year, 1924, Sir Max Waechter, a German-born British industrialist, published How To Abolish War: The United States of Europe, in which he independently proposed that the way to European federation could lie through establishing a customs union or common market, not least because this would be the only way for Europe to continue competing economically with America and, before long, Japan.He founded a European Unity League to advance his ideas, but this made little impact.

[11] Like many supporters of a United States of Europe, Tucholsky regarded narrow-minded, aggressive nationalism as the real threat to peace.In 1928 he was to write May the thought of the United States of Europe triumph over the nationalistic German and petty Bavarian thoughtlessness of the absolute sovereignty of individual states. Two years earlier, in an essay on Foreign and Domestic Policy in the pacifist journal Friedenswarte, he wrote We no longer live in the individual fortresses of the Middle Ages.We live in a house and the name of that house is Europe.Tucholsky was naturally violently opposed to the rising tide of Nazism, and when Hitler took power the Nazis stripped him of his citizenship, burned his books and gloated over the news of his suicide. (King, Ian. (2001), Kurt Tucholsky as Prophet of European Unity. European Paper 5/2001, South Bank University, London.)

[12] Churchill W. S. (1948), The Second World War, Vol. I – The Gathering Storm. Cassell, London, pp. 40-1.

[13] In 1929 Coudenhove Kalergi adopted the theme of the last movement of Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony as Pan Europa’s anthem. He was to organise further congresses in Berlin (1930), Basel (1932) and Vienna (1935), but none had the impact of his first Vienna congress in 1926.

[14] Gladwyn, Lord. (1966), The European Idea. Weidenfeld & Nicolson, London, p. 43.

[15] Summarised in Arthur Salter’s The United States of Europe (1931), George, Allen & Unwin, pp. 106-7. See also Keeton, Edward David (1987), Briand’s Locarno Policy: French Economics, Politics And Diplomacy 1925-9. New York. Cited in Carls, op. cit, p. 272.

[16] Churchill, W. S. (1976), Collected Essays Of Winston Churchill, Volume II, Churchill And Politics. London Library of Imperial History, pp. 176-186.

[17] Salter, op. cit, p. 123.

[18] For an admirable historical summary of proposals for a united Europe, see Gladwyn, The European Idea, op. cit. pp. 33-42.

[19] Salter, Arthur. (1961), The Slave Of The Lamp. London, Weidenfeld & Nicolson, p. 86.

[20] Hexner, Ervin. (1943), International Steel Cartels. Durham, N. C. Cited in Carls, op. cit, p. 266.

[21] Sampson, Anthony. (1968), The New Europeans. Hodder and Stoughton, London, p. 7.

[22] Monnet, Jean. (1978) Memoirs. Collins, London, pp. 49-52.

[23] Fransen, Frederic. (2001), The Supranational Politics Of Jean Monnet: Ideas And Origins Of The European Community. Greenwood Press, Connecticut, p. 15.

[24] Duchêne, François. (1994), Jean Monnet – The First Statesman Of Interdependence. W W Norton and Co, New York, p. 35.

[25] Monnet Memoirs, op. cit, p. 63. Loucheur met and took an intense dislike to Monnet, and tried to arrange his transfer to the front.After intense lobbying by Monnet, which reached Cabinet level, he retained his position.

[26] Salter. A. (1961), Memoirs Of A Public Servant. Weidenfeld & Nicolson, London, p. 113.

[27] Fransen, op. cit, p. 24.

[28] Jean Monnet, A Short Biography. Altiero Spinelli Institute for Federalist Studies. www.eurplace.org/federal/monnet.

[29] New Cambridge Modern History, op. cit, p. 477.

[30] This is the version given in Jean Monnet – A Short Biography, op. cit.The English translation of Monnet’s Memoirs (op. cit, p. 97), is rather more pedestrian: the veto was at once the cause and the symbol of this inability to go beyond national self-interest.

[31] Bromberger, Merry and Serge. (1969), Jean Monnet And The United States of Europe. Coward-McCann, New York, p. 19.

[32] Fransen, op. cit, p. 17.

[33] Salter, A. (1931), The United States Of Europe. George, Allen & Unwin, London, p. 92.

[34] Salter, op. cit, p. 134.

[35] Salter, op. cit, p. 136.

[36] Salter, op. cit, p. 124.

Chapter Two The Nazi Cul-de-Sac: 1933-1945

We are perhaps more interested in Europe than other countries need to be.Adolf Hitler, speech at Nuremberg Rally, 1937.

On 13 December 1941, when Hitler’s armies were at the gates of Moscow, the magazine Picture Post, then in its heyday as Britain’s leading mass-circulation weekly, gave prominence to an article by its proprietor Edward Hulton headed How The Nazis Promise Europe a New Heaven.In his article, Hulton reported on how a grand assembly of puppet powers had recently taken place in Berlin, to be told that it would be the Nazis purpose after the war to unite Europe as the richest economic entity in the world. Up to now a senior Nazi economist Werner Daitz had proclaimed,Europe has not been able to take advantage of her wonderful natural opportunities.This because her different states have refused to work together.But under the Nazi New Order, a united Europe would use her economic strength as a political lever to assert her proper influence in the world.To illustrate the Nazi plan for a new Europe the magazine published a map of the trans-continental railway system, quoting Josef Goebbels:a Europe without frontiers can make proper use of its communications.Half a century later, in the 1990s, a number of books appeared by British Eurosceptics arguing that the origins of the European Union lay in ideas put forward by the Nazis during World War Two.[1] This belief arose because their authors had noted what appeared to be a striking resemblance between some of those ideas and features of the European project as it had developed in the decades after the war.In particular they were struck by Nazi references during the war years to setting up a European economic community and a single European currency.The very fact that such an argument could be put forward was in itself a testament to the remarkable lack of knowledge, both among Eurosceptics and Europhiles, as how the post-war European project actually came about.In particular it reflected a near-universal failure to understand how directly that project stemmed from ideas which long predated the rise of Nazism, and which were already well-established in the minds of men such as Salter and Monnet before the end of the 1920s.Certainly the re-emergence of the campaign to built a United States of Europe in the years after the Second World War owed a great debt to ideas developed during the years of Hitler’s dominance.But these drew nothing from the Nazis. They were developed by men fiercely opposed to Nazism: not least by some of those whose thinking had already been moving in this direction for over twenty years.

There was only one moment when it had seemed possible that the Nazi Party might embrace the cause of a United States of Europe.This long preceded the Nazis’ arrival in power in 1933, happening during the only period in the party’s history when Hitler himself faced a serious rival for his leadership.In 1924, he had been imprisoned in the castle of Landsberg for his part in the previous year’s abortive Munich putsch and, in his absence, his deputy Gregor Strasser, a talented organiser, had led the party to its first electoral success, winning 32 seats in the Reichstag.Strasser was insistent that the Nazis must broaden out their base from Bavaria to other parts of Germany.In particular he won support from the then-young, left-wing-inclined Josef Goebbels, for his view that the National Socialist Party must become both more national and more socialist in its appeal.In 1925 when the two men drew up a party programme, this reflected the cause then being promoted by Stresemann and Briand by calling for a United States of Europe, including a proposal for a single European currency.In 1926, however, Hitler re-asserted his authority over the party, during a conference in Bamberg.Goebbels switched his loyalty from Strasser back to Hitler; Strasser’s Programme for National Socialism was rejected.Hitler was to eliminate his erstwhile rival in the Night of the Long Knives in 1934.He himself never showed the slightest interest in any idea of a united Europe, other than one united under his own leadership by force of arms. Once he had risen to power in 1933, the only value he attached to the concept of Europe was as the matrix of German culture, illustrated by his declaration at the Nuremberg Rally of 1937:Our country, our people, our culture and our economy have grown out of general European conditions.We must therefore be the enemy of any attempt to introduce elements of discord and destruction into this European family of peoples.[2]Embodying that desire to re-assert his nation’s identity which was an inevitable reaction to the humiliations forced on Germany by France at Versailles, Hitler had already reversed one of those humiliations by marching his troops into the demilitarised Rhineland in 1936.He was about to introduce further elements of discord into the European family by his expansion into those other legacies of Versailles,Austria and Czechoslovakia, in 1938-9.In September 1939, he advanced across another Versailles frontier, into the former German lands ceded to Poland in 1919.By the following spring and summer, as his armies swept through Denmark, Norway, Belgium, Holland, Luxembourg and France, he was well on the way to building a united Europe by means which would have had those 1920s idealists Stresemann and Briand recoiling in horror.

The twilight years of Europeanism

As the twin shadows of Nazism and Fascism lengthened over Europe in the immediate pre-war years, the futility of the League of Nations had become ever more cruelly exposed, firstly by its failure to prevent Japan attacking Manchuria and China, by Italy seizing Abyssinia and then Hitler marching into the Rhineland, Austria and Czechoslovakia.Coudenhove nevertheless continued his campaign for a United States of Europe until a few months after the German-Austrian anschluss in 1938.Two years later, after the war had begun, he took refuge in New York, where he was to spend the war years proselytising for European unity, in a way which was to have considerable influence on post-war American attitudes to Europe.In Britain some of the old League of Nations insiders who had been most enthusiastic for a United States of Europe in the 1920s remained in close touch.Salter, who continued to work for the League until 1930, became in 1934 the Gladstone Professor of Politics at Oxford and a fellow of All Souls.In 1937 he was elected an independent MP for Oxford University.One close friend, since they met at the Paris peace conference of 1919, was the economist John Maynard Keynes; and he was later to recall how, during the 1930s, they had both been members of a small and secret committee of leading economists which continued to advise successive prime ministers up to the outbreak of war.[3]When the war started, Salter recalled, Keynes held weekly meetings at his house where they were joined by William Beveridge, the civil servant who was to shape the post-war expansion of the welfare state, and Walter Layton.He was economist, who in the early 1920s had been director of the League of Nations’ Economic and Financial Section.[4] From 1923 to 1939 Layton had been an influential editor of the Economist and a fervent enthusiast for a federal Europe, a crusade he was to continue into the post-war era.A like-minded friend of this circle was Lionel Curtis, who had been a leading member of the British delegation concerned at the Paris conference with setting up the League of Nations.At that time, he had invited a number of British and American delegates, mainly from Woodrow Wilson’s League of Nations team, to form an Anglo-American society, out of which had come two think tanks, each destined to play an important behind-the-scenes role in lobbying for European integration over the following decades.In London in 1920 Curtis set up the Royal Institute of International Affairs, known as Chatham House.Its Washington counterpart was the Council on Foreign Relations (CFR).In 1940, when Coudenhove arrived in the USA as a refugee, it was the CFR which arranged for him a position at New York University, where he held graduate seminars on the problems of European federation.Through CFR contacts, he was given regular coverage in the New York Times and the New York Herald Tribune, whereby the idea of a United States of Europe was during the war years to become increasingly familiar to influential American opinion.[5] Another old friend with whom Salter was re-united shortly after the outbreak of war was Monnet. Following his lucrative spell in China, Monnet’s career as a merchant banker had continued to be murky. On his return to America he had been investigated for tax evasion.In 1938 his company had even come under suspicion by the FBI for having laundered Nazi money, although this inquiry was called off without any charges being laid.[6]At the outbreak of war in 1939, however, Monnet was back in Europe, where he was appointed chairman of the Franco-British Economic Co-ordination Committee, with the task of arranging contracts for war supplies in America and their shipment across the Atlantic.His vice-chairman, as parliamentary secretary to the new Ministry of Shipping, was Arthur Salter.Just as in 1914, the outbreak of war had brought the two men together in London and again for a very similar purpose.

In the spring of 1940, their task was made suddenly more urgent by the blitzkrieg launched by Hitler, first on Denmark and Norway, then on 10 May on Holland, Belgium and France.That morning Churchill became Britain’s prime minister.Three weeks later came the Dunkirk evacuation and by mid-June it was clear France was about to fall. At this critical moment, Monnet came to play a central role in one of the more curious episodes of the war.[7]On 14 June, General Charles de Gaulle, France’s under-secretary for war, had arrived in London to arrange for shipping to transport the French government and as many French troops as possible to North Africa, to enable them to continue the war.There he met Monnet, who came up with the even more daring proposal that, to symbolise their determination to fight on, France and Britain should declare a Franco-British Union.The two nations should be joined indissolubly as one, complete with a single government, joint armed forces, common citizenship and even a single currency.The two men, along with Monnet’s colleague Rene Pleven, had discussed this proposal with Sir Robert Vansittart, permanent head of the Foreign Office.The following day Vansittart, the Foreign Secretary Lord Halifax and others put the plan to Churchill over lunch at the Carlton Club.Churchill was far from convinced, but when he raised it at Cabinet later that afternoon, he was surprised to see the staid, stolid, experienced politicians of all parties engage themselves so passionately in an immense design whose implications and consequences were not in any way thought out.The following morning, 16 June, the Cabinet met again to discuss the collapse of France, which was becoming more alarming by the hour.At any time, it seemed, the French government might surrender, and not least of the Cabinet’s concerns was that this might give Hitler control of France’s naval fleet, the fourth largest in the world.By the time the Cabinet reassembled that afternoon, Churchill had seen de Gaulle, now wholly behind Monnet’s proposal and viewing such a dramatic gesture as the only hope of strengthening the hand of the French prime minister Paul Reynaud in stiffening his government’s resolve.Halifax reported that Vansittart had again been in consultation with de Gaulle, Monnet and Pleven, and that they had produced a draft declaration, which de Gaulle was ready to take back that night to present to the French government.Churchill’s War Cabinet discussed the draft proclamation of an Anglo-French Union.Only one substantive change was made to a text which had originated largely from Monnet, with Salter’s assistance.Churchill struck out his reference to Britain and France adopting a common currency. But otherwise the declaration was much as Monnet originally conceived it, including a provision for joint organs of defence, foreign, financial and economic policies.The two countries would have a single War Cabinet, and all the forces of Britain and France, whether on land, sea or in the air, will be placed under its direction.[8]After the draft had been approved by the War Cabinet, Churchill describes how he took it into the next room, where de Gaulle was waiting with Vansittart.The General read it with an air of unwonted enthusiasm, and communicated it by telephone to Reynaud at Bordeaux.If the French government approved, Churchill was ready to fly out with senior colleagues to discuss it the following day.But Reynaud’s colleagues, led by Marshal Petain, reacted with violent hostility to what they saw as a trick to reduce France to the status of a mere British dominion.A wave of anti-British feeling had swept official circles and public opinion in the wake of Dunkirk.We would rather have Hitler than be the slaves of England, some shouted in the halls of the prefecture of Bordeaux, again the temporary seat of the French government.[9]Petain himself described it as fusion with a corpse: the corpse in his eyes being a doomed Britain. Admitting defeat, Reynaud resigned. He was succeeded by Petain, who promptly sued with Germany for a humiliating peace.It was thus Monnet’s proposal which provided the final catalyst for France’s surrender.Following France’s fall, Monnet threw himself into transferring French contracts with America to the British war effort.Although he was now technically an enemy alien, Churchill appointed him as a member of the British Supply Council in Washington, personally signing his passport to give him entry to the USA. There he was able to continue liaising with Salter on arranging contracts for war supplies in America for the British government.In 1941 Churchill appointed Salter to head a British mission to Washington, to press on the Americans the need for a vast programme of new shipbuilding (this would eventually lead to the ‘Liberty ships’ which were to provide Britain with such a vital lifeline).[10] Between 1940 and 1943 (and again in 1944-5) Monnet was based in Washington, where his talent for networking soon won him influential friends in the US establishment, from Justice Felix Frankfurter of the Supreme Court to Dean Acheson, later to become US Secretary of State. Both men would lend active support to his European integrationist campaign in the post-war era.While in Washington in 1941, he met Paul-Henri Spaak.To him, he expounded his underlying philosophy for a united Europe and explained in rough outline plans for a European coal and steel union.[11]As the tide of war swung in the Allies’ favour, Monnet’s attention turned increasingly to the shape of the Europe he wished to see emerging in the post-war era.At the end of February 1943, after the Allies had retaken French North Africa, he was sent by President Roosevelt to Algiers to arrange for arms shipments to the Free French forces.Here he found bitter rivalry developing between the two French generals who could claim to act as leader of the Free French, de Gaulle and Giraud.In his efforts to resolve this dispute, Monnet formed a close alliance with the politician sent out by Churchill to act as the British Cabinet’s Political Representative in the Mediterranean, Harold Macmillan.

Macmillan records how he and Monnet had extensive conver­sations about the future of France and post-war Europe, and despite their reservations about de Gaulle’s high-handedness, agreed he was the only man of sufficient stature to lead a government in exile.Between them they laid the foundations for what amounted to a provisional French govern­ment, the Comité Francais de Libération Nationale (CFLN), to be led by de Gaulle.Monnet was co-opted as a member, and for one of its early meetings, on 5 August 1943, he produced a memorandum which declared:There will be no peace in Europe, if the states are reconstituted on the basis of national sovereignty with all that implies in terms of prestige politics and economic protectionism.If the nations of Europe adopt defensive positions again, huge armies will be necessary again. Under the future peace treaty, some nations will be allowed to re-arm; others will not.That was tried in 1919; we all know the result.Intra-European alliances will be formed; we know what they are worth.Social reform will be impeded or blocked by the sheer weight of military budgets.Europe will be reborn in fear.The nations of Europe are too circumscribed to give their peoples the prosperity made possible, and hence necessary, by modern conditions.They will need larger markets.And they will have to refrain from using a major proportion of their resources to maintain key industries needed for national defence and made mandatory by the concept of sovereign, protectionist States, as we knew them before 1939.Prosperity and vital social progress will remain elusive until the nations of Europe form a federation of a European entity which will forge them into a single economic unit…Our concern is a solution to the European problem.The British, the Americans, the Russians have worlds of their own into which they can temporarily retreat.France cannot opt out, for her very existence hinges on a solution to the European problem.Developments on the European scene in the wake of imminent liberalisation, will inevitably prompt the three major powers to protect themselves against Europe and hence France.For no agreement into which France might be drawn with Britain, America or Russia could cut her off from Europe, with whom she has so many intellectual, material and economic ties.[12]Again Monnet was developing his vision of a Europe which could achieve lasting peace only if organised under a supranational authority sufficient to overrule the fractious impulses of national sovereignty. This would forge the member states into a single economic unit, based on integrating those key industries needed for national defence, such as coal and steel.It would also be a Europe in which he no more imagined the direct involvement of Britain than that of America or Russia.[13]

Festung Europa

In the late summer of 1942, Europe was politically more united than she had ever been.From the North Cape to the Mani in southern Greece, from the fishing ports of Brittany to the snowcapped peaks of the Caucasus two thousand miles to the east, an unprecedented area was under the sway of a single political system.But within Hitler’s Fortress Europe three different groups of people were discussing the value of a united Europe which might emerge after the war, each for their own reasons.
Hitler himself regarded talk of post-war European unity as a presumptuous irrelevance.He had loathed the early European unity move­ment, despised the Briand-Stresemann policy of rapprochement and dismissed Coudenhove as everybody’s bas­tard.[14]He had banned European unity associat­ions as soon as he had the chance, together with the Esperanto language.Lower down the Nazi hierarchy, however, there were some who spent the war years conceiving plans for the kind of unity to which Europe might aspire when the war was over.One such was Werner Daitz, a leading Nazi economist.He launched a Society for European Economic Planning and Macroeconomics (Grossraum­wirtschaft), and produced a book, What the New Order in Europe Brings to the European Peoples.He was also one of many ideologues of the time who attacked the outmoded notions of national sovereignty and the nation state.In 1938 Daitz had declared that the idea of the state derived from British political theory and the French Revolution.He held the nation to be small and selfish compared with the great common undertaking’ which was Europe.The common interests of Europe take precedence over the selfish interests of nations, he declared.[15]Another enthusiast for European unity was Hitler’s foreign minister Joachim von Ribbentrop.In late 1942, he headed a Committee on the Restructuring of Europe, giving a number of academics and politicians free reign to create different scenarios for Europe’s future development. In March 1943 he proposed inviting all heads of state of the occupied countries, along with Franco’s Spain, to sign an instrument setting up a European confederation.[16]But he did not represent official Nazi thinking.Hitler’s contemptuous response was to issue a decree requiring that the planning, preparation and execution of demonstrations of a European or international kind… must cease.[17]A third Nazi functionary to favour European unity was Hitler’s finance minister, Walther Funk. Like Daitz, he held that common interests had to take precedence over particular ones.There must be a readiness to subordinate one’s own interests in certain cases to that of the European community, he declared.He was charged with planning the reconstruction of the post-war economy within the framework of a New European Order and a new world economy.To this effect he chaired a committee which produced a series of essays, which were still coming out as late as January 1945.These set out ideas for a Europaische Wirtschaft­gemeinschaft (European Economic Community), strictly under German leadership and including a proposal for a single currency.[18]Funk’s proposals were widely publicised in the occupied countries, to persuade their peoples that co-operation with Germany could reap economic benefits in the future.There was no evidence, however, of any systematic attempt to put them into practice.Indeed any attempt to impose on Europe a common currency would have caused Germany serious problems.The occupied countries were being charged the costs of their occupation: in the case of France twenty million Reichsmarks per day.Repayments were calculated at a much-devalued exchange rate, magnifying the debt to such an extent that forty-two percent of the total foreign contribution to the German war-time economy ended up coming from France.[19]A single currency would seriously have undermined this advantageous arrangement.Whatever the rhetoric of some of his followers, Hitler had not the slightest intention of giving up control.As Goebbels put it:It is only right and just that we take the leadership of Europe definitely into our hands…The German people… have actually won the hegemony of Europe and have a moral right to it.[20] Nevertheless, as the Germans came to terms with having to wage a prolonged war, Goebbels recognised that the rhetoric of Europeanism could serve a useful propaganda purpose.He wrote in his diary on 12 April 1943:It is a curious fact that we shun the phrase European co-operation, just as the devil shuns Holy Water.I can’t understand why that is true.So obvious a political and propaganda slogan ought really to become a general theme for public discussion in Europe.Instead, we avoid it wherever possible.[21]

The purpose, as he conceived it, was to create a sense of European identity, to make Europeans aware of their collective difference from the alien cultures with which they were at war, those of Britain, the United States and above all Stalin’s Soviet Union.The further the tide of war turned, the more prominent this theme became, projecting Germany as the protector of the European culture against the barbarians from the east.But such professed enthusiasm for the European ideal was simply a device to encourage occupied countries to volunteer their young men to join the Waffen-SS and to mobilise their economies against the Bolshevik hordes in what was increasingly styled a European war of liberation.[22]The propaganda had its effect. In June 1944, Fernand de Brinon, Vichy’s Secretary of State, affirmed: We will help Germany on every front and in every way to preserve the West, its enlightenment, its culture, its traditions.[23]Admittedly this came from a man known before the war as a crook with an irresistible love of money, who, as the Allies invaded France in 1944, escaped to Germany with four million francs in bank notes and a sizeable quantity of jewellery.[24]He was executed by the French in early 1947.[25]Nevertheless, in the end, 50,000 non-Germans from every part of occupied Europe fought on the Eastern front, under the banner of the Waffen SS.Many believed they were defending Europe, rather than serving the interests of Germany.[26]

Fascists and collaborators

Despite the tendency of some post-war writers to see the Nazis and their various allies across Axis-dominated Europe as a homogenous entity, the many disparate groups had their own distinct ideologies and ambitions.Nevertheless running through their rhetoric on the theme of European unity were two persistent themes.The first was a desire to proclaim the end of the nation state and its absorption into a greater European identity; the other a sense that the emerging New Europe could now recover its old self-confidence and compete with any power in the world.In 1943, for instance, Mussolini’s education minister Giuseppe Bottai wrote of nationalism being the ossification of a political principle that has served its time… it acts as a hindrance to the general advance of civilisation.[27]Italy’s finance minister Alberto de Stefani wrote:Nationalities do not form a sound basis for the planned new order… there is only hope for peace by means of a process which on the one hand respects the inalienable, fundamental patrimony of every nation but, on the other, moderates these and subordinates them to a continental policy... A European Union could not be subject to the variations of internal policy that are characteristic of liberal regimes.[28]Stephani’s reference here to liberal regimes was essentially a code for Britain and America.Thus he was simply reiterating the general line of Fascist propaganda, dressed in European clothes.This is more evident in the views of another Fascist opponent of the nation-state, Camillo Pellizzi, editor of the magazine Civilita Fascista.He believed the Fascist principle would overcome the particularism of Europe’s nation-states, writing: The Axis is, or can be, the first definite step towards surmount­ing...that typically European phenomenon which we call the nation, with its inevitable, one might say physiological corollary of nationalism... One cannot create Europe without the nations or against them: we must create it from the different nations, while subduing national particularism as far as may be necessary.[29]In the occupied countries, many politicians and intellectuals who had advocated the cause of European unity since the 1920s now convinced themselves working with the Nazis was the way to achieve it.Thus, one of the leading collaborators in Vichy France, Jacques Benoist-Mechin, secretary of state for Franco-German relations from June 1941 to September 1942, declared that France’s policy of collaboration required the abandonment of old illusions.She would be able to join the new Europe, he asserted, only when she abandons all crumbling forms of nationalism - which was itself in reality only an anachronistic particularism - and when she takes her place in the European community with honour.

Similarly, another ardent Vichyite, the writer and philosopher Pierre Drieu La Rochelle, who had been a strong supporter of European unity since the early 1920s, espoused the Fascist cause.He argued that it is the only way of defending Europe against itself and against other human groups.However, before committing suicide at the time of the liberation of France, he wrote, Perhaps all this is a lot of eyewash: the truth may be that I’m scared of being kicked around by the police.[30]In Belgium, the Walloon collaborator Léon Degrelle, a leader of the Fascist Rexist movement, saw his country becoming part of a recreated Burgundy (the middle kingdom between France and Germany) and a full partner of the Third Reich.Yet his original pre-war credo had been ultra-nationalistic and he had became overtly Fascist only in 1939.Under the Nazi occupation his brand of Fascism mutated into unashamed collaborationism, proclaiming a pan-European vision of the New Order.[31]Another Rexist leader, Pierre Daye, in 1942 wrote a tract, Europe for the Europeans, in which he saw Nazi Europe not as a political entity in its own right but more as a bastion against Communism and the divisive foreign policies of Great Britain.Vidkun Quisling, the Norwegian collaborationist leader, argued that Europe would be strong and peaceful only if united: We must create a Europe that does not squander its blood and strength in inter­necine conflict, but forms a compact unity.In this way it will become richer, stronger and more civilised, and will recover its old place in the world.He wanted to see a Pan-Germanic Federation with a federal flag and the Fuhrer as president.[32]

Nothing in all this flood of rhetoric, however, provided any practical model for the type of political integration which was to emerge after the war. As one historian put it:Such pan-European illusions were actively fostered by the Nazis themselves. Clearly the bulk of the Third Reich statements relating to pan-Europeanism disseminated by the Nazis in the occupied territories can be dismissed as cynical propaganda calculated to encourage, if not the active co-operation, then the passive acquiescence of the new vassals.Neither Hitler, nor many of his leading hierarchs such as Goebbels, had the slightest intention to compromise absolute German hegemony through the creation of a European confederation, subsidiary or otherwise.[33]Thus, the collaborationists’ real purpose was to clamber onto the sledge of Europe’s ruling power in the hope of being given a share in the spoils.There was nothing in their rhetoric which would spill over into the movement for European integration as it was to develop in the post-war years.Nazi thinking was an ideological cul-de-sac.The practical steps to realise the dream of a United States of Europe would derive their inspiration those who, during the war, regarded themselves as the Nazis’ sworn enemies.Some of those ideas were to emerge from within occupied Europe itself, from those who spent the war years most obviously at odds with everything Nazism and Fascism stood for.

The resistance

Outside the grip of the Nazis and their allies, the inter-war dreams of European unity did not die.They went underground.In each occupied country resistance movements emerged.If this movement as a whole had any unifying philosophy, it was a determination to seek a new beginning in the post-war recon­struct­ion of Europe. Central to this was the concept of a united Europe.In common with the pre-war Pan-Europeanists (and that of the Nazis when it suited them), they held nationalism and national pride to be responsible for past European wars.The prevailing ethos supported the creation of new structures to transcend historical boundaries.This much was openly declared, long before the end of the war, by resistance groups in Czechoslovakia, France, Italy, the Netherlands, Poland and Yugoslavia, and even in Germany itself.But the most strident supporters of European unity were the Italian Communists, who were at the core of the anti-Fascist movement.In this respect the major figure to emerge during the war years, who was eventually to make a very significant contribution to the develop­ment of the European Union, was the Italian, Altiero Spinelli.Born in 1907, he joined the Communists at the age of seventeen and had been active in opposing Mussolini’s Fascism.In 1928, he was arrested and imprisoned, spending twelve years in jail before eventually being sent to a prison on the Mediterranean island of Ventotene, thirty miles west of Naples.While in prison, he broke with Communism and embraced the cause of European unity, composing in 1941 what became known as the Ventotene Manifesto, under the title Towards a Free and United Europe.[34] This was to become one of the basic texts of the European federalist movement.Spinelli’s text addressed the familiar theme of creating a federal Europe, but now in terms of exploiting the continent-wide chaos which he predicted would inevitably arise when the war was over.Like so many others, Spinelli wanted to see the definitive abolition of the division of Europe into national, sovereign states.To achieve this, he called on his followers to foment revolut­ion. True to his political ideology, he proclaimed, the European revolution must be socialist: i.e., its goal must be the emancipation of the working classes and the creation of more humane conditions for them.Spinelli was coy about the structures of his European federation but definitely had in mind an all-powerful, supranational authority.This he saw developing into a United States of Europe, with its own constitution and armed forces.It would have the power to ensure that its deliber­ations for the maintenance of common order are executed in the individual federal states.In turgid prose, he argued that this state would only retain the autonomy it needed for a plastic articulation and development of political life according to the particular character­istics of the various peoples.His views on the part played by democracy, however, were very clear: During revolutionary times, when institutions are not simply to be admin­ister­ed but created he insisted, democratic procedures fail miserably.For a model of how Spinelli’s ‘European Federation’ would come about, one need look no further than this passage of the Ventotene Manifesto:During the revolutionary crisis, this movement will have the task of organising and guiding progressive forces, using all the popular bodies which form spontaneously, incandescent melting pots in which the revolutionary masses are mixed, not for the creation of plebiscites, but rather waiting to be guided.

It derives its vision and certainty of what must be done from the knowledge that it represents the deepest needs of modern society and not from any previous recognition by popular will, as yet non-existent.In this way it issues the basic guidelines of the new order, the first social discipline directed to the unformed masses.By this dictatorship of the revolutionary party a new State will be formed, and around this State new, genuine democracy will grow.[35]In other words, the people were not to be involved in the construction of the new state.Popular assent would be sought only when the project was all but complete.At that moment their crowning dream would be the calling of a constituent assembly, to decide upon the constitution they want. The drawing up of the constitution would be the final act in the emergence of the United States of Europe. Only then, within the framework of the new state which had been brought into being, would democracy be permitted to resume.In July 1941, Spinelli’s manifesto was smuggled to the mainland.His ideas came to be adopted by the Communist-dominated Italian Resistance as a whole, leading to the formation in 1943 of the European Federal­ist Movement.This spread the message to groups in other countries, giving rise to a series of meetings in neutral Switzerland, culminating in a major conference in Geneva in July 1944, attended by activists from Denmark, France, Italy, Norway, the Netherlands, Poland, Czechoslovakia and Yugoslavia. There was even a representative from a secret anti-Nazi group within Germany itself.At the Geneva conference, the collective resistance movements produced a declaration which claimed that their wartime struggle would give their countries the right to take part in the reconstruction of Europe on the same basis as the other victorious powers.In those countries, they declared, the life of the peoples which they represent must be based on respect of the human individual, on security, on social justice, on the complete utilisation of economic resources for the benefit of the whole and on the autonomous development of national life.[36]These aims, the conference considered, cannot be fulfilled unless the different countries of the world agree to go beyond the dogma of the absolute sovereignty of the state and unite in a single federal organisation.However, injecting a faint note of reality, the declaration went on: The lack of unity and cohesion that still exists between the different parts of the world will not allow us to achieve immediately an organisation that unites all civilisations under a single federal government.This meant that, in the immediate post-war period, the European problem must be given a more direct and more radical solution.[37]

This direct solution would consist of a European Federal Union.Only thus could the German people be allowed to participate in the life of the new Europe without endangering the rest.As before, the Union would have its written constitution and a supranational government directly responsible to the peoples of Europe.It would control its own army, with no national armies permitted.It would also have its own court, with sole juris­dict­ion over constitutional matters and exclusive rights to arbitrate in conflicts between the central authority and member states.It would be another forty years before Spinelli would make his central contribution to the shape of the European Union as it finally emerged.But the ideas on which this was based were all there in the declaration of 1944, originating from the few pages he had scribbled in his island prison, at a time when Hitler’s Thousand Year Reich had seemed the undisputed master of Europe.

The Nazi Cul-de-Sac: 1933-1945 We are perhaps more interested in Europe than other countries need to be.Adolf Hitler, speech at Nuremberg Rally, 1937.

On 13 December 1941, when Hitler’s armies were at the gates of Moscow, the magazine Picture Post, then in its heyday as Britain’s leading mass-circulation weekly, gave prominence to an article by its proprietor Edward Hulton headed How The Nazis Promise Europe a New Heaven.In his article, Hulton reported on how a grand assembly of puppet powers had recently taken place in Berlin, to be told that it would be the Nazis’ purpose after the war to unite Europe as the richest economic entity in the world. Up to now a senior Nazi economist Werner Daitz had proclaimed, Europe has not been able to take advantage of her wonderful natural opportunities.This because her different states have refused to work together. But under the Nazi New Order, a united Europe would use her economic strength as a political lever to assert her proper influence in the world.To illustrate the Nazi plan for a new Europe the magazine published a map of the trans-continental railway system, quoting Josef Goebbels: a Europe without frontiers can make proper use of its communications.Half a century later, in the 1990s, a number of books appeared by British Eurosceptics arguing that the origins of the European Union lay in ideas put forward by the Nazis during World War Two.[38]This belief arose because their authors had noted what appeared to be a striking resemblance between some of those ideas and features of the European project as it had developed in the decades after the war.In particular they were struck by Nazi references during the war years to setting up a European economic community and a single European currency.The very fact that such an argument could be put forward was in itself a testament to the remarkable lack of knowledge, both among Eurosceptics and Europhiles, as how the post-war European project actually came about. In particular it reflected a near-universal failure to understand how directly that project stemmed from ideas which long predated the rise of Nazism, and which were already well-established in the minds of men such as Salter and Monnet before the end of the 1920s.Certainly the re-emergence of the campaign to built a United States of Europe in the years after the Second World War owed a great debt to ideas developed during the years of Hitler’s dominance.But these drew nothing from the Nazis. They were developed by men fiercely opposed to Nazism: not least by some of those whose thinking had already been moving in this direction for over twenty years.

There was only one moment when it had seemed possible that the Nazi Party might embrace the cause of a United States of Europe.This long preceded the Nazis’ arrival in power in 1933, happening during the only period in the party’s history when Hitler himself faced a serious rival for his leadership. In 1924, he had been imprisoned in the castle of Landsberg for his part in the previous year’s abortive Munich putsch and, in his absence, his deputy Gregor Strasser, a talented organiser, had led the party to its first electoral success, winning 32 seats in the Reichstag.Strasser was insistent that the Nazis must broaden out their base from Bavaria to other parts of Germany.In particular he won support from the then-young, left-wing-inclined Josef Goebbels, for his view that the National Socialist Party must become both more national and more socialist in its appeal.In 1925 when the two men drew up a party programme, this reflected the cause then being promoted by Stresemann and Briand by calling for a United States of Europe, including a proposal for a single European currency.In 1926, however, Hitler re-asserted his authority over the party, during a conference in Bamberg. Goebbels switched his loyalty from Strasser back to Hitler; Strasser’s Programme for National Socialism was rejected.Hitler was to eliminate his erstwhile rival in the Night of the Long Knives in 1934.He himself never showed the slightest interest in any idea of a united Europe, other than one united under his own leadership by force of arms.Once he had risen to power in 1933, the only value he attached to the concept of Europe was as the matrix of German culture, illustrated by his declaration at the Nuremberg Rally of 1937:Our country, our people, our culture and our economy have grown out of general European conditions.We must therefore be the enemy of any attempt to introduce elements of discord and destruction into this European family of peoples.[39]Embodying that desire to re-assert his nation’s identity which was an inevitable reaction to the humiliations forced on Germany by France at Versailles, Hitler had already reversed one of those humiliations by marching his troops into the demilitarised Rhineland in 1936.He was about to introduce further elements of discord into the European family by his expansion into those other legacies of Versailles, Austria and Czechoslovakia, in 1938-9.In September 1939, he advanced across another Versailles frontier, into the former German lands ceded to Poland in 1919.By the following spring and summer, as his armies swept through Denmark, Norway, Belgium, Holland, Luxembourg and France, he was well on the way to building a united Europe by means which would have had those 1920s idealists Stresemann and Briand recoiling in horror.

The twilight years of Europeanism

As the twin shadows of Nazism and Fascism lengthened over Europe in the immediate pre-war years, the futility of the League of Nations had become ever more cruelly exposed, firstly by its failure to prevent Japan attacking Manchuria and China, by Italy seizing Abyssinia and then Hitler marching into the Rhineland, Austria and Czechoslovakia.Coudenhove nevertheless continued his campaign for a United States of Europe until a few months after the German-Austrian anschluss in 1938.Two years later, after the war had begun, he took refuge in New York, where he was to spend the war years proselytising for European unity, in a way which was to have considerable influence on post-war American attitudes to Europe.In Britain some of the old League of Nations insiders who had been most enthusiastic for a United States of Europe in the 1920s remained in close touch.Salter, who continued to work for the League until 1930, became in 1934 the Gladstone Professor of Politics at Oxford and a fellow of All Souls.In 1937 he was elected an independent MP for Oxford University.One close friend, since they met at the Paris peace conference of 1919, was the economist John Maynard Keynes; and he was later to recall how, during the 1930s, they had both been members of a small and secret committee of leading economists which continued to advise successive prime ministers up to the outbreak of war.[40] When the war started, Salter recalled, Keynes held weekly meetings at his house where they were joined by William Beveridge, the civil servant who was to shape the post-war expansion of the welfare state, and Walter Layton.He was economist, who in the early 1920s had been director of the League of Nations’ Economic and Financial Section.[41] From 1923 to 1939 Layton had been an influential editor of the Economist and a fervent enthusiast for a federal Europe, a crusade he was to continue into the post-war era.A like-minded friend of this circle was Lionel Curtis, who had been a leading member of the British delegation concerned at the Paris conference with setting up the League of Nations.At that time, he had invited a number of British and American delegates, mainly from Woodrow Wilson’s League of Nations team, to form an Anglo-American society, out of which had come two think tanks, each destined to play an important behind-the-scenes role in lobbying for European integration over the following decades. In London in 1920 Curtis set up the Royal Institute of International Affairs, known as Chatham House.Its Washington counterpart was the Council on Foreign Relations (CFR).In 1940, when Coudenhove arrived in the USA as a refugee, it was the CFR which arranged for him a position at New York University, where he held graduate seminars on the problems of European federation.Through CFR contacts, he was given regular coverage in the New York Times and the New York Herald Tribune, whereby the idea of a United States of Europe was during the war years to become increasingly familiar to influential American opinion.[42] Another old friend with whom Salter was re-united shortly after the outbreak of war was Monnet. Following his lucrative spell in China, Monnet’s career as a merchant banker had continued to be murky.On his return to America he had been investigated for tax evasion. In 1938 his company had even come under suspicion by the FBI for having laundered Nazi money, although this inquiry was called off without any charges being laid.[43]At the outbreak of war in 1939, however, Monnet was back in Europe, where he was appointed chairman of the Franco-British Economic Co-ordination Committee, with the task of arranging contracts for war supplies in America and their shipment across the Atlantic.His vice-chairman, as parliamentary secretary to the new Ministry of Shipping, was Arthur Salter.Just as in 1914, the outbreak of war had brought the two men together in London and again for a very similar purpose.

In the spring of 1940, their task was made suddenly more urgent by the blitzkrieg launched by Hitler, first on Denmark and Norway, then on 10 May on Holland, Belgium and France.That morning Churchill became Britain’s prime minister.Three weeks later came the Dunkirk evacuation and by mid-June it was clear France was about to fall. At this critical moment, Monnet came to play a central role in one of the more curious episodes of the war.[44]On 14 June, General Charles de Gaulle, France’s under-secretary for war, had arrived in London to arrange for shipping to transport the French government and as many French troops as possible to North Africa, to enable them to continue the war.There he met Monnet, who came up with the even more daring proposal that, to symbolise their determination to fight on, France and Britain should declare a Franco-British Union.The two nations should be joined indissolubly as one, complete with a single government, joint armed forces, common citizenship and even a single currency.The two men, along with Monnet’s colleague Rene Pleven, had discussed this proposal with Sir Robert Vansittart, permanent head of the Foreign Office.The following day Vansittart, the Foreign Secretary Lord Halifax and others put the plan to Churchill over lunch at the Carlton Club. Churchill was far from convinced, but when he raised it at Cabinet later that afternoon, he was surprised to see the staid, stolid, experienced politicians of all parties engage themselves so passionately in an immense design whose implications and consequences were not in any way thought out.The following morning, 16 June, the Cabinet met again to discuss the collapse of France, which was becoming more alarming by the hour.At any time, it seemed, the French government might surrender, and not least of the Cabinet’s concerns was that this might give Hitler control of France’s naval fleet, the fourth largest in the world.By the time the Cabinet reassembled that afternoon, Churchill had seen de Gaulle, now wholly behind Monnet’s proposal and viewing such a dramatic gesture as the only hope of strengthening the hand of the French prime minister Paul Reynaud in stiffening his government’s resolve.Halifax reported that Vansittart had again been in consultation with de Gaulle, Monnet and Pleven, and that they had produced a draft declaration, which de Gaulle was ready to take back that night to present to the French government.Churchill’s War Cabinet discussed the draft proclamation of an Anglo-French Union.Only one substantive change was made to a text which had originated largely from Monnet, with Salter’s assistance.Churchill struck out his reference to Britain and France adopting a common currency.But otherwise the declaration was much as Monnet originally conceived it, including a provision for joint organs of defence, foreign, financial and economic policies.The two countries would have a single War Cabinet, and all the forces of Britain and France, whether on land, sea or in the air, will be placed under its direction.[45]

After the draft had been approved by the War Cabinet, Churchill describes how he took it into the next room, where de Gaulle was waiting with Vansittart.The General read it with an air of unwonted enthusiasm, and communicated it by telephone to Reynaud at Bordeaux.If the French government approved, Churchill was ready to fly out with senior colleagues to discuss it the following day.But Reynaud’s colleagues, led by Marshal Petain, reacted with violent hostility to what they saw as a trick to reduce France to the status of a mere British dominion.A wave of anti-British feeling had swept official circles and public opinion in the wake of Dunkirk.We would rather have Hitler than be the slaves of England, some shouted in the halls of the prefecture of Bordeaux, again the temporary seat of the French government.[46]Petain himself described it as fusion with a corpse: the corpse in his eyes being a doomed Britain. Admitting defeat, Reynaud resigned.He was succeeded by Petain, who promptly sued with Germany for a humiliating peace.It was thus Monnet’s proposal which provided the final catalyst for France’s surrender.Following France’s fall, Monnet threw himself into transferring French contracts with America to the British war effort.Although he was now technically an enemy alien, Churchill appointed him as a member of the British Supply Council in Washington, personally signing his passport to give him entry to the USA.There he was able to continue liaising with Salter on arranging contracts for war supplies in America for the British government. In 1941 Churchill appointed Salter to head a British mission to Washington, to press on the Americans the need for a vast programme of new shipbuilding (this would eventually lead to the Liberty ships which were to provide Britain with such a vital lifeline).[47]Between 1940 and 1943 (and again in 1944-5) Monnet was based in Washington, where his talent for networking soon won him influential friends in the US establishment, from Justice Felix Frankfurter of the Supreme Court to Dean Acheson, later to become US Secretary of State.Both men would lend active support to his European integrationist campaign in the post-war era.While in Washington in 1941, he met Paul-Henri Spaak.To him, he expounded his underlying philosophy for a united Europe and explained in rough outline plans for a European coal and steel union.[48]As the tide of war swung in the Allies’ favour, Monnet’s attention turned increasingly to the shape of the Europe he wished to see emerging in the post-war era.At the end of February 1943, after the Allies had retaken French North Africa, he was sent by President Roosevelt to Algiers to arrange for arms shipments to the Free French forces.Here he found bitter rivalry developing between the two French generals who could claim to act as leader of the Free French, de Gaulle and Giraud.In his efforts to resolve this dispute, Monnet formed a close alliance with the politician sent out by Churchill to act as the British Cabinet’s Political Representative in the Mediterranean, Harold Macmillan.

Macmillan records how he and Monnet had extensive conver­sations about the future of France and post-war Europe, and despite their reservations about de Gaulle’s high-handedness, agreed he was the only man of sufficient stature to lead a government in exile.Between them they laid the foundations for what amounted to a provisional French govern­ment, the Comité Francais de Libération Nationale (CFLN), to be led by de Gaulle.Monnet was co-opted as a member, and for one of its early meetings, on 5 August 1943, he produced a memorandum which declared: There will be no peace in Europe, if the states are reconstituted on the basis of national sovereignty with all that implies in terms of prestige politics and economic protectionism.If the nations of Europe adopt defensive positions again, huge armies will be necessary again. Under the future peace treaty, some nations will be allowed to re-arm; others will not.That was tried in 1919; we all know the result.Intra-European alliances will be formed; we know what they are worth.Social reform will be impeded or blocked by the sheer weight of military budgets.Europe will be reborn in fear.The nations of Europe are too circumscribed to give their peoples the prosperity made possible, and hence necessary, by modern conditions.They will need larger markets.And they will have to refrain from using a major proportion of their resources to maintain key industries needed for national defence and made mandatory by the concept of sovereign, protectionist States, as we knew them before 1939. Prosperity and vital social progress will remain elusive until the nations of Europe form a federation of a European entity which will forge them into a single economic unit… Our concern is a solution to the European problem.The British, the Americans, the Russians have worlds of their own into which they can temporarily retreat.France cannot opt out, for her very existence hinges on a solution to the European problem.Developments on the European scene in the wake of imminent liberalisation, will inevitably prompt the three major powers to protect themselves against Europe and hence France.For no agreement into which France might be drawn with Britain, America or Russia could cut her off from Europe, with whom she has so many intellectual, material and economic ties.[49]Again Monnet was developing his vision of a Europe which could achieve lasting peace only if organised under a supranational authority sufficient to overrule the fractious impulses of national sovereignty.This would forge the member states into a single economic unit, based on integrating those key industries needed for national defence, such as coal and steel.It would also be a Europe in which he no more imagined the direct involvement of Britain than that of America or Russia.[50]

Hitler himself regarded talk of post-war European unity as a presumptuous irrelevance.He had loathed the early European unity move­ment, despised the Briand-Stresemann policy of rapprochement and dismissed Coudenhove as everybody’s bas­tard.[51] He had banned European unity associat­ions as soon as he had the chance, together with the Esperanto language.Lower down the Nazi hierarchy, however, there were some who spent the war years conceiving plans for the kind of unity to which Europe might aspire when the war was over.One such was Werner Daitz, a leading Nazi economist. He launched a Society for European Economic Planning and Macroeconomics (Grossraum­wirtschaft), and produced a book, What the New Order in Europe Brings to the European Peoples.He was also one of many ideologues of the time who attacked the outmoded notions of national sovereignty and the nation state.In 1938 Daitz had declared that the idea of the state derived from British political theory and the French Revolution.He held the nation to be small and selfish compared with the great common undertaking’ which was Europe.The common interests of Europe take precedence over the selfish interests of nations, he declared.[52]Another enthusiast for European unity was Hitler’s foreign minister Joachim von Ribbentrop. In late 1942, he headed a Committee on the Restructuring of Europe, giving a number of academics and politicians free reign to create different scenarios for Europe’s future development. In March 1943 he proposed inviting all heads of state of the occupied countries, along with Franco’s Spain, to sign an instrument setting up a European confederation.[53] But he did not represent official Nazi thinking. Hitler’s contemptuous response was to issue a decree requiring that the planning, preparation and execution of demonstrations of a European or international kind… must cease.[54]A third Nazi functionary to favour European unity was Hitler’s finance minister, Walther Funk. Like Daitz, he held that common interests had to take precedence over particular ones.There must be a readiness to subordinate one’s own interests in certain cases to that of the European community, he declared.He was charged with planning the reconstruction of the post-war economy within the framework of a New European Order and a new world economy.To this effect he chaired a committee which produced a series of essays, which were still coming out as late as January 1945.These set out ideas for a Europaische Wirtschaft­gemeinschaft (European Economic Community), strictly under German leadership and including a proposal for a single currency.[55]Funk’s proposals were widely publicised in the occupied countries, to persuade their peoples that co-operation with Germany could reap economic benefits in the future.There was no evidence, however, of any systematic attempt to put them into practice.Indeed any attempt to impose on Europe a common currency would have caused Germany serious problems.The occupied countries were being charged the costs of their occupation: in the case of France twenty million Reichsmarks per day.Repayments were calculated at a much-devalued exchange rate, magnifying the debt to such an extent that forty-two percent of the total foreign contribution to the German war-time economy ended up coming from France.[56] A single currency would seriously have undermined this advantageous arrangement.

Whatever the rhetoric of some of his followers, Hitler had not the slightest intention of giving up control.As Goebbels put it: It is only right and just that we take the leadership of Europe definitely into our hands…The German people… have actually won the hegemony of Europe and have a moral right to it.[57] Nevertheless, as the Germans came to terms with having to wage a prolonged war, Goebbels recognised that the rhetoric of Europeanism could serve a useful propaganda purpose.He wrote in his diary on 12 April 1943: It is a curious fact that we shun the phrase European co-operation, just as the devil shuns Holy Water. I can’t understand why that is true. So obvious a political and propaganda slogan ought really to become a general theme for public discussion in Europe.Instead, we avoid it wherever possible.[58]The purpose, as he conceived it, was to create a sense of European identity, to make Europeans aware of their collective difference from the alien cultures with which they were at war, those of Britain, the United States and above all Stalin’s Soviet Union. The further the tide of war turned, the more prominent this theme became, projecting Germany as the protector of the European culture against the barbarians from the east.But such professed enthusiasm for the European ideal was simply a device to encourage occupied countries to volunteer their young men to join the Waffen-SS and to mobilise their economies against the Bolshevik hordes in what was increasingly styled a European war of liberation.[59]The propaganda had its effect. In June 1944, Fernand de Brinon, Vichy’s Secretary of State, affirmed: We will help Germany on every front and in every way to preserve the West, its enlightenment, its culture, its traditions.[60] Admittedly this came from a man known before the war as a crook with an irresistible love of money, who, as the Allies invaded France in 1944, escaped to Germany with four million francs in bank notes and a sizeable quantity of jewellery.[61] He was executed by the French in early 1947.[62]Nevertheless, in the end, 50,000 non-Germans from every part of occupied Europe fought on the Eastern front, under the banner of the Waffen SS.Many believed they were defending Europe, rather than serving the interests of Germany.[63]Despite the tendency of some post-war writers to see the Nazis and their various allies across Axis-dominated Europe as a homogenous entity, the many disparate groups had their own distinct ideologies and ambitions. Nevertheless running through their rhetoric on the theme of European unity were two persistent themes.The first was a desire to proclaim the end of the nation state and its absorption into a greater European identity; the other a sense that the emerging New Europe could now recover its old self-confidence and compete with any power in the world.

In 1943, for instance, Mussolini’s education minister Giuseppe Bottai wrote of nationalism being the ossification of a political principle that has served its time… it acts as a hindrance to the general advance of civilisation.[64]Italy’s finance minister Alberto de Stefani wrote:Nationalities do not form a sound basis for the planned new order… there is only hope for peace by means of a process which on the one hand respects the inalienable, fundamental patrimony of every nation but, on the other, moderates these and subordinates them to a continental policy...A European Union could not be subject to the variations of internal policy that are characteristic of liberal regimes.[65]Stephani’s reference here to liberal regimes was essentially a code for Britain and America.Thus he was simply reiterating the general line of Fascist propaganda, dressed in European clothes.This is more evident in the views of another Fascist opponent of the nation-state, Camillo Pellizzi, editor of the magazine Civilita Fascista.He believed the Fascist principle would overcome the particularism of Europe’s nation-states, writing: The Axis is, or can be, the first definite step towards surmount­ing...that typically European phenomenon which we call the nation, with its inevitable, one might say physiological corollary of nationalism...One cannot create Europe without the nations or against them: we must create it from the different nations, while subduing national particularism as far as may be necessary.[66]In the occupied countries, many politicians and intellectuals who had advocated the cause of European unity since the 1920s now convinced themselves working with the Nazis was the way to achieve it.Thus, one of the leading collaborators in Vichy France, Jacques Benoist-Mechin, secretary of state for Franco-German relations from June 1941 to September 1942, declared that France’s policy of collaboration required the abandonment of old illusions.She would be able to join the new Europe, he asserted, only when she abandons all crumbling forms of nationalism - which was itself in reality only an anachronistic particularism - and when she takes her place in the European community with honour.Similarly, another ardent Vichyite, the writer and philosopher Pierre Drieu La Rochelle, who had been a strong supporter of European unity since the early 1920s, espoused the Fascist cause. He argued that it is the only way of defending Europe against itself and against other human groups. However, before committing suicide at the time of the liberation of France, he wrote, Perhaps all this is a lot of eyewash: the truth may be that I’m scared of being kicked around by the police.[67]In Belgium, the Walloon collaborator Léon Degrelle, a leader of the Fascist Rexist movement, saw his country becoming part of a recreated Burgundy (the middle kingdom between France and Germany) and a full partner of the Third Reich.Yet his original pre-war credo had been ultra-nationalistic and he had became overtly Fascist only in 1939.Under the Nazi occupation his brand of Fascism mutated into unashamed collaborationism, proclaiming a pan-European vision of the New Order.[68]Another Rexist leader, Pierre Daye, in 1942wrote a tract, Europe for the Europeans, in which he saw Nazi Europe not as a political entity in its own right but more as a bastion against Communism and the divisive foreign policies of Great Britain.

Vidkun Quisling, the Norwegian collaborationist leader, argued that Europe would be strong and peaceful only if united: We must create a Europe that does not squander its blood and strength in inter­necine conflict, but forms a compact unity.In this way it will become richer, stronger and more civilised, and will recover its old place in the world.He wanted to see a Pan-Germanic Federation with a federal flag and the Fuhrer as president.[69]Nothing in all this flood of rhetoric, however, provided any practical model for the type of political integration which was to emerge after the war.As one historian put it:Such pan-European illusions were actively fostered by the Nazis themselves.Clearly the bulk of the Third Reich statements relating to pan-Europeanism disseminated by the Nazis in the occupied territories can be dismissed as cynical propaganda calculated to encourage, if not the active co-operation, then the passive acquiescence of the new vassals.Neither Hitler, nor many of his leading hierarchs such as Goebbels, had the slightest intention to compromise absolute German hegemony through the creation of a European confederation, subsidiary or otherwise.[70]Thus, the collaborationists’ real purpose was to clamber onto the sledge of Europe’s ruling power in the hope of being given a share in the spoils.There was nothing in their rhetoric which would spill over into the movement for European integration as it was to develop in the post-war years.Nazi thinking was an ideological cul-de-sac. The practical steps to realise the dream of a United States of Europe would derive their inspiration those who, during the war, regarded themselves as the Nazis’ sworn enemies.Some of those ideas were to emerge from within occupied Europe itself, from those who spent the war years most obviously at odds with everything Nazism and Fascism stood for.Outside the grip of the Nazis and their allies, the inter-war dreams of European unity did not die.They went underground. In each occupied country resistance movements emerged.If this movement as a whole had any unifying philosophy, it was a determination to seek a new beginning in the post-war recon­struct­ion of Europe.Central to this was the concept of a united Europe. In common with the pre-war Pan-Europeanists (and that of the Nazis when it suited them), they held nationalism and national pride to be responsible for past European wars. The prevailing ethos supported the creation of new structures to transcend historical boundaries.This much was openly declared, long before the end of the war, by resistance groups in Czechoslovakia, France, Italy, the Netherlands, Poland and Yugoslavia, and even in Germany itself.But the most strident supporters of European unity were the Italian Communists, who were at the core of the anti-Fascist movement.

In this respect the major figure to emerge during the war years, who was eventually to make a very significant contribution to the develop­ment of the European Union, was the Italian, Altiero Spinelli.Born in 1907, he joined the Communists at the age of seventeen and had been active in opposing Mussolini’s Fascism.In 1928, he was arrested and imprisoned, spending twelve years in jail before eventually being sent to a prison on the Mediterranean island of Ventotene, thirty miles west of Naples. While in prison, he broke with Communism and embraced the cause of European unity, composing in 1941 what became known as the Ventotene Manifesto, under the title Towards a Free and United Europe.[71] This was to become one of the basic texts of the European federalist movement.Spinelli’s text addressed the familiar theme of creating a federal Europe, but now in terms of exploiting the continent-wide chaos which he predicted would inevitably arise when the war was over.Like so many others, Spinelli wanted to see the definitive abolition of the division of Europe into national, sovereign states.To achieve this, he called on his followers to foment revolut­ion.True to his political ideology, he proclaimed, the European revolution must be socialist: i.e., its goal must be the emancipation of the working classes and the creation of more humane conditions for them.Spinelli was coy about the structures of his European federation but definitely had in mind an all-powerful, supranational authority.This he saw developing into a United States of Europe, with its own constitution and armed forces.It would have the power to ensure that its deliber­ations for the maintenance of common order are executed in the individual federal states.In turgid prose, he argued that this state would only retain the autonomy it needed for a plastic articulation and development of political life according to the particular character­istics of the various peoples.His views on the part played by democracy, however, were very clear: During revolutionary times, when institutions are not simply to be admin­ister­ed but created he insisted, democratic procedures fail miserably.For a model of how Spinelli’s European Federation would come about, one need look no further than this passage of the Ventotene Manifesto:During the revolutionary crisis, this movement will have the task of organising and guiding progressive forces, using all the popular bodies which form spontaneously, incandescent melting pots in which the revolutionary masses are mixed, not for the creation of plebiscites, but rather waiting to be guided.It derives its vision and certainty of what must be done from the knowledge that it represents the deepest needs of modern society and not from any previous recognition by popular will, as yet non-existent.In this way it issues the basic guidelines of the new order, the first social discipline directed to the unformed masses.By this dictatorship of the revolutionary party a new State will be formed, and around this State new, genuine democracy will grow.[72]

In other words, the people were not to be involved in the construction of the new state.Popular assent would be sought only when the project was all but complete.At that moment their crowning dream would be the calling of a constituent assembly, to decide upon the constitution they want.The drawing up of the constitution would be the final act in the emergence of the United States of Europe.Only then, within the framework of the new state which had been brought into being, would democracy be permitted to resume.In July 1941, Spinelli’s manifesto was smuggled to the mainland. His ideas came to be adopted by the Communist-dominated Italian Resistance as a whole, leading to the formation in 1943 of the European Federal­ist Movement.This spread the message to groups in other countries, giving rise to a series of meetings in neutral Switzerland, culminating in a major conference in Geneva in July 1944, attended by activists from Denmark, France, Italy, Norway, the Netherlands, Poland, Czechoslovakia and Yugoslavia.There was even a representative from a secret anti-Nazi group within Germany itself.At the Geneva conference, the collective resistance movements produced a declaration which claimed that their wartime struggle would give their countries the right to take part in the reconstruction of Europe on the same basis as the other victorious powers.In those countries, they declared, the life of the peoples which they represent must be based on respect of the human individual, on security, on social justice, on the complete utilisation of economic resources for the benefit of the whole and on the autonomous development of national life’.[73]

These aims, the conference considered,cannot be fulfilled unless the different countries of the world agree to go beyond the dogma of the absolute sovereignty of the state and unite in a single federal organisation.However, injecting a faint note of reality, the declaration went on: The lack of unity and cohesion that still exists between the different parts of the world will not allow us to achieve immediately an organisation that unites all civilisations under a single federal government. This meant that, in the immediate post-war period, the European problem must be given a more direct and more radical solution.[74]This direct solution would consist of a European Federal Union. Only thus could the German people be allowed to participate in the life of the new Europe without endangering the rest.As before, the Union would have its written constitution and a supranational government directly responsible to the peoples of Europe.It would control its own army, with no national armies permitted.It would also have its own court, with sole juris­dict­ion over constitutional matters and exclusive rights to arbitrate in conflicts between the central authority and member states.It would be another forty years before Spinelli would make his central contribution to the shape of the European Union as it finally emerged.But the ideas on which this was based were all there in the declaration of 1944, originating from the few pages he had scribbled in his island prison, at a time when Hitler’s Thousand Year Reich had seemed the undisputed master of Europe.

[1] These included: Laughland, John. (1997), The Tainted Source – The Undemocratic Origins Of The European Idea. Warner Books, London; Atkinson, Rodney and McWhirter, Norris. (1994), Treason At Maastricht. Compuprint; Atkinson, Rodney, (1996), Europe’s Full Circle. Compuprint; Mote, Ashley. (2001), Vigilance. Tanner Publishing.

[2] Laughland, op. cit. p. 11.

[3] Salter, The Slave Of The Lamp, op. cit. p. 85.

[4] Salter, op. cit. p. 88.

[5] Jasper, William. F. (1989), United States of Europe, New American, 5, (8), 10 April.

[6] Fransen, op. cit, p. 144.

[7] This episode is largely reconstructed from the full account given by Churchill (1952) in The Second World War, Vol. II, Their Finest Hour. Cassell, London, pp. 176-184.

[8] The text of the Declaration Of Union is given by Churchill, op. cit. p. 179. The draft showing a line through Monnet’s proposal for a single currency is in the Public Record Office and was shown in the BBC documentary series A Poisoned Chalice, 1995.

[9] Brombergers, op. cit, p. 29.

[10] Dictionary of National Biography 1971-80. (1985), Oxford University.

[11] Spaak, Paul-Henri. (1971), The Continuing Battle: Memoirs Of A European. Little, Brown and Company, Boston, p. 213.

[12] Fontaine, Pascal. (ed) (1988), Jean Monnet: A Grand Design for Europe. OOP, Luxembourg.

[13] Fransen, op. cit, p. 89. Fransen read through the Monnet papers in Lucerne and records that it was at this time that Monnet first committed to paper his idea of creating a ‘European state of heavy metallurgy’.

[14] Burleigh, Michael. (2000), The Third Reich – A New History. Macmillan, London. See ‘Europe for the Europeans’, pp. 423-431.

[15] Laughland, op. cit, p. 14.

[16] op. cit, pp. 29-30.

[17] Cited in Stirk, Peter M. R. (1996), A History of European Integration Since 1914. Pinter, London, p. 64.

[18] It was the use of this term which was to prompt some Eurosceptic writers to claim a direct parallel between Funk’s European Economic Community and the European Economic Community’ set up in 1957.But this is based on an imprecision of terminology.Funk’s word gemeinschaft is used to describe a community which has a sense of belonging together, sharing values, loyalties and perhaps kinship.This aptly describes what the Nazis had in mind, bringing together the Aryan peoples in a Germanic empire, with the outer regions pressed into service as vassals.The later European Economic Community was not so much a gemeinschaft as a gesellschaft, a society of equals, based on the same framework of rules to control their competing interests.

[19] Burleigh, op. cit, p. 478.

[20] Lochner, Louis P. (editor and translator) (1948), The Goebbels Diaries 1942-43, Doubleday & Company Inc, New York, p. 83.

[21] op. cit, p. 325.

[22] Burleigh, op. cit, p. 430.

[23] Algazy, J. (1984), La Tentation Neo-fasciste En France 1944-65. Fayard, Paris, p. 56.

[24] Werth, Alexander. (1957), France 1940-1955, Robert Hale, London, p. 127.

[25] Novick, Peter. (1968), Resistance Versus Vichy. Chatto & Windus, London, p. 184.

[26] Burleigh, op. cit, pp. 430-431.

[27] Cited in Laughland, op. cit, pp. 17-18.

[28] op. cit, p. 18.

[29] op. cit, p. 19.

[30] Werth, op. cit, p. 126.

[31] Griffin, Roger. (1993), ‘Europe for The Europeans: Fascist Myths of the New Order 1922 – 1992, Occasional Paper (No. 1) by the Humanities Research Centre, Oxford Brookes University, Oxford.

[32] Cited in Laughland, op.cit, p. 16.

[33] Griffin, op. cit.

[34] Jenkins, Lindsay. (1996), Godfather Of The European Union – Altiero Spinelli. Bruges Group, London.

[35] Leiden University History Department History of European Integration site: http://www.let.leidenuniv.nl/history/rtg/res1/index.htm

[36] Vaughan, Richard. (1976), Post-war Integration In Europe. Edward Arnold, London, p. 17.

[37] ibid.

[38] These included: Laughland, John. (1997), The Tainted Source – The Undemocratic Origins Of The European Idea. Warner Books, London; Atkinson, Rodney and McWhirter, Norris. (1994), Treason At Maastricht. Compuprint; Atkinson, Rodney, (1996), Europe’s Full Circle. Compuprint; Mote, Ashley. (2001), Vigilance. Tanner Publishing.

[39] Laughland, op. cit. p. 11.

[40] Salter, The Slave Of The Lamp, op. cit. p. 85.

[41] Salter, op. cit. p. 88.

[42] Jasper, William. F. (1989), ‘United States of Europe’, New American, 5, (8), 10 April.

[43] Fransen, op. cit, p. 144.

[44] This episode is largely reconstructed from the full account given by Churchill (1952) in The Second World War, Vol. II, Their Finest Hour. Cassell, London, pp. 176-184.

[45] The text of the Declaration Of Union is given by Churchill, op. cit. p. 179. The draft showing a line through Monnet’s proposal for a single currency is in the Public Record Office and was shown in the BBC documentary series A Poisoned Chalice, 1995.

[46] Brombergers, op. cit, p. 29.

[47] Dictionary of National Biography 1971-80. (1985), Oxford University.

[48] Spaak, Paul-Henri. (1971), The Continuing Battle: Memoirs Of A European. Little, Brown and Company, Boston, p. 213.

[49] Fontaine, Pascal. (ed) (1988), Jean Monnet: A Grand Design for Europe. OOP, Luxembourg.

[50] Fransen, op. cit, p. 89. Fransen read through the Monnet papers in Lucerne and records that it was at this time that Monnet first committed to paper his idea of creating a European state of heavy metallurgy.

[51] Burleigh, Michael. (2000), The Third Reich – A New History. Macmillan, London. See Europe for the Europeans, pp. 423-431.

[52] Laughland, op. cit, p. 14.

[53] op. cit, pp. 29-30.

[54] Cited in Stirk, Peter M. R. (1996), A History of European Integration Since 1914. Pinter, London, p. 64.

[55] It was the use of this term which was to prompt some Eurosceptic writers to claim a direct parallel between Funk’s European Economic Community’ and the European Economic Community set up in 1957.But this is based on an imprecision of terminology. Funk’s word gemeinschaft is used to describe a community which has a sense of belonging together, sharing values, loyalties and perhaps kinship.This aptly describes what the Nazis had in mind, bringing together the Aryan peoples in a Germanic empire, with the outer regions pressed into service as vassals. The later ‘European Economic Community’ was not so much a gemeinschaft as a gesellschaft, a society of equals, based on the same framework of rules to control their competing interests.

[56] Burleigh, op. cit, p. 478.

[57] Lochner, Louis P. (editor and translator) (1948), The Goebbels Diaries 1942-43, Doubleday & Company Inc, New York, p. 83.

[58] op. cit, p. 325.

[59] Burleigh, op. cit, p. 430.

[60] Algazy, J. (1984), La Tentation Neo-fasciste En France 1944-65. Fayard, Paris, p. 56.

[61] Werth, Alexander. (1957), France 1940-1955, Robert Hale, London, p. 127.

[62] Novick, Peter. (1968), Resistance Versus Vichy. Chatto & Windus, London, p. 184.

[63] Burleigh, op. cit, pp. 430-431.

[64] Cited in Laughland, op. cit, pp. 17-18.

[65] op. cit, p. 18.

[66] op. cit, p. 19.

[67] Werth, op. cit, p. 126.

[68] Griffin, Roger. (1993), Europe for The Europeans: Fascist Myths of the New Order 1922 – 1992’, Occasional Paper (No. 1) by the Humanities Research Centre, Oxford Brookes University, Oxford.

[69] Cited in Laughland, op.cit, p. 16.

[70] Griffin, op. cit.

[71] Jenkins, Lindsay. (1996), Godfather Of The European Union – Altiero Spinelli. Bruges Group, London.

[72] Leiden University History Department History of European Integration site: http://www.let.leidenuniv.nl/history/rtg/res1/index.htm

[73] Vaughan, Richard. (1976), Post-war Integration In Europe. Edward Arnold, London, p. 17.

[74] ibid.