By all good means – you don’t understand the matter – here the reaBack in 1992, the power elites in Europe enticed the hapless member nations of the EU at that time into signing up to the Maastricht Treaty on European Union. The treaty contained a vital clause creating the foundation for an economic and monetary union—emu. This has become synonymous with the subsequent European Monetary Union, also called the emu.

The emu was glued together by a single currency. The euro was introduced in 1999, with notes and coins entering circulation in 2002. To date 16 EU member nations have joined the emu, sacrificing their individual national sovereign means of exchange—and in the process setting themselves on a course that would lead to the total sacrifice of their national sovereignty on the altar of the imperialist project of the European Union.

After the EU single currency system was implemented, certain voices predicted the failure of the euro. A handful 
theorized that the euro may well even have been deliberately created to fail by certain German elites. The theory was that Germany would bide its time and allow the unworkable monetary union to prevail till it reached a point of collapse and then, having wrested control of the European Central Bank (ecb) out of any competitor’s hands (read France, in particular), move in quickly and take direct control of emu administration. Germany could then ensure that a preferred core of EU member nations would receive ecb favor, with the disfavored reduced to vassal status or worse.

Why, if the theory is correct, would Germany deliberately create an economic and monetary union that was destined, from all the tests applied by the clearest thinking observers at the time, to fail?

Unification Through Stealth

When the eurozone’s founders began working toward pan-European unity, they knew it would be virtually impossible to unite the Continent. Jean Monnet, one of the forefathers of the European Union, was well aware of the difficulty of convincing voters to willingly relinquish their national sovereignty. Monnet felt that the only way to achieve unification, without war, was through stealth. The people must not know that sovereignty has been surrendered until it is gone.

English conservative and author Adrian Hilton described Monnet’s intentions for Europe this way: “Europe’s nations should be guided towards a superstate without their people understanding what is happening. This can be accomplished by successive steps each disguised as having an economic purpose, but which will eventually and irreversibly lead to federation” (The Principality and Power of Europe; emphasis ours throughout).

As Monnet said on April 30, 1952, “The fusion [of economic functions] would compel nations to fuse their sovereignty into that of a single European state.”

Peter Thorneycroft, former chancellor of the Exchequer of the United Kingdom and Europhile, described the Monnet unification method in a 1957 Foreign Affairs article: “The idea of a united Europe is not new. It has exercised the minds of the soldiers and sometimes of the statesmen of Europe for many centuries. … Torn by war and conquest, weakened by internecine strife, Europeans have yet found the time and the capacity to leave an incomparable legacy ….

“Yet men do not live easily within the same institutional arrangements. National patriotisms are strong ….”

In an earlier booklet, Design for Europe (1947), Thorneycroft wrote: “No government dependent upon a democratic vote could possibly agree in advance to the sacrifice which any adequate plan must involve. The people must be led slowly and unconsciously into the abandonment of their traditional economic defenses, not asked, in advance ….”

Economic integration, once initiated, would become self-sustaining, it was hoped. Monnet theorized that economic interdependence would drive integration until eventually, Europe would end up with de facto political centralization and unification.

Today, Europe may be at a tipping point where economic integration finally meets political unification.

“The European experiment with a trans-sovereign currency is facing its first acid test,” wrote Euro Pacific Capital’s John Browne. “In essence, the euro was created as a lever to encourage a complete European political union rather than as a currency representing … an already unified economy” (February 10).

According to Browne, who is a former British member of Parliament and close associate of then Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher, the euro has largely succeeded in creating the will for a federal Europe among the political classes even though European citizens have voted again and again to maintain their individual country’s sovereignty.

“Whoever controls the currency controls the government,” said economics guru Maynard Keynes. To him, that was not just a law of economics; it was a law that underwrote power politics.

Anticipated Crisis

When the euro was created, a chain of events was set in motion. For nations like Greece, a future debt crisis was almost inevitable.

By joining the eurozone, Greece traded its inflation-prone drachma for the stability of the euro. It also gained the economic borrowing clout of a superstar, even though it had the economy of a small supporting actor.

Initially, these two advantages vastly improved the standard of living for the people of Greece. They allowed corporations, individuals and government to borrow money at the low rates typical within large developed countries like Germany. The new low interest rates were more than Greece could resist. All levels of society binged on seemingly cheap money. The government, for its part, embraced a massive welfare state, also made possible by easily obtained low-interest loans.

But as lenders to Greece are beginning to remember, there was a good reason Greece paid far higher interest rates to borrow money when it was not a member of the Union. Greece has a history of borrowing too much. According to analyst John Mauldin, Greece has been in default in one way or another for 105 out of the past 200 years.

Even as luxury swiftly came to Greece, so now have the first whiffs of poverty.

With a projected budget deficit of 12.7 percent of the nation’s gross domestic product, Greece is far out of compliance with the eurozone’s mandated 3 percent maximum. With the world in recession, investors are wondering how Greece will pay its bills.

Typically when a country takes on too much debt, it contracts Argentine-disease. Known also as “quantitative easing,” countries devalue their currency by turning on the money printing presses and simply creating the currency to pay the bills. This of course upsets creditors, but at least the bills get paid. The economy also gets a short-term kick-start because a devalued currency makes exported goods less expensive; thus foreigners buy more domestic products.

Greece, however, does not have this option. Since it is locked into the euro, it does not control the printing presses. Germany does.

Analysts worry that Greece may be reaching the point where a debt spiral could bankrupt the government. What will Europe do?

It’s true that the Greece crisis will necessitate some difficult and costly decisions. But in some respects, as far as the European political class is concerned, it matters not whether Greece stays or goes. Greece is a peripheral country, immaterial to the desire for a federalist Europe. What is material is that the current crisis be exploited to its maximum—and that means that it be used to foster further integration of core Europe.

Will the Eurozone Be Pared Down?

The Telegraph’s Ambrose Evans-Pritchard wrote on January 31 that the solution to the crisis could involve a paring down of the eurozone. He noted the possibility of a bloc of nations centered on Germany leaving the eurozone and creating a new currency: the Deutsch mark 2. The rest of the eurozone countries would then be free to devalue the euro (turn on the printing presses) to pay down debts.

Although Evans-Pritchard noted that Germany is currently happy with its advantageous position within the euro, he also said there would be certain benefits to a newly created German-led bloc.

Events in Greece bear close watching, especially in light of the advent of the seventh revival of the Holy Roman Empire in Europe, which officially began on January 1 with the onset of the Lisbon Treaty.

The first major reason to watch this issue is that the Bible indicates that this final Roman imperial resurrection will be composed of 10 nations or groups of nations (as indicated in Daniel 2). Whether or not the current 27 EU nations get regrouped into new political regions remains to be seen, but the economic crisis in Greece may well provoke a vast restructuring or paring down of the European Union.

Far from heralding the end of the European unification project, the current crisis in Greece may actually signal a new beginning.

Forcing the Pace of Political Union

Back when the euro was first created, the European Commission’s top economists warned politicians that the new currency might not survive a serious crisis. They knew that because the eurozone had “no EU treasury or debt union to back it up” and a “one-size-fits-all regime of interest rates [that] caters badly to the different needs of Club Med and the German bloc,” the day would come that economic crisis would threaten the EU (Telegraph, Oct. 1, 2008).

The fathers of the euro did not dispute this. They knew European economic union was risky, but they saw it as an acceptable risk—even desirable—as a last-ditch option to force the pace of political union. As the Telegraph said, “They welcomed the idea of a ‘beneficial crisis.’” And as “ex-Commission chief Romano Prodi remarked, it would allow Brussels to break taboos and accelerate the move to a full-fledged EU economic government” (ibid.).
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