Europe Lost Her Sovereignty E-Book

Georg von Goldbach

• Herausgeber: BoD - Books on Demand
• Kategorie: Geisteswissenschaft
• Sprache: Englisch
• Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2024

Seitenzahl: 203

Beschreibung

CONTENT OF THE BOOK Human history does not proceed like a mechanical construct, the world is too complex for that. And yet, a certain direction and consistency in historical development become visible. Certain decisions made in 1919 by the victorious powers of the First World War led to a new order in the world. We need to know the principles of the shaping of power and domination that underpinned the decisions of that time in order to be able to classify today's events, as well as the actions of political decision-makers. This is the only way to succeed in recognizing a structure in the supposed chaos around us. We want to serve this learning from history with our book. The insights gained then ask us to take a close look again and again when political decisions are made. The consequences must be borne not only by us, but even more so by the future inhabitants of this planet. This book aims to use critical events to show how this process of European integration proceeded and what important results it has led to. The relationship between France and Germany after the Second World War and since the reunification of Germany and Europe after 1990 is the focus of our analysis. We will show how the relationship between the two economically and politically most important states in Europe, with the EU as the decisive shaping framework, has developed. We are paying particular attention to the role of the United States as the actor that has decisively shaped the creation process and consequently the political structures, as well as the geopolitical role of the EU.

Leseprobe

This book is a revised version of Part Three and a part of the Epilogue of the book

CONTENT

Foreword to the book

Chapter 1

The spiritual fathers of this book

Chapter 2

The European Policy Framework

Chapter 3

Political Will and Strategic Thinking

Chapter 4

Overview of the EU's foreign policy role

Chapter 5

Europe the "common home" – Russia the eternal enemy

Chapter 6

The New World Order after the Treaty of Versailles

F

OREWORD

L

IFE IN A

C

RISIS

M

ODE

- S

YMPTOMS OF

G

LOBAL

P

OLITICAL

S

TRUCTURES

T

HE NEW ORDER OF THE WORLD IS HERALDED BY THE

USA

IN

1919

E

VERYTHING HAS ITS PRICE

,

ESPECIALLY FOR

G

ERMANY

E

UROPE

: B

RIDGE BETWEEN

E

AST AND

W

EST

,

OR OUTPOST OF

US

HEGEMONY

T

HE APPROPRIATION OF

R

USSIA

'

S RAW MATERIALS IS THE PREREQUISITE FOR POWER OVER

C

HINA

B

RIEF

S

UMMARY OF

C

HAPTER

1:

THE

R

EORGANIZATION OF THE

W

ORLD AFTER

V

ERSAILLES

Chapter 7

How Europe Lost Her Identity: Taking Stock

I

NTRODUCTION

B

ROTHERS

U

NDER

A

RMS

2019 – T

HE

M

EDIA

W

ARNING

S

HOT

T

HE FOUNDING YEARS OF THE

EU:

CENTRAL STATE OR COMMUNITY OF FATHERLANDS

?

T

HE COMPLEMENTARY STARTING POSITION OF

G

ERMANY AND

F

RANCE

: G

ERMANY

'

S UNCONDITIONAL ORIENTATION TOWARDS THE

W

EST AND

F

RANCE

'

S CLAIM TO A LEADING ROLE IN

E

UROPE

T

HE

"E

UROPEAN

A

XIAL

A

GE

"

OF

1985-95

UNDER

D

ELORS AND

M

ITTERRAND

T

HE TURNING POINT IN THE PROCESS OF

E

UROPEAN INTEGRATION AND THE END OF THE

"G

RANDE

N

ATION

"

E

UROPE LOSING HER WAY

-

GOING ASTRAY ON

A

MERICAN PATHS

F

ATAL CONSEQUENCES OF THE

EU'

S ORIENTATION TOWARDS THE

W

EST

:

THE

A

MERICAN

"

CORDON SANITAIRE

"

FROM THE

B

ALTIC TO THE

B

LACK

S

EA

E

UROPE HAS GIVEN UP HER SOVEREIGNTY

Epilogue – Final Considerations

E

UROPE

'

S STEP OUT OF THE CRISIS

E

UROPE

'

S NEW SELF

-

IMAGE

,

GROWN OUT OF HER HISTORY AND CULTURE

Bibliography

This book cannot say anything about whether and how humanity will solve her problems... It can only convey how little we know...

It can also confirm what many have known for a long time, namely that historiography... is the record of the crimes and madness of humanity. It is no help for prophecies.

The Age of Extremes, World History of the 20thCentury Eric Hobsbawm

Foreword to the book

The personal motivation for this book comes from my realization that the creation of peace is, in our time, the most important concern of humanity. I was born in Germany and can therefore say that war is in my blood, as it is the case for most Europeans. A great number of wars have been waged on European ground among the European nations over the past centuries. In response to that, the European Union has been created and has progressively been shaped after the End of the Second World War as a “peace project”.

This hope is waning more and more, and Europe does not seem capable of escaping the claws of the evil of war.

In the decades after 1993, I had increasingly worked as a consultant for the European Union (EU). In the beginning, I was very happy and even enthusiastic to do this, as long as the EU’s credible intention for "international partnership" was still the guiding principle for the work of our advisory services and activities abroad. After 2001, however, I had noticed how an intentional effort for dominance had increasingly come to the fore within the foreign policy of the EU. Relations with partner countries became increasingly political, less characterized by friendship and the honest dealings among partners. Of course, this change in attitude had also become obvious to many of our partners in the countries in which we worked. I am more of a free and liberal spirit by nature, and ideological narrow-mindedness has never been one of my personal traits. However, I have always endeavored to consciously guide my actions based on my ethical convictions and moral principles.

I can say that peaceful development among people and nations based on shared values and principles has always been a matter close to my heart. That is why I didn’t feel challenged in particular when I was asked to consciously and with conviction, but without personal zeal or even fanaticism, to work for the healthy development of Europe and its relations with other countries in the world. My anxiety therefore increased more and more as certain authoritarian tendencies in the EU and the European Commission became more frequently apparent to me. I then drafted an essay in 2017, essentially for myself, to clearly articulate my own thoughts, entitled "How Europe Lost Her Sovereignty". In it, I showed how, in the interplay between Germany and France, which had become a second spiritual home for me, the European Commission usurped the sovereignty of the nation states and increasingly restricted their national responsibility. In addition, as a "participating observer", I had recognized that a war was being prepared on European soil. Of course, that was not easy to see at the time. All the friends, acquaintances and business partners I wanted to point out only looked into the air when I talked about it. Nobody wanted to know anything about it. I myself did not investigate this question and, of course, could not know in what form this war would then begin and take place. I was also personally surprised by the way, with a flick of the wrist, Germany and Europe were driven into this war, which was foreseeable by 2014 at the latest and then turned into an open war in 2022.

Personally, this experience has shaken me very much, also in my trust in people as a whole. I didn't want to believe how sensible and intelligent people could get involved in such stupidity. The experience of this irrationality still pains me very much. My grandfather was sent into the First World War in 1914 with the motto "Cannon thunder is our greeting". My father went to war in 1939 for the Hitler regime, from which he was not to return home from Russian captivity until the end of 19471, severely damaged in physical health and also mentally. And now, at the end of my life, the war was to haunt me and perhaps plague my children as well.

I have always consciously enjoyed and never despised the great fortune of growing up in peace and being able to shape my life peacefully. Peace had always seemed to me to be a great and precious good that had to be carefully preserved. Unfortunately, we did not succeed in this.

1 At a time when Russia is once again under strong ideological attack, it is necessary to confess that I have not developed any negative attitude or resentment from my father's experience in the mines of Russia. My father had been a prisoner of war (Kgf) and his imprisonment was therefore the result of a war that had arisen and been waged in a criminal way.

Chapter 1

The spiritual fathers of this book

The intellectual authorship of this book is held by two American thinkers and visionaries. The two have never met in person, but what they have in common is that they derive their thinking from cybernetics as a scientific means to understand and explain our world2. This is obvious in the case of Gregory Bateson3, because he speaks of it frequently in his writings. In the case of R. Buckminster Fuller4, the reference to cybernetics is visible everywhere in his writings and also in his works, but he was more of a pragmatist and generalist nature. "Bucky" Fuller strove to live a life, in which he fought for the practical implementation of his ideas, mainly through the use and application of his design artifacts, while Gregory Bateson limited himself to theoretical and epistemological reflection and teaching.

What they both have in common is that they were very sharp observers of what was going on in the world and were always keen to understand how people acted. Both have always put people at the center of their efforts and have always looked at people in a larger, more comprehensive context and from a system view. In Buckminster Fuller's case, it was "man in the universe." For Gregory Bateson, a trained anthropologist and biologist, it was the systemic relation between man and nature. What both have in common is that they saw the fundamental fallacy in human thought and action in the fact that man saw himself disconnected from these necessary systemic relations with nature and the universe. Both explained this as the result of the one-sided emphasis on the development of the natural sciences since the 17th century, which has led to a mechanistic world view. This paradigm of human isolation from nature and the universe, as both saw it, has slowly dissolved again since the early 20th century with quantum mechanics and new insights gained by biology in the self-regulating systems of life. These scientific discoveries generated progressively a new world view that related life and the role of humanity to the "uncertainty principle". A door into the unknown had opened. From now on, the meaning of life and human nature were perceived in a new light. It had become possible to reconnect with the nature of man and his importance in the cosmos.5

This sums up the experience shared by Gregory Bateson and Buckminster Fuller.

In order to understand these two great minds, we would like to emphasize the decisive basic idea that is characteristic of each of them. Buckminster Fuller developed his fundamental ideas after 1930, formulated them in 1969 in his Operating Manual for Spaceship Earth, and summarized them with the formulation of Synergetics as Explorations into the Geometry of Thinking6. Intuitively, he seized the need for the application of "general principles and laws" to the understanding of the functioning of Man in Universe. He convincingly shows that it is not a lack of energy that inhibits the development of humanity. Rather, the fundamental mistake lies in the fact that humanity has not found, not understood, the access to the infinite source of energy that is provided to us from the universe through the sun. This lack of access to understanding eternally regenerating energy has so far kept people caught in a self-made trap. According to Buckminster Fuller, this phenomenon can be traced back to the work of British economist Thomas Robert Malthus, who established at the beginning of the 19th century the principle that humans would reproduce with the necessary fatefulness, but at the same time had only limited natural resources at their disposal. Hence, the fight for limited resources was inevitable. For Darwin, this became the struggle for existence and led Darwinists to formulate the principle of "survival of the fittest". If we take these thoughts just a few steps further, we end up directly at the rationale for the demand for "unlimited growth" of the economy, and at the political level, for the hegemonic striving and the seemingly inevitable wars as a means of gaining power, which are at the center of the critical analysis of our book.

Gregory Bateson is an anthropologist and a biologist by training. He has also worked successfully in psychology and psychiatry7. However, he has the most important significance as a researcher on epistemology, and in particular on the importance of cybernetics for the sciences and for the shaping of human living conditions on earth.

He says of himself that "the two most important historical events in my life were the Treaty of Versailles and the discovery of cybernetics".8 This certainly sounds astonishing, because it is not immediately clear what the relationship between these two "events" looks like. We come closer to understanding what Gregory Bateson means when he says that, in his view, the "important question for history is: has the default9 or attitude been changed?". He goes on to explain that "the most important points in history are... the historical moments... in which attitudes are changed", in which previous "values" change. He then shows that the Treaty of Versailles has not successfully changed the attitudes and values of the most important signatories of the treaty10, i.e. Germany, France, Great Britain and the USA.11 Therefore, according to his understanding, the inevitable consequence of the Treaty of Versailles was the Second World War, with the same nations as important protagonists. He calls the Treaty of Versailles one of the "greatest relapses in the history of our civilization" and says that "we will have to deal with the aftermath of this betrayal for a number of generations to come", before adding that "betrayal in an armistice or in peace negotiations is worse than a stratagem in battle." His conclusion: "It goes on and on. The tragedy of fluctuating, self-propagating mistrust, hatred and destruction through generations".

Gregory Bateson is aware that cybernetics, i.e. "the second historical event" of his time, will not in itself bring the solution to our geopolitical problems. But he sees that it can be a contribution to changing attitudes and behavior. But he also knows that "any understanding can be used destructively". He summarizes his insight as follows: "In cybernetics itself there is integrity12, which helps us not to be seduced by it into another madness, but we cannot trust that it will keep us from sin"13 and then he adds in a more hopeful tone: "But this much is certain, that in cybernetics there is also the means to achieve a new and perhaps human worldview, a means to change our philosophy of power and a means to see our own stupidities in a larger perspective".

2 Cybernetics is the science of controlling and regulating machines in analogy to the functioning of living organisms by means of feedback processes that receive impulses from the sense organs. In social organizations, feedback works through information, communication and participant observation. The science of cybernetics was born from the cooperation of scientists in the "Vienna Circle". It was formulated by Norbert Wiener after 1945, after his emigration to the USA, when he came to the realization that intelligent behavior can be described as the result of feedback mechanisms.

3 In the case of Gregory Bateson, we are essentially referring to the collection of essays published as "Ecology of the Mind" in 1985. The English edition of "Steps to an Ecology of Mind, Collected Essays" dates from 1972.

4 At Buckminster Fuller, our main source is his book "Critical Path", which was published in 1981. Probably his best-known book is "Operating Manual for Spaceship Earth", from 1969. It can be downloaded online from the Buckminster Fuller Institute website. The German edition of "Instruction Manual for the Spaceship Earth and Other Writings" dates from 2011.

5 Fritjof Capra gives a catchy account of this in his "Tao of Physics", of 1977.

6 This is the title of a book first published in 1975, in cooperation with E. J. Applewhite.

7 The term "double-bind", i.e. the relationship trap, was coined by him.

8 In this part, we essentially refer to Gregory Bateson, "Ecology of the Mind, Part VI, Crises in the Ecology of the Mind, from Versailles to Cybernetics", from his lecture in 1966.

9 The term "specification" here refers to cybernetics, as a system theory, and means "leadership variable" or "decisive reference value" to which the other parameters and elements of a system are oriented.

10 We should note here that since the October Revolution of 1917, a government had taken power in Russia with which the United States did not want to come to an understanding.

11 As we will show later, it was precisely this thought that guided Rudolf Steiner in his assessment of the events surrounding the First World War. He insisted that it was necessary to change the political "rules" in order not to prepare a new catastrophe. As we know, Max von Baden, the last Reich Chancellor of the German Empire, very soon ended Rudolf Steiner's advisory activities.

12 Because cybernetics allows us to see the connections between events.

13 We would like to note here that Buckminster Fuller also sees integrity as a very important criterion for good and successful action. That's how he called one of his books, "Ideas and Integrities", from 1963. He also emphasizes this point in his "Critical Path".

Chapter 2

The European Policy Framework

Just a decade ago, we would have said that the intention we pursued with our book was to prevent Europe from being drawn into a new war, or being driven into it. Today, at the beginning of 2024, as we write this introduction, we will be too late with this appeal against war. Europe has entered into an open war again since 2022. This is not a "Cold War", as it is still offered to the public by the media. Since February 2022, probably close to one million soldiers and civilians have already died in this war. Millions are on the move and fleeing the war zone and its borderlands.

How could this happen? Cynically, one could answer: because the 14,000 Russian-speaking residents in the Luhansk and Donetsk regions, killed in their own country by the Ukrainian government since 2014, after the "Euro-Maidan", were not counted. In German, they say that they "did not count", i.e. they were not worth counting. Cynical? It's wartime again!

Behind this concealment of the terrorization and killing of its own population by the Ukrainian government, however, there was intention, one may assume "bad intention".

In 2015, the Minsk Agreement was signed in a binding manner under international law, and Germany, France, Russia and Ukraine pretended to take responsibility for its implementation. The main focus was on the observance of a ceasefire and the negotiation of an autonomous status for the two Russian-speaking regions of Luhansk and Donetsk.

However, as it turned out, there was no manifest intention on the part of Ukraine and the Western states that had signed the Minsk agreement to implement this agreement. As former Chancellor Angela Merkel publicly stated in 2023, the main intention of the Minsk agreement was to “buy Ukraine time”14. Since 2015, Ukraine has been massively armed by NATO to prepare for an imminent war with Russia. That had been the intention behind the staging of the Euro Maidan. In order to spread fog and give Russia hope, in the years from 2018 to 2020, new fragile ceasefire agreements were reached on average every three months by the Trilateral Contact Group for Ukraine, consisting of Russia, Ukraine and the OSCE15.

Today, it is obvious that NATO's preparations for a war with Russia have been in full swing since 2015 at the latest. The Ukrainian army has been massively upgraded and supported by European and American military advisers.

Russia put an end to this false and nasty game in February 2022, with its attack on Ukraine. In terms of its own self-defense, Russia found herself in a situation, in which the country had no other choice.

What can be achieved with this book in such a situation? Why do we address it to the public?

The crucial question we want to ask ourselves is: what were the reasons for the sabotage of the Minsk agreement by the Western powers and NATO? What were the intentions behind the preparation of the war against Russia? After all, as we will see in detail, Germany and France were only proxies for the "global West", i.e. for NATO, in this tactical game.

Methodologically, we want to advance from the perception of symptoms to the understanding of reality in order to answer this question. The answer to our questions is hidden behind the veil of symptoms16 that only show us a semblance of reality through false mirror images of reality that want to fool us. The most important instrument we will apply for understanding reality will be thinking, and the most important prerequisite is our own fearlessness in order to face the often terrible (un)truths and lies, for which some of our fellow humans are responsible. If we courageously face reality in this sense, then we will increasingly come to an understanding of the "spiritual driving forces" that are effective behind the behavior of some of the key political and economic actors behind the veil. In the course of our analytical description, we will provide important insights into these processes of geopolitics and the striving for global hegemonial power that is going on behind the veil.

For those who want to face reality, the facts are not so difficult to understand. Of course, one must be willing not to be blinded, not to be satisfied with the "colored reflections"17 of reality, that the media and our political leaders are spreading everywhere.

Intelligent and honest political analysts, such as Noam Chomsky, have been telling us what is going on behind the veil for decades. In an interview in the New Left Review (No. 57, September/October 1969), which was published in Germany in the appendix Linguistics and Politics to the book Language and Spirit, Chomsky said: "The goal of creating an integrated world economy dominated by American capital ranks first for the elite that governs the United States. It's not just about having safe areas for American investment, markets, and control over raw materials, as important as they may be. It is also necessary to keep defense-spending, i.e. ultimately the costs of war, at a high level. This is the most important Keynesian mechanism for maintaining what is called a healthy economy”. This is a clear statement: high spending on a war economy is seen by US power elites as an important mechanism for maintaining a healthy economy. We will have to come back to this point when we talk about the war economy, into which the EU and her various member states have been forced since 2023 by the hegemonial policies of the USA. As Eckart Conze writes: "Research rightly and almost unanimously considers the USA to be the hegemonic power of the Western world since 1945"18.

By taking away the veil that is covering the reality behind the symptoms, their historical origin and their connections, we want to show a way to come to an in-depth understanding of important political and economic processes and contexts in our time. This kind of "analytical and symptomatologic history" should then provide the basis for making a diagnosis, which we see as a prerequisite for showing possible future solutions to eventually eliminate the root causes of the evils we have identified.

With our symptomatologic look at history, we pretend not to remain at the symptomatic level with the analysis we are undertaking, but we intend to explore this question of reasons and intentions behind the veil of historical symptoms. In this, we want to shed light on the reality of events and processes from different angles and aspects in order to understand how Europe got on the path to its self-destruction and its imminent apocalypse. At the end of this analytical and intellectual process we will go through in this book, it should become clear what the situation in Europe is today and where the path taken will consequently lead in the coming years and decades. It should have become obvious that we don't want to write war reportage, nor do we want to indulge in the diplomatic backstabbing in detail, as it has been and still is presented in the media every hour for years now. Our goal is to come to an understanding of the deeper reasons and drivers of these processes that currently shape our lives in Europe.