We didn’t take de Gaulle’s hint
AS with any human undertaking, the motives of those leading the European Union are mixed and were so from the beginning. There is a strong authoritarian streak.
I have a translated speech by Dr Walther Hallstein, the first President of the European Commission, on harmonisation of the legal system across different European countries. Nothing remarkable about that – but it was delivered to a Nazi rally organised by the University of Rostock in early 1939 and referred to territories which had then recently come under Nazi control. He carried on in the harmonisation business after the war for the European Economic Community.
Some influential papers were produced in Germany under the title of “European Economic Community”. I translated them for myself.
They were published in Berlin in 1942 and, apart from occasional uncomplimentary references to Mr Churchill and President Roosevelt and exultation at the extinction of the English economic system, there is hardly anything in them which has not since come out of the post war EEC/EU or the European Movement.
More recently, I interviewed
Lord Walsingham, who was in the German department of the Foreign Office during the Attlee government in 1950 when Monnet and Schuman were launching the European
Coal and Steel Community – the forerunner of the EU.
Lord Walsingham said that British Intelligence knew that the Coal and Steel treaty included secret clauses between France and Germany that each would subsidise the other’s heavy industry when in competition with Britain – to weaken our economy and slowly secure the undisputed military ascendancy of the European Project over the continent.
General de Gaulle did us the inestimable good turn of keeping us out in 1963 but unfortunately we did not take the hint. By 1965 de Gaulle himself had the measure of the European Project.
“As for the Commission it deserves to disappear. I want no more of Hallstein... I want no more to do with them... I want no more that the French government should have to do business with these types.
“The problem is this mafia of supranationalists, whether commissioners, deputies or bureaucrats. They are all enemies. They have been put there by our enemies”.
So, faced with the instinctive revulsion of the British people from the EU’S anti-democratic system of government, it is not surprising that today’s successors of this mafia gave Mrs May a hard time and a contemptuous offer of a Vichy style of relationship with the EU – one which we will not be allowed to leave without permission. I suspect they were even more vicious because Mrs May was once one of them and regarded as a turncoat. Edward Spalton Address supplied