eurealist.co.uk

Those who would suggest that the EU is not destined to become the United States of Europe as originally envisioned by the founding fathers of the project, might like to answer one simple question. If that were not the case, then why on earth do we continually have new treaties thrust upon us? No sooner than one treaty has been ratified but they are working on the next one, in fact there is already a “group of wise men” tasked with studying for the next treaty, even before the Lisbon treaty has been ratified

Are we really to believe the alternative, that the leaders in the EU are so stupid that they cannot write a simple treaty agreement and stick to it, instead of continually being forced to change it by events?

The basic lie we are expected to swallow is that there is no defined end point to all of these treaty changes, each treaty is therefore presented as necessary to enable the EU to work more efficiently in some way or other. But nobody ever bothers to point out the obvious, the only way to make the EU work more efficiently in any area, is by removing the power of an individual member state to oppose legislation in that area.

EU citizenship has therefore been thrust upon us by a top down organisation, which is now desperate to legalise its own position.

Total EU integration is therefore the end point of all of this continual change; one nation state, one central overarching government that has a controlling influence over all areas of national power, one central high court, dispensing one form of central law. Everything the EU does is aimed at that one central goal to make the EU a real United States of Europe.

But what is needed above all to add legal, moral and democratic affect to a centralised EU is a real and meaningful EU based citizenship. To this point the EU has been constructed above the heads of the people even though the founding documents of the project made the claim that the people wanted an ever closer union, the people were never asked if this was indeed what they wanted. In fact just the opposite, at every stage when the people have stood in the way of the construction they have been ignored.

EU citizenship has therefore been thrust upon us by a top down organisation, which is now desperate to legalise its own position. Something it can only do if it can show its authority derives directly from the people and is not filtered through individual member states.

Unfortunately the states also realise that there authority is derived directly from the people, so there is a challenge between the member states on one hand and the central EU on the other, for the hearts and minds of the people. This is one of the main reason we continually have new treaties, as the construction of the EU can only move as fast as the member states will allow at any given time.

Citizenship of a trading organisation is not needed for it to fulfil its mandate of allowing its members to trade amongst themselves. It does not matter in the slightest if the people who live in Ireland have a constitution based on the Catholic religion and we in Britain do not, it does not matter that the people of France might have different basic rights than the people who live in Germany. Those are entirely decisions to be made by the people who live in those nation states. In international trade we do not make the point of refusing to trade with another country because its people have different constitutional rights than we do. We do not say to the Arab states we will not buy your oil because you do hold the same democratic principals as the west. Mind you the EU is begging to make such demands on its trading partners, but that is evidence of its central philosophy than anything else.

So the only reason for formalising EU citizenship has to do with creating a central EU state than it does for assisting trade.

In fact the idea that the construction of EU has anything to with trade is a conceited falsehood. The treaty establishing the European Coal and Steel Community first task was the harmonization of a significant but restricted scope of economic activities. But its real mission was fixed in the treaty’s Preamble this was to craft “the basis for a broader and deeper community among peoples long divided by bloody conflicts”. Thus the embryo citizenship was included from the first, because the treaty prohibited discrimination between nationals of the member states employed in the coal and steel industries. The Treaty of Rome six years later extended these requirements to include employment in all occupations, together with the self-employed, thus making freedom to work without discrimination on nationality grounds available for all member states’ citizens.

Thus by initiating and embryo community citizenship, the project was encouraging free movement of people, beginning to create the Projects demos by fashioning a foundation for the creation of a distinctive European identity separate from that of its member states, and creating a base for further political integration.

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