It is a great pleasure to be here in Berlin today to speak from a critical perspective about the developments within the EU. As the most powerful member of the EU, Germany plays a decisive role in determining past and future directions of the EU. Therefore, if we who want to stop the EU’s erosion of long established principles of democracy and the rule of law are to be successful, we need the support of the ordinary German people – many of whom are totally unaware of how far their political leaders and those who steer the EU project have pushed us all towards oligarchy. To a system where those who make decision supposedly’ on our behalf are no longer accountable to the people who are powerless to reverse any decision emanating from the drivers of the EU project. There is no longer an independent court that can adjudicate on the basis of the rule of law. Instead we have a court with a political agenda, which is to continue the process of creating an ever closer Union. My own involvement in politics was influenced in no small part by one of your own politicians – the late Petra Kelly – whose campaigning for peace, disarmament and anti-nuclear policies inspired me to follow suit. She came to Ireland on a number of occasions during referenda on EU treaty change to help campaign against the push towards this undemocratic, militarized super state that the EU is fast becoming. While Kelly like the vast majority of ordinary German people did not support a militarized EU this did not stop political leaders pushing ahead regardless. The former German Chancellor Helmut Kohl made it clear in a statement in 1992 what the end goal was: “A European Army and European police-force lie at the end of the road to European Union.” The scheme for turning the EU into a straight military alliance, able to use NATO resources for certain purposes, was presented in a confidential document by Germany to EU foreign ministers at a meeting in Germany on March 14 th 1999. If we fast-forward, post Maastricht, to the Lisbon Treaty we can see that, with the help of the intervening changes introduced in Amsterdam and Nice, the Lisbon Treaty brings to fruition the predictions of Kohl. The Lisbon Treaty was originally called the EU Constitution until it was rejected in referenda by two of the founding members of the EU France and Holland. It was then withdrawn, repackaged, renamed and ratified without going back to the peoples of those two countries to get their opinion. The only country where there was a vote was in Ireland and there the people were forced to vote a second time because on the first occasion they too rejected it. This demonstrates that democratic principles can be discarded if they impede the plans of our so-called political leaders. Foreign policy and military matters were originally conducted on an intergovernmental level between the EU countries. However, successive
treaty changes have made them Union functions with the most far-reaching being that introduced in Lisbon. Lisbon established a EU Foreign Minister – the High Representative for Common Foreign and Security Policy. It also established an EU diplomatic corps, the European External Action Service, with EU ambassadors. The Lisbon Treaty provided a mutual defence clause (Art. 42.7 TEU). This is extremely significant change in the military/defence field because it now, in effect, makes the EU a military pact. Member States now have “an obligation of aid and assistance by all the means in their power, Furthermore, Art.42.2 of Lisbon refers to as follows: “The common security and defence policy shall include the progressive framing of a common Union defence policy. This will lead to a common defence when the European Council, acting unanimously, so decides … Member States shall make civilian and military capabilities available to the Union for the implementation of the common security and defence policy … Member States shall undertake progressively to improve their military capabilities.” Another alarming aspect of this saga is the involvement of the arms industry. The arms industry has long been an integral player in the EU. All major arms companies have offices in Brussels with a maze of networks that are frequently consulted by EU officials. According to observers, most of the EU's policy decisions on armaments in recent years are almost identical to recommendations made by the arms lobby. In 2004, the arms trade received a considerable boost when the European Defence Agency (EDA) was established with the explicit objective of assisting EU governments to build up their arsenals. At that time, the three largest arms companies this side of the Atlantic - BAE, EADS and Thales - issued a joint statement predicting that the agency would be a "vital tool" in raising military expenditure.1 The European Defence Agency (EDA), established after decades of lobbying by Europe’s military industrialists, was incorporated into the treaties in Lisbon. This agency, established without any political or public debate at national level to facilitate arms manufacturers, has been given significant Treaty powers within the Lisbon Treaty: It “shall identify operational requirements, shall promote measures to satisfy those requirements and…shall participate in defining a European capabilities and armaments policy. . .” Their profits depend on wars and war preparations and they are among the most influential industrial interests in Europe, pushing cross-national economic integration and the common security and defence policy. The 1
For further information see http://www.stopwapenhandel.org/node/962
Treaty recognizes the NATO alliance, to which 25 of the 28 EU States belong, as the prime forum for the collective defence of its members and sees EU military policy as complementary to but separate from NATO’s. Some 18 EU Battle groups have been set up, each able to deploy 1500 men speedily from different Member States on a rotating basis. There has been EU military interventions, titled “peace-making” or “peace-keeping”, in Africa, the Balkans and the Middle East. Troops wear EU uniforms on these missions. Their conduct is supported by the European Defence Agency, the EU Satellite Centre and the EU Military Committee (EUMC). The latter is chaired by a four-star General or senior Admiral and oversees the EU Military Staff (EUMS) in Brussels. Overall military spending in the EU countries totalled €194 billion in 2010, which is higher than in 2001. For decades Greece has been the EU’s main military spender relative to its size. France, Germany and Britain are the EU’s biggest arms manufacturers. While Germany and France have insisted on the harshest cuts in the social budgets of Greece, Portugal and Spain to pay back debts during the Eurozone financial crisis, they have been much less supportive of cuts in military spending which would threaten arms sales to these Mediterranean countries. Another item on the wish list of arms companies have been pushing for decades to get easier access to the EU's scientific research grants, which total tens of billion annually. Since 9/11 the Commission has rewritten the rules covering its multi-annual programmes for research to enable arms companies easier access to EU taxpayers money for research on hard-core military research. Frank Slijper from the Dutch Campaign Against the Arms Trade has warned that the growing EU support for the arms industry is not subject to proper democratic scrutiny. He said "Brussels in general is very unreceptive to people who are critical of their views," he said. "They want to bolster their projects and they don't like people who start asking difficult questions about the ethical aspects of these projects. This is an area of the EU's work that is happening outside the public view. People in Brussels prefer to keep it that way." While references are made in the Treaties to observing the UN Charter (by the way, similar references are in the NATO treaty) the EU treaties do not state that the EU’s Rapid Reaction Forces or its Battlegroups require a UN mandate before being deployed. Writing in the International Herald Tribune (10/03/2008) the then French Foreign and European affairs minister Bernard Kouchner said “We have been working to build a European defence since the 1990s. The Europeans need military means commensurate with their political ambitions. How
could we hope to influence a crisis or negotiations without the mean s to back up our words? He went on to say “The Union must have the capacity for autonomous action, backed up by credible military forces, the means to decide to use them, and a readiness to do so, in order to respond to international crises”. He said the ESDP inscribed in the Lisbon Treaty finally allows us to meet this need. “In the future, if we wish to do so, the EU will be able to fully assume its role on the international scene.” Cynically, Mr. Kouchner prefaced his words – as do all good EU politicians who want to disguise their true motives, with a desire to “help and comfort for women – who up to now were raped or killed” and help “hungry children”. I think we need look no further that the EU’s current approach to the problems in the Mediterranean. The EU’s idea of help and comfort to human beings risking life and limb in an effort to find a refuge from violence and death is to stop them even trying to do so. The realization of Helmut Kohl’s EU army gets closer by the day. The President of the Commission, Jean-Claude Juncker has long advocated the creation of a European Army. He says the European Union needs its own army to help address the problem that it is not “taken entirely seriously” as an international force. Ursula von der Leyen, Germany’s defence minister, has said “our future as Europeans will one day be a European army”. Norbert Röttgen, head of the German parliament’s foreign policy committee, said having an EU army was “a European vision whose time has come” As Karl von Wogau, MEP recently pointed out in a briefing paper for the Kangaroo Group2 “the Treaty provides the right tool: the so called permanent structured cooperation. It would make a tremendous change in the cooperation among Member States and between them and the European institutions. Even a small group of countries could launch this permanent structured cooperation and thus pave the way to a European Army.” This permanent structured cooperation provision was also introduced by Lisbon. One brief example of how EU taxpayer’s money is going to fund projects that are far from benign is the Galileo project. This is not just about a Single European Sky but has a clear military purpose. It is intended to boost the global sale of EU arms manufacturers, whose equipment will be Galileodependent. The military aspect of this project were kept under wraps until the Lisbon Treaty was adopted because the Galileo programme was being managed by the European Space Agency – which is not part of the EU - and The Kangaroo Group is a longstanding controversial lobbyist group that benefits from the unprecedented privileged access to the European Parliament and to MEPs. The arms industry uses this group as one of its lobbying channels to shape EU security and defence policies. 2
the European Space Agency is not permitted by its rules to engage in military activity. But when Lisbon came into force it gave the EU the right to run its own space programme. Thus the military use of Galileo could retrospectively be made legal as control was handed over to the EU’s High Representative in charge of EU common foreign and security policy. While this talk has focused on the military aspects of the EU they are only one of many problems that exist within the EU. I hope that ordinary people will no longer buy into the propaganda that those who criticize the EU are nationalistic extremist. While this is what the Eurocrats would like you to believe nothing could be further from the truth. In fact most of those who have been long-time campaigners agaist the direction of the EU project are those who believe in human rights and dignity, the rule of law and basic democratic principles. It is vital to future generation that we challenge what is going on in our name. Patricia McKenna President of EUD