Financial Times May 18, 2012 7:47 pm
Europe’s hubristic imperial overstretch
By Andrew Roberts
For the first French empire and the Nazi empire the moment historians
call “imperial overstretch” is simple to spot: they both invaded Russia.
Historians
will long debate the hubris moment for the Roman empire. For my money,
it was when Diocletian established the Tetrarchy in 293AD, splitting the
empire into four, a classic sign of hubris.
So
when was it that the Brussels empire over-reached, and became more
concerned about its own expansion and glory, its own ambitions for
hegemony, than about the daily economic wellbeing of its citizens?
The European Economic Community’s Edinburgh Conference of December 11 and 12, 1992.
It was then, after the Danes had rejected the Maastricht treaty the
previous June, that the EU decided not to take their no for an answer.
Too
much was bound up in the project, too many hopes of one day supplanting
the US as the top-dog world economic power were invested in it, to
allow a small country like Denmark to derail it.
On November 1, 1993 the EEC became the EU and a political entity on the world stage.
On a deeper level Brussels knew perfectly well that Greece was lying about its debt,
Germany
and France should, therefore, in as orderly and honourable a way as
they can, return to the safety and the rationality of the original
Treaty of Rome, reinstitute the “six”, and keep the euro only for those
countries that deserve membership on the logical grounds of genuine
economic synergy.
These are utterly removed from the commission’s
hubristic fetish of global hegemony.
The writer’s books include ‘The Storm of War’ and ‘A History of the English Speaking Peoples Since 1900’
Rome, Habsburg and the European Union
Helmut Schlesinger, was president of the
Bundesbank when sterling was forced out of the European Exchange Rate
Mechanism in 1992.:
- And I would say that either we get the United States of Europe,
that is an actual political union, and then that political union gets
its own currency.
But then it is no monetary union any longer, but the currency of that new state.
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