Dangerous: New EU president Herman Van Rompuy extols ‘global governance’
Daily Mail | Jan 2, 2010
By Paul Belian, Belgian Lawyer And Historian
Perhaps, like many, you think Herman Van Rompuy, who took office as the first EU President on Friday, is a harmless figure of fun. Well, you’re wrong.
Van Rompuy, a former prime minister of Belgium, represents the ‘Belgianisation’ of Europe – a process which began 180 years ago and for which Britain has only itself to blame.
There is ominous symbolism in a Belgian ruling the EU. During the Second World War, Churchill called the Belgians ‘the most contemptible of all – a nation which vainly hoped to stay out of this war, no matter what they owed to those who had saved them in the last war’.
Yet the Belgian political model has since then stealthily conquered Britain, turning Brussels, not London, into the centre of power from which decisions are imposed on the British people.
Belgium was created by British Prime Minister Lord Palmerston in 1830-31. It is home to six million Flemings, three million Walloons and one million people in bilingual Brussels.
The country came about after French-speaking Walloons broke away from the Netherlands and tried to join France. Palmerston recognised the rebels on condition that they established a new state and remained neutral.
At first, everyone was sceptical about Palmerston’s creation. Even Belgium’s first king, Leopold I, said: ‘Belgium has no nationality and it can never have one. Basically, Belgium has no political reason to exist.’
By the late 19th Century the Belgian political elite had developed an ideology with a striking similarity to modern Europeanism. In 1904, the ideologist Leon Hennebicq wrote: ‘Have we not been called the laboratory of Europe? Indeed, we are a nation under construction… the solution is economic expansion, which can make us stronger by uniting us.’
His words foreshadowed the Europeanism of the Fifties, which aimed for political unification through economic integration.
But before this could be put into practice Germany invaded Belgium in 1914, forcing Britain to intervene in a Franco-German tussle to uphold Belgium’s neutrality. As neither the Flemings nor Walloons loved Belgium, they left Britain to do the fighting. The war left Britain with 700,000 military deaths.
After the war, the Belgian establishment put Hennebicq’s doctrine into practice. Since 1919, economic and social policies have not been decided in parliament, but between the government and so-called ’social partners’, including the trade unions and the Federation of Belgian Employers.
Soon, the Belgians realised they could apply their ideas to Europe. In the Thirties, Henri De Man, leader of the Belgian Socialist Party, said his country’s ‘corporatist welfare state’ model should be turned into a European or even a global system.
When Hitler overran Europe in 1940, Queen Elisabeth, the widow of Belgium’s King Albert, described it as a ‘work of necessary destruction’.
Meanwhile, De Man saw the Second World War as a unique opportunity to establish a united Europe, asking his followers not to oppose the German victory because: ‘The Socialist Order will thereby be established, as the common good, in the name of a national solidarity that will soon be continental, if not worldwide.’
What was needed, he added, ‘was as much federalism and as little separatism as possible’.
De Man is now forgotten by history. His legacy, however, is very much alive thanks to his deputy, Paul-Henri Spaak, who settled in Britain during the summer of 1940.
He would go on to produce the Spaak Report which laid the foundation of the Treaty of Rome in 1957. It recommended the creation of a European Common Market, which would later become the European Union, as a step towards political unification and ‘an ever closer union of the peoples of Europe’. From the beginning, what these peoples might think was deemed unimportant.
Today’s EU is a shotgun marriage for the peoples of Europe. When the Danes voted against the Maastricht Treaty, and the Irish against Nice and Lisbon, they had to vote again. When the French and Dutch rejected the EU Constitution, their verdict was discarded.
Britain’s Government simply denied its people a say on the Lisbon Treaty, so Westminster is now legally obliged to ‘contribute actively to the good functioning of the Union’ – i.e. to further the interests of the EU, rather than those of its own people.
Make no mistake, the EU is an empire with global ambitions. In his acceptance speech, President Van Rompuy extolled ‘global governance’.
Legions of bureaucrats will rule the British from Brussels, the Belgian capital. Being proud of your Britishness will be criminalised, just as Brussels has always punished Flemings who put Flanders first.
Last November, Van Rompuy, although a Fleming himself, confessed in an interview: ‘I am a European because the European idea is an antidote for Flemish nationalism, an antivenin [an antitoxin against a snake's venom] against the Flemish Movement.’
Two weeks later, he became the EU President. Van Rompuy is no harmless creature. He symbolises the conquest of Britain by Belgium, the monster created by Palmerston.
• Dr Paul Belien is the Flemish author of A Throne In Brussels: Britain, The Saxe-Coburgs And The Belgianisation Of Europe, published by Imprint Academic, Exeter.
