Extremists Stay Away!

Dear All, I just noticed that amongst my followers a website of dubious standing.  Upon closer inspection I discovered this to be a bigoted and racist Islamophobic website.  Upon realising that I immediately blocked it.  Let me be clear; I am firm in my views about policy and I communicate those views robustly to get through to a political class that is increasingly distant from we the citizens and deaf to our concerns.  However, my firmest held belief is that all people are deserving of equal respect from whatever faith, creed, race or orientation they may hail.  My suspicion is that this unwarranted visit from an extremist may have been prompted by my use of the term 'Islamo-fascists' in a blog on Mali to describe the extremists of Al Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb. For the record I was quoting a leading analyst and director of one of London'd top think-tanks during an interview he gave to the BBC TV.  Again, for the record, I have the deepest respect for Islam and Muslims and that should be understood by all.

Extremists stay away! 

Julian Lindley-French

TAFTA: For the Love of Italy:

Rome, Italy. 7 February.  It is just a golden moment.  Above my Roman roof-top cappuccino a flash of dawn radiates across a golden city which for three thousand years has come to symbolise Europe. Every empire since from Charlemagne to the European Union claims in some way to be the political heir of either Roman Republic or Empire. I love this town, I love this country.  It is therefore sad to see my old Italian friend brought low, visibly fraying at the edges.  As February’s national elections beckon the discourse is about more Brussels not less, a metaphor for more of my Dutch taxpayer’s money so that Europe can prolong its agony in mutual impoverishment.  Italy does not need more Brussels.  Italy needs a real macro-economic game-changer.  Italy needs TAFTA, a transatlantic free-trade agreement.   

The plain truth is that I could no more abandon Italy to a debt-drenched future than I could my own Yorkshire kith and kin.  That would be unconscionable.  However, it is also clear that the partial and wrong-headed EU response to the Eurozone crisis will fail Italy (and Spain and others) in its hour of need.   The wrong-headedness will be evident today in Brussels as leaders wrestle over the EU budget. The agreement they reach will once again be to invest in Europe’s past rather than Europe’s competitive future.  TAFTA would force Europeans to again look outward and compete. 

However, for TAFTA to work Washington must also cure itself of the fantasy that a United States of Europe would look anything like the United States of America.  Left to its own devices the appallingly bureaucratic and hopelessly over-regulated, statist and uncompetitive European ‘USE’ would look far more like the sclerotic and ultimately doomed USSR – a Union of Soviet European Republics.

The sad truth is that the political unionists in Brussels Centre seek to use the crisis to extend their fiat at the expense of legitimacy, democracy, but above all competitiveness.  Indeed, by linking Europe’s political future to the current crisis Brussels Centre is critically preventing the establishment of a truly pan-European recovery programme.  Moreover, what will come out of Brussels today (if anything) will not help Italy.  The leaders will talk a lot about growth but in reality do nothing to promote Horizon 2020, the research and development fund, or help the small and medium sized enterprises (SMEs) vital if Italy is to compete in a global economy. 

My visit to Rome was to address the excellent 58^th Assembly of the Atlantic Treaty Association.  There were two great elephants in a room full of defence wonks.  The first, naturally, was the Eurozone crisis which is the quintessential European security challenge of this age.  The other was TAFTA.  Indeed, I would go as far as to say the future of a credible NATO depends on TAFTA and a growth-driving transatlantic single market in goods and services it would create worth over 50% of global economic output.  

Rome is merely in the eye of the hurricane that is the Eurozone crisis.  The worst is yet to come.  The money and reforms Romans will need and have to go through before stability once again dawns is perhaps a decade away if there is no game-changer.  Therefore, the mantra of more Brussels must be pushed aside and a proper plan developed by ALL Europe’s nation-states within the wider macro-economic context that TAFTA would provide.

As I drove past Rome’s ancient forum below the Palatine hill where Republic and Empire tussled the ruins of a once great civilisation lay before me.  Decline and fall is now clear for all to see across Europe. Is that our shared European future?  As Brussels Centre edges forward with what one American friend calls a 'fascinating elite experiment' that she does not have to live with will the latter day republics and kingdoms that give Europe such cultural energy be replaced with a not so holy Brussels bureaucratic empire?  It is certainly a seductive ‘solution’ for many southern Europeans for like the Roman Empire of the first and second centuries this new statist Europe may offer temporary stability.  However, shorn of legitimacy, productivity and competitiveness it will ultimately fail mired in its own political decadence.    

The Obama administration says that TAFTA must be concluded quickly as the deal has to be done, “on one tank of gas”.  Sadly, the very people charged with promoting transatlantic “regulatory convergence” are the very Brussels Centre people who least want it.  For them TAFTA is a threat to their ‘competences’. 

TAFTA – for the love of Italy!

Julian Lindley-French

How Russia Won the War and is Still Losing the Peace

4 February.  Here in Verbier, Switzerland snow cascades from a grizzly grey slate sky in great dustings of caster white.  That is perhaps the only reality which a Swiss ski resort of today shares with frozen, broken Stalingrad a lifetime ago.  Russia’s President Putin said on the 2 February 70^th anniversary of the surrender of General von Paulus’s German Sixth Army, “We are proud.  Russia is proud of the defenders of Stalingrad…The Red Army lived and fought in this hell”.  Rarely do I agree with President Putin but he is absolutely right about the two hundred day battle of Stalingrad.  Russia’s critical role in the defeat of Nazi Germany helped create the very conditions by which I can write in freedom, even if in victory Moscow tried so hard for so long to deny that very freedom to millions.  The danger for a Russia that lost perhaps as many as twenty seven million citizens fighting Nazi Germany is that again Russia could slide away from freedom and its rightful place in Europe. 

  

Soviet Russia eventually collapsed in 1991 because it came to represent an impossible contradiction: the centralisation by bureaucratisation of utterly disparate peoples.  It is a lesson Brussels might learn today.  However, the fact the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics (USSR) stumbled on for so long after 1945 had much to do with the narrative Stalingrad established at the heart of Soviet politics.  The Great Patriotic War became an alibi for uncontested Kremlin power and locked Russia and its satellites into the political stasis that would in time consume it.

In spite of the immense sacrifice of the war generation the moment a leader emerged who did not and could not base his political legitimacy within the Communist Party of the Soviet Union on his war service Soviet Russia was doomed.  In 1985 Mikhail Gorbachev took power and immediately set out to modernise a Soviet Union that could honour Stalingrad but move beyond it.  It was simply too late and to this day Russia has grappled with the same dilemma.

The tragic irony for the heroes of Stalingrad is that they are still not allowed to rest in honoured peace in the Pantheon of Russia’s history.  With the announcement that Volgograd will resort to its wartime name Stalingrad, at least for the period of the anniversary, the danger is that contemporary Moscow will once again endeavour to ‘legitimise’ it power on the cult of the strong leader Stalin exploited and which Stalingrad came to represent. 

Joseph Stalin had no less blood on his hands than Hitler.  He penned an infamous pact with Hitler in August 1939 to keep Russia out of war.  Indeed, Stalin almost destroyed the very Red Army that would play such a crucial heroic role in defeating Hitler through brutal purges in the 1930s.

It is sometimes said of Britain (mainly in Germany for self-evident reasons) that until the British stop looking back to World War Two they can never take their place in the new Europe.  There is some truth to that, even if for those who make such a criticism new Europe is often a metaphor for a bureaucratic Europe that could bear striking similarities to the sclerotic USSR.  It is certainly true of Russia.

Lacking real political legitimacy Vladimir Putin could take Russia back into a sacrificial nostalgia and lock Russian society and his leadership in anachronistic aspic.  Such a political strategy may just last long enough to keep Putin and friends in power and wealth, but  it will do nothing to prepare Mother Russia for the twenty-first century.

Stalingrad was really the victory of ordinary Russia over a foreign, western criminal occupation.  It is a powerful story and utterly seductive to the Russian mind.  However, even the most cursory of glances at a map will demonstrate that the West is Russia’s one true friend.  Even the most cursory of glances at Russia’s economy demonstrates Moscow’s utter dependence on Europe for its fossil-fuelled wealth.

Every year Russia steps backward towards Stalingrad the longer and more painful the difficult journey will be for the Russian people to embrace political modernity.  And, the greater the unnecessary suffering and unwarranted poverty the Russian people will face.

Russia must honour the fallen of Stalingrad, as must we all.  However, it is time to let the dead rest and the memory of their suffering, sacrifice and immense achievement take its honoured place in Russia’s past not in Russia’s present.

At Stalingrad Russia won the war and then contrived to lose the peace. Here the snow continues to fall, each flake reflective of a lost Stalingrad soul.  For their sake the Russian people will always be welcome in freedom. 

One million people were killed during the battle of Stalingrad and I honour and respect every one of them.

Julian Lindley-French

Mali: Now What?

Alphen, Netherlands. 31 January.  Oscar Wilde once wrote “One of the many lessons that one learns in prison is that things are what they are and will be what they will be”.  As I witness the French, British and other Europeans rush to offer their very little militaries in support of an expanding Mali mission I am reminded of that famous little Dutch boy who stuck his finger in a dyke to stem a pending flood.  The gap between politician speak about “generational struggle” (dyke) and deep cuts to the very means needed to deal with such dangerous change (size of aforesaid finger) suggests either aforesaid politicians do not mean what they say (how can that be?) or they do mean it but do not know what they are doing (how can that be?).  Two questions now need to be answered; so what and now what?   

 

On the face of it there are good reasons to support the French.  For example, British PM David Cameron needs to show he is a ‘good’ European following last week’s now famous Euro-realist speech.  Moreover, today Prime Minister Cameron will announce not only that there will be no further cuts to the British armed forces, but he will officially confirm the €200bn ($271bn) military equipment programme I highlighted before Christmas.  The British government has finally come to realise that its armed forces are not only vital in and of themselves, but also underpin all other forms of British strategic influence, not least with an increasingly unfriendly Obama administration. 

However, London and all other European governments should be careful not to rush in at French behest to save a  la francophonie that France has jealously guarded hitherto as its sphere of influence unless one can really demonstrate a genuine strategic threat.  First, because one of the many lessons from Afghanistan is that the use of force in the absence of a meaningful political strategy (which includes political reconciliation) is but a short step to failure.  Watching Cameron jet off to Algiers yesterday had all the hallmarks of Britain being suckered into French problems.  What has happened to the informal agreement with France whereby Britain focuses its counter-terrorism intelligence effort on the Gulf and Yemen, whilst France focuses on la francophonie?  Third, in spite of calls by Paris for West African states and forces to step into the breach it is clear from discussions I have had that neither the money nor the forces pledged are likely to be anything like enough or good enough for a long time to come.  At present it looks like France (and the rest of us) is going to be there for a long time to come.

There is another reason for caution.  London is rightly keen to show that the 2010 Franco-British Defence and Security Treaty is worth more than the paper it is written on.  However, it is equally clear France not for the first time will happily take British support to get them out of a hole but offer little back in return.  Indeed, if Prime Minister Cameron thinks by stepping into la francophonie somehow Paris is going to change its implacably anti-British position on EU reform then he had better think again.  A taste of what is to come was all too apparent in comments made Tuesday by French intellectual (but appalling historian) Bernard-Henri Levy.  As Britain announced the commitment of some 340 troops to a training and support role Levy reacted with scornful derision.  He accused Britain of “spinelessness” and “inconsistency” for not committing combat troops.  He conveniently forgot that France repeatedly refused to move into southern Afghanistan, the crucible of the war therein, to support the British at a critical time in the campaign and has just completed a premature withdrawal from Afghanistan.  Whilst I honour the sacrifice of all coalition fallen in Afghanistan M. Levy’s comments reflect deep disrespect for the 440 British dead (as against 88 French dead) thus far in Afghanistan in what is meant to be an operation founded on NATO solidarity.  In other words, M. Levy, if you want Britain to support France shut up!

The French action in Mali was necessary to stop genocide.  However, my sense is that France and its allies are now drifting towards the great unplanned with no real sense of what they want to achieve, no real sense of how to achieve it and no idea at all how long it is going to take or what cost they will incur in lives or money.  Once again the solutions they are offering their publics exist purely in political imagininations.  This is action rather than strategy, heat rather than light. 

If the answers to my two questions can be both provided and demonstrated then there may be the making of strategy.  As Professor Colin Gray once wrote, “If we neglect strategic theory, marginalise it as irrelevant or unworldly then we are utterly at the mercy of the perspective of the moment”. 

Quite so! 

Julian Lindley-French

Europe and the Holocaust

Alphen, Netherlands. 28 January.  Yesterday was Holocaust Memorial Day, the sixty-eighth anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz by Soviet forces which last year I visited to pay homage to the murdered.  Here in the Netherlands Anne Frank wrote “In spite of everything I still believe that people are really good at heart.  I simply can't build up my hopes on a foundation consisting of confusion, misery and death.”  Anne Frank died in March 1945 in Bergen-Belsen concentration camp days before its liberation by the British 11^th Armoured Division.  Almost seventy years on what does the Holocaust mean for the Europe of today?

 

The Holocaust or Shoah defines modern Europe because without wishing to deny the suffering of millions in the 1939-45 European war it was the murder of six million Jews and others that stalks European politics to this day and rightly so.  The 1957 Treaty of Rome which established the then European Economic Community (EEC), the forebear of today’s EU, “determined to lay the foundations of an ever closer union among the peoples of Europe”.  It might have added “…to prevent genocide ever again being committed on Europe’s soil”.  All the human rights legislation overseen by the Council of Europe against which so many Europeans rail was also inspired by the need to prevent such obscenities.  Anti-Semitism, far from being confined to Nazi Germany, was prevalent across Europe before the war.     

As David Cameron last week finally forced Europeans to begin considering the relationship between power and people and just what “ever closer union” should actually mean in the future Europe the Holocaust continues to provide Europe's ghastly context.  Like it or not Hitler’s ghost still haunts latter day Europe and at this tipping in Europe’s history the political balance European leaders must strike is indeed a delicate one. 

Clearly, Europeans have a special duty of care for the Jewish people but such care must also extend to all minorities.  Indeed, Europe will be judged by its treatment of minorities, especially at a time of hyper-immigration, weak economies and the social tensions inevitable at such moments.  Today’s seminal debate on the future Europe is really about the interaction of globalisation, Europeanisation and integration and by extension power, structure and liberty. 

However, finding a new European balance is not the same as simply embracing the freedom-eroding mantras of political correctness that so infects European politics and which is fuelling new intolerance, new censorships and the new discriminations felt by an increasingly oppressed majority. The Holocaust must always inform European politics but not enslave it.

That the Holocaust still defines a historical fault-line in Europe can be seen in the tension between British Euro-realists and Euro-federalists.  Britain was never occupied and never suffered the terror of occupation.  In the Netherlands alone some 205,000 Dutch people died, the highest proportion in any occupied territory.   Moreover, one only has to visit certain parts of Central and East Europe to very quickly realise the importance of the EU as a safeguard against dangerous nationalisms and the intolerance of minorities.  This is something most Britons simply do not understand.  Indeed, even Britain’s so-called 'pro-EU' lobby simply see the EU as a means to an end of economic stability, rather than the quintessential historical end in itself many Europeans believe it to be.

 

Ironically, both the federalists and realists are deep down driven by the memory of the Holocaust and the need to ensure it never happens again.  They simply disagree about how.  Former Belgian Prime Minister Guy Verhofstadt, who is fast becoming the champion of federalism, when interviewed last week on the BBC suggested 'peace' in Europe can only be assured by a United States of Europe.  For Euro-realists the opposite is needed; a new separation of powers between Brussels and the member-states, in favour of the latter, to re-establish vital checks and balances that alone can prevent extreme abuse of extreme power. 

 

Ultimately political liberty must trump guilt however eloquently history speaks to Europeans.  The Holocaust must not be used as an implicit alibi for an ever closer union that is really about the undemocratic concentration of too much power in too few elite hands.  When the Treaty of Rome was drafted the key phrase was an ‘ever closer union of peoples’, nowhere does it call for an ever closer union of states which is how it has come to be interpreted by the Euro-federalists. 

 

Europe will continue to be held to account by its twentieth century history and rightly so.  However, Anne Frank is a heroine of mine precisely because in spite of the horror she endured her spirit soared alongside her belief in the essential goodness of humanity.  “Anne Frank: Diary of a Young Girl” is now online.  Read her, celebrate her and honour her belief in humanity.    

Never again!

Julian Lindley-French

The Dangerous Guy Verhofstadt

Alphen, Netherlands. 27 January. One of the beauties of a blog is the ability to react immediately. I have just been watching former Belgian Prime Minister and Euro-fanatic Guy Verhofstadt on a Dutch TV programme called "Buitenhof".  It is one of those political talking heads programmes that clog the airwaves of most European countries of a Sunday.  The main topic was of course Cameron's big speech on Europe this week.   It was strange to see my country being discussed at length with no Brit present who could offer a real insight into the strategic and political implications of the speech but hey ho! 

 

However, most galling was to watch the fanatical Mr Vershofstadt use blatant disinformation to make his case for Britain to stay in the EU and thereafter for a federal Europe that would, he said, come to look like the US.  He claimed that British trade with the rest of the EU represented over 53% of GDP.  Wrong.  It is 48% and declining.  He also failed to point out the EUR60bn trading deficit Britain suffers with the rest of the EU. He claimed that all the opinion polls show that the British people are clamouring to stay in the EU.  Wrong.  A poll for this morning's Sunday Telegraph shows a surge in support for Cameron and most of the polls suggest strong support for a referendum, a big majority in favour of repatriation of powers and a small majority in favour of leaving.  He asserted that the whole of British industry is warning Cameron not to push for a referendum. Wrong.  Most of British industry and commerce as represented through their respective trade bodies are strongly in favour of a reduction in EU regulations. 

 

Mr Verhofstadt is not simply a fanatic but he represents something very dangerous about the Euro-elite.  If the European people, including the British, are going to be subjected to this kind of propaganda the Europe that emerges could be something sinister.  It was after all Goebbels who said that if one repeats a big enough lie long enough people will start to believe it.

 

If you want to make your case for a federal Europe, Mr Verhofstadt, stick to fact not fallacy.

Julian Lindley-French

Poland's anti-British Anglophile

Alphen, Netherlands.  25 January. 

Dear Mr Sikorski, you are at it again.  You described Britain yesterday as a "country under special care" and that Poland would be happy to replace Britain in Europe's ruling triumvirate.  As you well know 'special care' in English implies a mental impairment. 

Here is just a bit of political education for you Mr Sikorski (your manners it would appear are beyond repair).  First, France and Germany have never let Britain be part of what you call rather clumsily the "ruling triumvirate".  There was no noticeable British presence at this week's fiftieth anniversary celebrations of the 1963 Elysee Treaty, the founding document of the Franco-German duarchy.  You must be an eternal optimist if you really believe France and Germany would ever let Poland into their club.  Will you have a real say over the Franco-German plan for deeper union which is to be rolled out this coming May?  Somehow I doubt it.  Second, it is strange to hear a Polish foreign minister seeking to create a new balance of power in Europe by offering to replace Britain in your triarchy. Surely the lesson of Polish history is that European integration should act as an insurance against the kind of power politics you clearly espouse.  Third, facts speak for themselves.  According to the IMF Poland had a 2011 economy worth $514bn, whereas the British economy was worth some four-times that at $2.4 trillion.  Poland has a population of 38.2 million against the British population of 65.5 million with a Polish GDP per capita of $13,469 against the British $38,811. 

So, good luck with your 'leadership' drive Mr Sikorski, but you will have to defy the gravity of the very power politics you clearly espouse if you are to succeed.  It may also be time that your President remind you that you are a foreign minister and that such language does no credit to your great country.  All your comment reveals is that you care little for minor political principles such as democracy and even less for the need to prepare the EU for the twenty-first century.  Instead your vision of the EU seems akin to a kind of centralised Union of European Socialist Soviet Republics.  Now there's an irony.     

You claim to be an Anglophile.  With friends like you we British really do not need enemies.  Good luck with your continuing hunt for a good job in Brussels.  I am sure the French and Germans will oblige.

Take special care with your language,  Mr Sikorski!

Julian Lindley-French