EU Profile
In 2012, the European Union (EU) was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize for its work in "the advancement of peace and reconciliation, democracy and human rights in Europe" for more than half a century (The Nobel Peace Prize for 2012). Lauded by the Norwegian Nobel Committee for its commitment to reconciling Germany and France in the post-war period, the EU joined such notable persons as Barack Obama, who was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in 2009. Ironically, however, Obama has gone on to be criticized as one of the worst violators of human rights in 21st century and as a worse war criminal than G.W. Bush. The same critics aim similar remarks at the EU. The documentary film EUphoria takes a critical look at the EU and its "peace" efforts and shows how as in the case of the American President, one swallow does not a summer make. This paper will discuss the history of the EU and show how its profile as a proponent for peace is often a screen for more dubious economic forms of terrorism, as seen in countries like Ukraine and Greece, which have virtually been raided by the European Central Bank (ECB) and the International Monetary Fund (IMF).
"But just what is the European Union exactly?" asks Critical Productions' (2014) EUphoria, and "How did it come about? How does it function today? Is it living up to Nobel Peace Prize wining policies?" These questions begin the documentary film, setting up the framework of investigation into the union of nations -- not all of which currently appear very happy to be part of that union (Durden 2015). EUphoria states that the EU is a "project without a blueprint," but is that really the case? There are 28 member nations in the EU, all part of a system of governmental and economic institutions, such as the Council of the EU, the European Council, the European Commission, the Court of Justice of the European Union, the ECB, the Court of Auditors, and the European Parliament. If anything, it appears the EU has enough blueprints to outlast bureaucracy itself. So why does EUphoria state that it has none? Perhaps the answer is in what the EU decides to state publicly in typical newspeak political spin, and what it actually intends to do privately, through its "Institutions" aka Troika aka central banking cartels. Indeed, EUphoria begins by posing the question of the EU to analysts -- all of whom agree that "the European Union began from good motives" because it was a hypothetical way to avoid future world war. However, the motives of the powers that be in the post-war years have been questioned by many scholars and researchers, and thus it is necessary to examine the history of the EU (Stone, Kuznick 2012).
As Bagnai, Granville and Soy (2015) state, the post-war document that served as the stepping stone to the EU was the Treaty of Rome in 1957, the first line of which urges "an ever-closer union among the peoples of Europe." This essential wording is pivotal for understanding what the EU is today: not so much a union of individual nations but rather an individual kingdom, with separate states, subject to the policies of professional bureaucrats and bankers. Such can be seen in the IMF's position towards Greece: As Bagnai, Granville and Soy (2015) show, the IMF "knew that Greece's debt was not sustainable, but decided to go ahead with the [bailout] 'because of the fear that spillovers from Greece would threaten the euro area and the global economy'." Two points are worth noting in that admission: first, that the EU serves itself, not its individual member nations; second, that the EU is part of a much larger, wider scheme -- the "global economy" -- which is, of course, run by the same cartel of bankers that operates within the EU. The "global" scheme has, in fact, been likened to a Ponzi scheme (Novak 2014), which depends upon all the pieces remaining in tact: if one goes bust, the whole scheme collapses. This explains the never-ending "kick-the-can-down-the-road" bailouts of Greece: the money "given" to Greece does not really go to Greece but rather to pay the interest on loans made by the EU "Institutions" (Spiegel, Hope 2015). Greece is a debt colony -- a money-funneling apparatus (Varoufakis 2015).
From the beginning the EU was an economic vehicle for centralization -- not the peaceful solution to Europe's problems that modern pundits appear to make it seem. It grew out of the European Coal and Steel Community of 1951 and the...
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