Attack on sovereignty
By Paul Craig Roberts
Those concerned about "The New World
Order" speak as if the United States is coming under the control of an
outside conspiratorial force. In fact, it is the US that is the New
World Order. That is what the American unipolar world, about which
China, Russia, and Iran complain, is all about.
Washington has demonstrated that it has
no respect for its own laws and Constitution, much less any respect for
international law and the law and sovereignty of other countries. All
that counts is Washington's will as the pursuit of hegemony moves
Washington closer to becoming a world dictator.
The examples are so numerous someone
should compile them into a book. During the Reagan administration the
long established bank secrecy laws of Switzerland had to bend to
Washington's will. The Clinton administration attacked Serbia, murdered
civilians and sent Serbia's president to be tried as a war criminal for
defending his country. The US government engages in widespread spying on
Europeans' emails and telephone calls that is unrelated to terrorism.
Julian Assange is confined to the Ecuadoran embassy in London, because
Washington won't permit the British government to honor his grant of
political asylum. Washington refuses to comply with a writ of habeas
corpus from a British count to turn over Yunus Rahmatullah whose
detention a British Court of Appeals has ruled to be unlawful.
Washington imposes sanctions on other countries and enforces them by
cutting sovereign nations that do not comply out of the international
payments system.
Last week the Obama regime warned the
British government that it was a violation of US interests for the UK to
pull out of the European Union or reduce its ties to the EU in any way.
In other words, the sovereignty of Great
Britain is not a choice to be made by the British government or people.
The decision is made by Washington in keeping with Washington's
interest.
The British are so accustomed to being
Washington's colony that deputy prime minister Nick Clegg and a group of
UK business executives quickly lined up with Washington.
This leaves Great Britain in a quandary.
The British economy, once a manufacturing powerhouse, has been reduced
to the City of London, Britain's equivalent to Wall Street. London, like
New York, is a world financial center of which there are none in
Europe. Without its financial status, there wouldn't be much left of the
UK.
It is because of the City's financial
importance that the UK, alone of the EU member states, kept the British
pound as its currency and did not join the euro. Because the UK has its
own currency and central bank, the UK was spared the sovereign debt
crisis that has plagued other EU member states. The Bank of England,
like the Federal Reserve in the US, was able to bail out its own banks,
whereas other EU states sharing a common currency could not create
money, and the European Central Bank is prohibited by its charter (at
Germany's insistence) from bailing out member states.
The quandary for the UK is that the
solution to the sovereign debt crisis toward which the EU is moving is
to strip the member governments of their fiscal sovereignty. For the
individual countries, the spending, taxing and, thereby, deficit or
surplus positions of the member countries' budgets will be set by EU
central authority. This would mean the end of national sovereignty for
European countries.
For Britain to remain an EU member while
retaining its own currency and central bank would mean special status
for Great Britain. The UK would be the only member of the EU that
remained a sovereign country. What are the chances that the UK will be
permitted such exceptional status? Is this acceptable to Germany and
France?
If the British are to fold themselves
into Europe, they will have to give up their currency, central bank,
their law, and their economic status as a world financial center and
accept governance by the EU bureaucracy. The British will have to give
up being somebody and become nobody.
It would, however, free the UK from being Washington's puppet unless the EU itself is Washington's puppet.
According to reports, sometime this year
Scotland, a constituent part of the UK, is to vote on leaving the UK
and becoming an independent country. How ironic that as the UK debates
its dismemberment the country itself faces being merged into a
multi-national state.
Paul Craig Roberts
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