Europe Needs to Be Independent
TRANSCEND MEMBERS, 21 Apr 2014
John Scales Avery – TRANSCEND Media Service
Legacies from the First and Second World Wars and the Cold War
In both World War I and World War II, participation by the United States brought victory to the Allies. In the years that followed 1945, the Marshall Plan helped Europe to recover. During the Cold War period that followed, many people in Europe saw NATO, and a close alliance with the United States, as means for preventing a takeover by the Soviet Union. However, whatever debt of gratitude Europe may owe to the United States for its past help, we must now ask whether the time has not now arrived for Europe to be independent. Just as the US once declared it is independence from England, Europe must now declare its independence from the United States.
The loss of democracy in the United States
Recent revelations by Edward Snowden, WikiLeaks and other whistle-blowers have made it clear that the United States has suffered a decay of its political institutions. The US can hardly be called a democracy today, since it seems to be ruled by an extremely wealthy oligarchy rather than by its people. In fact, the people of the US do not really know what their government is doing because the activities of the CIA, the NSA, Secret Service, Homeland Security the FBI, and many other agencies are masked in secrecy. A country where the people do not know what their government is doing, and where the people have no control over their government’s actions, cannot be said to be a democracy.
The history of this huge secret side of the US government goes back to the Cold War period, during which both sides engaged in both covert and military interference with the internal affairs of smaller countries. The Soviet Union and China also intervened in the internal affairs of many countries, for example in Korea in 1950-53, Hungary in 1956, Czechoslovakia in 1968, and so on; very long list.
Meanwhile the US interfered, militarily or covertly, in the internal affairs of a large number of nations: China, 1945-49; Italy, 1947-48; Greece, 1947-49; Philippines, 1946-53; South Korea, 1945-53; Albania, 1949-53; Germany, 1950s; Iran, 1953; Guatemala, 1953-1990s; Middle East, 1956-58; Indonesia, 1957-58; British Guiana/Guyana, 1953-64; Vietnam, 1950-73; Cambodia, 1955-73; The Congo/Zaire, 1960-65; Brazil, 1961-64; Dominican Republic, 1963-66; Cuba, 1959-present; Indonesia, 1965; Chile, 1964-73; Greece, 1964-74; East Timor, 1975-present; Nicaragua, 1978-89; Grenada, 1979-84; Libya, 1981-89; Panama, 1989; Iraq, 1990-present; Afghanistan 1979-92; El Salvador, 1980-92; Haiti, 1987-94; Yugoslavia, 1999; and Afghanistan, 2001-present, Syria, 2013-present. Egypt, 2013-present,Venezuela, 2013-present. None of these interventions can be justified, since people have a right to live under governments of their own choosing, regardless of whether those governments are optimal.
With the fall of the Soviet Union, intoxication with the idea of the United States as the sole superpower expressed itself in the form of contempt for international law and the United Nations, and especially in the declarations of the “Project for a New American Century”, which many people have compared to Hitler’s “Mein Kampf”. Here are some links:
http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/article3249.htm
http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/article29129.htm
NATO
Former UN Assistant Secretary General Hans Christof von Sponeck used the following words to express his opinion that NATO now violates the UN Charter and international law: “In the 1949 North Atlantic Treaty, the Charter of the United Nations was declared to be NATO’s legally binding framework. However, the United-Nations monopoly of the use of force, especially as specified in Article 51 of the Charter, was no longer accepted according to the 1999 NATO doctrine. NATO’s territorial scope, until then limited to the Euro-Atlantic region, was expanded by its members to include the whole world”
One might say that in recent years, participation in NATO has made European countries accomplices in US efforts to achieve global hegemony by means of military force, in violation of the UN Charter and international law.
Article 2 of the UN Charter requires that “All members shall refrain in their international relations from the threat or use of force against the territorial integrity or political independence of any state.” This requirement is somewhat qualified by Article 51, which says that “Nothing in the present Charter shall impair the inherent right of individual or collective self-defense if an armed attack occurs against a Memeber of the United Nations, until the Security Council has taken measures necessary to maintain international peace and security.”
Thus, in general, war is illegal under the UN Charter. Self-defense against an armed attack is permitted, but only for a limited time, until the Security Council has had time to act. The United Nations Charter does not permit the threat or use of force in preemptive wars, or to produce regime changes, or for so-called “democratization”, or for the domination of regions that are rich in oil. NATO must not be a party to the threat or use of force for such illegal purposes. At present the United States government is trying to force the European members of NATO to participate in aggressive operations in connection with the coup which it carried out in Ukraine. Europe must refuse. See the following link:
US tactical nuclear weapons in Europe
At present, NATO’s nuclear weapons policies violate both the spirit and the text of the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty in several respects: Today there are an estimated 200 US nuclear weapons still in Europe. The air forces of the nations in which they are based are regularly trained to deliver the US weapons. This “nuclear sharing”, as it is called, violates Articles I and II of the NPT, which forbid the transfer of nuclear weapons to non-nuclear-weapon states. It has been argued that the NPT would no longer be in force if a crisis arose, but there is nothing in the NPT saying that the treaty would not hold under all circumstances.
Article VI of the NPT requires states possessing nuclear weapon to get rid of them within a reasonable period of time. This article is violated by fact that NATO policy is guided by a Strategic Concept, which visualizes the continued use of nuclear weapons in the foreseeable future.’
The principle of no-first-use of nuclear weapons has been an extremely important safeguard over the years, but it is violated by present NATO policy, which permits the first-use of nuclear weapons in a wide variety of circumstances.
NSA spying on European leaders
The massive illegal collection of private data by the National Security Agency has produced worldwide anger. The targeting of European leaders has included the famous bugging of Angela Merkel’s cellphone.
In the words of former Assistant Secretary of the Treasury Paul Craig Roberts, “Obama’s US Trade Representative, who has been negotiating secret trade agreements in Europe and Asia that give US corporations immunity to the laws of all countries that sign the agreements, has threatened WTO penalties if Europe’s communications network excludes the US companies that serve as spies for NSA. Washington in all its arrogance has told its most necessary allies that if you don’t let us spy on you, we will use WTO to penalize you.”
What will the future bring?
For many years, the US dollar has acted as a global currency. However, we can already see moves away from the “petrodollar”. When China, India, Russia, Iran and Brazil begin non-dollar trading, the value of the dollar will fall drastically, and US political and economic power will fall with it. This is just one more reason why European independence is desirable. But the most important reasons are ethical ones: Europe must not be the close ally (or puppet?) of the world’s greatest purveyor of violence and war.
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John Scales Avery, Ph.D., who was part of a group that shared the 1995 Nobel Peace Prize for their work in organizing the Pugwash Conferences on Science and World Affairs, is a member of the TRANSCEND Network and Associate Professor Emeritus at the H.C. Ørsted Institute, University of Copenhagen, Denmark.He is chairman of both the Danish National Pugwash Group and the Danish Peace Academy and received his training in theoretical physics and theoretical chemistry at M.I.T., the University of Chicago and the University of London. He is the author of numerous books and articles both on scientific topics and on broader social questions. His most recent book is http://www.learndev.org/dl/Crisis21-Avery.pdf.
This article originally appeared on Transcend Media Service (TMS) on 21 Apr 2014.
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What if the United States stops intervening in European matters? (It may be very difficult for almost anybody to imagine that, but let’s imagine as such for the convenience of discussion here.)
Monroe Doctrine: “a statement of U.S. foreign policy expressing opposition to extension of European control or influence in the western hemisphere”, quoted from Merriam Webster’s Collegiate Dictionary, Eleventh Edition (2009).
A possibly simple-minded, innocent or ridiculous but, nonetheless, still important question:
– If the United States practices a Monroe Doctrine today, will many problems that the above article mentions be solved or minimized?
Five more possibly ….. questions:
– First: Is it possible for Europe “to be independent” from the United States in the foreseeable future?
– Second: Does Europe truly want “to be independent” from the United States?
– Third: If Europe seriously intends “to be independent” from the United States, will the United States let Europe “to be independent” from it without any serious problems or conditions?
– Fourth: If Europe achieves “its independence” from the United States, what will become the relation between Europe and the United States, then?
– Fifth: What will “Europe’s independence” from the United States, if achieved, actually affect peacemaking of the world?