THE 'SUPERSTATE' TAKES SHAPE IN PRODI'S PLAN

The European Commission has just published its 'five-year plan', Shaping the New Europe: Strategic Objectives 2000 Ð 2005 [Brussels, 9.2.2000; COM(2000)154 final].

This document is described as a "communication from the Commission to the European Parliament, the Council, The Economic and Social Committee and the Committee of the Regions". Since it is relatively short, at 12 pages, no page references are given for the following quotations. They can be found very easily by anyone keen to check their accuracy and context.

It is, in effect, the equivalent of the Queen's Speech, except that President Prodi, the person giving it, is no mere figurehead; nor does he intend to leave the implementation of his programme to anything so inefficient and 'traditional' as an elected government. What he says, he and his Commission will do; and he is no doubt congratulating himself that he has no Loyal Opposition, disruptive back-benchers, and awkward upper-housemen to wreck his plans for us and our 300 million fellow EU-'citizens'.

Instead he has his Council, his European Parliament, and his Committees; what he calls the "unique and innovative structures that transcend traditional international co-operation" which the EU's treaties have put in place.

These are now to form the Commission's various public faces, and they will be brought, if Prodi has anything to do with it, very close indeed to the Euro-citizens whom the Commission "exists to serve".

In other words, the Commission and its men are about to busy themselves in those corners of our lives where even national governments have feared to poke.

European Commission documents have a special quality in them to which no amount of paraphrasing can do justice. Recently, they seem to have become remarkably Blairite in language and tone.

For example, like a New Labour Tone-clone, Prodi speaks of "disenfranchisement" from the "global economy". Commission civil servants have been overheard referring to 'stakeholders' when discussing the Climate Change taxes implementing the 1996 Integrated Pollution Prevention and Control Directive. The Blairising of Commission-speak is the counterpart to the EU-ising of Britain's Lib-Labbery. Though the results are ugly, they will be quoted at length. After all, we may well be living with their effects very soon.

Prodi's over-riding aim is "a new kind of global governance to manage the global economy and environment". This will demonstrate that "the Europe we want [is] the Europe which can show genuine leadership on the world stage". Though Prodi nowhere says as much, the implication behind every assertion of EU power is the elevation of the EU to joint super-power status with the USA. Indeed, the USA is the yardstick by which the EU is to judge its prowess, just as the Soviet Union used to measure the size of its phenomena against those of capitalist Yankeedom: "Our growth performance compares favourably with the United States over the long term. Nevertheless, in recent years United States' growth and employment rates have outstripped those of the Union."

'Europe' Ð Prodi nearly always uses this word when he means the EU Ð will lead the world because its "model of integration, working successfully on a continental scale, is a quarry from which ideas for global governance can and should be drawn". He thereby puts the damned Yankees on notice that Anglo-Saxon-American traditions will not be housing too many world-wide institutions in the future.

And at the heart of the EU Ð where John Major pretended he found the UK?

"The Commission has a pivotal role to play. It is Europe's executive arm, the initiator of ideas and proposals and guardian of the Treaties. The Commission has always been the driving force for European integration."

Prodi's recipe for success has a peculiar flavour to it. Rather like a mid-Victorian workhouse overseer setting out the coming week's tasks to its inmates, he tells us "the Commission will work in close partnership with the other European institutions and through a careful division of labour with the member states". The snubbing of the national governments and the subordination of their autonomy to their share of "a careful division of labour" is chillingly incontrovertible.

Though the Blairites of all parties in the UK still pretend in public that Prodi doesn't know the meaning of the word 'superstate', there is scarcely a paragraph in Prodi's sermon that does not preach it.
"Enlargement must be seen as a factor driving deeper integration rather than a parallel process alongside but detached from it."
Under the heading 'Promoting new forms of European governance', Prodi unwittingly exposes the lying drivel of such federasts as Ethical Cook and Ethnical Vaz.
"The complex challenges ahead call for new forms of European governance. This is not the sole responsibility of European Union institutions.
"Governments and Parliaments, regional and local authorities are an integral part of European governance. They all have a responsibility in shaping, implementing and presenting policy".

The implications are clear. The EU's Great Helmsman cannot do it all alone. He needs lots and lots of little helpers, called in Britain (for example) New Labour ministers, to do his bidding for him. Not the least of their tasks will be propaganda ("presenting policy"), or as our Tone might put it, "Education, education, education!"

Prodi's example of EU governance at its best is nothing if not challenging Ð the Common Agricultural Policy, "largely implemented by national agencies".
As he points out, the national aspect is virtually a sham:

The CAP is right 'at the heart' of Prodi's New EU.
"It is necessary to develop and strengthen the European model of agriculture in order to increase the competitiveness of this sector, secure its sustainability and promote vital rural areas."
This is Prodi at his Soviet best Ð if something is manifestly corrupt, inefficient, stupid and demoralising, and is demonstrated to be so over decades, reinforce it and tell the world what a success it always has been and always will be. Anyway, as he says himself: the primary aim is...

"the establishment of a mechanism for collective governance."

In addition to the CAP, Prodi promises to concentrate his energies on "the core functions". These are...
"policy conception, political initiative, enforcing Community law, monitoring social and economic developments, stimulation, negotiation and where necessary legislating."

The next Inter-Governmental Conference will be the centre of a huge 'stimulation' programme "particularly in view of enlargement". Slipping away from these rather suggestive metaphors, Prodi demands that the forthcoming IGC "must also avoid any dilution of past achievements". William Hague, please note!

After 'stimulating' us all with his IGC, Prodi turns his beak towards the outside world, where "the European Union must provide [itself] with the means to assert itself with a single voice in the world".

This is familiar territory to any New-Brit Blairite. One man, one vote (Tone on the London mayoralty); one super-state, one voice (Solana, the somewhat Gilbertian Lord Heeiigh Commissionaarrr for Being Beastly to the Yanks).

The immediate target is the UN trough.
"The Union is not yet fully represented in international financial institutions or United Nations agencies. This anomaly needs to be corrected." You bet it does Ð to the great benefit, no doubt, of the bank accounts and air-miles statements of Prodi's finest.

From "global actor" to village policeman Ð Prodi's EU will be everywhere.
"The Commission will shortly present an initiative on how to strengthen civil society's voice in the process of policy shaping and implementation to ensure a proper representation of the [EU's] social and economic diversity at EU level."
Roughly translated, this means that the EU will replace all existing institutions in the member states with itself; one state, one voice, one system Ð or as a previous advocate of European unity put it earlier this century, 'Ein Volk, ein Reich, ein Fuehrer'.

The new EU will need 'resources'.
"Energy will be an essential factor for [the EU's] competitiveness and economic development. The Commission will launch a debate on energy and particularly the issues of sources of supply which continue to have strategic importance". Britain's oil? Scotland's? Sorry, Mr Dewar and Mr Salmond Ð it's the Commission's.
With oil, Prodi's Commissioners can travel around, doing good in those many European trouble-spots traditionally done good to by Western Europeans.

"We must take advantage of the new treaty provisions [in the Amsterdam Treaty of 1998] and develop a genuine common foreign policy .... we must develop our civilian and military capabilities in a common defence and security policy. The Commission intends to play a full role as a political contributor in this process and not just provide technical support. This requires ... [among other things] the creation of a Rapid Reaction Fund for non-military crises."
This is an interesting proposal. Prodi intends to put away a stash of funds to pay for a mercenary security force, answerable exclusively to the Commission, in case he encounters 'non-military' resistance to his 'governance' from pockets of Euro-plebs.

Yet what is there to resist? He is offering the speedy completion of an "area of freedom, security and justice" in which he will grant all of us docile enough not to be beaten up by his mercenaries a "European Charter of Fundamental Rights" Ð excluding trial by jury, habeas corpus, innocence until proved guilty and the rule against double jeopardy, of course.

Life in the 'area', or 'zone' as Tarkovsky might have called it, will be enlivened by
"a new economic dynamism". Labour, product and capital markets will be "reformed by a rigorous application of competition rules and by further progress in the co-ordination of tax policy."
For the UK this means higher taxes, and subsidies to the Continent's competitor industries but not to UK-based operations like Rover.

As a good European, Prodi cannot help but acknowledge his debt to one of Britain's few 'good Europeans' of international stature Ð Robert Maxwell. His Commission will
"make pensions safe and sustainable through a combination of employment-generating reforms, increasing the revenue base, and reviewing retirement systems."

Again, a translation for UK residents is necessary. Pension rules are likely to be Euro-harmonised, in effect transferring the surpluses on UK private pension funds to pay for the catastrophic deficits on public and private sector pension funds on the Continent. Brown, our own stalwart protector of Maxwell's little help-yourselfers on New Labour's government benches (Lord Donoghue, Helen Liddell, Geoffrey Robinson) pulled the same trick in his first budget, when he diverted 20 per cent of the income of Britain's private pension funds to pay for his 'jobs for the boys' programme. And it worked. Apart from Robinson, all his boys and girls have kept their jobs in Blair's government.

Of course Mr Prodi's pensions, like Maxwell's, will need a little assistance from the euro-public's purse. "Increasing the revenue base" suggests a euro-pension tax or contribution, which will be so manipulated as to provide the unlucky contributor no more than a nominal pension, paid in 'wooden' euros when he has ended his working life contributing to Prodi's new model CAP fund and other administocratical wheezes. However, it seems even that retirement day may be postponed Ð "reviewing retirement systems" is suspiciously akin to the Blairite determination to 'review' the age at which the UK old age pension can be drawn. In the UK that age will almost certainly be increased.

"The five years of the Prodi Commission will be a period of great change. Europe will become more closely integrated." This is Prodi's straightforward conclusion to his instructions to the lieutenants in the EU. There are many in continental capitals who will leap enthusiastically to his ranks; ready to do as much marching ahead, catching of buses, boarding of trains, forging of things here and there as is necessary "to give shape and force to the New Europe". There are, notoriously, enough people in those same capitals always ready to give 'force' to as many New Europes as there are podium-stompers to dream of them.

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