Portugal has borne the full brunt of the EU austerity machine.

Workers fought back in 2011 with a series of general and sectoral mass strikes.

Referring to the easiness with which the German government imposes more and more its own interests on other countries in the European Union (EU), Volker Kauder,  secretary-general of Chancellor Angela Merkel’s party,  stated during its congress in Leipzig: “Currently, German is spoken throughout Europe.”

A Euro-Germanic wave of chauvinism is being instigated by the leader of the political class in Germany.

Countries indebted and ruined by speculators are being stigmatized by Christian Democracy governmental circles as “deficit sinners.”

Not even the most faithful friends tolerate opinions not previously authorized by Berlin, as recently occurred when the German Chancellor classified the proposal of European Commission President [Jose Manuel Durão Barroso, a Portuguese bourgeois politican] as “fortuitous and unsuitable,” and the ZDF, the [German] TV network, reported during its prime-time news, that Durão Barroso “was screwy.”

The truth is that the European Union (EU)  has changed into a permanent martial law zone, in which economic power rules democracy, imposing non-elected and illegitimate governments directly controlled by Berlin, as in Greece and Italy. The EU adjusts matters by means of anti-national leaders who do other than what has been promised during election campaigns, thereby deceiving the peoples and the voters. Finally, the EU prepares changes to the treaties currently in force, which definitely withdraw sovereign rights from the states which do not submit.

But this whole state of affairs was predictable. It would have been enough to follow attentively both the geo-strategic documents and statements of the most relevant political figures in the last 20 years.

Germany’s ambitions to dominate Europe did not arise today.

In 1990, just after the so-called “unification” in 1990 Klaus Kinkel, the Foreign Minister, stated that” now we must achieve what we failed twice” (the two World Wars).

Since the beginning of the nineties, Berlin understood the European Union project as an indispensable instrument for re-launching another attempt to dominate the whole continent.

Hans Peter Schawarz, counsellor of  the Christian-Democrat chancellor Helmut Kohl, on approaching the issue of “the European cental power” (Berlin, 1994) says that "only one State exists which, owing to its geographic position, economic capacity and cultural influence, has the conditions of assuming to itself as an European central power – that is Germany.”

In 2000, Joschka Fisher (The Greens Party), the former German Foreign Affairs minister, during a conference in Berlin where he presented his ideas on the EU’s goals,  called upon Germany “considering its area, economic strength and geographic situation,” to exercise the right to practise a “soft hegemony” over Europe, that is, “without the use of strategic military force.”

The idea that Germany must dominate Europe, owing to its geographic position, economic strength, population, etc.,  is permanent in German leaders’ political speeches. The Eurofederalist, dominated elites within the dependent countries have permanently concealed this.

The principles contained in the EU’s treaties — from the Treaty of Maastricht and the Treaty of Nice, to the Lisbon Treaty — are all in that same direction. Even currently, as one can see, the cry for “ more Europe”, the deepening of federalism or even the treaties’ revision, means more power for the great powers’ directorate, more German hegemony, more anti-democratic power for big capital,  more challenges to social, labour and cultural rights, and an ever more forceful strangulation of the peoples’ sovereign will.

http://www.pcp.pt/en/euro-germanic-chauvinism-0

December 2, 2011