[fse-esf] Fw: [time_for_change_europe] Fighting Fire with Buckets - WEED paper on EU financial reform

[Mikael Book]

Yes, Peter Wahl's paper on the EU's attempts to reform the financial
sector is excellent, and recommended reading at the ESF, or in the process
of the ESF.(I have just annnounced and quoted the paper at length at
http://cttcampaigns.info/) 

Yet it also needs to be said that 'the overall economic bias in the
process of [the European] integration' (Wahl, p 12) cannot be fully
understood with a purely economic analysis, because economics always
abstracts from the political and military reality. For instance: can we
grasp the real significance of the Greek crisis without taking into
account that country's huge imports of fighter jets and similar military
hardware from the factories of the transatlantic
military-industrial-academic complex? What restrictions did the EU impose
-- or is it planning to impose -- on that spending? 


The further integration or disintegration of the EU is a process and a
problem which is certainly highlighted by Peter Wahl in his paper
"Fighting Fire with Buckets. A Guide to European Regulation of Financial
Markets". But it is not primarily an economic process or problem. It is,
first of all, a question of the EU:s political and military independence
from the USA or, if you want, of Europeanism.  The question is whether
Europeanism will "continue to be a relatively superfluous appendage to
Atlanticism and will hardly go beyond the economic liberalization of the
three Communities" (as Altiero Spinelli wrote Foreign Affairs, July 1962),
or become strong enough to lead to a democratic Federal state

One of the necessary conditions for a democratic European state is the
denuclearization of Europe. As Spinelli wrote (in the same article), the
Americans will have to accept it. 

In the epoch of Spinelli*, denuclearisation "only" meant nuclear
disarmament, because people still believed in the myth of the "Atoms for
Peace". In our time, denuclearisation must also imply a stop to the
construction of new nuclear power stations like AREVA's first EPR-reactor
at Olkiluoto, Finland, and the dismantling of the existing ones. Which of
course means that the EURATOM treaty has to be thoroughly revised.

All the best.

  - Mikael

* Altiero Spinelli, b. 1907, died in May 1986. The ongoing Chernobyl
catastrophe started the same year, in April.

Mikael Böök * book at kaapeli.fi * gsm +358(0)-44 5511 324 * 
http://www.kaapeli.fi/book/  * http://blogi.kaapeli.fi/book/ *
http://blog.spinellisfootsteps.info/


On Tue, 26 Oct 2010, CymruEuropaPress wrote:


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