German Fascism Principles Long Used by Enviro-Groups in Effort to Change US Laws & Deprive American Landowners of Their Private Property Rights

http://www.fee.org/publications/the-freeman/article.asp?aid=3647


Eco-Fascism


The Freeman: Ideas on Liberty - April 1995


By Russell Madden, Instructor in Communication at Mt. Mercy College in Cedar Rapids, Iowa


[READERS SHOULD WELL CONSIDER HOW & WHY THIS MOVEMENT HAS ENDURED AS LONG AS IT HAS - IT HAS RECEIVED BACKDOOR SUPPORT FROM THE LIBERAL POLITICAL ESTABLISHMENT - PREVIOUSLY, FROM THE (BILL) CLINTON ADMINISTRATION DURING THE 1990'S AND PROSPECTIVELY, FROM BOTH THE (HILLARY CLINTON AND BARACK OBAMA PRESIDENTIAL CAMPAIGNS), AND ALSO THE EUROPEAN COMMISSION WHICH IS 'DISCRETELY' TRYING TO INFLUENCE U.S. PUBLIC OPINION ABOUT ENVIRONMENTAL ISSUES, AND THROUGH THEM, THE OUTCOME OF THE 2008 PRESIDENTIAL ELECTIONS]


The violations of private property rights that have flowed from the environmental movement and its adherence to the erroneous theory of "intrinsic value" have already caused intense hardships for many people. Individuals have been prevented from developing their land as they best see fit because of claims by environmentalists that such usage would threaten an endangered species, a coastline, a wetland, or the general "character" of some landscape. The contention is that efforts to enjoy the benefits of these properties would destroy the value which that land or animal or plant supposedly possesses by its mere existence regardless of its relationship to specific human beings.


Unfortunately, as the old saying goes, "You ain't seen nothin' yet."


Generally, owners are allowed to retain title to the property under question but are prohibited from altering it in any way which does not follow some (usually ambiguous and frequently self-contradictory) governmental law or regulation. While they suddenly find themselves denied any say in what to do with that land, these hapless owners are still permitted the privilege of paying taxes on the property in question. This type of titular ownership devoid of control fits the definition of that economic/ political system known as fascism.


Given their successes in gaining governmental control over many disparate pieces of private property situated near so-called "ecologically sensitive" areas, the advocates of environmental fascism have gained confidence and grown bolder. They are now advocating a move that takes the environmental movement from a practice of petty theft to grand larceny on a breathtaking scale. The more radical practitioners of the theory of intrinsic value are no longer satisfied with the passage of laws that prevent the removal of a tree, the building of a fence or house, or the dumping of a few loads of dirt without permission. Their new Holy Grail is to create millions of acres of wilderness zones that will not merely regulate human usage, but will prevent anyone from venturing into such areas for even esthetic enjoyment. It is the intrinsic theory of value taken to its ultimate conclusion: the total elimination of human beings.


The Wildlands Project


The North American Wilderness Recovery (Wildlands) Project suggested by the Earth First! movement and its founder, Dave Foreman, proposes a violation of property rights which is so outrageous that many people might be tempted to dismiss it out of hand.[1] It would be easy to assume from its ludicrous provisions that the Wildlands Project would stand no realistic chance of passage; that defenders of private property could easily ignore it and devote their efforts to other concerns.


Yet fifty years ago, who would have supposed it credible that a snail, an owl, or a tree on one's own land would become excuses for the ecological fascism that has already spread its tentacles not only into American society, but throughout the entire world? The micro-management of land usage we have witnessed in the past thirty years now aspires to "macro-management" of the entire continent.


In these wilderness preserves, all evidence of humanity would be erased. All dwellings, the roads that link them together, the power lines that feed them, and any and all other man-made constructs would be removed and destroyed. Plants and animals—not people—would become the definers of value and usage. The needs, interests, or desires of human beings would be ruthlessly excised from any "ecological" decisions by the central planners of this ecological fascism. People would become subordinate to lower life forms in a crazy flip-flop of values and priorities. The needs of other species-not the protection of human rights-would become the new basis and rationale for politics if those who accept the credo of Earth First! have their way.


This movement becomes less a wild-eyed-pie-in-the-sky and more of a scary potential reality when you realize that other-wise reputable scientists support the general premise if not the specific details of such widespread preservation attempts. John Robinson, a biologist with the Wildlife Conservation Society, believes preservation should be done on a "landscape level." Another biologist from Oregon, Reed Noss, suggests that conservation must be practiced on a scale large enough to include not only endangered animals or plants, but also supporting flora and fauna and entire ecosystems in which natural selection and adaptation can occur.


New Endangered Species: Man


The logical conclusion of such premises is the removal of human beings from the entire earth, the largest ecosystem that exists. Then and only then would "Gaia" be restored to health.


While the eco-fascists have not yet announced such a far-reaching target, according to Michael Soule, creator of the Wilderness Project, they are unconcerned with "the limitations of time and space." They are committed if necessary to a centuries-long endeavor to restore much of North America to its pristine condition before the advent of humans altered these landscapes. Noss would like to see "at least half of the land area of the coterminous states" (emphasis added) included in this "hands off" zone. Additionally, these zones would be bordered by buffers in which only limited human activity would be allowed. Eventually, land occupied by people would exist only as isolated pockets within the greater wilderness areas.


Spokesmen for such groups as the Society for Conservation Biology, The Wilderness Society, Defenders of Wildlife, and even members of the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service offer support for the general idea of the Wilderness Project. Peter Brussard from the University of Nevada at Reno believes that the Project "certainly is justifiable scientifically." Luckily, not a biologists accept that position; Deborah Jensen, a biologist with The Nature Conservancy, does not believe that the goal of conserving biodiversity requires such an approach as the Wilderness Project.


Even if those touting the Wilderness Project do not believe it possible to create such a massive preserve in one fell swoop, they may yet achieve their final goal piecemeal. Efforts are currently underway to set aside 139,000 square miles in the Great Plains for a buffalo sanctuary; the Paseo Pantera project seeks to connect wilderness areas in Central America; British Columbia is linking a new 4,000-square-mile park with Alaska and the Yukon Territory to create a 33,000-square-mile preserve; Congress is considering setting aside 11,000 square miles in California; the Nevada Biodiversity Project seeks to set aside hundreds of square miles of mountains; and Noss recently received $150,000 from the Pew Charitable Funds to further planning for wildlands set-asides.


In response to this proposal, some people were rightfully outraged.[2] One woman from Nevada said that, "Proponents of the project are incredibly insensitive to the values, freedoms, and property rights of the many millions of people who live in and love" these lands. She characterized these ecologists as "an arrogant urban elite with a compulsion to live out their fantasy at our expense" (italics in original—which is a remarkably accurate description of statists of any stripe.


Another man from Arizona stated that this idea "illustrates all the absurd flaws in the ecocentric mind—... that balanced ecosystems don't include humans, [and] that government coercion can override human nature." Absurd, yes ... but no more so than might describe the mind-sets of Marx or Lenin. Unfortunately, the "absurd flaws" of their political system did not prevent them from imposing it across a significant fraction of the globe over a seventy year time span. The idea of the Wilderness Project is still relatively new and controversial, yet its supporters may become powerful beyond any rational expectations.


Some of those advocates believe it is important to "halt the spread of nature's most dangerous predator and competitor"; that lands should be cared for by people "who wish to restore themselves to a natural (i.e., tribal) state"; that "27 representatives" and "over 50 scientists also support the Northern Rockies Ecosystem Protection Act."


Even if the Wildlands Project itself is not implemented, its very radicalism makes other, more subtle eco-fascist strategies seem reasonable. This kind of strategy has been used repeatedly in the environmental movement: push an outlandish policy then propose something even crazier so the first proposal appears rational in comparison. Given the plethora of environmental laws strangling our country and shredding our property rights, this approach has been an effective one.


As has been pointed out by other writers, collectivists and statists who have been unable to achieve the degree of control they desire over our society through economic arguments have shifted their plan of attack to a "moral" appeal based on the false premises of "intrinsic value," "animal rights," and the supposed imminent destruction of the very environment upon which we depend for survival.


A new coat of paint, however, does nothing to alter the essence of who these eco-fascists are and what they believe. As a song from the Sixties said, the new boss is the same as the old boss. The struggle against collectivism is far from over: it has merely shifted to a new playing field. And as do most collectivists, the eco-fascists say they want to do this to us "for our own good."


--------------------------------------------------------------------------------


1. Elizabeth Pennis, "Conservation's Ecocentrics," Science News. 9-11-93, pp. 168-170.

2. Science News, "Letters," 11-20-93, pp. 323, 334.

Klaus Warns Americans: US Embrace Of Global Warming Alarmism Premised on Europe's Precautionary Principle Will Result In Sacrifice Of Liberty

http://online.wsj.com/article/SB120494352520121491.html?mod=opinion_main_commentaries


The Contrarian of Prague


By BRIAN M. CARNEY


March 8, 2008; Page A9


Wall Street Journal, New York


Being president of the Czech Republic is more like being England's monarch than the president of the United States. While the Czech president has veto power over certain types of legislation, his role is supposed to be mostly ceremonial.


But Vaclav Klaus -- who was re-elected last month after being chosen by the Czech Parliament as head of state in 2003 -- has not been content to confine himself to ribbon cuttings and state dinners.


Mr. Klaus has become a globally prominent voice of skepticism about what he calls global-warming "alarmism." This week, while in New York to address a gathering of fellow "non-alarmists" at a conference in Times Square, he took some time to sit down with members of the Journal's editorial board to offer his dissenting views on Russia, Kosovo, America and of course, climate change.


"I am not a climatologist," Mr. Klaus cheerfully admits. "I am not disputing the measurement of the temperature." Even so, Mr. Klaus believes that his many years of experience in the fields of economics and econometrics give him some insight into the nature of the problems faced by climatologists and policy makers. In climatology as in economics, he says, "there are no controlled experiments. . . . You can't repeat the time series." So, just as you can't run a controlled experiment to determine the effect of, say, deficits on interest rates, we can't directly determine the effect of CO2 on climate. All we have are observations and inferences.


Mr. Klaus is also interested in the politics of global warming. He has written a book, tentatively titled "Blue, Not Green Planet," published in Czech last year and due out in English translation in the U.S. this May. The main question of the book is in its subtitle: "What is in danger: climate or freedom?"


He likens global-warming alarmism to communism, which he experienced first-hand in Cold War Czechoslovakia, then a Soviet satellite. While the communists argued that we must all sacrifice some freedom in pursuit of "equality," the "warmists," as Mr. Klaus calls them, want us to sacrifice liberty -- especially economic liberty -- to prevent a change in climate. In both cases, in Mr. Klaus's view, the costs of achieving the goal, and the impossibility of truly doing so, argue strongly against paying a price of freedom.


Furthermore, the fact that there has been some warming over so many years does not, by itself, prove to him that this trend will continue indefinitely. "Undoubtedly there is some warming," Mr. Klaus allows. "But there has never been no change in climate, no change in global temperatures."


The world, he argues, is full of risks, and the risk of catastrophic climate change is just one of them. Therefore, we need a more measured approach to assessing the risks and the costs of mitigating them.


Cost-benefit analysis and the precautionary principle "are two different methodologies, two different

approaches, two different ways of thinking," he says.

The less desirable precautionary principle "as used by Al Gore and all his fellow travelers" says that "if you are afraid that there are risks to something, you may prohibit everything." He continues: "This is for me

absolutely unacceptable to think about."


Mr. Klaus's contrarian streak is not confined to climate change. He has been one of the few politicians in the European Union to publicly express doubts about the wisdom of recognizing Kosovo's recently declared independence from Serbia.


He fears that Kosovo's independence "will be a very good example for other parts of countries that are not happy with what is going on around them. A domino effect -- let's put it that way. So this is for me a very, very serious issue." He declines to be drawn out on specific examples of regions in Europe that could be emboldened to follow Kosovo's lead -- but it does not take much imagination to guess.


The Czech Republic has a sizable Hungarian minority that has been a periodic source of tension with its neighbor to the south for decades. Czechoslovakia, of course, also had its own unhappy experience with its German minority in the Sudetenland in the 1930s.


Even so, Mr. Klaus, steadfastly keeping to the level of generalities and hypotheticals, says: "I am . . . afraid that there are some countries where it's just the opposite -- a bigger country has a minority somewhere and wants to create a bigger original 'mother country' as it's sometimes called. And that's for me a problem because that could destabilize the situation in Europe."


When it comes to hosting American missile-defense facilities, Mr. Klaus's position is contrary to the dominant view in Europe. Opposition to the radar facilities is, in his view, nothing more than old-fashioned anti-Americanism.


"Some 'Old European' countries," Mr. Klaus says, pointedly borrowing the Rumsfeldian formulation that caused so much angst on the continent earlier in the decade, "take [the installation of the facilities] as our way of saying we are not just locked in Europe. We want to stand on two legs. One of them is the European and the other is trans-Atlantic. And they feel that this is our motivation, not Iran, not North Korea. . . . It's just that simple." For his part, "I want to have close ties with [the U.S.]," which is why he supports the bases.


Perhaps the most surprising and counterintuitive position he took during our meeting concerned Russia. The former Soviet satellites in Central Europe are often thought of as reliable skeptics of Russian intentions. But Mr. Klaus expresses a more sanguine view, even arguing that Western fears about Russia and Vladimir Putin are misplaced.


"I was one who always rejected the high-brow approach, [which says], 'Well, it's not good that they're not doing as well as some other countries in Central Europe.' That's a cheap criticism that I don't accept." So, does he not think that, through its supply of arms to Syria and Iran, and its obstructionism over Iran at the U.N. Security Council, Russia is once again picking a fight with the U.S. -- or at least in danger of doing so?


His response is at turns heated and pleading: "No one is thinking about that in Russia. Why do you think that's the way [they think]? Simply, Russia was totally lost and pushed to the floor and simply wants to be a normal country again. Don't interpret all the attempts to be accepted as a normal country as an aggressive position vis-à-vis the United States. This is not that way. I'm afraid that this is the mantra in the American newspapers but please, please, think about it twice because this is a tragic mistake."


What about the danger that Russia could use its role in supplying oil and gas to the rest of Europe as a weapon against EU economies? Again, the response is passionate: "I don't see it. This is for me . . . cheap, cheap headlining to say that, really. I live in a country where we are totally dependent -- we used to be totally dependent on Russian oil and gas. In my life, and I will be 67 this June, it has never happened for one minute that there has been cutting of deliveries of oil and gas. Please don't -- don't -- exaggerate that point. It's such cheap writing. Don't do it."


It's a strange moment. Here is a man who built his political career on his reputation for leading post-communist Czechoslovakia out of its socialist past, and who by his own account was banished into a kind of internal exile for championing liberalization ahead of the Warsaw Pact invasion of his country in 1968. Now he is urging his listeners to give Moscow the benefit of the doubt.


And yet when pressed, he pleads sudden ignorance of the country whose intentions he has just been defending. "You know, I am not an expert on Russia. You know more about it."


That seemed to end the matter, so we tried to return to global warming. But he interrupts to add a final thought on Russia: "Russia is more free now than in any time in its 2,000 years of history. So to speak about dictatorship is misusing the terminology, devaluing the terms that we use. This is something we should not say."


This is not to say everything is sunshine in Russia. "They are much less free than the Americans and the Czechs would accept. . . . Let's be clear about this. Is that clear?


"For me it is unacceptable to have such a relatively closed political system. Personally unacceptable, and being in Russia I would fight against it. But that's a different story than speaking of a dictatorship or not putting it in a proper historical perspective."


He goes on. "To say 'dictatorship' or to speak about Putin as the 'KGB man,' I would be [embarrassed] to use such a term. That is maybe for some boulevard journalist, but this is definitely much more complicated. Putin is a much more complicated and structured personality than just the 'KGB man.' And I'm sure you know it."


But here his account took an inexplicable turn. Mr. Klaus, by his own description "no expert" on Russia, points to "a growing decentralization in the country. The role of the individual regions and those governors, they create a different style of thinking and I see an evolution in Russia."


These are the same governors that, formerly directly elected, are now appointed by Mr. Putin himself, which hardly seems a recipe either for decentralization or independence from Moscow. Even so, Mr. Klaus argues that "to be blind . . . to the real changes that have been going on there probably would be a mistake."


In Europe, Mr. Klaus has the reputation of a firebrand, if not a loose cannon. This is a president, after all, who calls global warming "alarmism" a "radical political project" based in a form of "Malthusianism" that is itself grounded on a "cynical approach [by] those who themselves are sufficiently well-off."


"It is not about climatology," he insists. "It is about freedom." Mr. Klaus left his hosts with a clear idea of why he so infuriates his opponents. There's no doubt, either, that he enjoys his self-assigned role as a contrarian.

Why Europe’s National Politicians Sign Away National Sovereignty

Brussels Journal


By John Laughland


Created 2007-12-19 15:15


http://www.brusselsjournal.com/node/2785


I have often compared the European Union to a cartel – a cartel of governments, engaged in a permanent conspiracy against their own electorates and parliaments. This analysis seems to have been dramatically confirmed by the Lisbon Treaty, signed last week, which replaces the defunct “constitution” rejected in referenda in France and the Netherlands in 2005.


Although a lot of anti-EU rhetoric rightly concentrates on the overweening power of the unelected European Commission – which indeed generates far too many laws and has an institutional self-interest in augmenting its own power – what many Eurosceptics overlook is that European integration also, and crucially, favours the power of national governments over that of their respective national parliaments. Because laws in the EU are made by the Council of Ministers, i.e. the committee of 27 ministers for whichever subject is being voted on, EU integration means that governments receive wide-ranging law-making powers.


This is, of course, incompatible with the principle of the separation of powers. According to that principle, the executive power (the government) should be separate from, and accountable to, the legislature (the national parliament) and of course the judiciary. Dictatorship is precisely the form of government in which the executive is not so constrained, and this is also the case in the EU.


Because the EU represents a dramatic and constant transfer of legislative power from national legislatures to national executives (sitting in the Council of Ministers), it can also be dubbed “a permanent coup d’état” (to use the phrase François Mitterrand used in 1965 to attack the powers of the Fifth Republic, long before he was happy to wield them himself). The fact that the Council of Ministers, the EU’s legislature, meets and votes in secret only makes the fundamentally anti-democratic character of the European construction even clearer.


It is for this simple reason that all establishment politicians, whether of Left or Right, are in favour of the EU. It increases their power and their room for manoeuvre. How much easier it is to pass laws in a quiet and secret meeting with your twenty-seven colleagues, than it is to do so in front of a fractious parliament where there is usually an in-built opposition which will attack whatever you do! How much more comfortable to engage in a bit of mild horse-trading with like-minded politicians from other countries, than to have to argue your case in the glare of public criticism! How much better to be able to vote an unpopular law and then blame “Europe” for it instead!


For many decades, this conspiracy worked wonderfully, mainly because Europe adopted and stuck to the so-called “Monnet method”. Named after the European Community’s brilliant if vain founder, Jean Monnet, the Monnet method consists in sapping power away from national parliaments on the quiet. This is achieved by pretending that the powers thus alienated are non-political – technical things like coal and steel, the common market, the single currency. This impression that the powers transferred are merely technical is reinforced by the fact that the transfers are usually effected by means of impenetrable treaties written in a language no one can understand.


There have been only two occasions when this principle has been abandoned, and on both occasions it had led to failure. The first was after the signature of the Maastricht treaty in December 1991. That treaty was conceived as a geopolitical quid pro quo for German unification: France agreed to the reunification of Germany on the basis that it would subsume its deutsche mark hegemony into that of the euro. In other words, it was a big political project which was presented to the electorate as such and as a great leap forward for European unification in general. It was rejected by Danish voters in June 1992. France responded by declaring that she too would hold a referendum, which in turn was very nearly rejected in September of that year. The Danes were forced to vote again in 1993, and so Europe’s pet project, the euro, passed by only a whisker.


The second time that Europe announced a big political project was when it drew up the constitution. However little interest people took in the details of treaty law, the word “constitution” was politically resonant. It focussed attention on the federal vocation of the EU, hitherto hidden from view by the Monnet method. People understood that it meant the permanent alienation of power from their nation-states, but it also allowed people to project their other worries clearly onto the EU, especially about excessive deregulation, competition from cheap labour countries in Eastern Europe, and of course the prospect of a new wave of immigration from Turkey if ever that country is admitted as an EU member.


Voters in France and the Netherlands, two founder members of the EU, therefore rejected the proposed constitution.


As a result of that rejection, Europe’s leaders have now decided to put behind them their foolish flirtation with democracy and return instead to the tried and tested method of doing things behind closed doors.


Rather than announcing a big political project in a language which most people can understand, the new Lisbon Treaty goes back to the old method of formulating only amendments to previous treaties. You simply cannot understand the text unless you go back through the previous treaties to see what articles are amended, which few people have the time or the inclination to do. Whereas the constitution at least had the merit of clarity, the new treaty displays all the old EU vices of opacity and legalese. This is quite deliberate. Europe’s leaders know that such a difficult text will never attract the same hostility as the old constitution because it is simply too difficult to understand.


How do we know that this is deliberate? We know because the author of the defunct constitution, the former French president, Valéry Giscard d’Estaing, has told us so. In an article in Le Monde in October, Giscard wrote that the new treaty had been composed “by jurists” who had taken the content of the old constitution and simply re-formulated it in terms of amendments to existing treaties.


“They started with the text of the constitution,” he wrote, “took its elements apart one by one, and made them correspond by means of amendments to the two existing treaties, Rome (1957) and Maastricht (1992) […] What is the purpose of this subtle manoeuvre? First and above all to escape from the constraint of having to hold a referendum by dispersing the articles and by renouncing the constitutional vocabulary.”


As I say, the EU is a cartel of governments and a conspiracy by them against their electorates. It is an affront to democracy and should be dissolved.

Sarkozy to Make France the 'Soul' of a 'New Renaissance" With 'A Policy of Civilization' Required By Europe's 'Old World.'???

A Union of the West? Balladur says it's time

By John Vinocur
Monday, January 7, 2008

International Herald Tribune


PARIS: And now for something radical. It's an idea that comes from a dour-looking man with an acute political mind whose ecclesiastically scarlet or royally purple socks peak out from under the dark trousers of Savile Row suits.

Here's his notion: The United States and Europe soon risk being overtaken by the rest of the world. To hold on to their place and value system, they ought to form an organic alliance, a Union of the West.

The time to get moving is now.

The idea comes from Edouard Balladur, the former French prime minister whose belly-of-the-beast Gaullist establishment credentials stretch back 40 years. Today, part of his pertinence lies in a close relationship with Nicolas Sarkozy, once his budget minister and spokesman, who a decade ago argued that Balladur would make a better president than Jacques Chirac.

For all its deliberately provocative and spiky aura, Balladur's Union of the West concept is not a bolt out of the blue.

Rather, it extends into a Great Notion a current, but still hesitant, attempt to bring the United States and the European Union closer together.

That project involves the sketchy outlines of a trans-Atlantic economic zone. Pushed by Angela Merkel, and backed in principle by Gordon Brown, it led last year to promising meetings between groups of EU commissioners and U.S. cabinet-level officials aimed at a vast harmonization of trade-related issues.

Worthy stuff, not radical or sexy, yet an undertaking that, an American participant said, "I think has legs."

But its wide, underlying premise has been left without substantial articulation by Merkel and Brown - and avoided by the Bush administration:

Europe and the United States acting in concert can best deal with China and Russia's advance, and the instability brought by radical Islam. Reality insists that alone, the Americans and Europeans have growing disadvantages in a world where the rule of law and democracy are not serving as controls over newly distributed economic and political power.

Balladur confronts the issue. He makes the case that half-measures that fail to bundle the West's strengths won't be a sufficient response. In a 120-page essay titled "Pour une Union occidentale entre l'Europe et les États-Unis," he says:
"History is starting to be made without the West, and perhaps one day it will be made against it.
"There's a simple method for avoiding this. The people of the West must become aware of the risk and convince themselves that the greatest possible solidarity between them is the only means for dealing with it."

For Balladur, there must be "a new alliance between Europe and America, and even more - a true union."

Twenty years ago, he told me, the idea was premature. That was just after the fall of the Berlin Wall and in the midst of the Soviet Union's implosion, when Secretary of State James Baker called for the development of a new, organic relationship between the European Union and the United States.

America was too uniquely all-powerful, and Europe too weak and suspicious of American dominance, for it to happen then. Now, in a new context, with the limits of U.S. power more apparent, and Europe's chances as a go-it-alone superstate limited or rejected, the concept has become actual.

Last autumn, Merkel, heightening the tone of her interest, said Europeans and Americans mistook "the mission of the trans-Atlantic relationship" if they did not to see that "combining our strengths goes in our interests, to our conception of being able to live by certain values."

Now, according to Balladur, France, as a former symbol of anti-Americanism, which realizes a weakened America disserves European interests, must take the initiative in creating a Union of the West.

The practicalities: a permanent Union secretariat to prepare common positions for international meetings; gradual creation of a common trans-Atlantic market; linkage between the dollar and euro; converging policies on energy supply and its security; and the creation of a trans-Atlantic executive council of leaders that would convene every three months.

Balladur won't say if that council should have decision-making powers. But he insists it would represent "immense progress" if it met frequently, and if "neither Europeans nor Americans could decide anything about common problems without having talked them through beforehand."

Drivel born out of desperation? An escapist proposal that excuses the rich and comfortable from looking closer and less indulgently at their own failures?

"Too great an ambition?" Balladur asks the question himself, and sounds Oswald Spengler-ish in providing an answer.

"There aren't any others that will allow the West to escape the decline threatening it." America's indispensability has a 20-year time frame; Europe has to stop "nourishing" its "illusion of power."

Sarkozy's old mentor sent his essay to the president, and he has telephoned Balladur to thank him for it.

For a politician who lives his life and makes policy outside the confines of convention, great ambitions don't confront much inhibition.

Seven months into a five-year term, Sarkozy has already struck a claim to European leadership, proposed a Mediterranean Union for the European and Arab countries along its shores and readied France's reintegration in NATO on the condition it gets its share of prestigious commands.

He plays big.

Sarkozy's New Year's to-do list includes making France the "soul" of a "new renaissance" with "a policy of civilization" required by "our old world."

On a Union of the West, if Sarkozy played a little smaller against the background of a leadership change in America, reaching not so much for effect but for the proposal's nuggets of practicality and general good sense, it might just have a long-shot chance at some success.

Shaping Our Fears With the Right Information

The Role of Information in the Development of Fear Beliefs: End of Award Report

By Andy Peter Field and Robin Banerjee

Economic and Social Research Council (ESRC) (July 2005) (Excerpts)


“Results showed that both positive and negative information changed fear beliefs…The Source of Information did not interact with the effect of the information, either explicitly in the FBQ scores or implicitly in the Affective Priming measure. This was in contrast to previous work which found that information was only effective at altering fear beliefs if it came from an adult rather than a peer (Field, Argyris & Knowles, 2001). Experiment 3, however, matched the faces and voices of the different informants much more closely and presenting them via the computer may also have reduced the felt difference between the informants…Fear beliefs did increase significantly after negative information compared to after no information and after positive information. Source of Information did not moderate or influence the effect of information in any way.

Affective Priming also showed differences between the negatively and positively portrayed situations, showing that the information had had an effect at an implicit level as well as at the explicit level…changes in fear beliefs did alter causal learning.

Specifically, negative information increased the rate at which a congruent causal
relationship was detected, and led to an overestimation of the frequency of negative outcomes when the causal relationship was incongruent with information and the actual frequency of negative outcomes was only 20%. For positive information, the results were broadly similar. Participants were quicker to detect the 80% frequency of positive outcomes after they had been given positive information about the situation and, when the outcomes were incongruent (that is, 80% negative and only 20% positive), participants consistently overpredicted the frequency of positive outcomes. This suggests that information can interact with causal learning experiences, and may in some cases have a protective effect.

Even after 40 trials of an 80% negative outcome, positive information led to an underestimate of the likelihood of a negative outcome…A key feature of clinical phobias and excessive fears is that they do not respond to verbal reassurances and show a resistance to extinction. That is, despite repeated experiences of the phobic object not leading to aversive outcomes, the fear persists.

...Further research should look at whether the type of fear learning that results from information is resistant to extinction or whether it can easily be reversed by contrary experience or information. The results of the causal learning experiments suggest that information can bias the processing of subsequent contrary evidence to minimise its evidential value. Elucidating the processes that lead to the persistence of fears and phobias in the face of contradictory evidence could have very useful therapeutic implications.”

The Fear Factor Behind Europe's UN-Centered 'Negative' Sustainable Development

A. The Power and Dynamic of Fear

The well-known Italian political philosopher, Niccolo Machiavelli, once opined that,

“[S]ince love and fear can hardly exist together, if we must choose between them, it is far safer to be feared than loved.” [1]

Many political theorists have since recognized the wisdom of Machiavelli’s words, particularly, how “our evolved physiological makeup disposes us to fear all sorts of actual and potential threats, even those that exist only in our imagination”. Governments, as well, “understand this basic fact of human nature.” [2]

“The people who have the effrontery to rule us, who call themselves our government, understand this basic fact of human nature. They exploit it, and they cultivate it. Whether they compose a warfare state or a welfare state, they depend on it to secure popular submission, compliance with official dictates, and, on some occasions, affirmative cooperation with the state's enterprises and adventures. Without popular fear, no government could endure more than twenty-four hours.” [3]

Indeed, as some have suggested, fear is a depreciable asset that continually requires “maintenance, modernization and replacement”. Therefore, governments have become savvy about not overloading the public's sensibilities, and about periodically investing in their “stock of fear capital”, lest the people will “eventually discount government's attempts to frighten them further.”[4]

At least one authoritative British study recently evaluated the use of fear as a stimulus for learning. It looked at the impact of negative information on the formation and persistence of children’s fear beliefs. The study found not only that a person’s fear beliefs increased significantly after hearing negative information (much more so than after hearing positive information or no information at all), but also, that negative information also altered a person’s “causal learning”. In fact, negative information “led to an overestimation of the frequency of negative outcomes [for future events even] when the causal relationship was incongruent with [the] information and the actual frequency of negative outcomes” was much, much less (“20% of the time).[5] In other words, negative information caused them subsequently to over-predict the frequency of negative outcomes.

The study concluded such findings to be significant, given that a “key feature of clinical phobias and excessive fears is that they do not respond to verbal reassurances and…that…despite repeated experiences of the phobic object not leading to aversive outcomes, the fear persists…” [6]

Scholars, furthermore, have noted how ‘fear’ serves as an efficient tool of governance and subjugation, especially when fear is promoted in the media and used to keep the public in a state of artificially heightened fatigue and apprehension. This, in turn, paves the way for greater government control over individual freedoms and rights, via regulation, taxation, reporting and surveillance.

“… By keeping the population in a state of artificially heightened apprehension, the government-cum-media prepares the ground for planting specific measures of taxation, regulation, surveillance, reporting, and other invasions of the people's wealth, privacy, and freedoms. Left alone for a while, relieved of this ceaseless bombardment of warnings, people would soon come to understand that hardly any of the announced threats has any substance and that they can manage their own affairs quite well without the security-related regimentation and tax-extortion the government seeks to justify. Large parts of the government and the "private" sector participate in the production and distribution of fear…At every point, opportunists latch onto existing fears and strive to invent new ones to feather their own nests.” [7]

Last, but not least, fear is being used to induce fundamental changes in human behavior, with respect to the environment, without the opportunity for public dissent. For example, should anyone, including scientists, engineers, lawyers, businesspersons, politicians and reformed environmental activists[8] dare to get in the way of the environment-centric message now being crafted and to publicly refute the ostensible science underlying the political consensus formed among European nations, UN bureaucrats, American Europhiles and environmental activists, it is virtually assured that they will be publicly castigated and discredited,[9] and their views censored.[10]

This has already occurred at the hands of the liberal media elite,[11] scientific journals controlled by the liberal agenda,[12] and an emboldened band of liberal and politically correct Congressional[13] and European government representatives.[14] Such persons, apparently, have determined that it is absolutely necessary to stifle public debates on critically important policy questions concerning the environment that they believe they might lose.[15] This censorship has occurred before the public has even had a chance to participate or to evaluate the conflicting evidence.[16]

Coincidentally, ‘enlightened’ members of the U.S. Congress also seem to embrace an uneducated preference for knee-jerk ‘go-along-to-get-along’ European-style multilateralism, whether or not it would endanger the long term security of the United States.

It is extremely ironic that, just as former vice president Al Gore, in 2004, had “denounced President Bush for ‘playing on our fears’” with respect to the threat of terrorism, Mr. Gore and many congressional Democrats and ‘soft’ Republicans are now “at the forefront of a ‘green scare’ about global warming [and other potential environmental hazards] intended to terrify Americans into submitting to [their politically preferred] environmental policies.”[17] One such policy would be to adopt the European Precautionary Principle as the basis US federal, state and local environmental, health and safety law,[18] even though it is incapable of ensuring against a great many public environmental and health risks, and may actually cause more public harm than good.[19]

Indeed, environmental scaremongering and misinformation, especially in Europe, can be traced back to the accidental 1986 explosion and subsequent radiation leak at the Chernobyl nuclear plant in the Ukraine. Research performed by the United Nations Development Program found that, “fear, not radiation…truly afflicted the peoples of the region” (emphasis added).[20] Later research confirmed that scaremongering and misinformation had served to shape negative public opinion surrounding nuclear energy and to bolster public support for a greater government role in protecting and assisting the public against such hazards in the future.

This had a truly profound impact on Ukrainian public opinion during the ensuing years, despite the fact that little empirical evidence of actual harm was later adduced that justified such fears.

According to Kalman Mizsei, former UN Assistant Secretary-General and UNDP Regional Director for Europe and the Commonwealth of Independent States,

“[A] lack of information and a Soviet legacy of fatalism have left Chernobyl survivors convinced that they continue to live under a cloud, resulting in a culture of despair and dependency that has stunted development in the impoverished region…Research shows that people still don't know what the effects are…The fatalistic mentality that communism created has shifted to Chernobyl.” [21]

In the words of best-selling author, Michael Crichton, however, “Authoritatively telling people they are going to die can in itself be fatal.”[22]

B. The Use of Fear by European Governments

French President Jacques Chirac recently delivered a speech in Paris, France to the “Citizens of the Earth Conference for Ecological Global Governance”. French bureaucrats,[23] environmental activists and fear-inciters extraordinaire, including climate alarmists such as former US vice president Al Gore and disputed British political economist Nicholas Stern, also spoke at this event.

Mr. Chirac emphasized, in his trademark Gaullist tone and condescending paternalistic manner, that there is an immediate need for a new French-led post-WWII global paradigm. He argues that it is necessitated by the ‘environmental emergency’/ ‘environmental crisis’ at hand that could conceivably lead to an international ‘environmental war’. With fear as his motivator, Monsieur Chirac thus recommends the adoption of a new paradigm based on the negative Malthusian[24] notion of environment-centric sustainable development.

The French president extolled the multiple purposes of the Earth Conference as indispensable to saving the planet from such threats. There were three:

“[1] To raise awareness of the urgency of the situation, taking stock together of the threats facing the environment and endangering the broad ecological balances of our planet[;] [2] To decide upon priority measures to combat those threats in order to respond to the global ecological issues for our time and for generations to come[;] [and 3] To take action, at international level, to create a United Nations Environment Organization (UNEO) with a view to strengthening environmental governance.” [25]

Monsieur Chirac began by setting the forth the following fear-based rationale for engaging in ‘enlightened’ global environmental governance; a/k/a negative sustainable development:

“The planet is sick. The symptoms are its increasingly frequent extreme reactions – hurricanes, floods and droughts. Nature is sick. Species are dying out at an alarming rate. We have proof that human activity is causing these disorders. The day is fast approaching when runaway climate change will spin out of control. We have almost reached the historic point of no return… For years now, in the European institutions, in the G8, in all the international fora, France has been battling – I have been battling – to draw attention to the environmental emergency at hand”. [26]

Mr. Chirac then proceeded to chastise humankind and to criticize the current post-WWII paradigm as contributing to such environmental emergency:

“Why are we not taking the steps that need to be taken? Because in our reprehensible selfishness we refuse to face the facts; because we are unable to shake off outmoded mindsets and an economic structure inherited from the nineteenth century; because our international policy-making structure is ill-suited to the crucial issue of the twenty-first century, namely the environment.” [27]

According to Chirac, we must develop a ‘humanist environmentalism’, that leads to the creation of a new “fundamental…human right – the right to a sound and protected [as opposed to a ‘clean’] environment”. In addition, such human right must be universally recognized via the adoption at the UN of a “Universal Declaration of Environmental Rights and Duties”, which would be binding on all nations and peoples.

“Our responsibility towards the earth is inseparable from our responsibility to humanity. The environmental imperative opens an unprecedented chapter in human rights. We must assert and enforce a new fundamental right – the right to a sound and protected environment. That is the meaning of humanist environmentalism. We need a revolution in our culture. We must educate everyone, especially the very young, in environmental issues. To ensure that we all become ‘Citizens of the Earth’, let us adopt a Universal Declaration of Environmental Rights and Duties at the United Nations. The Declaration will be an expression of our common environmental ethics, which will underpin our public and individual endeavours.” [xxviii]

In addition, President Chirac noted the economic and other sacrifices that ALL developed nations and individuals, including Americans, must make in the name of negative sustainable development.

“[T]he sustainable development revolution...will require a radical transformation in our production and consumption patterns and stewardship of natural resources and environments. It will mean cutting pollution; including environmental quality in calculating GDP; and pricing natural resources fairly. Companies must take on board their environmental responsibilities…The most innovative and environmentally protective economies will be the most powerful economies. To achieve that, however, we need clear and fair competition rules. Either the international community knuckles down, or there will be an ‘environmental war’. The burden must be fairly shared. The countries of the North were the first to build their wealth on the massive exploitation of natural resources. They must shoulder their share of responsibility by complying, within a concerted framework, with production rules and environmental standards. These are the focus of the negotiations on combating global warming within the framework of the United Nations Convention, which are to be completed before 2009 and which cover the post-Kyoto Protocol period”. [29]

Last, but not least, Chirac called for the creation of a multilateral environmental organization with the authority to ensure environment-centric sustainable development and international peace.

“[T]he environmental imperative is increasingly shaping local and national policies. But this struggle must be waged at a global level. The environmental crisis recognizes no borders. Yet we still, all too often, fail to act together. We must build world environmental governance. In this area as in others, unilateralism leads nowhere. Just as multilateralism is the prerequisite for peace, it is the key to sustainable development. The United Nations Environment Programme is outstanding, and I want to pay tribute to it. But it does not have adequate powers or institutional clout. We must aim to transform it into a fully-fledged United Nations agency. This UNEO will act as the world's ecological conscience. It will carry out impartial and scientific assessment of environmental dangers. It will have policy-making terms of reference giving it the legitimacy to implement action jointly decided. It will lend greater weight and greater cohesion to our collective endeavours. The goal of this conference is to mobilize all our citizens and all sections of our societies and to set up a group of pioneer countries prepared to support the United Nations Environment Organization project and to win over those who are still hesitant to join us.” [30]

C. The European Commission’s ‘Fear Report’

A 2003 report prepared by the European Commission[31] had previously highlighted the negative physical and emotional impacts associated with public fears generated by a host of hazardous human activities. It explained how the public’s perceptions, fears and impressions of uncertain and hypothetical future hazards are often directly responsible for the tensions and psychosomatic ailments that reduce human ‘well-being’ as defined by the World Health Organization, and thereby, the ‘quality of life’. It also found that such fears are largely rooted in cultural and ethical values “which can be different regionally and individually and even change in time.”[32]

“[A]nxieties stem not from a general and unavoidable fear of the unknown, but partly from the failures of the EU risk communication and technology education, and partly from the ‘unnatural character of new technologies’. These failings have allegedly had a profound impact on Europeans’ perception of self-autonomy and have thus resulted in the public experiencing higher levels of stress and feelings of helplessness." [33]

The report identified a number of economic activities that the European public perceives as being too risky.[34] These include “exposure to health hazards by chemical factors, safety of food and drinking water, natural and manmade poisons, infectious diseases, and new technologies, especially biotechnology. They include also the welfare of companion animals, wildlife and animals in general, as well as the environment as a whole.”[35]

Interestingly, the report did not consider the possibility that these higher levels of stress might be traceable in part to the false and exaggerated claims of technological harm put out time and again by extremist environmental organizations and ‘green’ publications. Rather, it concluded that public risk perception and risk communication have a direct bearing on ‘quality of life’ considerations and human ‘well-being’, whether or not the risks are real, and that such fears have reduced public confidence in the ability of EU regulators to protect them from harm.

To reduce these negative impacts and improve Europeans’ quality of life, the report called for risk assessments to go beyond the traditional use of ‘hard’ analytical science (e.g., statistical analyses of likelihood of severity of harm, actual exposure data, and the likely impact on affected exposure groups). In other words, risk assessments would need to encompass also the use of ‘soft’ social science principles that reflected subjective ‘quality of life’ notions.

The report thus recommended that aspects of the quality of life beyond traditional risk assessment and risk management are to be included in the [risk evaluation] process via the Precautionary Principle.[36] In other words, the report called for more and more stringent regulation. Thus, the European Commission had hoped to rely upon the report’s findings to change the scientific risk assessment protocols which it and the EU’s member states could rely upon to justify European Precautionary Principle-based regulations at variance with World Trade Organization rules.

D. The Embrace of Fear by the WTO Director-General

While it may be comforting to believe that the extreme ideas articulated by Monsieur Chirac are embraced only by his fellow European leaders, and perhaps even by socialist UN bureaucrats, think again. Similar thoughts have also been expressed by none other than World Trade Organization Director-General, Pascal Lamy. Although one may be inclined to dismiss Monsieur Lamy as another Frenchmen reared in the socialist tradition, he is, in his official capacity, obliged to defend the negotiated rules and principles of the international free trade system against illegitimate abuse via disguised protectionism. However, he appears not to have assumed his responsibility as seriously as he should.[37]

In a recent speech delivered to the UN Environment Programme Governing Council and Environment Ministerial in Nairobi, Kenya, Mr. Lamy, too, sought to incite public fear. He alleged that free trade advocates were seeking to derail the WTO Doha Round trade negotiations by refusing to engage in negotiation of environmental matters. He warned that “failure of the Doha negotiations ‘would strengthen the hand of all those who argue that economic growth should proceed unchecked’ without regard for the environment. He then stressed that ‘trade, and indeed the WTO, must be made to deliver sustainable development’”.[38] “It was the first time a WTO leader had attended the UN Environment Programme's Governing Council meetings, and his attendance was hailed by environmental campaigners.” [39]

“The Doha Round of trade negotiations contains a promise for the environment. A promise to allow for a more efficient allocation of resources — including natural ones — on a global scale through a continued reduction of obstacles to trade (tariffs and subsidies). But it also includes a promise to ensure greater harmony between the WTO and MEAs: a promise to tear down the barriers that stand in the way of trade in clean technologies and services; as well as a promise to reduce the environmentally harmful agricultural subsidies that are leading to overproduction and harmful fisheries subsidies which are encouraging over-fishing and depleting the world's fish stock.” [40]

In referring to this need, Lamy invoked the quasi-Pagan name ‘Gaia’ that environmental extremists have long used to personify, worship and protect planet Earth (‘Mother Earth’)[41] against most human interference. He did so, just as he emphasized the urgency of re-launching environmental negotiations at the Doha Round. According to Lamy, global adherence to environment-centric sustainable development is no longer an ‘option’ – it is now a ‘must’. “A sustainable development strategy, linking all international actors, must become our goal. We must not wait for Gaia to react!” [42]

“According to the Gaia Hypothesis, we are parts of a greater whole (he said). Our destiny is not dependent merely on what we do for ourselves but also what we do for Gaia as a whole. If we endanger her, she will dispense with us in the interests of a higher value — life itself…In 1987, when the Brundtland Report coined the term “sustainable development”, many of us saw it as one option. The other option was the business-as-usual scenario. Twenty years later no one can argue that sustainable development is a choice anymore. It has become a must. Sustainable development should be the cornerstone of our approach to globalization and to the global governance architecture that we create…[T]he WTO stands ready to do its part.” [43]

To achieve environment-centric sustainable development, Mr. Lamy called for greater and more integrated global governance at a supra-national level. This involves synchronized environmental and trade policies, as well as synchronized global institutions - the WTO, UNEP, and MEAs by which all nations, including America, would be bound.

“[T]he world has become interconnected to a point, that today it is impossible for a country to live and prosper in isolation of the rest of the world…Clearly, globalization is a phenomenon that requires careful management…The management of globalization would allow us to capture its benefits, while leaving behind its downside [i.e., pollution that crosses borders]…There is no doubt that the world needs more effective ‘global governance’ — governance at a level that transcends national boundaries. Our institutions of global governance must therefore be strengthened. They must also be made to function as a more coherent whole. This applies to the WTO, and to all other international institutions, which should complement each other…In today's world, our policies are not fully synchronized. Greater awareness of the need for this synchronization is, first and foremost, required of governments. We need to turn the page on the era in which governments would bring conflicting positions to different fora. The right hand of government should not compete with its left hand. The WTO, UNEP, and MEAs — as well as all other international institutions — must be put to work towards a shared sustainable development vision” (emphasis added). [44]


[1] See Niccolò Machiavelli, The Prince, 1513.
[2] See Robert Higgs, “The Political Economy of Fear”, Ludwig von Mises Institute (5/16/05) at: http://www.mises.org/story/1819#_ftnref1 .
[3] Ibid.
[4] Ibid.
[5] See Andy Peter Field and Robin Banerjee, “The Role of Information in the Development of Fear Beliefs: End of Award Report”, Economic and Social Research Council (ESRC) (July 2005) at: http://www.statisticshell.com/research/childfear.htm .
[6] Ibid.
[7] Robert Higgs, supra.
[8] “Greenpeace co-founder and former leader Dr. Patrick Moore said the United Kingdom's Royal Society should stop playing a political blame game on global warming and retract its recent letter that smacks of a repressive and anti-intellectual attitude. ‘It appears to be the policy of the Royal Society to stifle dissent and silence anyone who may have doubts about the connection between global warming and human activity,’ said Dr. Moore, Chairman and Chief Scientist of Vancouver, Canada-based Greenspirit Strategies Ltd. ‘That kind of repression seems more suited to the Inquisition than to a modern, respected scientific body,’ said Moore. In a letter dated September 4 and published this week in a London newspaper, the Royal Society's Bob Ward accused ExxonMobil of misleading the public by daring to question the link between human activity and increases in global temperatures” (emphasis added). See “Greenpeace Co-founder Asks UK's Royal Society to Stop Playing Political Blame Game on Global Warming” PR Newswire (9/21/06) at: http://www.prnewswire.co.uk/cgi/news/release?id=179680 .
[9] “As Richard Lindzen, professor of meteorology at MIT, recently lamented in the Wall Street Journal: ‘Scientists who dissent from the alarmism have seen their grant funds disappear, their work derided, and themselves libeled as industry stooges, scientific hacks or worse. Consequently, lies about climate change gain credence even when they fly in the face of the science that supposedly is their basis’…[T]o the greens…the only thing we have to fear is the lack of fear itself” (emphasis added). See Jonah Goldberg, “Conveniently Missing the Truth”, National Review Online (4/21/06) at: http://www.nationalreview.com/goldberg/goldberg200604210711.asp .
[10] See United States Senator James Inhofe, “Hot and Cold Media Spin Cycle: A Challenge to Journalists Who Cover Global Warming – A Skeptics Guide to Debunking Global Warming Alarmism”, Senate Floor Speech and Global Warming Related Materials (9/25/06) at: http://epw.senate.gov/public/index.cfm?FuseAction=Files.View&FileStore_id=56dd129d-e40a-4bad-abd9-68c808e8809e .
[11] In the case of global warming, such scaremongering has been undertaken despite the fact that “60 climatologists from around the world who wrote Canada's prime minister that ‘observational evidence does not support today's computer climate models…[Consequently,’…there is little reason to trust model predictions of the future.’ But that's all beside the point to Gore & Co., who say the time for debate is over. And if you disagree, get ready for the witch-hunt. Major news media have gone after scientists who argue there's still time to study global warming rather than plunge into some half-baked environmental jihad that could waste possibly trillions of dollars.” See Jonah Goldberg, “Conveniently Missing the Truth”, supra.
[12] “Two of the world's leading scientific journals have come under fire from researchers for refusing to publish papers which challenge fashionable wisdom over global warming. A British authority on natural catastrophes who disputed whether climatologists really agree that the Earth is getting warmer because of human activity, says his work was rejected by the American publication, Science, on the flimsiest of grounds. A separate team of climate scientists, which was regularly used by Science and the journal Nature to review papers on the progress of global warming, said it was dropped after attempting to publish its own research which raised doubts over the issue.” See Robert Matthews, “Leading Scientific Journals Are ‘Censoring Debate on Global Warming’”, UK Telegraph (5/1/05) at: http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/main.jhtml?xml=/news/2005/05/01/wglob01.xml&sSheet=/news/2005/05/01/ixworld.html .
[13] "In an effort to call attention to the detrimental effects of industry-funded, so-called ‘research’ in the debate on global climate change, Senators John (Jay) Rockefeller IV (D-WV) and Olympia Snowe (R-ME) today called on the world’s largest oil company to end its funding of a climate change denial campaign. Rockefeller and Snowe’s effort would also reassert the leading role of the United States in addressing important global issues that demand the world’s collective attention. Rockefeller and Snowe said that ExxonMobil’s extensive funding of an “echo chamber” of non-peer reviewed pseudo-science had unfortunately succeeded in raising questions about the legitimate scientific community’s virtually universal findings on the detrimental effects of global warming. This ongoing “debate” has also damaged America’s reputation as a leader in global affairs.” See “Rockefeller and Snowe Demand that Exxon Mobil End Funding of Campaign that Denies Global Climate Change”, Olympia J. Snowe, United States Senator for Maine (10/30/06) at: http://snowe.senate.gov/public/index.cfm?FuseAction=PressRoom.PressReleases&ContentRecord_id=9acba744-802a-23ad-47be-2683985c724e .
[14] “In a speech to the Royal United Services Institute on November 9, foreign secretary Margaret Beckett called on the media to deny terrorists and their supporters a platform…But then she said something shocking. ‘I've seen [the same thing] in the long-running debate on climate change: wheel out the resident sceptic, however unrepresentative or discredited, to generate tension and voice provocative views in the name of editorial balance. It makes for more heated exchanges and louder headlines. But it is not the way to build a common consensus on the ground we share’…Here, Beckett explicitly compared ‘climate-change skeptics’ to terrorists, and implied that both should be denied media air time. In one fell swoop, she demonised those who challenge the consensus on climate change by lumping them in with radicals who support the use of violence, and suggested these sceptics should be censored…[T]he fact [though,] is that most of them are scientists, and many of them work in British universities. Yet…the secretary of state for foreign affairs put[] these middle-class professionals in the same camp as terrorists who, according to the government, pose the greatest threat to life and liberty as we know it. Beckett is following a trend. Increasingly, environmentalists are calling for the silencing of climate-change sceptics or deniers. The deniers' words are so dangerous, we are told, that they must be censored for the good of humanity. Some have even claimed that in denying climate change, these individuals are committing a ‘crime against humanity’ and should be put on trial.”See Brendan O’Neill, “A Climate of Censorship”, Guardian Unlimited (11/22/06) at: http://commentisfree.guardian.co.uk/brendan_oneill/2006/11/a_climate_of_censorship.html . [15] See Kevin Mooney, “Activists Try to Shut Down Climate Debate, Skeptics Say”, CNSNews.com (1/23/07) at: http://www.cnsnews.com/ViewCulture.asp?Page=/Culture/archive/200701/CUL20070123a.html .
[16] See Bonner Cohen, The Green Wave: Environmentalism and its Consequences, Capital Research Center (©2006).
[17] See Jonah Goldberg, “Conveniently Missing the Truth”, supra.
[18] See Lawrence A. Kogan, “Exporting Precaution: How Europe’s Risk-Free Regulatory Agenda Threatens American Free Enterprise”, supra at pp. 43-91; Lawrence A. Kogan, “Precautionary Preference: How Europe Employs Disguised Regulatory Protectionism to Weaken American Free Enterprise”, supra at: pp. 152-240.
[19] For example, a Precautionary Principle-based REACH chemicals regulation will be unable to ensure that greater risks to human health and the environment will not materialize through use of mandated substitute substances and products, and thereby likely trigger what risk managers term a ‘risk-risk’ scenario. “Policymakers face a serious dilemma. If they design policies according to the risk perceptions of lay people, they actually may tolerate more real sacrifices in terms of lives lost or human suffering than necessary. If they follow only the advice of the professional experts, they may lose public support or even sympathy.” See Ortwin Renn, “Risks and Society”, Presentation made at the Directorate General, Health and Consumer Protection, International Conference: .Risk Analysis and Its Role in the European Union”, Brussels (July 18-19, 2000), available online at http://europa.eu.int/comm/food/risk/session1_1_en.pdf ;
www.konsumentsamverkan.se/evenemang/brysselriskprogram.html , cited in Lawrence A. Kogan, “The Precautionary Principle and WTO Law: Divergent Views Toward the Role of Science in Assessing and Managing Risk”, Seton Hall Journal of Diplomacy and International Relations V(1), Winter/Spring 2004, pages 77-123 at p. 77, at: http://diplomacy.shu.edu/journal/KOGAN%20-%20Precautionary%20Principle%20&%20WTO%20Law.pdf .
[20] See “Fear, Not Radiation, the Sad Legacy of Chernobyl”, United Nations Development Program, Europe and the Commonwealth of Independent States (Sept. 2005) at: http://europeandcis.undp.org/?menu=p_cms/show&content_id=A4CC9963-F203-1EE9-B777058EE3F5D77D , citing the Chernobyl Forum report, “Chernobyl’s Legacy: Health, Environmental and Socio-Economic Impacts,”
[21] Ibid. Indeed, “The experts concluded that the majority of people who had been living in the contaminated area received only low doses of radiation. There is no evidence of decreased fertility, or of an increase in birth defects. There have been 4,000 cases of thyroid cancer caused by the blast, mainly in children, but except for nine fatalities, all of them have recovered. Moreover, the accident has been far less damaging to the environment than originally feared. Except for the still closed, highly contaminated 30-kilometre area surrounding the reactor, and a few lakes and restricted forests, radiation levels have mostly returned to acceptable levels. While the report makes clear that Chernobyl was a ‘very serious accident with major health consequences,’ it also found that ‘the mental health impact of Chernobyl is the largest public health problem unleashed by the accident to date’. Misinformation has led many Chernobyl survivors to believe that they are doomed to die from the radiation. Ironically such fatalism has caused many to disregard their health, exacerbating existing problems such as poor diet, excessive drinking and tobacco use. ‘Fear is not allowing [these people] to get on with their lives,’ said Burton Bennett, chairman of the Chernobyl Forum and an authority on radiation effects. The real problem of the Chernobyl area, as for much of the former Soviet Union, is poverty, said Mr. Mizsei, but misperceptions have helped to keep moneys from being used effectively for development.” Ibid.
[22] See Michael Crichton, “Fear, Complexity, & Environmental Management in the 21st Century”, Washington Center for Complexity and Public Policy (11/6/05) at: http://www.michaelcrichton.com/speeches/complexity/complexity.html . “[T]he greatest damage to the people of Chernobyl was caused by bad information. These people weren’t blighted by radiation so much as by terrifying but false information. We ought to ponder, for a minute, exactly what that implies. We demand strict controls on radiation because it is such a health hazard. But Chernobyl suggests that false information can be a health hazard as damaging as radiation. I am not saying radiation is not a threat. I am not saying Chernobyl was not a genuinely serious event. But thousands of Ukrainians who didn’t die were made invalids out of fear. They were told to be afraid. They were told they were going to die when they weren’t. They were told their children would be deformed when they weren’t. They were told they couldn’t have children when they could. They were authoritatively promised a future of cancer, deformities, pain and decay. It’s no wonder they responded as they did. In fact, we need to recognize that this kind of human response is well-documented. Authoritatively telling people they are going to die can in itself be fatal.” Ibid.
[23] See “Biography, Committee of Honour”, “Citizens of the Earth” Conference for Global Ecological Governance at: http://www.citoyensdelaterre.fr/conference/?Biography-Committee-of-honour ; “Steering Committee” , “Citizens of the Earth” Conference for Global Ecological Governance at: http://www.citoyensdelaterre.fr/conference/?-Steering-Committee-&lang=en .
[24] In his famous work, An Essay on the Principle of Population, eighteen century English economist Sir Thomas Malthus wrote that “the realization of a happy society will always be hindered by the miseries consequent on the tendency of population to increase faster than the means of subsistence.” See “Thomas Robert Malthus 1766-1834”, Online Encyclopedia at: http://encyclopedia.jrank.org/MAL_MAR/MALTHUS_THOMAS_ROBERT_1766_1834.html . In other words, Malthus “opined that poverty and distress are unavoidable because population increases faster than the means of subsistence. As checks on population growth, Malthus accepted only war, famine, and disease but later added moral restraint.” See “Biographies – Political Theorists and Activists” at: http://www.blupete.com/Literature/Biographies/Philosophy/BiosPol.htm . “[B]oth historically and philosophically the doctrine of Malthus was a corrective reaction against the superficial optimism diffused by the school of Rousseau. It was the same optimism, with its easy methods of regenerating society and its fatal blindness to the real conditions that circumscribe human life, that was responsible for the wild theories of the French Revolution and many of its consequent excesses…[Malthus] and his followers appear to have greatly exaggerated both the magnitude and the urgency of the dangers to which they pointed. In their conceptions a single social imperfection assumed such portentous dimensions that it seemed to overcloud the whole heaven and threaten the world with ruin. This doubtless arose from his having at first omitted altogether from his view of the question the great counteracting agency of moral restraint. Because a force exists, capable, if unchecked, of producing certain results, it does not follow that those results are imminent or even possible in the sphere of experience.” See Robert Malthus 1766-1834”, Online Encyclopedia, supra.
[25] See “Presentation”, “Citizens of the Earth” Conference for Global Ecological Governance at: http://www.citoyensdelaterre.fr/conference/?-Presentation,10- .
[26] “See Speech by M. Jacques Chirac, President of the Republic, on the Occasion of the “Citizens of the Earth” Conference for Global Ecological Governance (2/2/07) at:
http://www.diplomatie.gouv.fr/actu/bulletin.gb.asp?liste=20070202.gb.html&submit.x=6&submit.y=9 ;
http://www.citoyensdelaterre.fr/conference/?Appel-de-Paris ; http://www.citoyensdelaterre.fr/conference/?-English-.
[27] Ibid.
[28] See Speech by M. Jacques Chirac, supra.
[29] Ibid. France and Great Britain, with the support of the European Commission, have pushed for this result. They have also sent emissaries to the United States in the hopes of persuading federal congressional and state level action on climate change. See “Britain Leads EU Charge to Undermine US Federal Climate Change Policy”, Press Release, Institute for Trade, Standards and Sustainable Development (7/17/06) at: http://www.itssd.org/Press%20Release/BritainUndermines.pdf . See also Lawrence A. Kogan, “Beware of the Flying Dutchman When Traveling to Brussels”, Institute for Trade, Standards and Sustainable Development (Aug. 2006) at: http://www.itssd.org/Publications/Beware-Flying-DutchmanIII.pdf .
[30] See Speech by M. Jacques Chirac, supra.
[31] See “Final Report on Setting the Scientific Frame for the Inclusion of New Quality of Life Concerns in the Risk Assessment Process”, adopted April 10-11, 2003, European Commission, Health & Consumer Protection Directorate-General, at: http://ec.europa.eu/food/fs/sc/ssc/out362_en.pdf .
[32] See Lawrence A. Kogan, “Exporting Europe's Protectionism”, National Interest No. 77 (Fall 2004), pp. 91-99 at 93-94, at: http://www.itssd.org/Publications/Kogan%20TNI%2077FINAL.pdf .
[33] Ibid., at 94.
[34] Ibid., at 94.
[35] “Final Report on Setting the Scientific Frame for the Inclusion of New Quality of Life Concerns in the Risk Assessment Process”, at pp. 3-4, supra.
[36] Ibid., at pp. 3, 22-23, 30, 33.
[37] See Lawrence A. Kogan, “Polluting the Future of the WTO”, Institute for Trade, Standards and Sustainable Development (July 2006) at: http://www.itssd.org/Publications/PollutingtheFuture.pdf ; Lawrence A. Kogan, “EU Trade Protectionism Must Yield to Non-EU Market Access Demands”, Institute for Trade, Standards and Sustainable Development (July 2006) at: http://www.itssd.org/Publications/EU-Trade-Protectionism.pdf .
[38] See Speech by Pascal Lamy, “Globalisation and the Environment in a Reformed UN”, (2/5/07) at p. 3, at: http://www.polity.org.za/pdf/Lamt5_2.pdf .
[39] See “Interview – Free Trade Can Help Guard the Environment – WTO”, Planet Ark (2/6/07) at: http://www.planetark.com/dailynewsstory.cfm/newsid/40201/story.htm .
[40] Ibid.
[41] “The Gaia hypothesis is an ecological theory that proposes that the living matter of planet Earth functions like a single organism…[T]he Gaia theory is more commonly referred to as earth system science, and is a class of scientific models of the geo-biosphere in which life as a whole fosters and maintains suitable conditions for itself by helping to create an environment on Earth suitable for its continuity…[According to one advocate of this theory,] life on Earth provides a cybernetic, homeostatic feedback system [i.e., life maintains the stability of the natural environment, and that this stability enables life to continue to exist] operated automatically and unconsciously by the biota, leading to broad stabilization of global temperature and chemical composition. [However, there is disagreement among Gaia advocates about whether Earth is or is not a living organism. According to another advocate]…only homeorhetic and not homeostatic balances are involved: that is, the composition of Earth's atmosphere, hydrosphere, and lithosphere are regulated around ‘set points’ as in homeostatis, but those set points change with time. Also…there is no special tendency of biospheres to preserve their current inhabitants, and certainly not to make them comfortable. Accordingly, the Earth is not a living organism which can live or die all at once, but rather a kind of community of trust which can exist at many discrete levels of integration. But this is true of all multicellular organisms; not all cells in the body die instantaneously…[Rather it is]…an emergent property of interaction among organisms[, a]…series of interacting ecosystems that compose a single huge ecosystem at the Earth's surface.” See “Gaia Hypothesis” Wikipedia at: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gaia_hypothesis .
[42] See Speech by Pascal Lamy, “Globalisation and the Environment in a Reformed UN”, supra.
[43] Ibid.
[44] Ibid.

Europe Seeks its Own Identity Based on Three Central Fears: Climate Change, Energy Supplies & Unemployment???

How Will the Dream End?

Roger Boyes

The New Statesman

Published 19 March 2007

Over five decades the postwar European states have struggled to define a common purpose. But what exactly should the EU's mission be?

The Frenchman leaned across to the German and broke the news softly. "I am thinking of my two sons - they're 18 and 20," said Pierre Mendès France mournfully. "I don't want to see their lives sacrificed in another war between France and Germany."

Then the French premier came to the point: the National Assembly was about to reject the European Defence Community (EDC), a tentative step towards a European army in an attempt to bring West Germany back into the fold. It was the great integrationist project of the day, and it failed. Konrad Adenauer, the German chancellor, was thunderstruck. Europe had never seemed so weak. That was in 1954. Within three years the old man had overcome the setback: West Germany became one of the six signatories of the Treaty of Rome, which set out the terms for a European Common Market.

Now Europe is weak again, its institutions crippled by enlargement and bureaucratic overstretch. It makes no decisive contribution to putting out fires across the world. It is becoming a patchily efficient trading entity, significant only because of its bulk. Can it make a comeback?

Angela Merkel thinks it can, just as West Germany pulled itself out of the 1954 crisis. There is an Oskar Kokoschka portrait of Adenauer in her study and she means to live up to her Christian Democrat predecessor by exploiting the dialectic of the European Union: out of weakness comes strength. First, the crisis; then the reinvention.

The modern version of the EDC débâcle is the failure of the European constitution, its resolute rejection by the French and Dutch and the near-certainty that the British, Poles and Czechs would throw out any cosmetically enhanced treaty. It is an institutional breakdown that has left Europeans - the Rhinelanders of Cologne, the Calabrians, the Bohemians and all the Continent's many tribes - wondering about the purpose and the principles of the European Union.

I recently met the Hungarian prime minister, Ferenc Gyurcsány, who warned that a European crescent stretching from Poland to the Balkans was wrestling with a dilemma: whether to modernise quickly or whether to retreat into a regressive nationalism.

"Something horrible is happening," he said, and the implied question was: What is the EU going to do about it? If Europe, if the idea of Europe, is indeed to modernise society, then where do our responsibilities begin and end? Is the mission of the EU to shape a wealth-creation zone, to secure prosperity, or to redistribute it? We can all agree that the EU needs to deregulate - but many of those regulations were put in place to protect people as well as sectional interests. How far should the EU let people fall in its rush to overhaul and slim down the welfare state?

On New Year's Eve, I was travelling on a coach full of Romanians supposedly heading to London (in fact they all got off in Germany, which is a much easier country to invade). They were middle-class professionals - architects and engineers and teachers - who were willing to work as waiters and carers in the west because of the social upheaval in their country. The Romanian economy is growing by leaps and bounds and the gap between rich and poor has never been so frighteningly wide.

Do we accept this brain-drain migration as a healthy sign of an open Europe, or do we act out of solidarity to prevent a dumbing-down of the western Balkans? Ordinary Europeans are posing these existential questions, yet the EU does not even attempt an answer. As a result, immigration has become the only political passion in Europe and far-right groups are sprouting like weeds in the driveway.

The German-led presidency of the EU is therefore missing the point when it offers an agenda addressing what it identifies as the three central fears of Europeans: climate change, energy supplies and unemployment. These are indeed subjects of discussion over frothing beer in pubs in Bradford and Bochum, but the greening of Europe is likely to remain a sham.

Merkel may be leading the charge, but she does so on a steed that is buckling at the knees. She is a captive of Europe's increasingly powerful lobbies - the big petrol-guzzling car manufacturers, the aerospace industry - and her Social Democratic coalition partner, which is thwarting her hopes of reviving nuclear energy in Germany. As for energy security, it strikes a chord throughout Europe. The right to a warm room is something that most people can agree on. But Merkel, leading a government that cannot work out whether the Russians should be criticised or cuddled, is probably not the right person to develop an intelligent strategic relationship with Moscow, the primary supplier of Europe's energy. The EU, in other words, exposes itself by claiming solutions to problems that lie outside its control: it cannot hope to reverse climate change and it cannot stop Russia closing down its pipelines at whim.

Initiatives coming out of Berlin merely chip away at the credibility of the EU. A Europe-wide ban on light bulbs that give out too much heat? A proposed ban on the swastika? A creeping (and rather sinister) extension of the European arrest warrant?

Yet Merkel is certainly correct that the EU has to have a more pronounced political identity if it is to justify itself, and make itself useful to its citizens. There simply has to be a proper calibration between what the EU can do with its current powers and the needs of the inhabitants of its 27 member states. Until this has been sorted out, there is no real point in reaching for the skies. The founders of the Common Market - Schuman, Spaak, Monnet - were a small elite who imposed a vision on a shattered continent. It worked because West Germany actively surrendered itself to Europe.

As the historian Tony Judt points out, Germany was the only country that stood to recover its sovereignty by joining the Common Market. So it is absurd for Merkel to talk up a European energy policy as the modern version of the European Coal and Steel Community. The ECSC was a historic compromise between France and Germany, devised by a handful of mandarins. An EU energy-security policy would involve a compromise with Vladimir Putin: not the same thing at all.

Punchy, vague and proud

And so, unable to identify the true issues facing Europe, unable to agree on a basic constitutional credo, unable to give Merkel her Adenauer moment, the EU resorts to operetta. In the coming week, the 27 leaders and their courtiers will gather in the German capital to celebrate the 50th birthday of the Treaty of Rome. A declaration so simple that it can be published in full by Bild and the Sun will be released, declaring Europe's achievements, values and goals.

"It will be punchy, it will be vague, it will make us proud," said a German official, not spotting the obvious contradictions. The aim will be to stir popular interest in a new constitution, to tip the mood. So the French, Dutch and English translations had better be very punchy indeed. And vague. In truth, the Declaration of Berlin will just be an oversized birthday card.

The celebrations are unlikely to impress anyone apart from the lumpenproletariat of Berlin, which has not hosted such a circus since the Congress of Berlin in 1878. Then, Bismarck, Disraeli and company could be seen bumping into each other in mirrored cafés and the lobby of the Hotel Kaiserhof. Chancellor Merkel can match that spectacle in only one respect: the 27 leaders have been instructed to bring along two birth-day cakes per country, displaying the very best of their confectionary talent. It is a frightening contribution to a continent that already boasts some of the world's worst coronary heart disease statistics. If federal Europe means boosting cholesterol values to such astronomic levels, maybe the Polish Eurosceptics (slogan: "The Nice Treaty or Die!") had a point.

It would be churlish to begrudge Merkel her cream cake. The Congress of Berlin was about restraining Russian expansion. This month's summit is both less and more important than that. Less, because no borders are being changed; no countries are being sliced up; and Russia is off-stage. More, because we are embarking on what can only be clumsily called a "period of definition" for this strange semi-imperial postmodern agglomeration. The cakes are misleading because they are suggestive of a club or, at worst, a bring-and-buy sale. That kind of intimacy may have existed half a century ago; it has long since gone.

Besides, the declaration is misleading, because you could be lulled into believing that the EU knows what it wants. Yet it is at a turning point: the EU, at 50, is affirming that there is more to life than money - that it is once again permissible to entertain a political dream that goes beyond endless enlargement.

Making wars impossible

If a new mission is to be properly defined, however, the current cohort of leaders has to shed the old idea that the EU is quintessentially about preventing war. Mendès France irritated Adenauer when he talked about his sons, but he was sincere. Helmut Kohl justified the introduction of the euro by saying it was a matter of war and peace - the only argument that could trump German fears of inflation.

In 30 years of covering Europe, east and west, I have accumulated a number of ornithological sightings. One, from when I was a young correspondent in Moscow in the 1970s, was of an old apparatchik, crippled with arthritis, being carried up the steps of Gosplan, the Soviet planning ministry. He was a crucial figure, I later found out, in manipulating the budget: a man with a broken body called in to rig the stats.

Later, in 1989, I saw a Romanian rebel literally shoot himself in the foot while giving an interview on live television. I realised then that we were dealing not with a revolution, but with a coup, a handover of power between two sections of the communist elite. The people (as in: "We, the People!") were extras, unpaid and incompetent.

And then there was the Kohl sighting. François Mitterrand had crossed the Rhine to see his "cher ami Helmut" and was hamming it up in a speech about the humanity of his German wartime captors. No one believed a word of it. Suddenly I saw Kohl's eyes fill with tears. His vast, fleshy body seemed to be made of glass. Every physical inflection, his round, tense shoulders, his quivering thighs, showed that Mitterrand had scored an emotional bull's-eye. Kohl really believed that his Europe was about making wars impossible. You cannot fake that kind of response.

However, to move forward, we have to forget the war as a legitimising factor. In fact, we have to mentally discard the obsession with uniting two arch-enemies, France and Germany, and all the nervous fretting of the European pioneers from Schuman to Kohl. It has served its purpose. We have reunited Europe, with Germany at its centre, with very little bloodshed.

Clinging on to the spirit of the Treaty of Rome and the old statecraft has given us the wrong focus. We have become preoccupied with external borders, when the true concern of citizens across Europe is the internal divisions - the social boundaries that have created immigrant ghettoes, windy cavernous no-go areas on the fringes of our cities. How many riots have there been, from Oldham and Bradford to Paris and beyond? We know the causes - the discrimination, the friction with police, the hidden blockades against immigrants - and we know some of the side effects, from street gangs to Koranic schools.

Europe should heal its cities before it starts to sell itself as an endearing alternative to red-raw American capitalism and corrupt Chinese capitalism. Yet there is no European strategy for dealing with migrant disaffection. The European migrant has become a dynamic part of society in some cities; in others, he is the most frustrated. Integration begins at home, not on the Rhine. The European Union, to be worthy of its name, needs to become more active in its minority policies; it has to target urban youth.

This is not, obviously, the only challenge facing Europe, but it does help order the priorities. If the EU is to assert its political primacy (indeed, if it is to survive another 50 years), it has to build on the principle of intercommunal and international solidarity. We don't all have to develop at the same speed, or even march in step, but we have to prevent a situation where there are more losers than winners within the EU.

Everything else - a credible European foreign policy, further expansion, an intelligent use of resources - follows from that sense of social cohesion. Here is a suggestion: some time in June, Gordon Brown, Merkel and the new French president should take a walk in the woods and talk about what is really important in Europe.

And when they come back, their hiking boots clogged with mud, they should use the word once copyrighted by the Poles: solidarity.

Roger Boyes is the Times Berlin correspondent