The European template: plans for creating a North American Union are following the well established template successfully used to submerge the nations of Europe in the European Union.

In Europe, a major transnational superstate has emerged in the form of the European Union. That body now exercises nearly total control over each of its 27 member nations. More alarmingly, in our own hemisphere, political elites hope to use the European Union as a model for creating a North American Union.

Those in favor of the plan include notable leaders, such as former Mexican President Vicente Fox, who frequently urged an expansion of NAFTA into "something like the European Union." In July 2001, the Wall Street Journal heaped praise on Fox's recommendation and enthusiastically announced that it "supports his vision." Also in 2001, the Atlanta Journal-Constitution chimed in with its call for a "political alliance similar in scope and ambition to the European Union." In that same year, Dr. Robert Pastor of American University released Toward a North American Community: Lessons from the Old World for the New. A chapter labeled "Lesson from EU Experience" urged expansion of NAFTA into a duplicate of the European Union.

Recently, Congressman Tom Tancredo (R-Colo.) warned that the creation of the Security and Prosperity Partnership of North America is "an effort designed to dilute American sovereignty by entering into a European Union-like arrangement with Canada and Mexico." Congressman Ron Paul (R-Texas) sees the same threat. Discounting Bush administration denials that a merger is not in the works, Congressman Paulhas concluded, "The real issue is national sovereignty."

The reality is that the European Union is the template internationalists seek to follow in crafting a transnational government for the nations of North America. It is a terrible prospect for many reasons, not the least of which is that the EU presently amounts to one of the greatest concentrations of political power in the history of mankind.

European Alarm

The European Union got its start with the so-called Schuman plan, drafted by French planning minister Jean Monnet in 1950. The plan created the European Coal and Steel Community (ECSC), an innocuous-sounding organization that, on its surface, seemed to be about nothing more than the coordination of coal and steel production. But it was much more. As Georgetown University historian Caroll Quigley pointed out, the ECSC was in fact "a truly revolutionary organization since it had sovereign powers, including the authority to raise funds outside any existing state's power." Through a series of steps including the European "Common Market," the ECSC eventually morphed into the EU.

Among those in Europe who now understand what has happened to their respective countries, the most prominent are British citizens Christopher Booker, a columnist for London's Sunday Telegraph, and Dr. Richard North, a former research director at the European Parliament. In their book, The Great Deception, Booker and North offer a meticulously assembled history of the growth of the European Union. According to the authors, the decades-long "stealth" campaign that gave birth to the EU was "a slow-motion coup d'etat, the most spectacular coup d'etat in history." They note that Jean Monnet made sure that "all mentions of political union were suppressed" as the plan gained momentum. Just as we have witnessed with NAFTA, originally Monnet and other EU schemers set about "selling the treaty to the world as no more than a deal to promote trade and prosperity." EU supporters kept up the deceit, even using it in recent years. In 2004, Mike Nattrass of England's United Kingdom Independence Party noted: "The EU was sold to the British people as 'a trading agreement' and has turned into a 'Political Union' which is changing our basic laws and traditions."

As a step toward formalization of their already tight control, Europe's EU leaders produced a revealing constitution in 2004 and sent it to member nations for ratification. It boldly stated: "This Constitution ... shall have primacy over the law of Member States." Significantly, the document repeatedly expresses conformity with the Charter of the United Nations. As the EU Constitution was making its way through Europe's capital cities, President Vaclav Klaus of the Czech Republic registered his awareness of its danger. Pointing to what he saw as a "European superstate," he claimed that full ratification would mean "there will be no more sovereign states in Europe [and] only one will remain."

After the parliaments in more than a dozen EU member states formally ratified the 2004 Constitution, voters in France and Holland shocked the would-be overlords in the EU's home base of Brussels by rejecting it outright in national referenda. But that rejection has not stopped the EU juggernaut. In England, wary European Parliament member Daniel Hannah told his constituents that the seemingly rejected Constitution was now j "being implemented, clause by clause, as if the votes had never happened."

In Spain, delighted over his own country's approval of the 2004 Constitution, Spanish Foreign Minister Miguel Angel Moratinos nevertheless admitted that the EU has destroyed old Europe: "We are witnessing the last remnants of national politics," Moratinos exulted. "The concept of traditional citizenship has been bypassed in the 21st Century."

Perhaps the most dramatic realization of the EU's dominance over formerly independent nations came in January 2007. Roman Herzog, Germany's president from 1994 to 1999, pointed out that in a recent five-year period, "84 percent of the legal acts in Germany stemmed from [EU headquarters] in Brussels." Agonizing over what had occurred, he wondered aloud "whether Germany can still unreservedly be called a parliamentary democracy."

Poland's laws, too, are under fire from the EU. In Strasbourg, France, the European Court of Human Rights has awarded a Polish woman 25,000 euros for damages after Polish law denied her the "right" to terminate the life of her unborn child. Poland's membership in the Council of Europe obligates the nation to abide by the Strasbourg-based court's decisions. More importantly, the ruling means that Poland must abandon its strict rule against abortion.

Global Governance

In our own hemisphere, NAFTA is the foundational structure for the planned merger of the United States, Canada, and Mexico. Under the guise of beefing up NAFTA, President Bush and his compatriots have already entwined our nation in the Security and Prosperity Partnership as another step toward forming the North American Union.

But it would be a mistake to conclude that regional governance through bodies like the European Union is the end result sought by the architects of international order. They are, in fact, much more ambitious, as was revealed by internationalist scholar Richard Gardner in Foreign Affairs, the journal of the Council on Foreign Relations, in 1974. In his revealing essay entitled "The Hard Road to World Order," Gardner noted that "instant world government" was not feasible. Instead, said Gardner, "the 'house of world order' will have to be built from the bottom up rather than from the top down. It will look like a great 'booming, buzzing confusion,' to use William James' famous description of reality, but an end run around national sovereignty, eroding it piece by piece, will accomplish much more than the old-fashioned frontal assault."

That Gardner's plan is being followed was indicated by former National Security Adviser Zbigniew Brzezinski when, in 1995 at Mikhail Gorbachev's State of the World Forum, he admitted, "In brief, the precondition for eventual globalization I genuine globalization I is progressive regionalization."