The world government two-step: regional arrangements such as the EU and the proposed FTAA supposedly promote free trade, but their real purpose is to gradually merge nations into a world government.

I hope that more regional communities will be created, following the example of the European Union, so that the UN can be transformed soon into a true World Union.... I recommend that the General Assembly of the UN place on its yearly agenda an item on existing regional communities and new ones in formation, because they are a great hope for peace and building blocks for the World Community or Union.

--Robert Muller Former Assistant Secretary-General of the United Nations (1994)

The Belgian-born Robert Muller has long advocated a single world government, and his advocacy of new and strengthened regional superstates does not constitute a change in his dream. Instead, it is the result of reflection on the reality that regional blocs are a practical means to establish world government. Muller's wish is hardly that of a pollyannaish dreamer; instead it's a reflection of two provable realities: (1) regional superstates such as the European Union are created explicitly as subsets of the United Nations; and (2) these regional bodies enable globalists to transfer national sovereignty to a world body, largely without significant opposition.

The European Union's Maastricht Treaty states that an inviolable goal of the charter is "to preserve peace and strengthen international security, in accordance with the principles of the United Nations Charter." It also makes the following commitment: "The Community and the Member States shall comply with the commitments and take account of the objectives they have approved in the context of the United Nations and other competent international organizations" Clearly, the European Union is a subset of the United Nations to a degree that none of the formerly independent European nation-states ever were.

Likewise, in a more cleverly disguised fashion, the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) is a subset of the United Nations. The NAFTA Treaty is part of a United Nations' sub-unit, the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade, which was renamed the World Trade Organization in 1995. The 1993 NAFTA Treaty states: "The Parties affirm their existing rights and obligations with respect to each other under the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade and other agreements to which such Parties are party." Thus, NAFTA and the pending Central American Free Trade Agreement (CAFTA) and the yet-to-be-finalized Free Trade Area of the Americas (FTAA) are all obligated to follow edicts set down by the United Nations.

Regional Bodies More Easily Absorbed

Because these regional bodies group as many as several dozen formerly sovereign nations under a single governing body, it is less difficult to merge the nations into a world government once they are entwined in regional bloc arrangements. With the yeoman's work of destroying national sovereignty already accomplished by the regional bodies, the bulk of the expected protests that would occur with the loss of national independence and with subservience to a global body are avoided. All this is accomplished merely by establishing so-called free trade agreements for various geographical regions and then gradually giving the newly created regional bureaucracies more economic power until they become supranational governments controlling the member nations.

It is worth recalling that what is now known as the European Union was originally sold to the unsuspecting peoples of Europe as a "Common Market" that would not threaten the independence of the member nations. This decades-long transformation from a supposed free-trade agreement to a supranational government, a process still underway, was by design. But the architects of a new European order had to mask their subversive schemes in order to succeed. As Christopher Booker and Richard North wrote in their recent book The Great Deception, from the beginning EU founder Jean Monnet "used a front-man to preside over the negotiations--Belgian politician Paul Henri-Spaak, one of his closest allies, who ensured that all mentions of political union were suppressed, selling the treaty to the world as no more than a deal to promote trade and prosperity." Booker and North explained that the subterfuge was backed and financed behind the scenes by the U.S. government, which had Undersecretary of State George Ball lobby the British prime minister in the early 1960s to retain sovereignty-destroying precedents in pending European Union agreements. Ball told then-British Prime Minister Harold Macmillan "that the Rome treaty [of 1957] was not merely a static document but a process leading towards political unification."

The EU is the most advanced of the regional building blocks for world government, but the NAFTA-CAFTA-FTAA process is intended to follow the same trajectory as the Common Market-EU process, only on an accelerated timetable. In fact, the proposed FTAA is exactly the kind of arrangement world order architect Robert Muller had in mind when he expressed his "hope that more regional communities will be created, following the example of the European Union."

Attack on American Sovereignty

Though some prominent American proponents of NAFTA-CAFTA-FTAA still occasionally claim that the agreements are only about "free trade" and that they do not endanger American national sovereignty, their claims are not credible. First of all, NAFTA has already violated U.S. independence. For example, on August 31, 2004 a NAFTA dispute resolution panel known as the United States-Canada Binational Panel in Softwood Lumber ordered that the U.S. International Trade Commission overturn import tariffs on Canadian softwood imports. The U.S. agency complied, conceding in a public statement that NAFTA had indeed superseded U.S. law: "Because the Commission respects and is bound by the NAFTA dispute settlement process, we issue a determination, consistent with the Panel's decision, that the U.S. softwood lumber industry is not threatened with material injury by reason of subject imports from Canada."

Another reason not to take claims by some proponents of NAFTA-CAFTA-FTAA seriously when they assert that these agreements won't compromise U.S. national sovereignty is that many of the architects of these trade agreements have admitted from the beginning that their intent is to expand NAFTA into a European Union-style superstate in the Western hemisphere. For instance, when NAFTA became a serious proposal in the 1990s, Dr. M. Delal Baer suggested in the Fall 1991 edition of Foreign Affairs, the journal of the Council on Foreign Relations, that NAFTA should eventually evolve into a European Union-style superstate:

   It may be useful to revisit
   the spirit of the Monnet
   Commission, which
   provided a blueprint for
   Europe at a moment of
   extraordinary opportunity.
   The three nations of
   North America, in more
   modest fashion, have also
   arrived at a defining moment.
   They may want to
   create a wiseman's North
   American commission to
   operate in the post-ratification
   period .... The commission
   might also adopt
   a forward-looking agenda
   on themes such as North
   American competitiveness,
   links between scientific
   institutions, borderland
   integration, the
   continental ecological
   system and educational and cultural
   exchanges.

And American University Professor Robert A. Pastor stressed in a 2004 article in Foreign Affairs that "NAFTA was merely the first draft of an economic constitution for North America," saying the European Union is a model for North America to follow on issues as diverse as "currency crises, environmental degradation, terrorist threats, infrastructural impediments or development gaps."

But not only the usual suspects have backed NAFTA as the first draft of an EU-style super-government that would destroy American national sovereignty. Wall Street Journal Editor Robert Bartley opined on July 2, 2001 that "Reformist Mexican President Vicente Fox raises eyebrows with his suggestion that over a decade or two NAFTA should evolve into something like the European Union, with open borders for not only goods and investment but also people. He can rest assured that there is one voice north of the Rio Grande that supports his vision. To wit, this newspaper."

The "free trade" rhetoric is phony; the "world government" accusations are real. "CAFTA and other international trade agreements do not represent free trade," Congressman Ron Paul (R-Texas) has stated. "Free trade occurs in the absence of government interference in the flow of goods, while CAFTA represents more government in the form of an international body." Representative Paul stresses: "It is absurd to believe that CAFTA and other trade agreements do not diminish American sovereignty. When we grant quasi-governmental international bodies the power to make decisions about American trade rules, we lose sovereignty plain and simple."

Europeans were fooled by this same deceit in past decades. Americans who want to keep the United States as an independent sovereign nation need to pressure their congressmen to drop these agreements. If the agreements pass, the path will be paved that leads the United States first into a Western hemispheric government and then into a world government under the auspices of the United Nations--and we will lose the freedoms protected by the U.S. Constitution.