"The world is developing into one not of nation states, but of empires. China is an empire. India is an empire. The US is an empire. We need to create a European Union that is capable of defending our interests."
Guy Verhofstadt talking to CNN yesterday.
“We got rid of them...We finally turned them [the UK] into a colony! And that was our plan from the first moment.”
One of Verhofstadt’s staffers recorded in a recent BBC Four documentary about the Brexit negotiations.
"Austria Hungary was a European Union that worked."Helen Szamuely
“The day of small nations has long passed away. The day of Empires has come.”Joseph Chamberlain in 1904, quoted today in the Daily Telegraph by Robert Tombs.
"Having wilfully abandoned the British Empire, we are to enter the German Empire instead."A.J.P. Taylor, Daily Express, May 1969
"The whole thing began with the Roman Empire. I wrote a book on this subject, and I think it’s probably right. The truth is that the history of the last couple of thousand years has been broadly repeated attempts by various people or institutions—in a Freudian way—to rediscover the lost childhood of Europe, this golden age of peace and prosperity under the Romans, by trying to unify it. Napoleon, Hitler, various people tried this out, and it ends tragically.
"The EU is an attempt to do this by different methods. But fundamentally what it is lacking is the eternal problem, which is that there is no underlying loyalty to the idea of Europe. There is no single authority that anybody respects or understands. That is causing this massive democratic void."
Boris Johnson, who was criticised very hard in England and in Europe for comparing the EU to Hitler.
Anthony Burgess in an interview with John Cullinan in 1972."I used to think that England might become just a place that liked to be visited — like that island in J. M. Barrie’s Mary Rose — but now I see that so many of the things worth seeing — old things — are disappearing so that England can become a huge Los Angeles, all motorways, getting about more important than actually getting anywhere. England is now going into Europe, not — as I had once expected and even hoped — America, and I think it will now have Europe’s faults without its virtues. The decimal coinage is a monstrosity, and soon there’ll be liters of beer, as in Nineteen Eighty–Four, and no cheap wine or caporal tobacco. Absorption, anyway, since England either has to absorb or be absorbed. Napoleon has won."
"Now, it has become widely accepted that, in Bernard Lewis's words, 'Europe will be Islamic by the end of the century.'"
Daniel Pipes, "The Islamic States of America?", FrontPageMagazine.com, September 23, 2004.
"Austria Hungary was a European Union that worked."
ReplyDeleteSure did... for Austria and Hungary.
She was a half Hungarian Jewess so biassed but has she said the Austrian empire was a European Union that worked she'd have been closer to the truth. Before 1867 the Hapsburg empire did work pretty well. By 20th century standards Mettenich having people arrested by writing a letter and without bothering about courts seems a fairly venial offence.
ReplyDeleteThe arrangements tacitly or explicitly made by Francis
DeleteJoseph with the Austrian-German party under Auersperg
between 1871 and 1879, and with the Magyar Liberal Party
under the elder Tisza, 1875- 1890, gave each of those parties
and races a free hand in the administrative oppression of
their opponents, and were maintained as long as the Germans
and the Magyars furnished without flinching money and
recruits for the army. Further instances might be cited,
particularly in regard to the ill-treatment of Croatia-Slavonia
and of the Rumanes and other non-Magyar races of Hungary
by various Magyar governments. But all these instances
go to substantiate the main thesis of this book—that, to the
head of the Hapsburg dynasty, races and peoples, governments
and systems of government, statesmen, officials and
politicians, appear as simple factors in the problem of preserving
the dynastic inheritance which, in his own firm belief,
the Monarch has been divinely appointed to administer for
its own good and for that of the Imperial and Royal House.
The Hapsburg Monarchy by Henry Wickham Steed
PREFACE TO THE THIRD EDITION
London, September 1914.
https://ia800200.us.archive.org/7/items/cu31924028096760/cu31924028096760.pdf