Peak Globalism: Farage Has Trumped Monnet

Gary North - February 01, 2020

Last night at 11 PM Greenwich mean time, the United Kingdom regained its sovereignty by formally withdrawing from the European Union.

As a professionally trained historian, I predict that this event will be regarded by historians as one of the most momentous events of the 21st century. It is surely the most momentous event of the first two decades.

This event marks the high watermark of globalism. These days, everybody talks about peak this or peak that. So, this event was peak globalism.

It took 101 years for globalism to peak. The rise began in 1919 in the aftermath of World War I. At the Versailles Treaty, men behind the scenes were attempting to create what in the second half of the 20th century was sometimes called the New World Order. The result of the Versailles Treaty was the League of Nations. But the United States did not sign the treaty Because the Senate would not ratify it. The United States did not enter the league. It took another world war for the United Nations to replace the League.

The United Nations was more of a symbol of globalism than an instrument of it. It has no taxing ability. It does not have a central bank. Its armed forces, capped with blue helmets, have never had any independent power apart from the United States government and NATO.

With the demise of the Soviet empire on December 25, 1991, this left only the European Union as an operational international government. last night, the unraveling of the European Union began officially.

Historians always need representative figures in order to tell the story of any great development. The story of globalism over the last century can be told now by surveying the lives and the work of two men: Jean Monnet and Nigel Farage. I want to be the first historian to launch this historical narrative.

MONNET AND FOSDICK

Only a handful of specialists are aware of the fact that two of the negotiators at Versailles who were crucial for preparing the league of Nations were Jean Monnet, who represented France, and Raymond Fosdick, who represented the United States government.

Fosdick was the younger brother of liberal Protestant preacher Harry Emerson Fosdick. Rev. Fosdick had been on the board of the Rockefeller foundation since 1917. In 1921, Raymond Fosdick became Rockefeller’s lawyer. In 1936, he became president of the Rockefeller Foundation. He retained that position until 1948, when he retired. He was Rockefeller’s official biographer. I wrote the following in my book, Crossed Fingers: How the Liberals Captured the Presbyterian Church (1996).

In April, 1920, Raymond Fosdick resigned from his job as the American Under Secretary General of the League of Nations and returned to the United States. Fosdick in 1919 and 1920 was travelling in high circles, which as a result of the international contacts generated by the Paris Peace Conference were becoming much higher for all concerned. His career had obviously soared since that fateful meeting with Junior in 1910. At the League of Nations, he had worked closely with 31-year-old Jean Monnet. As Fosdick put it at the time; he and Monnet were working in 1919 to lay the foundations of “the framework of international government. . . .” This was no idle boast. Over the next six decades, Monnet became the driving force behind the creation of the European Common Market and the New European order (p. 395).

With the failure of the United States to enter the League of Nations, Fosdick became president of the League of Nations Non Partisan Association. But he never had the opportunity of organizing another international organization. In contrast, Monnet became the primary spokesman for world government. He, more than anybody else, was responsible for the creation of the European Union.

Rockefeller Foundation money funded a series of books promoting free trade. Free trade was the economic bait on a political hook. The hook was political union. This is why the Rockefeller Foundation financed books by Ludwig von Mises (Omnipotent Government, 1944) and Wilhelm Röpke (International Economic Disintegration, 1936). After World War II, Monnet oversaw the preliminary steps in this international bait-and-switch operation. Step-by-step, treaty by treaty, trade barriers were reduced or eliminated, but regulation by international government agencies increased. This culminated in the Maastricht Treaty of 1991, which created the European Union. This was four decades after the original union in the form of the European Coal and Steel Community.

MONNET, THE ARCHITECT

Monnet's Wikipedia entry says this: “An influential supporter of European unity, he is considered as one of the founding fathers of the European Union. Jean Monnet has been called ‘The Father of Europe’ by those who see his innovative and pioneering efforts in the 1950s as the key to establishing the European Coal and Steel Community, the predecessor of today's European Union. Never elected to public office, Monnet worked behind the scenes of American and European governments as a well-connected pragmatic internationalist.”

Monnet was named Deputy Secretary-General of the League of Nations. He quit in disgust in 1923. He was the consummate insider. Probably more than anyone in the 20th century, he was the consummate globalist. Wikipedia’s summary of his interwar career is accurate:

In 1925, Monnet moved to America to accept a partnership in Blair & Co., a New York bank which merged with Bank of America in 1929, forming Bancamerica-Blair Corporation which was owned by Transamerica Corporation. He returned to international politics and, as an international financier, proved to be instrumental to the economic recovery of several Central and Eastern Europe nations. . . .

In 1935, when Monnet was still in Shanghai, he became a business partner of George Murnane (a former colleague of Monnet at Transamerica) in Monnet, Murnane & Co. Murnane was connected to the Wallenberg family in Sweden, the Bosch family in Germany, the Solvays and Boëls in Belgium, and John Foster Dulles, André Meyer, and the Rockefeller family in the United States. He was considered among the most connected persons of his time.

He became ever more powerful after World War II.

When tensions between France and Germany rose over the control of the then vital coal and steel industries, Monnet and his associates conceived the idea of a European Community. On 9 May 1950, with the agreement of Chancellor Konrad Adenauer of West Germany, French Minister of Foreign Affairs Robert Schuman made a declaration in the name of the French government. This declaration, prepared by Monnet for Schuman, proposed integration of the French and German coal and steel industries under joint control, a so-called High Authority, open to the other countries of Europe.

He, more than anyone else, was the founder of the European Union.

He was the first to be bestowed Honorary Citizen of Europe by the European Council of the European Union, for extraordinary work to promote European cooperation on 2 April 1976. Following this, he became the first person then living to be pictured on a Federal Republic of Germany stamp who was not a German head of state.

He died in 1979. Today, there is a Jean Monnet University in France. “Named after Monnet, the Jean Monnet building was the principle location of the European Commission's activities in Luxembourg between 1975 and 2016. Its replacement, the Jean Monnet 2 building, will become operational from February 2023.”

The European Union itself maintains his memory with the Jean Monnet Activities, under the Erasmus+ programme of the Education, Audiovisual and Culture Executive Agency (EACEA). These activities promote knowledge on European integration and European studies on a worldwide scale, especially at the university level, through the Jean Monnet Centres of Excellence, as well as chairs, policy debates, and support to associations.

There is a tax-funded shrine for him.

In 1982, even though the house had deteriorated because of a lack of upkeep, the European Parliament considered Monnet's home to be a symbolic place loaded with memories, thus being a common heritage for Europeans. The Parliament acquired it and entrusted its reconstitution, management, and organization to the Jean Monnet Association. Since 2000, a multimedia conference room has welcomed bigger groups of visitors. The Jean Monnet Association team organizes about 250 conferences on European history and current events each year.

All across Europe, anonymous rich people have donated huge amounts of money to set up academic chairs named after Monnet. There are over two dozen of them. The globalists want to keep his legacy alive. They want to train the next generation of globalists to extend that legacy.

He was the most prominent architect of globalism's strategy. That strategy began in the interwar years. It was a bait-and-switch strategy. It offered greater economic growth and greater economic freedom by promoting free trade. At the same time, it promoted a reduction of economic freedom by means of international government regulation over the terms of trade and the rules governing production. It took seven decades to complete.

FARAGE, THE DEMOLITION MAN

Unlike Monnet, who operated quietly in the background of political decision-making, Farage has operated front and center. Monnet was a spokesman for rich and powerful people in high places. Farage was a spokesman for millions of British citizens in low places. Monnet was dispensable. Farage was indispensable.

Farage has a gift: rhetoric. He is not a pontificator. He is also not a man who spends hours laboriously crafting his speeches and then practicing in advance, unlike Churchill. He has the unique gift of being able to think on his feet. Because of YouTube, he has been on his feet in front of millions of Britishers and a sizable collection of American anti-globalists who delight in his rhetorical barbs. His is a rhetoric of confrontation. This has been a tradition of British oratory for centuries. We have not seen it in the United States since the Civil War. Americans have a phrase for this: he takes no prisoners.

in 1982, he became a commodities trader. I can think of no better training for political confrontation. Commodities traders have to be insanely optimistic, insanely self-confident, and put their money and their investors' money on the line day after day. They get beaten up by the markets, but to stay in the business, they have to rebound.

His moment of truth was the Maastricht (pronounced "mass tricked") Treaty. The United Kingdom entered the European Union. The British Prime Minister, the forgettable John Major, led the Conservative Party. At that point, Farage left the Conservative Party. he became a co-founder of the United Kingdom Independence Party (UKIP) in 1993. Wikipedia reports: "After campaigning unsuccessfully in European and Westminster parliamentary elections for UKIP since 1994, he was elected MEP [Member of the European Parliament] for South East England in the 1999 European Parliament election. He was re-elected in the 2004, 2009, 2014 and 2019 European Parliament elections."

He became leader of the UKIP in 2006. In 2009, the party won the second highest share of UK voters. It defeated both Labour and the Liberal Democrats. He stepped down as leader in 2009, but in 2010 he regained leadership.

The Wikipedia article does not seem to be inaccurate. It just misses the point. It says that he did this or that. He got into arguments with this person or that person. What it doesn't say is that, without him, there would never have been a vote in 2016 on leaving the EU. The article gives no sense of exactly how he became as influential as he was. It does not talk about his constituents. It does not mention his YouTube speeches, which got millions of hits. Farage benefited from YouTube in much the same way that Trump benefited from Twitter. It says only this about the 2016 referendum:

Farage was a key figurehead in the Brexit campaign of 2016, which, with 52 per cent of the vote, won. Jean-Claude Juncker promptly told all UKIP members to leave the Parliament. During the campaign, Farage had made the suggestion of a future second referendum should the Brexit campaign be unsuccessful, but the result be closer than 52-48. Farage accused U.S. President Barack Obama of a "monstrous interference" in the Brexit referendum debate, saying "You wouldn’t expect the British Prime Minister to intervene in your presidential election, you wouldn’t expect the Prime Minister to endorse one candidate or another."

Consider this sentence: "Farage was a key figurehead in the Brexit campaign of 2016, which, with 52 per cent of the vote, won." This is like saying that Thomas Jefferson was a key figurehead in the secession campaign in 1776. Like Jefferson, Farage was far more than a figurehead. He was the indispensable verbal spokesman in the secession movement. Without him, there would have been no referendum. There was a referendum only because he had spent a quarter century in the political trenches.

The Wikipedia article does not mention the obvious fact that it was YouTube that delivered an unexpectedly large audience for his no-compromise speeches in the European Parliament. He became the most important British representative in the European Parliament because of YouTube. Prime Minister David Cameron would not have had to promise the referendum in 2015 as a condition of being reelected if Farage had never appeared on the scene. Cameron made the promise because he did not believe that a majority of British voters would vote to secede. He represented the operational British aristocracy today, the intellectual elite, which is overwhelmingly globalist, as is true of the intellectual elites throughout the West. The vote to leave came as a shock to the elite, just as the election of Donald Trump in 2016 came as a shock to the American political and intellectual elite.

Cameron resigned, and Theresa May replaced him. She had not been in favor of secession. Her weak-willed efforts to avoid a clean break with the European Union never got political support for the two years in which she attempted to minimize the scope of Brexit. Farage got tired of the delay. He began to campaign on a very good slogan: "Leave means leave." In January 2019, Farage started a new political party: the Brexit Party. This was in preparation for Britain's vote for representation in the European Union on May 23. Two weeks before the vote, the Brexit Party had 34% of the electorate. The conservative party had 11%. This was historically unprecedented. This was a spanner in the works.

The outcome was a disaster for the conservatives. Of the 63 seats, the Brexit Party got 29. The conservatives got four. The next day, Theresa May resigned as Prime Minister. Boris Johnson replaced her on July 24. The deadlock continued in parliament over the terms of secession. Johnson called a national election, which was held on December 12, 2019. The conservatives gained an overwhelming victory. Johnson declared that the country would leave the European Union on January 31, and so it did.

The actual terms of departure will be hammered out between now and December 31. For now, the old rules still apply. During the transition period, there will still be freedom of movement within the EU. My guess is that a lot of immigrants from the Eastern nations in the EU are going to show up inside England over the next 11 months. But there is no going back institutionally. Those who believe that the UK should have remained in the EU are finished. They lost. They dragged it out, but they lost.

CONCLUSION

We have seen the peak of globalism.

Two decades ago, a pair of scholarly authors said this would happen. Jacques Barzun wrote a book, which was published in the year he turned 93: From Dawn to Decadence: 1500 to the Present (2000). Martin van Creveld wrote the other: The Rise and Decline of the State (1999). They both offered their forecasts in the final chapters. the nation-state has overplayed its hand. it has over-promised benefits to the electorate. The next move of society will be in the direction of decentralization, not centralization.

The successful secession of the UK from the EU is not just symbolic; it is substantive. It is going to restore the judicial sovereignty of a rich nation.

Without Farage, this would not have happened. I am convinced that without YouTube, this would not have happened.

Let us delight once again in this departure video.

Jean Monnet's lobster trap has broken. The British lobster got out. This will serve as an emblem of victory for all of the secession parties inside the EU. Over time, more of them will find themselves outside the EU, along with their nations.

One man made it possible.

Thanks, Nigel.