[lg policy] The Belgianisation of Europe

Tue Nov 24 14:58:43 UTC 2009

Van Rompuy: Man without a countryHere is my column in today's Irish
Daily Mail --

 If you reckon you can take comfort in the fact that Herman Van
Rompuy, the new president of the European Council, has the look and
manner of an aging and dozy rodent, forget about it. His call for the
imposition of EU taxes is just the first of his European policies that
are going to mean pain for this country. The man is no bumbler,
despite the international joke of being a Belgian prime minister who
rose to office without being elected – he was merely appointed last
year by the king. Those in Brussels who know Mr Van Rompuy tell me he
is a manipulator. As Paul Belien, the editor of The Brussels Journal,
wrote in this paper on Saturday, Mr Van Rompuy is the ‘shrewd master
of the shabby compromise.’ Dr Belien has known Mr Van Rompuy since the
mid-Eighties, and he knows the new council president has just one
political ideal: ‘The creation of a federal superstate, destroying
national identities across Europe.’

He is, in short, exactly the man to help José Manuel Barroso, the
president of the European Commission, throw the switches on all the
new centralizing powers the European institutions now have thanks to
the Lisbon Treaty. Take Mr Van Rompuy’s call for taxes to be imposed
on all of us directly by the EU. He was not just thinking aloud at a
private dinner. His call was not just the Belgian prime minister
running a flag up a pole to see if anyone salutes. His call was for
the EU to go ahead and implement the new tax powers it will have when
Lisbon comes into force next month.

Article 311 of the section of Lisbon called the Treaty on the
Functioning of the European Union covers this. Not that our Government
much advertised Article 311 during the referendum. Nor indeed much
advertised the changes Lisbon makes to EU control over our level of
corporation tax. Mr Van Rompuy’s established policy is to drive always
towards greater and greater ‘harmonisation’ – that is, equalization –
of all taxes across the 27 member states. Lisbon now clears the path
for him and other ardent centralisers to ‘harmonise’ our low rate of
corporation tax out of existence.

The ground for the change is already being prepared by Mr Barroso and
the former European Commissioner for the single market, Mario Monti.
Mr Barroso has commissioned Mr Monti to write a study of the single
market. It is no surprise to learn that the study will be nothing but
an excuse for the former commissioner to showcase the ‘big idea’ he
now shares with the commission president – that the EU must suppress
its competitive and liberal policies in order to insure social
‘redistribution’. How to do this? According to a recent Charlemagne
column in The Economist: ‘In concrete terms, Mr Monti talks of curbing
tax competition between EU countries, so that governments can pay for
social policies dear to European voters even as they fix their
battered public finances. This could mean agreed minimum tax rates, he
suggests, notably on capital and corporate profits.’
Of course, any mention of such harmonisation always brings the same
response from the Finance Department. At the weekend, the department
was at it again, dismissing Mr Van Rompuy’s calls for implementation
of EU-wide taxes with the usual line: ‘Taxation matters remain the
responsibility of member states and there is no agreement to change
that situation.’

Which is not quite right. The agreement to ‘change that situation’ is
Lisbon itself. Previous treaty law only demanded that taxes in member
countries must not interfere with the functioning of the market.
Lisbon adds the imperative that taxes in EU member states must also
avoid the ‘distortion of competition’. Now, the cry usually goes up
from euro-enthusiasts that these restrictions only apply to indirect
taxation, and corporation tax is a direct tax. To which one can reply:
‘Sez who?’ Dig deeper and you will come up with the fact that the new
Lisbon line about ‘distortion of competition’ opens the way for more
court cases at the European Court of Justice. Such cases can outlaw
‘distorting’ tax rules, whether in relation to direct or indirect
taxes.

If you want to check that analysis, the man to ask is Jens-Peter
Bonde, the Danish politician who served in the European Parliament
from 1979 to 2008. He served as well in the convention which drafted
the European constitution. He chaired the Democracy Forum at the
convention. He has edited several editions of the constitution as it
turned into the Lisbon Treaty, and has created the online EU abc, a
lexicon of EU terms. In 2001, Mr Bonde was named European Politician
of the Year by the European Voice, the Brussels weekly newspaper which
is part of the same publishing empire as the Financial Times.I say all
of that so you will understand that Mr Bonde knows his Lisbon stuff.
One of his most significant notes is the line that within the Lisbon
Treaty, ‘there is no clear definition of indirect taxes’.

That fits in with reports I’ve already heard coming out of the
commission – that the commission plans to take to itself the power to
define what is and what is not a direct tax. Just as the commission
plans to harmonise the tax base for corporate taxes – although our
Government insists corporate taxes are nothing to do with the EU, they
are powerless to stop this harmonisation going ahead – it now appears
the eurocrats will soon have the power to decide that corporation tax
isn’t a direct tax after all. Whatever the commission does about the
definition, the challenges in the ECJ will come. The cases will be
based on assertions that Lisbon’s new line about tax and the
‘distortion of competition’ mean that Ireland can no longer be allowed
to ‘distort competition’ by applying a low rate of corporation tax.

Urging on such court cases will be Mr Van Rompuy. More than anything
else, he wants to see the destruction of national control over taxes.
That is because his political ideal is to destroy the national
sovereignty of EU member states. As Mr Bonde has said: ‘Tax policy is
a symbol and an important element of national sovereignty.’ To
understand Mr Van Rompuy’s antagonism to such symbols and elements of
sovereignty, you must understand what it means to be a Belgian
politician – and I do mean ‘Belgian’ rather than Flemish, despite Mr
Van Rompuy’s Flemish name. There is no such thing as the Belgian
nation. There is the Flemish nation, whose fatherland is Flanders and
whose language is Dutch, and there is the Walloon nation, whose
fatherland is Wallonia and whose language is French. In 1830, the big
powers of the day forced the Flemings of Flanders and the Walloons of
Wallonia to join together in a new, ‘non-identity’ state called
Belgium.

As Dr Belien has written in the Brussels Journal, ‘To understand
Herman, one must know something about Belgium, the prototype of the
EU. Belgians do not like their state. They despise it. They say it
represents nothing. There are no Belgian patriots, because no one is
willing to die for a flag which does not represent anything. Because
Belgium represents nothing, multicultural ideologues love Belgium.
They say that without patriotism, there would be no wars and the world
would be a better place. ‘In 1957, Belgian politicians stood at the
cradle of the European Union. Their aim was to turn the whole of
Europe into a Greater Belgium, so that wars between the nations of
Europe would no longer be possible as there would no longer be
nations, the latter all having been incorporated into an artificial
superstate.’

The result of this absence of national identity is that Belgium has
been a fraud since its creation. As Dr Belien says, this ‘laboratory
of Europe’ lacks more than patriotism, it also lacks democracy,
respect for the rule of law and political morality. All of which is
exactly where the EU is heading. So far, democracy has been done away
with. If you doubt it, consider the means used to select Mr Van Rompuy
as president of the council – secret meetings controlled by the big
powers. The man who emerged as president of the council of this new
artificial superstate is a politician who despises the only source of
democracy, the nation state. This is the Belgianisation of Europe.

http://synonblog.dailymail.co.uk/2009/11/van-rompuy-man-without-a-country.html
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