Authority and order are back on the European political agenda. I want to put forward an hypothesis that readers can test against the facts. If I am right, then it opens up a new field of enquiry for parapolitical investigators.
Let me state the thesis briefly: the need to create an international infrastructure of authority and an ideology to manage Europe is assisting in the creation of a new type of unaccountable elite. This is already, if slowly, becoming the dominant force at the centre of the European project.
There is no single ‘conspiracy’ as such, just a convergence of trends towards a new consensus on how Europe can and should be governed. This crisis of authority just happens to see some convergence between the logical next stage in the development of ‘third way’ ideology and the modernisation of the right, based in part on the social Catholic politics of the current pontiff. A new European CentreRight, beyond nationalism, universalist and contemptuous of all forms of socialism except the Catholic version, is now in play. The elements may disagree on gay issues and on women’s rights but they agree on a lot more. Alongside this development, the thesis continues, a class of pan-European investigating judges is also emerging. It operates as an agent for a security and law enforcement programme that will come to serve the interests of the new order even if its relationship to it is currently ambiguous.
Investigating judges
Let us start with the investigating judge movement. It is a European-wide extension of developments that took place in Italy in the 1970s and 1980s in response to the corrupt politics of the Christian Democrat political community and is merely the honest arm of a dishonest and highly politicised judicial system. This movement of one of integrity (epitomised by the murdered anti-mafia campaigner Judge Falcone). It was and is intended to be ‘beyond politics’ (much like the ‘third way’). Anti-mafia investigators included secularists like Falcone himself and former fascists and catholics like Borsellino (1) but they shared a belief in the State and order.
The ‘movement of order’ seeks to exist in conditions where an ethic of incorruptibility is placed above any particular party allegiance, although Catholic social justice and human and human rights ideology is central to its challenge to the old corrupt order.
The Southern Mediterranean and francophone investigating judges have since emerged from the margins of power in their own states. They now cooperate trans-nationally against organised crime, terrorism and extra-territorial human rights violations,(2) in some cases exporting their disdain for the failure of democracy to deal with corruption and ineptitude.
In their mission, they operate with minimal democratic accountability as their trans-national operations bring them into ever closer association with security and intelligence services with whom they increasingly share the same ideology of global threat. They are, in short, constructing the basis for the new European, indeed ‘Western’, Security State before that state actually exists.
Riggs Bank
But let us start with an act of classic conspiracy theory just to spice things up a bit. I have been fascinated by the careful investigative targeting of Riggs Bank in Washington. (3) Senate and media investigators (or rather journalists provided with ready-made dossiers) have picked very specifically on three apparently unconnected issues (amongst the many choices that could have been made) pour encourager les autres, in this case money-laundering banks:(4) the first was the Pinochet funds held at the bank; the second were the allegedly corrupt payments to persons allegedly connected to the dictator of Equatorial Guinea; and the third was related to the ongoing 9/11 civil suit against prominent Saudis.
In all these cases, the concern was ultimately with the conduct of all banks in acting as flags of convenience for illiberal interests. By punishing one, the ‘system’ warned many others that the world had changed.
The details of the issues are not important although all three were intimately related to the policy priorities of liberal modernisers concerned with international relations. Each was also about the blind eye that had been offered in the past to the actions of its allies by the US for ‘realist’ political gain. The international nature of the operation was apparently demonstrated by a common denominator in these three cases which remains unexplained – unless, as we say, it is pure coincidence that the Spanish judiciary should be greatly interested in them all.
The office of Judge Baltazar Garzon (also leading the investigation against Basque and ‘Al-Qaeda’ terrorism in Spain) has been global lead manager in the campaign against Pinochet. It was Garzon’s office that broke all international precedent by using a Spanish law to try and extradite Pinochet from Britain.(5) His office had also supplied extensive files on request on alleged Islamic finance networks to Motley Rice, the legal counsel in charge of the 9/11 civil suit, through a private sector intermediary.(6) This was not an official request for information by the FBI, CIA or US Treasury, but was to benefit a private prosecution on foreign soil with no direct Spanish content.(7)
The Times meanwhile reported that Spanish ships were on standby to go to the Gulf of Guinea about the time of the coup attempt in Equatorial Guinea.(8) Another Murdoch press article noted that a Spanish investigating magistrate (unidentified) was ready with a warrant under Spanish law to arrest President Obiang for human rights violations.(9)
It is interesting to note the coincidence that Judge Garzon is the pioneer who issued the arrest warrant against Pinochet. He might be expected to be the most authoritative person to issue another arrest warrant of a similar nature. Whether it was he or another, Spain was positioned, under Aznar, as a state actor in ‘humanitarian intervention’ overseas, possibly operating in association with an investigating judge.(10)
In other words, an investigation into a US bank by a US Senate Committee happened to touch on three issues of apparent central interest to the Spanish investigating judiciary and to the liberal international relations community.
But it must be coincidental. It certainly is not easy to explain otherwise unless these were the only such scandals within the international system – which I scarcely think likely.
The brief of Baltazar Garzon is very extensive and I am sure he is very ‘good egg’ of undoubted integrity. He was apparently the very recent target of an assassination attempt (the sort that made Falcone a symbol of Italian judicial integrity) and he is undoubtedly a very brave man.(11) He is personally answerable to the Spanish Constitution (on which I am not expert) but, in each of these areas, regardless of the Riggs investigation, we appear to see a major judicial figure engaging in international affairs on a quasi-political brief. He may be doing good things but he certainly seems to have a great deal of power to influence events globally. Examples could be provided of similar investigative engagements in Italy and France in the domestic political affairs of their respective countries.
As this system of politicised judicial investigation internationalises, the next decade will see a wave of extraditions as the global structures of judge-made international law, aimed at bankers as much as terrorists, is put in place.
Liberal media, favoured NGOs and lawyers will choose for us what we should be interested in according to their ideological presumptions. They will increasingly have the power to manage the imagery and so the emotional responses of the Western public through the manner in which they set the media agenda.
The extension of judicial action into ever more areas is symptomatic of a new order that imposes traditional liberal values, without consideration of economic or cultural context, onto a wider society. If the judges are permitted to by-pass the democratic political process because of the gap left by the democratic deficit in international institutions, perhaps the blame is not only theirs but ours.
Liberal totalitarianism?
One critic has called this liberal totalitarianism precisely because a vanguard group is steadily imposing on the general population what it has to think and what values it has to hold if an individual is to hold a responsible post in society.
In the wider world (as we shall see), communitarian faith-based politics and the liberal human rights agenda are converging in an historic compromise between two, hitherto alien, ideologies. Left theorists give up socialism and secularism as an offensive force – and catholics and their faith allies accept a social agenda and human rights as their concessions to liberalism. The judges take the role of priests in moulding politics along ethical lines.
The rise of this new form of secret state should be a matter of the gravest concern because this new system, without trans-national democratic control and with weak or venal legislatures, is, by definition, minimally accountable. Laws made in one jurisdiction are imposed internationally by treaties that cut out effective democratic or community scrutiny. Weak scrutiny means that a person can no longer rely on being judged by his peers in his own community. He has become a citizen of a ‘universal Rome’ imposed by stealth.
This seems to be a trend that is becoming a network as Spanish investigating judges deal with their French counterparts (anxious about political Islam and corruption) and with global law enforcement officials and security agencies in the war on terror. They start to swap files and dossiers of uncorroborated or private material and, since some jurisdictions leak more than others, such materials then become tools of political warfare. Worse, law enforcement officials can trade data into jurisdictions where colleagues from other forces, equally out of democratic control, can make a wholly different use of it – just as intelligence agencies scrutinise each other’s citizens in order to by-pass local laws. There is nothing wrong with intelligence sharing in criminal and terrorism cases. There may be a lot wrong with selective leaking of materials for political effect and in the handover of documentation to private investigators in order to help with a court case.
The investigating judges are a class apart in the European system. As the British decide to enter more fully into Europe, it is a legitimate question whether we are happy with a judicial system of such power operating in areas that are properly political but just outside the democratic system of direct or representative accountability.(12) If investigating judges are to become political actors and operate internationally in support of the ‘liberal totalitarian’ extension of Western values to the wider world, then we should be concerned if we, the people, are not in control of the process.
Liberal values appear to be such a noble end that we are in danger of not noticing the means. And the means can be turned on its head for other purposes which is why Mr. Buttiglione was a concern not in himself but in his presumptions about ‘sin’.
Networks of influence
We should particularly worry if new networks of influence emerge as international phenomena that seem to be carrying on a war amongst each other without reference to us. Some European judges, for example, seem not to be able to distinguish between campaigning against terrorism and campaigning against the free expression of Islamist views. To have views similar to a bomber is not to be a bomber or even to be an accessory to a bombing.
Thoughts and opinions may drift into becoming crimes in cultures where there are precedents for removing persons from their employment because of their political beliefs and where criticism of authority is frowned upon rather than welcomed as a contribution to debate. Authority and order become cultural imperatives in a way that most Anglo-Saxons will find unacceptable. This is a European tradition where the judiciary acts as the disinterested agent of authority and order against disorder rather than as a dispenser of justice in defence of individual rights, albeit one operating within a framework of accepted authority.
I chose Garzon precisely because he is an admirable figure in many ways. It is not the man but the office that concerns this author. He is representative of an over-mighty force the independent judge as subtle arbiter of policy and, increasingly, (in France and Italy) the unelected and unaccountable check on the elected.
A new alliance?
Meanwhile, a new generation of European right political leaders is trying to bring faith-based groups, business interests and the middling sort into a new alliance without the traditional criminal element. Anti-criminality and reform are no longer affairs for communists and socialists alone. It is this shift of priorities on the European Right towards neo-liberalism and towards an almost neo-conservative view on democracy that has made the recent Buttiglione affair so interesting.
The idea that a Christian Democrat linked to the Church could credibly act as EU Justice and Security Minister was intended to be a cultural signal to the Italian and European middle classes. It was of enormous importance to Berlusconi that Italy should be respected as one of the major powers of Europe on equal terms to France, Germany and the UK and alongside Spain.(13)
The Buttiglione nomination was supposed to be a sign that, because godless communism was no longer a direct threat to family life and property, the new wave of socially aware but neo-liberal largely Catholic conservatives could hold the highest moral values and protect both family and property against new threats.
We see much more than a ‘zeitgeist’ at work here; more than a chance meeting of minds. We are seeing a strategy of order that is logical and almost inevitable.
With communism gone, we are left with a radical neo-liberal world of unrestrained financial power, internationalised crime and ‘threats to the West’ (and, though rarely said, its moral values). The forces of order and the protectors of family and property need to capture the discontents of modernisation and command them. Since theocracy is no longer possible, the Church must bring together all faiths against the faithless, including, as leading right-wing modernisers, such as French Finance Minister Nicholas Sarkozy, have suggested, moderate Muslims alongside Jews and Christians. Since corporatism is no longer feasible against US hegemonic power, a new Europe must arise to match the US in terms of economic effectiveness. The main threat to all this is lawless revolt from below – in which criminals, political terrorists, Leftists, animal rights activists and anti-globalisation protesters are all lumped into one category of disorder.
Power struggle
We are now seeing a power struggle between generations of the European Right in which corruption, corporatism and obscurantism are being jettisoned in favour of a combination of liberal reform and social communitarianism. This, in turn, links to the Europeanisation of wider justice and security policy in the interests of the ‘West’ and support for human rights ideology as a bulwark against the revival of the Left or, indeed, of national socialism.
Aye, but here’s the rub. This reification of the West is in a tone that would be familiar to disappointed Strasserites, the Europeanist faction of the post-war fascists and even General Vlasov. It enables the participation of former Fascists within this new alliance. This is the bridge to the US neo-con Right and it needs deeper investigation – for what is the current flow between the US and Europe in political warfare operations, ideas and ideology? What was ‘normal’ in the Cold War against the Communists did not just go away when the Berlin Wall fell. The intimate relationship between the European Right and the American security and intelligence structure continued and continues. Neo-conservative ideology and the new European law enforcement and security model have a great deal in common even if you can find many examples of individuals from both sides who seem to be at loggerheads with each other.
There is a concept of a universal West. There is an attitude to the mass as sheep to be led by enlightened persons – ‘political soldiers’ in Evola’s influential phrase. There is a belief in authority and order. There is an acceptance of the ‘noble lie’ (or in Tertullian’s terms, that belief is absurd and so I must believe). There is an acceptance of the place of irrational faith in politics as a standing rebuke to the Enlightenment. There is room for everyone in the house so long as they accept the house rules. It is stoic, it is Roman, it is Western.
There is also a pragmatism about which politicians to back and which to let go so that Blair and the ex-Maoist Barroso are in, and the traditionalist Gaullist Chirac is out.
This is where we need more research.
What are the neo-conservatives doing in Europe now? What is Richard Perle doing when he visits his French home and Michael Ledeen when he pops by for a casual chat with Italian intelligence in Rome? Is there a material link between the movement for extra-territoriality of human rights legislation in Europe and the use of the judicial process in public policy in the US – and, indeed, of both with the use of the investigating judge as agent of political change in Europe?
The one cause for pause in all this is that so many operations seem to target George W. Bush and his immediate circle as part of the culture of corruption, yet George W. Bush is the patron of aggressive international neo-conservatism. Similarly, investigating judges lead on the attack on prominent conservative leaders’ alleged flirtations with corruption – both Berlusconi and Chirac are regularly targeted. The former leads a coalition that includes the Catholic social Right.
Neo-conservative political action, the investigating judge phenomenon and the new European Right are, in fact, distinct and competitive ways of seeing and operating. They overlap in some places (in the war against terrorism) and they conflict in others (over Iraq). Conflicts continue and are inevitable. I explore a theory of why this is below.
A new consensus
Three conservative models are starting to converge, with, as we shall see, the ‘third way’ model, in a new political consensus where the political debate is largely about competing cultural values rather than control of the economy. A structure of ‘liberal totalitarianism’ thus creates a democracy of manipulative elites, administrative transmission belts, a regulated neo-liberal economy, and the suppression of serious cultural difference and dissent by exclusion without discrimination. In this context, the neo-conservatives are building a European base, the investigating judges are developing an international operating procedure and the traditional European Right is jettisoning its old guard – but the key bridge between the three models is in the unlikely figure of centre-left leader, Tony Blair.
Blair
Blair is a liberal internationalist prepared for preemptive action, a faith-based communitarian with a human rights agenda and a liberal moderniser in economics. And this is why the foreign policy implications of the Riggs Bank scandal are interesting. If you look at the type of scandals we have identified, they show up three policy imperatives.
The first is an interest in transforming Africa as a continent of failed states. The second is with reforming centres of alternative ideology such as Saudi Arabia so that they can enter the liberal democratic consensus. And, as we have noted, the third is a concern to expose past dirty deals with dictators. This is essentially both the neo-conservative and the liberal internationalist agenda, even if the former would send in troops and the latter would tend to prefer sanctions. Aznar’s Spain appears to be following both a Blairite and a neo-conservative agenda in at least the first two cases – and probably the third.
We might have expected this package of policies to be the interest of the Left. They certainly are interests of liberal internationalists, but the European Left has a much stronger sense of national sovereignty and respect for the colonial struggle. In each case, the case studies reflect wider campaigns of intervention against ‘failed states’ or ‘states at risk of failing’ – and the attack on dictators is even-handed to include Castro, Mugabe and Chavez alongside Pinochet and other hate figures of the Left.
Furthermore, many of the New Labour foreign policy elite cut their student teeth on campaigns against ‘fascist’ dictators and would have had a sympathetic ear from State Department officials who disapproved of Kissinger’s realism in this respect. As a result, for the ‘real’ or ‘old’ Left, the ends are wished for but the methods – radical subversion, political warfare and military intervention – are not; and this gives us a clue to a further aspect of the ‘Western’ conservative alliance that is emerging in Europe.
Universalising ‘the West’
It extends and universalises the ‘West’ as a repository of universal values whether for reasons of preemptive defence (the American Right) or because it is a moral imperative based on ideology (the neo-conservative and liberal internationalist impulse). Until now, this reification of the West was a propaganda tool by one side in the Cold War or the plaything of intellectuals and of a certain school of right-wing radicalism. Now it is a practical political programme in which certain Judaeo-Christian and Enlightenment ideas are synthesised into a global model for trickledown through the world’s middle classes.
The investigating judges are merely, in this context, the potential police agents of the new universalist order that is being constructed in response to the growing sense of panic at the consequences of neo-liberal globalisation. So, this is why order and authority are back on the agenda after decades of neo-liberal market-driven anarchy. Because the core community roots of social collapse cannot be addressed through other strategies, both neo-liberal economics and protection of private freedoms requires an authoritarian political and security order Rome again, ‘De Civitate Dei’.
The task is threefold:
- to create moral legitimacy for authority (hence the cleaning out of the Augean stables of Cold War realism);
- to restore order and authority through the international collaboration of elites; and
- to manage democracies to sustain the authority necessary to maintain order.
This is an unusual convergence of liberal human rights and State interests that is the real fruit of the end of the Cold War.
In undertaking this project, the New European Right is mounting an ideological coup d’etat. The universalism of Marxist international socialism has been transferred bodily to the liberal democratic and Catholic Right just as these two rivals are rapidly burying the hatchet between themselves under the reformist ‘third way’ banner.
So here is another point of investigation – how close are neo-conservative and liberal internationalist thinkers in practice? Can the British Foreign Policy Centre really have anything in common with the American Enterprise Institute? Surely one is a progressive liberal organisation whose grandparents were revisionist Marxists, whereas the other is a reactionary organisation whose grandparents included disillusioned Trotskyists. On the surface, it appears completely ridiculous that a hard-line US political warfare operation could have anything to do with a progressive arm of a centre-left government. But it is perhaps time to dig deeper on several fronts. Let me propose another linked series of hypotheses for further investigation.
- The US vision of liberal democracy: The neo-conservative vision was far from predicated solely on the fall of the Soviet Union. It was a vision of global liberal democracy running through at least two, possibly three generations, based on a particular vision of how the world should be. It was a vision that was cynical about politics (and so was party-neutral) and largely interested in creating a climate of opinion that could work in both conservative and progressive environments. This, after all, was also the initial strategy of its neo-liberal cousin and, coincidentally, shares the mindset of the investigating judge movement.
- The logic of US involvement in New Labour: Anglo-US relationship was so intimate by the 1980s and the UK was so built into US strategic thinking that it was in the interest of the US to ensure that a change of party did not mean a change of policy towards the US. Substantial political investment went into New Labour. Given the state of the Labour Party in the 1980s, it would be logical for the US to participate indirectly in its reconstruction in favour of Atlanticism.
- The logic of an anti-Stalinist/US ‘understanding’: It was also logical, not only in the UK but across Europe, for the US to make use of Trotskyist and revisionist Marxist discontent with the Soviet model and of their personal frustration at the failures of socialism and at their own marginalisation and ambitions. These action intellectuals eventually lost an ideology but not the propensity for universalist thinking within the new framework of US hegemony. They had also faced the ‘tactics of terror’ question in the wake of 1968 and had drawn back from the abyss. If you do not or cannot use force, you must use the system and once you use the system, you must play it to win. If the hegemonic power offers a few discreet short cuts, you may take them.
- Many flowers bloom in the anti-communist garden: The UK was not the only country that was managed in this way. Continuity of policy in the US has to be set against disruptions caused by the arrival of new action intellectuals (like the neo-cons or, say, liberal feminists) as each administration came and went. So, what was developed elsewhere was both different from the US model and had still to evolve into a shared European model. Competing versions of anti-communist universalism emerged within many different political cultures between the 1970s and the new century. Ordine Nuovo, Gladio and the Christian Democrats (Democrazia Cristiana) might be useful in one country and New Labour and the AEEU in another – but all anti-communist ideologies would share common atlanticist characteristics.
- New Labour takes a leadership role because it is different: New Labour has, by a series of accidents and designs, not merely ensured the continuity of an alliance. The ideology behind that alliance provided the moral high ground suitable for a centre-left party that was to be recruited in the war on communism.
Each ideology of anti-communism owes its differences and similarities to a combination of common origins within the US system and internal political struggle, yet each has a very different history.
The struggle for synthesis and dominance for the best non-Left model for the West is now in process. New Labour has a particular coordinating role precisely because it can credibly plead the moral high ground as the reformed centre-left. To use the language of the Clinton New Democrats, it ‘triangulates’ and captures the centre-ground for atlanticism. These accidents of history have thus seen several parallel movements emerge, all promoting universal values, of which three stand out. We see the neo-conservative (US), the ‘third way’ (UK and ‘progressive Europe’) and the genuinely indigenous investigating judge movement in Southern Europe which emerged in reaction to the corrupt old Christian Democrat order. The first two came out of grand Hegelian theorising and both now converge, from separate perspectives, on issues of ‘humanitarian’ military intervention. The third comes in part from Catholic reform movements horrified by the criminal partnerships used to counter the communist threat.
All three see the public as pawns suffering from false consciousness or the effects of manipulation or as simply ignorant victims. All three are sincere in belief systems based on a grand theory of the world and, yes, the ‘third way’ is based on essentially Hegelian premises about progress.
Logically, these ideologies must clash or synthesise because the ‘real’ Left (and other challengers to Western liberalism) cannot be expected to remain supine forever. The rise of political Islam has thus kick-started a process that had previously proceeded at the leisurely pace of the European project. The integration of the Right must be completed before the Left gets a second wind and challenges both the Church (as Zapateros has done) and the economic liberalisation programme of the modernisers from Blair to Berlusconi. The State Department may well have created its very own monster in Al-Qaeda but, in terms of synthesising the new liberal order, it has also created a very useful hero figure in the proselytising and loyal ‘third way’ liberal internationalist Tony Blair.
Tony Blair takes seriously the implicit deal of the mid-1990s – to bring Western values (meaning liberal democratic values) to Europe and the world through an engagement with the European Union and as America’s chief Atlanticist ally. This is so fundamental to the New Labour project that it is a non-negotiable policy regardless of public opinion in the domestic arena.
When this all started, the US State Department could not have foreseen the collapse of Communism nor the expansion of Europe (to the point where it would have its own bloc vote of small liberal countries) nor troops in Romania nor the triumph of the ‘third way’. It has never been in as much control of the agenda as they would like us all to think. The Americans are at their most effective when they stand back from organising coups d’etat and simply plant the seeds of their distinctive Enlightenment ideology, water them and watch them grow.
By the law of unintended consequences, and quite happily for the US in the long term, the US now has a small neo-conservative following moving up the European Right and a centre-Left Leader helping along the process of transforming the European Right into a ‘universal’ Western values conservative coalition. It also has a militarily weak and economically under-performing European Union, split between atlanticist and federalist factions. It has a powerful air strike and military capability in the UK and Romania and a slew of small anti-communist pro-US statelets in the Eastern third of the Union with disproportionate power on the Commission.
It also has excellent relations with the security and intelligence apparat of the Union, thanks to the shared class interest in the war on terror. They must be dancing the fandango every night in the State Department.
Above all, indigenous modernising Conservatives and ‘third way’ centre-left politicians now look to Atlanticism as their primary focus for challenging old-style Euro-corporatism. The ‘third way’ and the alliance of Blair, Berlusconi and Aznar (and in due course Sarkozy) will come back to haunt the Republican Radical Right as the happy revenge of career diplomats on the neo-con sect in Washington
More royalist than the king, the new European Right now wants a share in something that most Republican Americans may not want to share but which multilateralist American realists are very happy to share the enforcement of liberal universalism across the world. And so our circle is squared. (14)
Notes
1 John Dickie, Cosa Nostra: A History of the Sicilian Mafia, (London, 2004) p.391
2 A clue to the members of the new internal security elite can be gathered from the speakers at the October Summit of Transnational Crime at <www.cmf.ch/cmf_fichiers/crime04/SEMProg-GB240804.doc>
3 The simplest and most complete basic account of the Riggs Bank scandal (as it is presented to the public by the investigators) is on the World Socialist Web Site, <www.wsws.org/articles/2004/aug2004/rigg-a24.shtml> As with all WSWS material, cautioned should be exercised about interpretation and the readers should note that the exposure of Riggs Bank was also part of a wider and highly dubious campaign to ‘expose’ Bush links with the Saudi elite and draw certain conspiratorial conclusions from the connection see the work of Moore, Unger and others. The facts of the scandal should be isolated from the interpretation and neither should be taken at face value. The fact of a politically engineered scandal which deserves more investigation is what is important here.
4 ‘The law that outlaws banks’, Financial Times, 9 July 2004
5 A good basic account of the Garzon operation against Pinochet was issued by Associated Press from Madrid on 17 September and, read in conjunction with the CNN report of the day, makes explicit the Riggs Bank link to the Pinochet investigation.
6 A full account of the link between Judge Garzon’s office and the 9/11 Civil Action can be found in the Charleston Post & Courier of 22 June 2003: ‘The King of Torts vs. al-Quaida Inc.’ <http://www.charleston.net/stories/062203/911_22alqstory.shtml>
7 However, Madrid has announced that an agreement on full co-operation in the war on terror is expected by the end of this year – see Reuters, ‘Spain, US to sign anti-terror co-operation deal’, Madrid, 20 September.
8 ‘Spain “secretly backed coup by sending warships”‘, The Times, 27 August, 2004
9 ‘US was told of Thatcher “coup plot”‘, The Sunday Times 29 August 2004, where there is reference to a proposed ‘carbon copy’ of the arrest of General Pinochet. However, this report appeared after the appointment of PR counsel to the alleged coup plotters and should be treated with caution.
10 What precisely was going on in Equatorial Guinea remains extremely murky. A selection of web sites for initial research might include, in addition to The Times references above:-
- <www.guardian.co.uk/spain/article/0,2763,1239745,00.html>
- </www.sundayherald.com/44412>
- <www.afrol.com/articles/14576>
11 Associated Press, 23 October and Reuters, 24 October, both reporting from Madrid.
12 This is a new debate for the British but one that has already been rehearsed in Italy during the anti-mafia maxi-trials of two decades ago. If the State is too weak to deal with politicised organised crime or terrorism, is it not legitimate for a ‘virtuous minority’ to suspend certain liberties to defeat criminalised insurgents? Leonardo Sciascia, a lifelong campaigner against the mafia, took a libertarian view. John Dickie’s Cosa Nostra takes a strong anti-mafia view and I recommend the relevant chapters of the book [pages 379-403] referred to in note 1. My position is that, regardless of appropriateness in Southern Europe, the potential importation of Sicilian methods into the British Isles through integration with Europe is unnecessary, counter-productive and politically dangerous.
13 The Italian equivalents of our Times leader-writers would, in their anti-Communist frenzy, tell their readers to ‘hold their noses and vote Christian Democrat’. At one point in the 1960s, two junior Ministers from Sicily wearing Christian Democrat labels might equally have been regarded as members for the Mafia interest. Readers are directed to the Financial Times of 4 November, ‘Berlusconi ally to face trial on aiding Mafia’, which contains all the basic material for investigation into the domestic pressures regarding crime, corruption and security on the Italian Prime Minister. The demonisation of Berlusconi often goes too far – the process of digging the Italian Right out of its sink pit of corruption is neither an easy nor an unambiguous one. A sign of just how important Italian right-wing control of the security agenda is to Berlusconi (for wholly domestic reasons) is the fact that Buttiglione’s replacement, Franco Frattini, has gone straight into the same role as EU Justice and Security Commissioner without any suggestion of a reshuffle by Mr. Barroso.
14 A good basic account of the powers and role of the investigating judge in France can be found at <www.legislationline.org/index.php?topic=140&country=3&org=0&eu=0>. The system operates differently in countries as various as Spain, Italy and Luxembourg but the general principles behind it, derived from Roman jurisprudence, tend to be similar. The logic of European integration suggests that it will become the basis for a similar system at a pan-European level, albeit with due obeisance to Catholic principles of subsidiarity. The probable development of a national security equivalent for Europe of the interstate commerce clause in the US may well result in the handing over of great swathes of investigation to such pan-European investigators or national investigators with trans-national powers not only organised crime, terrorism and human rights cases but also those covering tax evasion, fraud, money-laundering, anti-competitive practices and corruption. This will mean that not only national security and human rights but regulation of the international capitalist system will gradually fall into the hands of judicial executives whose power is derived from the collaboration of national security elites without adequate national or pan-European democratic checks and balances. The use of ‘pentiti’ (informers) in Italy, the lack of habeas corpus rules across much of Europe, the political aspects of judicial appointments and increasingly intrusive extradition treaties suggest that British civil libertarians should be very worried about these trends within the European project.