Europe Inc: Regional and Global Restructuring and the Rise of Corporate Power
Belén Balanyá, Ann Doherty, Olivier Hoedeman, Adam Ma’anit and Erik Wessselius
Pluto Press, London and Sterling (Virginia, USA) 2000, £14.99
Blowing the Whistle: one man’s fight against fraud in the European Commission
Paul van Buitenen,
London: Politicos, 2000, £12.99
In his memoir, In Office,(1) Norman Lamont describes meeting Wim Kok, the Dutch Finance Minister, at one of the many European Union meetings Lamont attended in his roles as Chief Secretary to the Treasury and then Chancellor of the Exchequer. On the question of whether or not European electorates should be asked to vote on joining the single currency, Lamont quotes Kok as saying this:
If we let Parliaments interfere (sic) in this matter then they may vote against the single currency and Europe will never find its destiny. (p.123)
Ah, yes, destiny. (Better yet, Destiny.) I’m one of the people whose brains turn off at abstract nouns like Destiny. I just can’t take such stuff seriously. I’d like to be able to claim that this is the result of an intensive study of logical-positivism but, alas, the truth is it that when I read something like ‘Destiny’ it evokes not the great Western philosophical tradition but Stan Lee’s Marvel comics of the 1960s. To my ear Destiny sounds like the name of one of his minor Super Heroes – ‘Here comes Captain Infinity and Destiny’ – and carries too many overtones of A. Hitler and his crew of dotty psychos. Kok’s contempt for democracy, all too characteristic of our European elites, evokes the same echoes to me.
The two books under review now join John Laughland,(2) Hugo Young’s This Blessed Plot (3) and John Connolly’s The Rotten Heart of Europe(4) in the category of essential books on the Federal European project. Europe Inc is the work of European Corporate Observatory (www. xs4all.nl/~ceo/), who have been referred to before in these columns. This is a devastating analysis of the various forums attached to the EU which ensure that corporate opinion prevails. (There are ten thousand corporate lobbyists in Brussels.) This is more evidential flesh on the thesis discussed in Mike Peters’ essay on Bilderberg and the EU in Lobster 32. Bilderberg, the European Round Table of Industrialists and their satellites, the PR firms – all are described and documented here in impressive detail.
The von Buitenen book is quite different, one man’s account of how he was reluctantly forced to blow the whistle on the corruption in the EU. It is personal, chatty, anecdotal – but utterly damning in its way. Given the absolute absence of accountability and oversight in the EU, what would you expect? Right: massive institutionalised corruption; gravy trains for friends, supporters, family. And barely hidden. Von Buitenen, an accountant and a Christian, apparently the only honest man with any bottle on the EU staff, didn’t have to look hard to find corruption: it was everywhere he went.(5)
Notes
- London: Little, Brown, 1999
- The Tainted Source: the Undemocratic Origins of the European Idea, (London: Little Brown, 1997) which has recently been remaindered and is around for about a £1 in the UK.
- Reviewed in Lobster 37
- London: Faber and Faber, 1995
- There is a section at the end of the van Buitenen book showing how reluctantly and incompetently comrade Commissioner Kinnock responded to the corruption charges.