THE WORLD NEEDS A ‘NEW DEAL’
After the French Elections:

Is All Europe
Going Neo-Con?

by Helga Zepp-LaRouche


EIRNS/Helene Müller

Helga Zepp-LaRouche
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After the French Elections:
Is All Europe Going Neo-Con?

by Helga Zepp-LaRouche

Mrs. LaRouche, chairwoman of Germany’s Civil Rights Solidarity Movement (BüSo), issued this statement on May 11. It has been translated from German.


The election of Nicolas Sarkozy as President of France has drastically worsened the world political situation. Europe threatens to go completely in the direction of the neo-cons, who are headed for World War III, and at the same time to become ungovernable due to the financial crisis.


Joan of Arc would turn over in her grave. For while she heroically liberated France from the British occupation, and thus created the conditions for the development of France as the first sovereign nation-state, the French population voted May 6 for British control of the Elysée. And thus, happy about the new situation in Europe, the Financial Times wrote at the beginning of the week: “How often has there been a combination of heads of governments, which had such British instincts?” Tony Blair, the primary architect of the war in Iraq built on lies, immediately expressed his joy about the change in France, and German Federal Chancellor Angela Merkel now expects an improvement in German-French relations—effectively under British design.

For his part, Sarkozy announced as his first objective the improvement of France’s relations with the Bush Administration; Is all of Europe turning towards the camp of the neo-cons? and his massive rejection of President Vladimir Putin and Russia is well known. Overall, therefore, the situation in Europe has deteriorated. For in the face of the increasing tensions, which have evoked a state of ungovernability in more and more European states, it is now even less likely, that Europe will step forward with political initiatives, which could effectively counter the existential dangers, with which the world is confronted.

On the contrary, a complete assortment of people leaning to the right, who are affiliated with the Synarchist International, rushed to acclaim Sarkozy’s coming to power. Thus, the arch-neo-con Richard Perle expressed satisfaction in Le Figaro over the fact that France would now finally be “liberated” from the Gaullist obsession, to want to be different from the U.S. The friend of Pinochet and the pseudo-Democrat Felix Rohatyn expressed his gratification, that Sarkozy will now be a close confederate of the United States and NATO. Very soon, it will become evident what Sarkozy meant, when, during the election campaign, he promised a break, a “rupture,” with previous policy. And for starters, Sarkozy himself spent three days on the yacht of Vincent Bolloré, who, as a close friend of the president of the Assicurazioni Generali, Antoine Bernheim, is affiliated with the financial interests of Lazard Frères—that banking house, which in the 1930s supported the forces friendly to Hitler. After this short vacation, rumors circulated in Paris that Bolloré will buy up the first channel of the French television station TF1 from Sarkozy’s friend Martin Bouygues, and he in turn will obtain the right to buy up the nuclear energy firm Areva, which Sarkozy wants to privatize soon.

The Strategic Threat

What does this new direction mean in strategic terms, at a time, when international oligarchical circles have launched a massive campaign against President Putin personally, and a policy of isolation against Russia? It was an aspect of this campaign to dissuade France and Germany from pursuing its earlier partnership with Russia, which now, in the case of France, has been completely successful, and in the case of Germany, nearly so. At the same time, not only Putin himself, but also many other well-known Russian personalities, such as the head of the U.S.A.-Canada Institute, Sergei Rogov, are warning that the world is returning to the edge of a new Cold War, and the Damocles sword of nuclear war hangs over us. Gen. Leonid Ivashov recently warned that the U.S. has prepared nuclear strikes against Iran and wants to circumvent the resistance in Congress through a staged incident.

Last, but not least, it is clear to the traditional military in the U.S., that a military strike against Iran, in which so-called “mini-nukes” would be employed, would lead in all probability to a global asymmetrical war. Well-informed sources from this milieu warn that the current trip of U.S. Vice President Dick Cheney to the Southwest Asian region must be seen in this connection. In this context, how is it to be assessed that in various locations in Southwest Asia and South Asia, the U.S. is demanding the right to station American troops, for of its warships to utilize the ports of these nations? And what is the real intention behind the American plans to station missile defense systems in Poland and the Czech Republic, to which Putin has responded with the suspension of the CFE [Conventional Armed Forces in Europe] Treaty? In many places the answer given is that, with all of these different elements, what is at stake is an orientation towards World War III.

While Europe, in the era of Schröder-Chirac, represented a clear counterweight to the war policy of the Anglo-American neo-cons, it now threatens, in the event of an emergency, to be involved in a world war as part of a new combination, in which Russia, China, and India, among others, would stand on the other side.

A Crisis of Ungovernability

However, even without this extreme sharpening of the crisis, in many European states, globalization has already produced a state of ungovernability. Thus, the recent elections in Great Britain, despite all the pretensions of London to be the world capital of the hedge funds, have shown how much the antagonisms among Scotland, where the Scottish National Party became the strongest power, Wales, and England are splitting up the country. The Scottish National Party aims at holding a referendum on the independence of Scotland, which the future Prime Minister Gordon Brown completely rejects; Brown has formed an inherently unstable minority government, after negotiations with the Liberal Democratic Party collapsed.

In Belgium, the antagonisms between Flemings and Walloons are likewise unbridgeable under the present circumstances. The election of the chairman of the Radical Party in Serbia, Tomislav Nicolic, as Speaker of the Parliament, has increased the tensions on the Kosovo issue. Nicolic declared that, in an emergency, he will wage war, if the West supports the independence of Kosovo. If a government is not formed in Serbia by May 15, a new election must take place.

The situation in almost all Eastern European states is extremely unstable. In Germany, there are cracks in the Grand Coalition on so many topics, that despite the mutual love of power, it is always a question as to whether this alliance will endure for long under this stress. And in France, with increasing difficulties in the economy, Sarkozy will polarize the country very much more than has already happened.

In fact, the political and economic situation in Europe viewed up close, is much more fragile, than that which the EU would like to present to the rest of the world. Nowhere is this clearer than in Germany, the country which once was in the vanguard of nuclear technology, and which today no longer possesses the know-how to reverse its ban on nuclear power. While there is a renaissance in nuclear energy throughout the whole world, our rotund Environmental Minister, Sigmar Gabriel, sits on the leadership and blocks every rational discussion. And while there are concrete plans in dozens of countries to build the Transrapid [high speed magnetic-levitation trains] over great distances, as, for example, in Venezuela or along the [Persian] Gulf Coast, Germany will presumably not be the beneficiary, rather, if anything, it will be China or Japan that will export their models. For it is questionable whether the technology of the Transrapid, subsidized by taxes, which, due to the greening of the brains of the politicians, was never built here commercially, still belongs to us at all, or whether it was not traded away long ago.

The current ungovernability in Germany becomes clear from the simple fact that in Berlin neither the Grand Coalition, nor any other combination of parties represented in the Bundestag [the lower house of parliament], is able to make the decisions, on which the political and economic survival of Germany depends. Indeed, there are by all means members of the Bundestag who know that we need nuclear energy, and that there are inherently safe forms such as the high-temperature reactor; who know that the Transrapid could be one of the top export items for Germany; who know that the scare about so-called man-made Global Warming is a swindle—but who would never stick their necks out so far as to endanger their careers.

This moral quagmire and the degree of sophistry represent the greatest problem. If one observes in detail how exhausted the situation in Europe really is, it might be clear that the increasingly acute financial crash threatens to plunge the political structures completely into chaos. If one compares this desolate state with the manifold plans for the development of transportation corridors and extensive projects in Russia, India, and other parts of Asia and Ibero-America, it becomes clear that the measures proposed by Lyndon LaRouche for action by an internally transformed U.S., without the war party of Cheney, in combination with Russia, China, and India, represent the only, and final chance. Only if the realization of a new financial system in the tradition of Franklin D. Roosevelt and a New Deal for the reconstruction of the world economy is placed on the agenda very quickly by these four nations, can there be a positive solution. Intelligent individuals will stake everything on orienting Germany and the other nations of Europe towards this alternative.

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