Niall Ferguson Has Some Fun: Europe, 2021

Gary North - June 06, 2018

Historian Niall Ferguson has written a playful piece for the Wall Street Journal. It is written as an observer’s reminiscences of the transition to the United States of Europe.

The euro survives. The independence of Western European nations does not.

England is outside the system. The voters vetoed the idea of union.

Israel attacked Iran. Turkey sided with Iran. The Muslim Brotherhood took over in Egypt. Egypt then broke its alliance with Israel. Israel is now isolated.

The rate of unemployment in the southern PIIGS is at 20%. No progress on that front. But money still flows from northern Europe. Residents of the PIIGS enjoy the good life at the expense of the north.

The capital of Europe is now Vienna. It’s back to the past: Vienna in 1900, but with iPads.

The bankers are still in control.

The defeat of Angela Merkel’s coalition in 2013 came as no surprise following the German banking crisis of the previous year. Taxpayers were up in arms about Ms. Merkel’s decision to bail out Deutsche Bank, despite the fact that Deutsche’s loans to the ill-fated European Financial Stability Fund had been made at her government’s behest. The German public was simply fed up with bailing out bankers. “Occupy Frankfurt” won.

Yet the opposition Social Democrats essentially pursued the same policies as before, only with more pro-European conviction. It was the SPD that pushed through the treaty revision that created the European Finance Funding Office (fondly referred to in the British press as “EffOff”), effectively a European Treasury Department to be based in Vienna.

Ferguson sees an extension of present trends. Somehow, Europe will muddle through, but in a new form: a single political order.

It’s possible. The NWO may pull this off. They have been working on it since 1919. But disintegration seems more likely to me. The forces of nationalism cannot be contained if the eurozone breaks down, as it looks as though it will. The action to repair it — political centralization — will produce a reaction: operational secession. This seems hard to believe today, but this is what national government bankruptcy does. It opens up new possibilities.

Continue reading on online.wsj.com

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This was published on November 22, 2011. The original is here.