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June 28, 2021 - 3:41pm
Which organisation really runs the European Union? Is it the European Parliament? The European Commission? The European Central Bank?
A useful rule of thumb is that the more visible and democratically accountable the body, the less power it holds.
Therefore the directly elected European Parliament is by the far the weakest of the major EU institutions. The Commission clearly has more power than the Parliament — and is made up of appointees. However, these are high profile appointees. When they screw up badly — as they have over the EU’s vaccine procurement programme — their failures are politically embarrassing.
This combination of visibility without direct democratic accountability therefore puts a limit on how much power someone like Ursula von der Leyen, or her predecessor Jean-Claude Juncker, can be given. Though it varies from country to country, there is a point at which voters would demand the restoration of effective democracy (as British voters did five years ago).
To avoid any further crises of this kind, non-accountable power in the EU needs to be wielded invisibly. Hence the importance of bodies like the European Central Bank, whose inner workings are much less obvious to the public than the fumblings of the Commission.
The most invisible body would be one that no one has heard of. And that’s very nearly true of the Committee of Permanent Representatives, also known as COREPER. This is the grouping that brings together the top diplomatic representatives of each member state to the European Union. In other words, it is a committee of ambassadors and deputy ambassadors.
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SubscribeThe problem with the world is it is like an onion with the surface we know, and then layers and layers we do not see – and to most as they are not seen they must not exist/matter.
I believe the world is run by invisible financiers. Since the times of Henry the VIII we saw how even absolute Monarchs were limited in power by the need for debt (for War, or ship-building, or anything really big), and thus the Bankers had real power, they gave it to him, or not, and so he owed them power.
Money/currency is in fact debt. Banks create it,
(this is interesting but how it works, and always has for millennium) You borrow $1000,000 from a bank to buy a house. FIRST!! They enter your ‘NOTE’ (agreement to pay, mortgage) on the Plus side of their ledger books as an Asset. Then They give you the $100,000 check and THEN list it as a Liability on the other side of the ledger! (once on the note is entered on the + side they now have the asset to use to pay you with, so then can now list that on the minus side as debt and pay for the house- cool, isn’t it? Chicken and egg stuff)
The Bank just Created $100,000. They did not go to the vault and get it out of piles of banknotes – they created $100,000 out of air, and it is now real money. (read on ”Fractional Reserve Banking’ for the fairy tale version of this)
The same great families who loaned to Henry VIII are the ones now, tho handle the $300,000,000,000,000 of global debt – and when ever it passes by them they get a tiny cut – they own the world, they are the Global Elite, and are like the COREPER in a way, but much more powerful and invisible.
Now people think the note in their wallet is money, could not be more wrong, it is currency, it is a token representing a debt someone holds (Central Bank -> and they to others) that is in Circulation.
Back in the day, pre 1971, Gold was money, paper was currency, but the ending of the Bretton Woods 1944-1971 made the USA Fed Reserve $ the world’s reserve currency, all paper and digital zeros – and … well it is a very long story, but leads to here with the Covid-19 Money printing (almost all of which ended up in the hands of the wealthy, and is destroying the money of middle class and lower income through the stealth tax called INFLATION), and inflated the stocks (equities) so their P/E is such they pay very little dividends, and so the pensions are toast, and the wealthy more wealthy… The wealthy hold appreciating assets, the rest not in real terms – but that is all another story, and I wish Unherd would do stories on these things as the real world is NOTHING like you think it is.
Good post and very clear. From the above note on Coreper, which says almost nothing apart from mentioning the name, I am guessing that UnHerd does not have the money to commission detailed, analytical essays and, instead, relies on you to do their work.
How about “Bank for International Settlements, BIS
The Bank for International Settlements is an international financial institution owned by central banks that “fosters international monetary and financial cooperation and serves as a bank for central banks””
Do you all even know of this one? They just made rules about gold as reserve for Central Bank debt – the Gold Bugs are all excited about that, who appoints them?
How about the IMF (remember Christine Legarde? who appointed her?) Well they also ‘Print Money’, they are called ‘Special Drawing Rights’ SDRs, and the IMF printed out of air about a trillion $ of them in the last year…
The World Bank... and on and on it goes, all appointed, like all the Central Bankers – USA Fed chief, Powell, said there are some dots on a chart which may mean a 0.25% interest in 2023 (from zero now) and the markets went Crazy!
Everything goes on behind closed doors.
The BIS have always been transparent and generally very sensible – they are the ones who attempt to keep national central banks such as the BoE on the rails.
The reason they are little known is that they publish long and detailed analyses which look a bit technical so most people don’t read them. They are well worth a read.
According to Wikipedia there are two Coreper committees:
‘Coreper 1 consists of deputy heads of mission and deals largely with social and economic issues.’
‘Coreper 2 consists of heads of mission (Ambassador Extraordinary and Plenipotentiary) and deals largely with political, financial and foreign policy issues.’
‘Representatives of the Council Secretariat for the relevant Directorates and from the Legal Directorate are also present.’
Sounds like a good p**s-up on expenses.
COREPER is more democratic, if less transparent, than the European Commission, as it is made up of representatives of democratic governments, rather than independent appointees. It’s more consistent with a Europe of nations, as opposed to a European state. So it’s not obviously wrong. But clearly it should be better known and more transparent, and there are far too many European bodies. Why have both the European Commission and Coreper? Why have Ambassadors to the EU as well as MEPs? American states don’t have Ambassadors in Washington. The UN doesn’t have elected representatives as well as Ambassadors. Why have three or more “Presidents”?
We dont elect diplomats. The EC remit is technocratic, despite some mission creep in recent years. The diplomats deal with much more important issues.
The EU, at its core, is a group of corporate bureaucrats in Brussels working as de facto agents of big banks and transnational businesses. Such policies dominate the European Commission, the Parliament, the ECB and the ECJ – not to mention COREPER – and does so without the knowledge or the consent of the governed.
The only thing that terrifies Brussels more than transparency, is the idea of real democracy, hence why they’ve never tried it and why they deliberately put their legislators beyond the reach of the ballot box.
This is not an accident, it is calculated policy that goes all the way back to Jean Monnet’s first plans for a US of E. It was quite intentionally designed to be unaccountable to the European electorate – offering them just a fig-leaf of democracy, a pretence of democracy, with elections for MEPs, who are powerless to change the make up or direction of the EU institutions – or broader policy.
Those who’d watched the League of Nations fall apart (due to it having to allow for democratic decision-making) had learned a salutary lesson and were determined their new version would avoid such a mistake. Monnet and other architects of the European project all referenced the fact that building a pan-European entity to encompass such varied and disparate cultures would have been impossible if they’d stopped to ask the citizenry and so, quite deliberately, they didn’t.
To say such a thing among European political scholars would not be at all controversial – it is only in the UK that EU zealots cling to the fiction that the EU is somehow a bastion of honest transparent government and democracy – it simply isn’t, really. Anyone who believes that the “democratic” affectation of elections for MEPs in any way represents actual democracy convicts themselves of frightening gullibility.
Europhiles kid themselves that the EU has the best interests of its citizens at heart – in truth it could not care less. The EU can only succeed in a future where decisions are made above the nation state; by institutions, large corporate interests and financial markets, overseen by politicians who remain entirely unaccountable and never have to subject themselves to the inconvenience of achieving a popular mandate.