Just as German elites bullied Europe into accepting a single currency, they are achieving, by the same process, a fiscal union on the Continent. The end result is that Berlin will ultimately control currency, interest rates and taxation Europe-wide. At that point, EU members will have lost all sense of national sovereignty. The European Union will have become a singular, imperial political entity, in reality a Fourth Reich—none other than the seventh, and final, resurrection of the Holy Roman Empire.

The most astute civil servants within the EU system have been aware of the end result of this postwar European project for some time. One of the sharpest of observers is Bernard Connolly. His book The Rotten Heart of Europe remains a classic in the field of the increasing number of exposés of the true nature of the Eurobeast.

Published back in 1995 in the wake of the 1992 Maastricht Treaty—the treaty that enabled the founding of a monetary and political union by European elites—Connolly’s book unravels the mystery of the creation of the EU Exchange Rate Mechanism. That was the means by which the EU was steered along the road to total fiscal union. He describes how Germans were inveigled into sacrificing their sovereign means of exchange—their beloved deutsche mark—and accepting a European federal unit administered under an EU authority: “Across the Rhine, successive German governments have, in their pursuit of a ‘European’ cloak for German ambitions, been prepared to accept an apparent cession of national monetary authority—as long as the new European monetary authority looks, sounds, smells and acts exactly as the German monetary authority now does.”

His position as head of the European Monetary System’s (ems’s) National and Community Monetary Policies Unit of the European Commission not only gave Connolly unique insight into the Commission’s “environment hostile to thought,” but also gave him a “feeling for the distinctly German way of approaching monetary questions.” That “distinctly German way” was described in a Daily Mail comment as: “What Germany wants, Germany will get. That is the clear message. And anyone who still has not realized who will rule the roost in the fast-developing European superstate should take note” (Jan. 12, 1999).

Connolly understands that which most politicians and few in the press and mass media are prepared to publicize, that the European Union, being a “cloak for German ambitions,” has deeply-entrenched historical roots in the ever resurrecting old Holy Roman Empire.

In the first chapter of his book, appropriately titled “Genesis,” Connolly speaks of the Frankish-German desire to use the European unification process to “recreate the empire of Charlemagne.” To this end—and this is something of which American observers, given the relative youth of their nation, largely lack an understanding—symbolism plays a great part.

Connolly notes that it was by no mere coincidence that the Belgian and German leaders at the time, Valéry Giscard D’Estaing and Helmut Schmidt, agreed to the ems process “at a bilateral summit in September 1978 at Aachen, principal seat and burial place of Charlemagne. The symbolism was heavily underlined in both France and Germany; the two leaders paid a special visit to the throne of Charlemagne and a special service was held in the cathedral; at the end of the summit, D’Estaing remarked that: ‘Perhaps when we discussed monetary problems, the spirit of Charlemagne brooded over us’” (emphasis mine throughout).

Thirty-two years later, we see that spirit of Charlemagne alive and active in the end result of European monetary union. It is in such a spirit that German elites have now placed their imperialist stamp on the political union of Europe, using monetary union as the facilitator. As Connolly observed back in 1995, the story of European union is a story based on the concept that “economics—and monetary economics in particular—is the instrument of political hegemony … and the wider the currency’s domain, the greater the power of those who control it.”

On March 28, Vaclav Klaus, the Czech Republic’s president, wrote an opinion piece in the Czech daily newspaper Pravo on the subject of Germany’s latest move for EU fiscal consolidation. It is known by the odd name the “euro-plus pact,” and 23 of the EU bloc’s 27 nations have signed up to it. In true realist fashion, Klaus exposed the new pact for what it actually has achieved: “The Brussels summit on March 25 was not about anything else but the further integration of Europe towards fiscal … union. It was a radical reduction of the sovereignty of other EU countries.” That is, other than Germany!

In a further indication of the EU untying its Atlantic alliance apron strings, the European Central Bank (ecb), the authority that sets interests rates for the EU, has sundered its traditional connection with the U.S. Federal Reserve and for the first time in its history charted its own course.

Reuters reported on March 31 that “After following the Federal Reserve’s lead for over a decade, the European Central Bank is poised to launch a series of interest rate hikes before the U.S. central bank for the first time in the ecb’s history.

“The change from the traditional pattern reflects the ecb’s greater preoccupation with inflation pressures, as well as its higher level of discomfort with the emergency bond-buying programs run by central banks. … The divergence between the ecb and the Fed has produced situations where the ecb seems to be publicly criticizing the U.S. central bank.”

German officials have been quite blunt at times in condemning the U.S. approach of spending more as a means to get out of debt. As Reuters comments, the ecb stance “reflects the legacy of the hawkish Bundesbank, which the ecb carries in its dna” (ibid.).

As Germany closes the jaws of its centralized system of banking, financial and economic control around Europe, it is becoming patently clear that the system is designed to greatly enhance Germany’s political and economic control over the Continent.

Being by far the most powerful EU economy, Germany holds the purse strings when it comes to bailing out EU economies whose economic foundations have been wrecked by joining the eurozone. The result has been that Germany has imposed punitive conditions on these nations in return for bailout funds.

Take the example of Greece. “On the eve of the Brussels summit, Chancellor Angela Merkel laid out to the Europe Committee of the German Bundestag under which conditions Berlin would be in agreement to grant ‘German support’ to Greece. Athens would have to sell public property and undertake extensive privatizations, if it is to be granted a lower interest rate for its EU credit” (German-Foreign-Policy.com, March 23).

The upshot of this approach is, “In the intermediate term, sales from the public sector, within the framework of the announced wave of privatizations, are supposed to prohibit a new budgetary emergency in Greece. It will not be the Greek nation, but, more than anyone else, the companies—probably also German—that will be the main beneficiaries of this forced privatization. They will be able to purchase what had previously been Greek public property, that Greece now is forced to sell” (ibid.).

The progressive transfer of national assets from EU nations to Germany has been taking place largely unnoticed since German reunification. However, what has been an increasing trend since 1990 is set to become a literal landslide of takeovers by Germany of land, businesses, national infrastructure and institutions in the wake of the euro crisis.

As we have said before, had Dr. Walther Funk, Hitler’s old economics minister, been alive today, he would be laughing up his nationalist socialist sleeve at how German elites have achieved, via the instrument of the European Union treaties, what he set out to do 60 years earlier by more aggressive means. And it has all been achieved this time without a shot being fired in anger—yet!

It must now be admitted that German imperialists who went underground in the latter years of World War ii to plan for the rise of the Fourth Reich, passing the baton to another generation through their penetration of all major German institutions post-World War ii, are very close to achieving their goal. Yet there is a major missing element.

In his comparison between Charlemagne’s Holy Roman Empire and today’s European Union, Bernard Connolly asks the burning question, “In the new empire of Charlemagne, who would play Charlemagne?”

Regardless of the personality who eventually takes that role, in the national sense the answer is now quite obvious!