By Dan Bilefsky - International Herald Tribune Abridged
Published: July 20, 2007
"LISBON: In this old and nostalgic capital, filled with grand monuments to the navigators who helped create Europe's first overseas empire in the 15th century, one begins to understand why the Portuguese have never completely learned to love the latter-day empire of sorts known as the European Union.
On the surface, it would seem natural that Portugal, a small country of 10.6 million people that shed an authoritarian regime, would have an instinctive affinity for the EU. The Union has been an anchor of democracy since the revolution that overthrew the dictatorship here in 1974. It has pumped nearly 50 billion euros into Portugal's economy since the country joined the EU in 1986 and helps it to have influence beyond its size on the world stage.
Yet Portugal has an ambivalent relationship with the bloc of 480 million people it will now lead as EU president for the next six months. It is sometimes said here that Europe was the last continent to be discovered by the Portuguese.
"We were the first European country to have an empire and the last one to give it up," said Jaime Nogueira Pinto, a biographer of Antonio de Oliveira Salazar, the dictator who ruled Portugal for nearly 50 years. "So the Portuguese, more than most, are sensitive about losing our national identity."
Salazar's authoritarian regime was far more focused on Portugal's overseas provinces than on Europe, believing that little Portugal would be lost without its empire.
Since the transition to democracy, successive governments have harnessed the country's future to the EU. But its colonial past still exerts a strong hold on the national psyche and Lisbon still maintains close ties with Portugal's five former African colonies and Brazil. It is no coincidence that Portugal will use its EU presidency to hold the first EU-Africa summit in seven years, as well as a high-profile summit with Brazil.
However potent its imperial hangover, the greatest factor weighing on Portugal's mixed attitude toward the EU is its economy, which is severely underperforming other neighboring EU countries like Spain.
According to a recent Eurobarometer poll, support for the EU dropped to 49 percent last year compared with 58 percent the year before but edged up to 55 percent in the first quarter of this year. In 2006, half of the respondents believed the process of European integration undermined the country's economy and contributed to its 8 percent unemployment rate.
While the Spanish economy grew at about 3.9 percent last year, Portugal had the lowest economic growth in Western Europe, about 1.3 percent. Its budget deficit of 3.9 percent of gross domestic product also breaches EU rules requiring countries in the euro zone to maintain deficits under 3 percent."
Eliadite:- Here would be a perfect partner in the Commonwealth Bloc. Britain's oldest ally and a European country with so much in common in terms of being a former colonial power and historically with an outward-looking, maritime attitude. It would also provide an certain element of contigruity between the Commonwealth Bloc countires of north west Europe and the African ones. Obviously Portugal's membership would also raise the possibility of Angola joining and possibly even Brazil.
Friday 27 February 2009
Thursday 19 February 2009
The Social Commonwealth
Mosley transcended both free market economics and the Marxist alternative. He rejected both the belief of those who put their blind trust in international competition based on free trade and those who simply waited for capitalism to collapse through its “inherent contradictions”, as the Marxists viewed the recurring crises.
Before turning to fascism, Mosley had visited America where he witnessed a higher standard of living linked to a highly developed technology. The secret he found rested on the existence of a large home market protected from the competition of low-waged imports because America was large enough geographically to become self-sufficient in food production and raw materials. Restricted immigration also maintained a shortage of labour that gave the unions more clout to push wages up to a higher standard of living for the workers, thus giving them the purchasing power to buy the goods they produced. The elimination of the need to trade with the rest of the world by being self-sufficient solved most problems.
So why not do the same with the resources of the British Empire?
The main obstacle was the City of London. The main occupation of the City of London was foreign lending for the purpose of making profits for financiers. As the home market became depressed through low wages and unemployment, the City of London invested more and more in foreign countries. With the absence of gold and other services in these countries, the interest from loans was drawn back on foreign imports … knocking down the producers and consumers in Britain.
Mosley attacked this system for its predatory affects on the national economy claiming that the speculative nature of international finance led to instability and the destruction of British industry.
Finance was to become the handmaiden of the economy and not the master. All the resources of Empire would have been used for an Insulated Empire Policy protecting the nation from cheap foreign imports.
-Robert Edwards, Sir Oswald Mosley and the British Union of Fascists
Comment from Drakeleigh:
The Empire has long ago evolved into the Commonwealth and Mosley's ideas moved in the direction of a united Europe, both as a consequence of the dramatic events of WWII. Yet as that terrible episode in world history recedes into more distant history, we can review where we are now and how else it might have been. Oswald Mosley lived until 1980, not long enough to see just what a miserable parody of the vision he had the European Union has become. Maybe now so much dust has settled, we can find solutions to the state Britain is in not just from Mosley's post-war writings, but also from his earlier views regarding Britain's role in the world. The European Union as it has developed is little more than a free trade club for bankers, with very little "organic" integrity. The Commonwealth, for all it's faults, is an organic entity, springing from that dynamic expression of European civilisation, British sea power. Here is a real starting point, not some artificial expenses paid bureacracy.
We should look again at Mosley's idea of Europe- Africa, but put it in the already existing construct of the Commonwealth. And open membership of the Commonwealth to other European countries, they too can be part of this project of which the British monarch is the head.
Before turning to fascism, Mosley had visited America where he witnessed a higher standard of living linked to a highly developed technology. The secret he found rested on the existence of a large home market protected from the competition of low-waged imports because America was large enough geographically to become self-sufficient in food production and raw materials. Restricted immigration also maintained a shortage of labour that gave the unions more clout to push wages up to a higher standard of living for the workers, thus giving them the purchasing power to buy the goods they produced. The elimination of the need to trade with the rest of the world by being self-sufficient solved most problems.
So why not do the same with the resources of the British Empire?
The main obstacle was the City of London. The main occupation of the City of London was foreign lending for the purpose of making profits for financiers. As the home market became depressed through low wages and unemployment, the City of London invested more and more in foreign countries. With the absence of gold and other services in these countries, the interest from loans was drawn back on foreign imports … knocking down the producers and consumers in Britain.
Mosley attacked this system for its predatory affects on the national economy claiming that the speculative nature of international finance led to instability and the destruction of British industry.
Finance was to become the handmaiden of the economy and not the master. All the resources of Empire would have been used for an Insulated Empire Policy protecting the nation from cheap foreign imports.
-Robert Edwards, Sir Oswald Mosley and the British Union of Fascists
Comment from Drakeleigh:
The Empire has long ago evolved into the Commonwealth and Mosley's ideas moved in the direction of a united Europe, both as a consequence of the dramatic events of WWII. Yet as that terrible episode in world history recedes into more distant history, we can review where we are now and how else it might have been. Oswald Mosley lived until 1980, not long enough to see just what a miserable parody of the vision he had the European Union has become. Maybe now so much dust has settled, we can find solutions to the state Britain is in not just from Mosley's post-war writings, but also from his earlier views regarding Britain's role in the world. The European Union as it has developed is little more than a free trade club for bankers, with very little "organic" integrity. The Commonwealth, for all it's faults, is an organic entity, springing from that dynamic expression of European civilisation, British sea power. Here is a real starting point, not some artificial expenses paid bureacracy.
We should look again at Mosley's idea of Europe- Africa, but put it in the already existing construct of the Commonwealth. And open membership of the Commonwealth to other European countries, they too can be part of this project of which the British monarch is the head.
Wednesday 18 February 2009
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