THE EUROPEAN UNION AND GERMANY’S NEW “PUSH TO THE EAST”

Dateline: l3th December 1999

Congratulations on publishing the letter from MPs of the Polish Parliament and Czech parliaments. They rightly emphasized the dangers of the European Union's own defence forces undermining NATO. Those in Eastern Europe who in previous generations suffered from the expansion of "German Europe" see rather more clearly than we do the ominous parallels today.

Only last year a motion was passed in the German Parliament ("Refugees, evacuees and German minorities are a bridge between Germans and their Eastern neighbours") which was rightly seen in both the Czech Republic and in Poland as a territorial and cultural threat. The motion made it clear that the German  political class sees the expansion of the European Union eastwards as a means of expanding German and "cultural" influence.

Germans also see the European Union, with its “citizenship” and “Free movement” and “single market” as a vehicle for the return of Germans to Poland and the Czech Republic from which they were understandably expelled following their collaboration with Nazi Germany in its East European conquests. Perhaps the most sinister aspect of the German Parliament’s motion was its assertion that "we are approaching the common goal of a just peace for the whole of Europe."

Most people assumed we had achieved that in 1945 - or at 1989 with the fall of the Soviet empire. Apparently Germany does not - rather it sees the European Union as the tool for establishing the German version of "peace" in Eastern Europe.