The high treason of the Vice-President of the EEC vis-à-vis the 6 member states of the EEC. If one reads closely this memo, one gains awareness the incredible fact that the Frenchman Marjolin confides to these American negotiators his wish to circumvent the will of the European states and of the European peoples, in imposing on them surreptitiously a monetary union, something at that stage not envisaged on account of the known opposition. This duplicitous behaviour of the EEC Vice-President is a matter of high treason vis-à-vis the then 6 member states of the EEC, and notably, as a French national, with respect to France. How to otherwise describe his confidences, given that he evidently had no mandate that permits him to make disclosures on this type of subject with the representatives of a foreign government? In particular, the Frenchman Marjolin was the best placed person to know that Charles de Gaulle was then in frontal opposition with the EEC, presided over by the German jurist Walter Hallstein, friendly with Nazi authorities during the 1930s and until 1944. Besides, the founder of Free France – less than three weeks after this meeting in Washington – provoked the celebrated ‘empty chair crisis’, which lasts from 30 June 1965 to 30 January 1966. Marjolin’s desire to please his US masters leads him to declare that he “did not think that such agreements were very desirable”, and to regret “that they would cause difficulties for the U.S. in regard to Latin America”, but to reassure Washington in underlining “that they are limited in duration and would expire by 1970”. Can one imagine a government official more assiduous in submitting himself slavishly to foreign interests? And can one genuinely be astonished, if one confronts the personal and institutional supporters which have guided his career, not least the Rockefeller Foundation and Jean Monnet? “As for this Commission, it deserves to disappear. I want no more of Hallstein. I want no more of Marjolin. I want no more to do with them. … I want no more that the French government should have to do business with these types. … The problem, it is this mafia of supranationalists, whether commissioners, deputies or bureaucrats. They are all enemies. They have been put there by our enemies.” C’était de Gaulle, Alain Peyrefitte, Fayard, Éditions de Fallois, Tome II, pp.290-291. What would de Gaulle have thought of these projects of monetary union that Robert Marjolin discusses with his counterparts? Can one imagine the man of 18 June [tr: 1940] giving a mandate to Robert Marjolin to advance such a project in cooperation with the USA? This is the country that he had justly denounced as the dominant force behind ‘European construction’ in his press conference of 15 May 1962, in describing the object as ‘federalist’, which ‘could not be European’. The answer is not difficult to imagine since de Gaulle himself had indicated in a tête-à-tête with Alain Peyrefitte what he thought of Robert Marjolin and his confrères. A detail symptomatic: Marjolin had made known his secret to his Minister on Saturday morning 12 June 1965, only a few hours after the Washington meeting the evening before, and of which the Chief of the French state had probably no knowledge. Let us return to and further explore the previous quotation for its implications. Charles-de-Gaulle: “Hallstein has invented a ceremony of letters of credence for officials of the states in Brussels. He takes himself for the President of a supranational Government. He doesn’t even hide his agenda, which consists of replicating at the European level the federal structure of West Germany. The Commission would become the federal Government. The European Assembly would be the equivalent of the Bundestag. The Council of Ministers would become the Bundesrat, the Senate, in short! It’s laughable. But don’t deceive yourself: it involves an institutional drift that will finish by taking over if we don’t put a stop to it. And we alone have the power to do it. … As for the Commission, it won’t get him into heaven. I will have satisfaction. Hallstein, Marjolin and Mansholt [tr: Dutch, European Commissioner for Agriculture], they’re finished. I will not renew their mandates.” Fifteen days later, during another tête-à-tête with Peyrefitte, held after the Council of Ministers’ meeting on 1 July 1965, the founder of Free France and of the Fifth Republic explodes in anger against the European Commission, and notably against Wallter Hallstein and Robert Marjolin: “As for this Commission, it deserves to disappear. I want no more of Hallstein. I want no more of Marjolin. I want no more of Mansholt. I want no more to do with them. … It is necessary to be clear of it all. In any case, I want no more that the French government should have to do business with these types. It is finished for good. … The problem, it is this mafia of supranationalists, whether commissioners, deputies or bureaucrats. They are all enemies. They have been put there by our enemies. The Socialist buddies, with some MRP hostages, friends of Felix Gaillard [tr: Radical, Prime Minister 1957-58] and of Maurice Faure [tr: perennial Minister and fervent Europeanist]. They have spent their time in forging a state of a spirit hostile to France.” In June 1965, what did President Charles de Gaulle think of Robert Marjolin and of some of the European Commission’s projects? The most important lesson arising from the original memorandum of the State Department of 11 June 1965 resides in the total political allegiance – even complicity – of the EEC Vice-President, with the US officials. Robert Marjolin engages precisely in what has always been designated ‘friendship with a foreign power’ and an act of high treason vis-à-vis the 6 member states of the EEC in whose interests he is supposed to work, and particularly vis-à-vis his own country, France. Finally, this memorandum, with its status of partial confidentiality, is only the visible part of the iceberg? The secret documents, written in a style certainly more direct and a cynicism surely more transparent, are still unopened.
Posted on: Sat, 28 Jun 2014 21:10:06 +0000