Funk, Darre and the Nazi economist Werner Daitz sought to establish a single European Currency, and were influenced by the C19 economic theories of Friedrich List. Under Dr Bernhard Benning, of the Reich Credit Company, later head of the post WW2 Bundesbank, they created a European Credit clearing system, which seems to have been a larger version of the Compendium Bookshop payment methods, the idea here being that the German army eg would take produce from French farmers, and sometime much later, maybe, the farmers would possibly be paid for this... This was intended as a fore runner to a full blown single currency.

The drive for European Unity is also fascist at a political and cultural level, and Laughland goes into great detail about the various youth movements in Belgium and France, who held a Todtnauberg style youth camp at Zoute in Belgium, 11th - 19th July 1936. There were other groups such as Ordre Nouveau, Jeune Europe, and L'Action Francaise. Denis de Rougemont, a Swiss political theorist is an important link here, who got the idea off the trains: 'I could read on the long brown carriages Amsterdam, Basel, Milan, Zagreb, Bucharest. For the first time, I felt Europe.' [p 58]. Letter to Hitler: 'Your work is courageous, it has grandeur.' (November 1933) There are figures like Henri de Man, and Paul Henri Spaak, later author of the Spaak Report (1956) a key document in their post WW2 drive towards unification, who, in 1940, undermined Belgian defence plans by engineering a railway strike just as the Germans invaded. [pp 64-65] Otto Abetz, an agent for Ribbentrop, linked between the various groups, among them Leon Degrelle and the Rexists, Degrelle later fighting in the Waffen SS. Vichy recruited slave workers, and soldiers for the first single European army: 'With your European comrades, under the SS sign, you will win.'

'Personalism' and the figure of Emmanuel Mounier are examined at length. In the early 1930s, the journal 'Esprit' was seen as a Catholic version of Otto Strasser's 'Plans', and was partly published using funds secretly channeled from Ribbentrop via Les Editions de la Toison d'Or. 'We very well know that they decant, purify and perfect the thick foreign currents; they bring the experiences to fruition. French National Socialism will simply be more artful than the others.' ('Sur un certain front unique', January 1933) There were other links to Otto Strasser's 'Black Front' and Harro Schulze-Boysen (later executed by the Nazis) There was talk of communitarianism and the 'third way'. Mounier dined with Goebbels and Himmler, and published a pro-Hitler book in February 1939. In 1940, Mounier was in pole position, and 'Esprit' became a key Vichyite publication. Mounier became one of the leading lights behind the Uriage Vichy Staff College. Later, he was ousted during an anti Catholic purge, and mistakenly arrested as a member of the Resistance, which error later was used to rehabilitate him. Post WW2, Mounier seems to have been motivated by hostility towards the US, similar to that expressed by Heidegger at around the same time.

Laughland goes into the European political culture, which is fundamentally anti-democratic and founded on lies and deception. It functions, not through consensus, but is 'Dirigiste', working via secretive managerial diktat. The Euro is being imposed, and with a single currency comes a single political system. Laughland essentially objects to this, because he supports the free market, but it also brings the abolition of the individual state's sovereignty. Hitler's disparaging talk of 'Kleinstaatengerumpel' again. Some of this is straightforwardly self-contradictory tosh; Margaret Thatcher speaking of 'rolling back the frontiers of the state' but anxiously trying to protect her national borders, for example. He writes of the European myth of inevitability, which has to be challenged. Where this book is good is in the exposure of the fascist origins of Europe; the free market stuff and advocacy of the gold standard are less than convincing, as is the material about EU expansion eastwards.

– Steve Booth

Green Anarchist: Front Page Current Articles First 10 Issues See: uk.indymedia.org for more on the university expansion.

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