Putin to visit Brussels as ‘Eurasian Union’ leader

Russian President Vladimir Putin is expected to attend the EU-Russia summit in Brussels later this month. But he will make sure his hosts welcome him as the representative of the Eurasian Union – Putin’s pet geopolitical project, which bears similarities to the EU.

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The summit is the second to take place this year, after a first summit in St. Petersburg in June where Putin listed conditions for signing a new basic treaty between Russia and the EU.

Putin said he would not advance negotiations unless the EU formalised relations with the so-called Common Economic Space involving Russia, Belarus and Kazakhstan (see background). The three countries have also forged a customs union.

Germany’s Merkel Calls for EU Veto Power Over National Budgets

Instead of bullets and bombs, it’s the erosion of national sovereignty and nearly complete capitulation of EU member states that were known to not qualify from the very beginning. It was known it would fail as the cultures and economies were to diverse to begin with, and now, according to plan, they’re seizing the moment.

Guess what’s back: The Fourth Reich under a new EU, or United States of Europe.

German Chancellor Angela Merkel is pushing a scheme that would purport to give an unelected official within the increasingly powerful but unpopular European Union the authority to veto the budgets of elected national governments. If approved, the EU would have more power over its formerly sovereign members than even the U.S. federal government has been able to usurp from American states.

Speaking to the EU summit before an EU summit on October 18, Merkel declared that it was time for the emerging Brussels-based super-state to have even more powers. “We have made good progress on strengthening fiscal discipline with the fiscal pact but we are of the opinion, and I speak for the whole German government on this, that we could go a step further by giving Europe real rights of intervention in national budgets,” she told the Bundestag lower house, drawing swift criticism.

Barroso: EU Needs New Treaty

While it’s true that further integration (and also the introduction of Eurobonds) will help stem the tide, it is not a permanent solution and is only kicking the proverbial can down the road. In addition, all roads continue to lead to Germany as the main benefactor of the crisis.

European Commission President Jose Manuel Barroso called for EU nations to sign a new treaty as he called for “greater unity” within EU, during his first major speech after the summer break, September 1.

His speech comes after reports that Germany has been quietly making the same proposal despite it being opposed by most EU nations.

Speaking at a convention of supreme court judges in The Hague, Barroso said that power at “the European level has yet to be consolidated to such a degree” that the EU can effectively solve its problems.

“We are experiencing a situation in which we need greater unity and coherence between our policies, as well as greater legislative harmonization,” he said. “And, to achieve all this, we need greater institutional integration.”

“The crisis has made it clear that we must not only complete the economic and monetary union, but also pursue greater economic integration and deeper political and democratic union with appropriate mechanisms of accountability,” he explained.

Barroso also brought up one of the great contradictions in this crisis. “We need more integration, and the corollary of more integration has to be more democracy,” he said. This is a common sentiment from Eurocrats. But more integration and more democracy are mutually exclusive: The people of Europe want less integration. To Barroso and his ilk, integration comes first; the people don’t get a say about that. The EU remains a fundamentally undemocratic project.

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Some, probably many, will opt out of this integration. But Barosso is right, the crisis is forcing Europe to unify, which is exactly what Europe elites designed the crisis to do.

Full article: Barroso: EU Needs New Treaty (The Trumpet)