Give Europe a Vital Mission
for the Future
by Jacques Cheminade
Jacques Cheminade is the chairman of the Solidarity and Progress party in France, and the long-time leader of the LaRouche movement there. He addressed an EIR-sponsored seminar in Berlin, Germany on the afternoon of June 28, 2005.
As Helga Zepp-LaRouche conveyed it, we have to see with the eyes of our mind and heart, in particular in a historical period as ours, and not with the eyes of our senses. If we look at it like that, we are facing in France, an extremely dramatic and interesting situation—both dramatic and interesting. Dramatic, if it's left to itself, to its own impulse; and interesting, if we intervene, to further awaken and organize the growing potential for the good.
There are two main points to it: First, is a disinhibition of the French people. They voted "non" to the European Constitution (or to the so-called European Constitution). They voted "non" against 35 years of growing unemployment, and ultra-liberal policies, destructive of labor. They voted "non" to the deregulated financial and monetary system. And they voted "non" to financial serfdom.
We did our best to help achieve that result, with our massive distribution of leaflets in the Paris area, and with systematic interventions of our Youth Movement in meetings, which were more and more focussed, and more and more to the point.
But the second point, is the point that now we have to face: the absolute incapacity of the established forces of the country to respond to the challenge.
If we look at what happened since the vote, it is a terrible arrogance, the disrespect, the disrespect for the population of the established elites. They promoted this Chirac-Villepin-Sarkozy government, which is exactly opposed to the will of the population, as a team. As it is said, "The sick dog always returns to its vomit"—and you can see, that my contempt and my disgust with the French elites, is of the same sort as that of Lyndon LaRouche.
But I must add something: If you call these people "France," it amounts to calling Bush, Cheney, and Rove, "United States." They are not what France represents, historically.
Louis XI vs. Napoleon
We are facing, therefore, a paradigm shift with no leadership. So my job is to provide that leadership, with minimal material means, in a situation where human beings—the French people—are left without a project. And if you are left without a project, you rot. Especially if you are targetted by a counterculture, oriented towards gambling—as all tourism, now—entertainment, drugs, and banality.
We put on the table two main issues. The first one, is a necessity of public productive credit, state credit, based on national banking, for long-term, low-interest-rate loans, for infrastructure in the area of 25 to 50 years. That is, to finance investment beyond tax collection and beyond loans. It means commitment of the state to produce that public credit, and also to protect tangible private investment. That is the first point put on the table.
The second issue is a sense of French history as a continuous process of an idea. And there we are faced with a paradox: France as a source of modern fascism, with a variety of earthly messianism, Louis XIV and Napoleon. And you have to face the fact that both Villepin and Sarkozy, the Prime Minister and the Interior Minister, are admirers of Napoleon's Interior and Police Minister, Fouché. And then, France, also the creator of the first nation-state in world history, the nation-state of Louis XI. So, you have Napoleon, and Louis XI, in a moment of history.
A certain, if limited understanding of Louis XI's period was conveyed in recent French history between the 1930s and the '70s, by such people as Charles de Gaulle and Jacques Rueff, or Jean Monnet and Pierre Mendès-France of the France of Roosevelt. Mostly, this is centered on national planning and state-credit issuance, what the French used to call le grand déssin [the grand design]. The good news is, that impulse still exists in the country, in the aerospace sector, the nuclear sector, the public service tradition, machine tools, also in the automotive sector.
The bad news: It is being looted, destroyed, privatized, and is collapsing, in particular, socially. At this point, we have in France, according to European standards, 2 million children living below the poverty level. We have 10% of the French population officially unemployed; the true figure is 20%; and 35% of the French population of working age, who are not working. That's the unemployed capacity of the nation. And if people make faces over it, it's almost the same situation in all European countries; the French situation is not an exception—it's a bit worse, probably, socially.
So, it's Louis XI against Napoleon.
We need the public production orientation of the Louis XI tradition to be revived and mobilized. This means a shift, in particular in French-American relations, which have been pretty much misguided since, let's say, the beginning of the 19th Century. To become again fruitful, we have to bring first to the consciousness of people that the United States was a creation of Europe, the very best of Europe, and in particular, of Louis XI's nation-state tradition, through people like Leibniz, Kästner, and then Emmerich de Vattel of Switzerland. This history is absolutely ignored in France. The second point is to bring back from the United States into Europe, and in particular into France, the republican tradition embodied in the American tradition that we in Europe have lost: the American System of political economy that Lyn referred to.
Hence, the issue of LaRouche against those who have kidnapped the American state, and the related issue of Classical culture, the Dichter [poet] principle (in German), are therefore not external, but internal, domestic burning issues for Europe and France. It's inside, it's not something outside.
A Leadership Vacuum in Europe
At this point, without a reaction of the French authorities, the German authorities first, and together with France, the future of Europe is either chaos, or that of a Merkel-Blair-Sarkozy association: an earthly road to Hell. The reaction, as it was stressed today many times, is not going to come as such, by itself, by Europe, and certainly not from France. It's not going to come from Europe, because there are no leaders in Europe. What you have on the European political scene, is a sort of Regietheater à la German, or à la French-German, or à la Congress for Cultural Freedom. These people, our leaders, or so-called leaders, it should be said, are more afraid to face the financier oligarchy, than concerned by the misery of their own population.
Therefore, Helga Zepp-LaRouche's campaign to become Chancellor of Germany, is crucial, and mine for the Presidency of France, as associated to Helga's campaign, as a leverage to make a merge, a new center of gravity in European policies, are absolutely necessary and crucial, to respond to what Lyn has created in the decisive battleground, in the primordial battleground in the United States: It's a necessary response from Europe to what Lyn is doing in the United States. And it's in terms of culture, because it's one and the same type of European culture.
The French elections are only in 2007. But reality will strike well before that—in the next weeks. At the latest in France, it will take the form of social unrest in September. And it's very clear, that with the provocations of Sarkozy, it will happen. A process is bounded as a process with respect to the principle of least action of that very process. Now, we are at the end of the system—economic, cultural, monetary, financial—which is antagonistic to the least action principle, and antagonistic to truth and justice.
Therefore, it has to be changed. And it can only be changed, if we introduce a new physical principle, defining a new boundary, a new border, a new frontier. Helga, and myself also in that sense, have to be, at least by default of other leaders, the generators of that principle, exemplifying a policy to rebuild infrastructure for the future, and create in the process 20 million new jobs in Europe. The issue for that is national banking against central banking, as Lyn defined it.
As such, it is not a new project: It was expressed after World War I by the little-known association of Walther Rathenau with Albert Thomas, which tried to establish a principle of peace through mutual development. This was killed by financial Synarchy, for whom Paris was a safehouse at the time. After the fall of the Berlin Wall, the same effort was launched by Helga Zepp-LaRouche and Lyndon LaRouche, from the time he was in jail, and the criminal Mitterrand-Thatcher-Bush policies killed it: It was the Synarchy, again, doing its task, its destructive, criminal task. And before that, you had, in the 19th Century, Emil Rathenau, Sergei Witte, and in France, Gabriel Hanotaux as a minor partner, with the same project.
So, this is nothing new. It's something knocking at our door for a long time in Europe, and it's about time to make it this time. We have to do it now. It's what Helga referred to as a peaceful world order for the 21st Century, to accomplish what the 20th Century was unable to accomplish. This has to be done soon, and it has been a process, starting now with, as a target, the next year. Because the ghosts of the early '30s are now again knocking at the door, with the culture of death. There is no other alternative, than to reestablish the culture of immortality, a culture of hope, in Europe, against the shadows of a system which is a state, now, of life and death, or as Italians say, "We are in a system which is a morto qui parla."
That is our responsibility, to accomplish what was not accomplished in the 20th Century, to make our continent see again with the eyes of the future. Or better said, with the eyes of those who in the past cared for the generations then to come. And these generations today are us: us, as products of the advantage of the other; us, whose responsibility is to accomplish the unaccomplished of the past as, today, a dedication to the future.
