[Text Fwd] [Mahdi Darius Nazemroaya] World Geopolitics and The Battle for the Mediterranean 세계 정치 경제학과 지중해를 차지하려는 싸움

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Global Research
PART III The Mediterranean Union: The Emergence of a New Order and the Battle for the Mediterranean
by Mahdi Darius Nazemroaya
Nov. 5, 2010
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In PART I of this study, the long-term plans for creating a Mediterranean Union, which predate Nicolas Sarkozy by many years, were revealed as were U.S. and E.U. efforts to turn the Middle East and North Africa into free-trade zones and economic territories. The implementation of what is now called the “Union of the Mediterranean” was a project planned through the 1995 Barcelona Process and the U.S. Middle East Free Trade Area (MEFTA).

Also discussed were Franco-German plans for extending the borders of the European Union in synchronization with the “Global War on Terror.” The case of Libya was also discussed to expose the economic agendas of the E.U. and America. Finally the earlier portion of this text also confirmed the roles of Germany and the European Union as a whole in establishing the Mediterranean Union.

In PART II of the text, NATO expansion in the Mediterranean Basin was discussed through NATO’s “Mediterranean Dialogue” and its “Mediterranean Initiative” as a means of paving the way for E.U. expansion and control. The process follows the same steps as NATO and E.U. expansion in Eastern Europe. The projection for the inclusion of Israel in the E.U. and NATO were also addressed, as well as the role of securing energy resources and markets in the Middle East and North Africa.

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The Barcelona Process and the Informal 1995 Declaration of a Mediterranean Union

On February 10, 2008 the E.U. Commissioner for Information Society and Media, Viviane Reding reacted to scepticism about the Mediterranean Union on Deutsche Welle Television (DW-TV). Commissioner Reding was told by her interviewer that sceptics in the E.U. fear that the Mediterranean Union will tear the E.U. apart. Reding, a Luxembourger, responded that the Mediterranean Union was already put in place in 1995 through the Barcelona Process and that at the time, in 2008, the entity was merely being fine-tuned: “We already have a Mediterranean Union with the [creation of the] Barcelona Process, where the E.U. formed a solidarity treaty with the countries of the Southern Mediterranean. The correct action [for the E.U.] is to build on that.” [1]

The three main stated objectives of the Barcelona Process or the Euro-Mediterranean Partnership that was established in Spain are stated through the Barcelona Declaration;

(1) The definition of a common area of peace and stability through the reinforcement of political and security dialogue.

(2) The construction of a zone of shared prosperity through an economic and financial partnership and the gradual establishment of a free-trade area.

(3) The rapprochement between peoples through a social, cultural, and human partnership aimed at encouraging understanding between cultures and exchanged between civil societies.

These principles are clearly tied to the creation of joint economic, political, and military-security spheres; the same ties that parallel the principles behind the formation of the European Union. Yet, the motives and agenda behind these principles are not as benign as they are presented. Actions speak louder than words. There is a great deal more to the larger picture of this supranational project.

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Site Fwd: [Reality Zone]“Crisis is an Opportunity”: Engineering a Global Depression to Create a Global Government 위기는 기회, 세계 불황을 세계 정부로 만드는 행동

From Reality Zone blog
Global Research
Tuesday, October 26, 2010
“Crisis is an Opportunity”: Engineering a Global Depression to Create a Global Government
by Andrew Gavin Marshall

The following is a sample from an forthcoming book by Andrew Gavin Marshall on 'Global Government', Global Research Publishers, Montreal. For more by this author on the issue of the economic crisis and global governance, see the recently-released book by Global Research "The Global Economic Crisis: The Great Depression of the XXI Century," Michel Chossudovsky and Andrew Gavin Marshall, (Editors), in which the author contributed three chapters on the history of central banking, the rise of a global currency and global central bank, and the political economy of global government.

Problem, Reaction, Solution: “Crisis is an Opportunity”

In May of 2010, Dominique Strauss-Kahn, Managing Director of the IMF, stated that, “crisis is an opportunity,” and called for “a new global currency issued by a global central bank, with robust governance and institutional features,” and that the “global central bank could also serve as a lender of last resort.” However, he stated, “I fear we are still very far from that level of global collaboration.”[1] Well, perhaps not so far as it might seem.

The notion of global governance has taken an evolutionary path to the present day, with the principle global political and economic actors and institutions incrementally constructing the apparatus of a global government. In the modern world, global governance is an inter-lapping, intersecting, and intertwined web of international organizations, think tanks, multinational corporations, nations, NGOs, philanthropic foundations, military alliances, intelligence agencies, banks and interest groups. Globalization – a term which was popularized in the late 1980s to refer to the global spread of multinational corporations – has laid the principle ideological and institutional foundations for this process. Global social, economic and political integration do not occur at an equal pace; rather, economic integration and governance on a global level has and will continue to be ahead of the other sectors of human social interaction, in both the pace and degree of integration. In short, global economic governance will set the pace for social and political global governance to follow.

In 1885, Friedrich List, a German mercantilist economic theorist wrote that when it came to the integration of a “universal union or confederation of nations,” that “all examples which history can show are those in which the political union has led the way, and the commercial union has followed. Not a single instance can be adduced in which the latter has taken the lead, and the former has grown up from it.”[2] The twentieth century thus changed the historical trend, with undertaking economic integration – union – which is then followed by political integration. The best example of this is the European Union, which started out as a series of trade agreements (1951), eventually leading to an economic community (1957), followed by an economic union (1993), followed by a currency union (2002), and with the recent Lisbon Treaty, is now in the process of implementing the apparatus of a political union (2009). While this same regional governance model is occurring on a global scale in Africa, South America, East Asia, the Gulf Arab states, and with North American and Euro-American integration, it is simultaneously taking place on a global level. With the establishment of the World Trade Organization (WTO) in 1995, global trade systems were institutionally integrated, while the major global economic institutions of the IMF and World Bank, as well as others including the Bank for International Settlements (BIS), accelerated their management of the global economy.

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