“Five people have gone on trial in Rome charged in connection with the alleged murder of Italian banker Roberto Calvi in London in 1982. . . Calvi, dubbed ‘God’s banker’ because of his ties to the Vatican, was found hanging from Blackfriars Bridge. . .”
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/europe/4313960.stm

ps. What does the word sleaze mean

However, long before that I recall jokes from the office about the nostalgia of some avowed Europhiles for the Holy Roman Empire. One of David Cameron’s early initiatives on becoming leader of the Conservatives in Britain was to commit to disentangling Britain’s Conservative MEPs from the European People’s Party (EPP) in the European Parliament.

I can readily understand his rationale. The EPP is committed to creating a Federal European (super) state, to which the Conservative Party is opposed, and the EPP is also the grouping in the European Parliament for MEPs from Christian Democrat parties around Europe of which we have no equivalent in Britain - one reason being that Christian Democrats tend to have definite Catholic affiliations. Besides that, with Kohlgate in Germany and the trials and tribulations of S. Andreotti in Italy, European Christian Democrats tend to have a lot of surplus political baggage: http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/europe/3746322.stm

I’m pleased to reassure all here that the suggestion made about recreating the Holy Roman Empire wasn’t in any way original on my part. The notion of resurrection was embodied long ago in the institution of the Charlemagne Prize to be awarded to those who promoted the cause of European integration above and beyond the call of duty, so to speak.

Among recent recipients, Tony Blair was so honoured in 1999 and Giscard d’Estaing, the principal authour of the EU’s draft Constitution, in 2003.

Jean-Pierre Chevenement, France’s interior minister in Jospin’s government in 2000, was quite explicit in the charge he made: “There is a tendency in Germany to imagine a federal structure for Europe which fits in with its own model. Deep down, it is still dreaming of the Holy Roman Empire. It hasn’t cured itself of its past derailment into Nazism.” Predictably, he came under intense pressure to apologise and retract which he duly did. But besides all that, how come all the pressures there were to embed commitments to Christian theology and values in the EU’s draft Constitution?

Fortunately, the pressures were eventually abortive but they clearly paraded the intention to revert back from the prevailing European model of the secular state which starts from a presumption that adherents of all faiths are regarded as endowed with equivalent entitlements and responsibilities.

What of this? “We’ve just witnessed the addition of another ten nations to the membership of the European Union, with the enthusiastic blessing of the pope. The development of this entity has been of particular interest to us because of the Bible prophecies that indicate there will be a final resurrection of the ‘Holy Roman Empire’ which will play a pivotal role in events which will culminate in Christ’s second coming. Will the European Union play that prophesied role?”
http://www.garnertedarmstrong.ws/Mark_Wordfroms/manews0009.shtml

Well, mightn’t it be more accurate to state the principal rule of Westphalia as: An attempt to interfere with affairs beyond your borders is an act of war. War was seen as a fact of life.

Furthermore, in some cases aggression between states of the Empire was seen as a breach of law. Prussia in its wars against Austria technically also fought the Empire, whose army had shrunk to a few hundred men. That law is sometimes broken is more or less a normal state of affairs.

Absolutely - and the international objection each time was the infringement of national sovereignty by an aggressor. The League of Nations after WW1 and the United Nations after WW2 were both intended to prevent unilateral aggression in Europe and elsewhere. The League flagged and failed in its mission and the authority of the United Nations is under challenge, not least because of the invasion of Iraq by the “Coalition of Willing” in 2003 without the sanction of the UN Security Council. The legality of the Iraq invasion was emphatically rejected in a letter to The Guardian on 7 March 2003 by eminent teachers of international law:

“We are teachers of international law. On the basis of the information publicly available, there is no justification under international law for the use of military force against Iraq. The UN charter outlaws the use of force with only two exceptions: individual or collective self-defence in response to an armed attack and action authorised by the security council as a collective response to a threat to the peace, breach of the peace or act of aggression. There are currently no grounds for a claim to use such force in self-defence. The doctrine of pre-emptive self-defence against an attack that might arise at some hypothetical future time has no basis in international law. Neither security council resolution 1441 nor any prior resolution authorises the proposed use of force in the present circumstances.”
http://www.guardian.co.uk/letters/story/0,3604,909275,00.html

The participants to the Peace of Westphalia undermined the remaining rationale for the Holy Roman Empire by agreeing that the internal affairs of a sovereign state were the sole prerogative of the sovereign authority of that state and no other state. Precisely that same principle is invoked by PRC whenever the issue of abuse of human rights in China is raised by other governments. We may regret that but then President Bush appears quite unconcerned whenever other governments object to the abuse of human rights on US administered territories.

The internal laws of states are regularly infringed by their respective citizens, which is why most states have police forces, courts and trials. The fact that laws are often breached is not usually taken to be an effective argument for having no laws and abolishing national institutions of justice and law enforcement. By implication, the body of international laws, agreements and protocols governing inter-state relations that we have may function imperfectly but it is surely better than having none at all and resolving each emerging issue afresh through force majeur.

In short, on consideration, Doug doesn’t seem to have made much of a case. (:

Like who?

The closest I can think of is the old joke about Otto von Habsburg’s comment when asked about the outcome of the Austria-Hungary soccer game: “Yes, but who did the play?” I can’t say that this is a serious contribution to political analysis.

Posing Westphalia as the end of the Holy Roman Empire (and remembering Voltaire’s quote on same) is, to my mind, peculiar. It’s in the middle of the period when the Habsburgs were emperors, but at a time when the office was at least nominally electoral and when being an imperial elector was a sign of great power. (Prussia rising from the lands of the Elector of Brandenburg well after 1648, for example.) So I don’t see Westphalia making much difference in the trajectory of the HRE at all.

Second, thinking of the Thirty Years’ War solely in terms of its effects on the German lands — or at a stretch its effects on what we now see as Germany, Austria and perhaps the Czech Republic — is to miss its enormous impact east of the Elbe, where Denmark, Poland, Sweden and Russia contended over vast swathes of territory. Westphalia did precious little to entrench sovereignty in this area. And indeed, by most accounts the war began with a Cossack uprising in 1648. Ignoring this history may have made sense while the Berlin Wall still stood, but in the decade and a half since, the time has come for a broader view of European history, one that does not pretend that Europe ends where Stalin’s tanks came to rest.

Third, the concept of ‘Westphalian’ sovereignty was slow to emerge, with European states overrunning each other on a regular basis from the time of the peace until, more or less, 1945.

Fourth, the concept of ‘non-interference’ most stringently codified in the UN Charter and, for Europe, the Helsinki Declarations, has been under significant pressure for at least a decade. The European Union is, as is well known, a pool of sovereignty, and thus a challenge to the model at the peaceful end of the spectrum. Humanitarian intervention by the West in Bosnia and Kosovo — to say nothing of the violent disintegration of Yugoslavia — are challenges to the Westphalian notion of sovereignty at the pointy end of the stick.

In short, I think that Bob’s argument has as many holes as Swiss cheese.

It is hardly my fault if the region of Yorkshire and the Humber has outstanding UK national records in burglary, auto theft, sex offenders, binge drinking, political corruption, increased in deaths from alcohol related diseases 2000-04, failing schools etc etc - all of which can be extensively documented with references to UK mainstream media reports. Mitterrand and his politics appear almost saintly by comparison.

As for the Catholic stuff, I simply recount the history. Catholics may object but it is well documented in all major history texts and without it there is no satisfactory explanation for eg the “Glorious Revolution” of 1688, the Act of Settlement barring the heir to the UK throne from marrying a Catholic, the Gordon Riots of 1780 or the difficulty the Duke of Wellington had as prime minister in getting the Catholic Emancipation Act through Parliament in 1829. The summer marching season in Northern Ireland famously relates to the defeat of King James II at the battle of the Boyne in 1689, which finally put paid to his fragile hopes of recovering the throne he had fled because of popular opposition to his espousal of Catholicism. It is virtually impossible to understand the course of English history since the early 16th century without considering the extent of hostile sentiments towards Catholicism. It makes sense to examine whether there was a rational basis for it and it turns out that there was. To understand where we are we need to know how we got here.

As for the current relevance, you may recall recent abortive pressures to introduce religious principles in the draft EU Constitution. It has been said that some in mainland Europe devoutly wish to recreate the Holy Roman Empire that relapsed with the Peace of Westphalia in 1648, which had brought to an end the Thirty Years War in Europe, a war originally prompted by rivalrous states in Europe attempting to install the “correct” brand of Christianity in neighbouring states for the salvation of the souls of their citizens. There are many uncomfortable parallels with currently prevailing civilization clashes. Some certainly challenge the presumption that Blair wishes to champion of legitimising regime change through armed intervention when regimes are deemed insufficiently concerned to protect the rights of their citizens. The strange irony is that it was the Peace of Westphalia which established the principle in international relations that war to effect regime change was unacceptable. Blair wants to unpick that.

The connection between Mitterrand and John Reid is straight forward enough. With the recent cabinet discussion on removing the ban against tapping the phones of MPs in Britain, it seems we in Britain are about to follow the bugging practices that Mitterrand introduced into French politics in the early 1980s. John Reid was famously - and accurately IMO - charicatured as Labour’s attack dog by Jeremy Paxman in a BBC Newsnight interview. If we are curious about Mitterrand’s fascist provenance in his connections with the Vichy regime in wartime France, it seems to me utterly extraordinary that we have now as defence secretary someone who joined the Communist Party in 1973 despite possessing all the academic training to know what a despicable, murderous, self-serving tyrant Stalin was and what a dubious ideology Marxism is.

John Reid loves to dish it out but he and his more dedicated supporters and political colleagues hate for the compliment to be returned. His personal character flaws became even more transparent when he was pressed in a BBC interview to account for his position on the donation to the Labour Party of £100,000 by the publisher of adult magazines. His revealing response was: “If you are asking if we are going to sit in moral judgment, in political judgment, on those who wish to contribute to the Labour party, then the answer to that is no.” We can assess his character accordingly.