Not too long ago, European integration promised peace, prosperity, and the sustained betterment of the human condition. As of spring 2025, the Brussels-led bloc appears poised to change beyond recognition. Led by politicians of questionable reputation — and even worse characters — like Commission chief Ursula von der Leyen (once in the running to succeed former chancellor Merkel, but she was too incompetent and corrupt, hence she was ‘exported’ to Brussels) or ECB head Christine Lagarde (a convicted felon), as well as the festering corruption at the heart of the EU’s parliament, the purported European dream is turning into a nightmare before our very eyes. Rosy-eyed prospects for the ravaged Old World are rapidly giving way to increased centralisation and militarisation while the European publics are bamboozled into acquiescence by the appearance of a lawful and, above all, legitimate progress under the conditions of presumed normalcy.
This second instalment departs from the truism that there is no such thing as a constant salience to any body politic over time, and ‘Europe’ — by which is meant the EU/EEC — is changing ever so swiftly these days. The EU leadership class is both speeding up long-held aims of creating an ‘ever closer union’ as envisioned in the 1983 Solemn Declaration on European Union while attempting to centralise and broaden its reach. This two-pronged pursuit feeds rising anti-EU sentiment, which provides the background for the increasing polarisation of politics and everyday life, which combines to produce a perplexing conundrum: if EU expansion is supposedly the resolution to many, if not all, of the continent’s woes, why these dissonant tones?
In the first half of this essay, I discussed adoption by the World Health Organization (WHO) of the EU’s ‘digital Covid certificates’ as worldwide standard, as well as the Orwellian re-definition of the term ‘sustainable’, which now includes military procurement.
In this present second part, I shall discuss the ongoing efforts by Brussels to turn the European Union into a federalised super-state with increasingly centralised command-control-and-punishment structures. On the one hand, we will consider the EU Commission’s declaration, via a little-noticed press release in autumn 2024, of (de facto) sovereignty: Brussels may now issue bills and bonds, i.e., collateralised debt obligations in the name of the entire bloc. And then there is the tightening of control over the bloc’s peoples via yet another EU-level bureaucracy in statu nascendi, the aptly-named ‘Authority for Anti-Money Laundering and Countering the Financing of Terrorism’, or AMLA. All that is required for them to launch a veritable armada of administrative penalties is — the suspicion of potentially illegal intent. Needless to say, this is only possible to do by doing away with due process, the presumption of innocence, police investigative procedures, and the independence of the judiciary, on the other hand.
Put differently, this essay discusses what are arguably the EU’s most consequential policy decisions of the past couple of years whose relevance transcends the bloc’s borders: first, the institutionalisation of a ‘domestic’ passport to restrict freedom of movement deriving from the bloc’s Covid policies; and second, the creeping militarisation of the bloc via the Commission’s unilateral abrogation of key aspects of the foundational treaties. The looming arrogation of de facto sovereignty via issuance of bills and bonds in the name of the EU and the push towards command and control of all payments are the subject of the second instalment. While the first part relates issues that largely fall into the category of ‘domestic’ affairs, the second part covers what Politico recently, and fairly tellingly, considered Europe’s ‘Hamiltonian moment’. I have endeavoured to furnish the reader also with a few concluding lines at the end of this second part.
In all four major fields, the discrepancies between what politicians claim, what media reports, and the underlying legal arrangements are both telling — and count among the least discussed aspects of contemporary life in Europe.
Meet the EU’s BFFs: Sovereign Bills & Bonds
In October 2024, a brief press release informed the populace that the ‘Commission launche[d] EU Repurchase Agreement, thereby becoming a sovereign-style issuer on EU capital markets’. This was a significant move — hence its non-discussion by legacy media should immediately raise eyebrows:
Following EU bonds’ exponential growth in the secondary market trading in recent years, the launch of the Repo facility will also make the Commission become a sovereign-style issuer on EU capital markets.
Put succinctly, while virtually no-one was listening, the Commission declared itself sovereign.
What, then, is a ‘repurchase facility’? According to Investopedia, ‘a repurchase agreement is a contract to sell securities, usually government bonds, and repurchase them back shortly after at a slightly higher price’. Its main functions within the economy at-large is to ‘raise short-term capital’, which is ‘crucial…since it’s about nothing less than the liquidity of the capital markets that run our economy’. Technically, a repo facility is a repurchase agreement, and hence it is quite comparable to a secured loan for raising short-term capital, albeit with additional bells and whistles (increased bankruptcy protection) that are essential for the functioning of the economy.
What the EU Commission announced in October 2024 is nothing less than the arrogation of the privileges — i.e., it is an extra-constitutional, extra-legal move — of ‘a sovereign-style issuer’. By comparison, in the United States, it took both the Federal Reserve Act of 1913 and the US entering the First World War before such repo facilities were used from 1917 onwards (and they are essential: since the Banking Acts of 1933 and 1935 and the powers awarded to the Federal Open Market Committee, for the management of both the money supply and credit operations across the US economy ever since).[1]
To begin to grasp the momentous nature of what transpired on 10 October 2024, then, we turn once more to the EU Commission’s press release:
Today the Commission launches its EU Repurchase Agreement (Repo) facility, a form of short-term issuance of EU securities available on-demand to EU primary dealers, to further strengthen the role of EU bonds and, consequently, improve the overall efficiency and fluidity of the EU bonds market.
Given the widespread, if time-worn, characterisation of the First World War as ‘the great seminal catastrophe of the twentieth century’ by US diplomat George F. Kennan, the magnitude of the EU Commission’s move cannot be overstated.
But wait, there is ‘more’: if you’re scratching your heads over the term ‘primary dealers’, it relates to a list of — at the moment 37 — ‘too big to fail’ banks that includes all the usual suspects, such as BNP Paribas, Deutsche Bank, Morgan Stanley, Societe Generale, and the UniCredit group, among others. On that website, we also read that ‘the Commission will seek to work with banks active in supporting bond issuance and placements in order to successfully place its EU-Bonds and EU-Bills’. Incidentally, the EU’s ‘primary dealers’ are the same ‘too big to fail’ financial institutions that both the Federal Reserve (of New York) and the Bank of Japan rely on: JPMorgan Chase, Bank of America, HSBC, Goldman Sachs, Barclays, Morgan Stanley. The world — rather: ‘global village’ of transnational capital — is a small place after all…
The main difference between these three major components of the ‘collective West’ is that, unlike the US and Japanese governments, the EU Commission has no income in terms of taxes and the EU’s ‘budget’ derives from member-states’ contributions (and which the Ukraine policy blew a gigantic hole into, which led to spendthrift Von der Leyen effectively running out of money before the end of her five-year term). Still, the Commission will now issue ‘EU-Bonds and EU-Bills’, and here is what this means, according to Investopedia:
Government bonds pay bondholders periodic interest payments called coupon payments. Government bonds issued and backed by national governments are often considered low-risk investments. Government bonds issued by a federal government are also known as sovereign debt.
In addition to ‘EU-Bonds’, the Commission apparently also desires to issue ‘EU-Bills’, which, I presume, are the functional equivalent of US Treasury Bills. With these two key terms defined, we can safely consider their implications: the EU Commission has just declared its de facto sovereign authority, which also comes to the fore in the Commission’s account (here and in the following, emphases mine):
Following EU bonds’ exponential growth in the secondary market trading in recent years, the launch of the Repo facility will also make the Commission become a sovereign-style issuer on EU capital markets [their words, not mine]. Through the [repo] facility, the EU offers its primary dealers the possibility to source specific EU bonds on a temporary basis, supporting their capacity to post firm public quotes. The [repo] facility allows investors to be more confident in the terms on which they can trade EU bonds in the secondary market.
A ‘secondary market’ is the place — virtually any kind of exchange or the like where primary dealers then (horse) trade with these bonds and bills. This will likely also include (re)packaging of these ‘EU-Bonds and EU-Bills’ — rendering them into so-called derivatives. Moreover, primary dealers (’too big to fail banks’) will also use such ‘EU-Bonds and EU-Bills’ as part of their assets (although they are debt obligations), which further reinforces the cartel-like co-dependency of high finance with the fate of the EU at-large. In other words: the ‘systemically relevant’ banks will become even more systemically relevant, rendering it virtually impossible to even announce intent to prosecute them in the event of wrongdoing, to say nothing about the spectre of them ever going bankrupt due to their crucial importance for the entire EU (US, Japanese) system: talk about perverse incentives.
Repo facilities are commonly used by sovereign issuers to support the market activities of their primary dealers [they are, in other words, a massive gov’t intervention that favours one kind of market (sic) participants — the too big to fail banks — over everybody else]. The EU Repo facility operates in line with standard practices of peer sovereign issuers [hence the importance of esp. what the US Federal Reserve does]. The launch of the Repo facility marks the implementation of the final measure announced by the Commission in December 2022 to support the EU bonds market. The Commission has now all the tools that it needs to manage successfully a busy period of issuance to end-2026 with the support of its valued Primary Dealer Network.
What remains hidden in this kind of verbiage, albeit in plain sight, are the following implications: the EU Commission has a kind of ‘budget’ consisting of the contributions of member-states that are allocated for the duration of the commission’s entire five-year term. Apart from these appropriations — most of which are earmarked — the EU Commission has no money to spend, let alone any income. The issuance of ‘EU-Bonds and EU-Bills’, then, turns the EU Commission into a de facto ‘sovereign issuer’, which means that this is the backdoor through which ‘Brussels’ can raise funds from their ‘primary dealers’ and spend without either a written constitution or the authority to tax the EU population directly (which, let’s not mince words here, is the primary reason for parliaments regularly appropriating budgets: to assure creditors that enough income is there to service the debt: spot the fly in the EU’s ointment). And since the Commission is not responsible to any kind of judicial, parliamentary, or other oversight, this is a recipe for abuse, corruption, and political adventurism (disaster).
If, at this point, you’re asking who or what is underwriting these ‘EU-Bonds and EU-Bills’, there are but two options: either the EU Commission securitises its five-year budget (which is earmarked and dedicated to other items than debt-service) and/or otherwise put ‘something else’ aside to secure these ‘EU-Bonds and EU-Bills’ (although it is unclear what that might be). Alternatively, the next EU Treaty or whatever backroom shenanigans — here is looking at you, Protocol 14 of the Lisbon Treaty (which permits changes to these structures in the absence of any new treaties or the like, according to one of its primary architects, the late Wolfgang Schäuble) — will impose direct EU-level taxation to enable the EU Commission to make interest payments on these obligations.
Note, moreover, the de jure absence of the European Central Bank (ECB) in these matters, which I think has been done on purpose. As the ‘factsheet’ that accompanies the press release shows, all of these EU Commission debt instruments are routed through the German Bundesbank and its Luxembourg-based subsidiary Clearstream, a ‘bank for banks’. Yes, the Bundesbank is part of the ECB/Eurozone ecosystem, but I do suspect that the EU Commission is issuing these ‘EU-Bonds and EU-Bills’ via the Bundesbank and its subsidiary Clearstream because it’s ‘more convenient’ to do so than via the ECB (which, I suspect, may also lack the legal [sic] authority to issue such repo obligations).
I think this is done on purpose because the ECB is a strange hybrid in terms of its Statute, which must be read in conjunction with the Treaty of Amsterdam, especially Article 2 (‘the Court of Justice shall have no jurisdiction on measures or decisions relating to the maintenance of law and order and the safeguarding of internal security’) and Article 5 (2), which holds that ‘the relevant provisions of the Treaties referred to in the first subparagraph of paragraph 1 shall apply even if the Council has not adopted the measures referred to in Article 2 (1), second subparagraph’. In other words, we are talking about the proverbial exceptions to whatever rules exist, that is, provided we are talking about the ECB. We note, in passing, that the ECB issues the Euro, but not all EU member-states are in the Eurozone, and there is quite clear wording as regards the prohibition of the ECB to engage in the kinds of debt-issuance the EU Commission has been mulling in autumn of last year. As per Article 21 of the ECB’s Statute, we read (emphasis mine):
In accordance with Article 101 of this Treaty, overdrafts or any other type of credit facility with the ECB or with the national central banks in favour of Community institutions or bodies, central governments, regional, local or other public authorities, other bodies governed by public law, or public undertakings of Member States shall be prohibited, as shall the purchase directly from them by the ECB or national central banks of debt instruments.
Here, we can clearly see the loop hole — and it becomes understandable as to why the EU Commission’s ‘Bills and Bonds’ are taken on via the German Bundesbank’ (albeit in the name of the EU as a whole, and not ‘just’ on behalf of the members of the Eurozone) and its Luxembourg-based subsidiary Clearstream, which puts just enough distance between the issuing authority (sic) and whoever is performing these tasks. By declaring itself a ‘sovereign’, the EU Commission is positioning itself effectively above and beyond its own ‘primary law’ and will, in due time, likely move towards imposition of direct taxation to underwrite these debt instruments.
We do need to look at some of the puff lingo employed; here’s a bit more from the ‘factsheet’, specifically the section explaining how the repo facility works:
The EU will create the requested bonds for each trade and cancel them upon conclusion of the transaction so that the volume of outstanding bonds returns to their previous level. The facility will hence not impact the Commission’s planned execution of EU-Bond issuances in accordance with legislative mandates. The evolution of the outstanding amounts of EU-Bonds, taking into account the repo volumes, will be published as per usual practice by the Luxembourg Stock Exchange … The transaction will be cleared via Eurex Clearing as central counterparty (CCP) where Deutsche Bundesbank will represent the EU in its capacity as General Clearing Member (GCM). Transactions will be settled via Deutsche Bundesbank’s settlement account structure. The EU has also equipped itself with the means to undertake reverse repo transactions so that it can optimise the return on the cash received as collateral from the Primary Dealer. Under the reverse repo transaction the Commission will invest in tradable securities for the duration of the repo transaction.
If you wish to go down some other rabbit holes, here is a compilation of documents relating to the EU Commissions ‘Annual Borrowing Decision’. For the time being, I shall mention that the most relevant document, titled ‘Governance decision on borrowing and debt management operations under the diversified funding strategy and related lending operations’, which was issued on 12 Dec. 2023, includes but one mention of the term ‘tax’ (and it does so with respect to the claim that the EU Commission will uphold all its ‘standards on transparency’ and the like, whatever that means).
What are the most likely implications?
We note that the EU Commission, via a press briefing in October 2024, declared its intent to henceforth act as a ‘sovereign-style’ issuer of debt obligations to fund whatever Brussels seems fit. This will be done via the German Bundesbank and its subsidiary Clearstream, as opposed to the European Central Bank, and by taking recourse to a network of global ‘too big to fail banks’ (virtually the same ‘primary dealers’ used by the US Federal Reserve and the Bank of Japan). All of this will be done without any reference to any income underwriting these debt instruments, such as taxation, to secure these ‘EU-Bonds and EU-Bills’. Such proposals have been floated every now and then in the past months, and this writer considers the imposition of dedicated EU taxes not far behind, if only to assure the ‘primary dealers’ of regular and dependable interest payments. Equally likely seems an impending spending spree by the Commission to out-do member-states’ governments (and/or bail them out in exchange for a new treaty, or ‘primary law’), thus creating the conditions for subsequent transformation of the EU into one gigantic pseudo-federal entity.
This possibility has not escaped the Transatlantic milieu juste, for whose stance this recent piece in Politico, tellingly entitled ‘Europe is going full 1790 America’, serves as a pars pro toto. In it, several succinct, if none-too-subtle, points are made, including most importantly that the issuance of joint debt obligations has historically been ‘a creature of war’ (while both the creation of the Bank of England and Napoleon’s national bank are cited as examples, the creation of the US Federal Reserve remains, incongruously, beyond the piece). In the event, this will likely be sold as a kind of ‘regular’, even business-as-usual, measure imposed by circumstance (‘Russia! Russia! Russia!’) while doubling as the fulfilment of long-held aspirations. All EU institutions—from the bloc’s ‘primary’ and ‘secondary laws’ to the Council (the assembly of heads-of-governments) or the ‘Parliament’ (which, lacking the power to initiate legislation, is not a real legislature) will likely enable the creation of a direct way of taxing EU residents to finance the EU Commission’s debt and spending obligations.
Farewell, Presumption of Innocence, Hello Arbitrary Penalties
There is, yet another aspect to consider here, and it has to do with the expected — expectable — backlash against this blatant power grab by Brussels. Already, plans to create an ‘asset register’ are well underway, as the Swiss Weltwoche’s Hans Kaufmann detailed in April 2025 (translation and emphases mine):
Following the abolition of banking secrecy [across the EU bloc, which pertains also to Switzerland, although it was the US gov’t that instigated this], the introduction of a global automatic exchange of information in tax matters (AEOI), money laundering regulations, and withholding taxes, the EU now also wants to record all the assets of honest citizens in a wealth register [background via this enquiry and the EU Commission’s reply; for the ‘legislative’ (sic) ‘package’, see here]. This project has been underway since 2021 and aims to use a gigantic centralised database to record, consolidate, and monitor all assets of legal and natural persons in the EU. This heralds the end of privacy [also coming to a jurisdiction near you very soon as putting data into this registry will become the precondition for doing business with the EU, much like the bloc’s digital COVID passports]. For EU Commission President Von der Leyen, such an asset register is the starting point for future EU initiatives for a standardised legal basis, common instruments and, above all, joint action by EU countries against the migration of assets across EU borders to countries that still offer good opportunities to hide private assets from the tax authorities in the country of origin.
Among the most worrying parts of this creation (see its ‘authorisation’) is certainly Article 21, which describes the ‘Administrative Measures’ that may be undertaken without recourse to, say, credible allegations, an ongoing police investigation, a signed warrant, due process, or a jury being required:
[title] 1. the Authority shall have the power to apply the administrative measures…to require any selected obliged entity to take the necessary measures where [here follows a veritable laundry list of actionable…well, what exactly? Reasonable suspicion? A warrant signed by a judge? A court order? None of the above. Here’s what’s required for Anti-Money Laundering Authority to spring into action] (a) the selected obliged entity is found to be in breach of the Union acts [that would be, once more, ‘primary’ or ‘secondary law’] and national legislation referred to in Article 1(2) (b) the Authority has sufficient and demonstrable indications that the selected obliged entity is likely to breach the Union acts [pre-crime, anyone?] and national legislation referred to in Article 1(2) and the application of an administrative measure can prevent the occurrence of the breach or reduce the risk thereof
This is so elastic, there’s literally no way of ever defining anything, and here is Article 1 (2) of the Anti-Money Laundering Authority’s authorisation to drive home this point:
The Authority shall act within the powers conferred on it by this Regulation [i.e., ‘secondary law’], in particular those set out in Article 6, and within the scope of Regulation (EU) 2023/1113, Directive (EU) 2024/1640 and Regulation (EU) 2024/1624 [more such pieces of ‘secondary law’], as well as all directives, regulations and decisions based on those acts [i.e., everything deriving from such ‘secondary law’, including their incorporation via ‘transposition’ in member-states’ legislation], or any further legally binding Union act which confers tasks on the Authority, and of national legislation transposing Directive (EU) 2024/1640, and other directives conferring tasks on supervisory authorities.
For all intents and purposes, this kind of agency is the functional equivalent of a Trojan Horse in the form of a Matryoshka Doll, with ever more regulations, laws, and the like to be found once one begins reading. To cite but a few examples, there are further references that ‘refer to Art. 1 (2)’ — Art. 6 outlines the Powers of the Authority (‘as specified in Articles 17 to 21’), and it does so ‘in the area of AML/CFT under the applicable Union law, unless otherwise provided for by this Regulation’.
It all looks and certainly feels like ‘by the book’ and ‘it’s all there in writing’. In reality, it seems, but this is all obfuscation, vague formulations, and cross-references intended to look ‘legit’; its apparent intent is to create an ever-expanding list of offences or, worse, afford power to the Authority for Anti-Money Laundering and Countering the Financing of Terrorism (AMLA) to compile a list of ‘sufficient and demonstrable indications that the selected obliged entity is likely to breach the Union acts’ (we note the absence here of the term ‘law’, primary, secondary, or otherwise).
None of this meets even the lowest bars for police investigation, let alone judicial review. (For a more detailed sampling from both the Weltwoche’s article and the AMLA charter, see my analysis here.) Here is the conclusion by Mr. Kaufmann about the implications of this abomination of an institution:
AMLA is also to have access to citizenship and civil registers, social security registers, weapons registers, financial data, customs databases, cross-border travel and vehicle registers of all nation states. And what seems even more worrying is that the EU wants to allow access to the EU asset register not only to authorities but also to people with a legitimate [sic] interest, including journalists, civil society organisations, NGOs, universities, insurance companies and international organisations such as the OECD, the FATF [Financial Action Task Force], and the UN. An exact date for the entry into force of the EU asset register has not yet been set. It is likely to be introduced in 2025 or 2027 at the earliest, as technical, legal and political challenges still need to be clarified.
In short: the EU is about to create a intergovernmental-transnational authority (sic) that exists above all national or even most EU institutions, which may or may not add regulations, treaty provisions, and what have you to the laundry list of intentional or negligent ‘breaches’ thereof. Punishment is to be assigned via ‘administrative measures’, hence it will all be outside the legal system and beyond the expectable separation of powers, in particular between the executive branch and the judiciary.
May/June 2025: Brussels Goes ‘All-In’
The above interpretation of what is currently transpiring at the EU level is, as poignant and as opposed to it as this writer is, however, no longer theoretical (they were so, to varying degrees, when I began drafting this piece in April of this year). To indicate the proverbial shape of things to come, I restrict myself to citing but the first, but certainly not the last, instances in which both above-related measures are put into practice.
As regards the debt-financed push towards ‘joint procurement’ financed by EU sovereign debt instruments, we turn to the conclusions by the European (sic) Council adopted on 6 March 2025. In paragraph 5, we read that ‘the European Union will accelerate the mobilisation of the necessary instruments and financing in order to bolster the security of the European Union’, which is followed by paragraph 6 subsections b) and c), which hold:
The European Council … calls on the Commission to propose additional funding sources for defence at EU level … [and] takes note of the intention of the Commission to put forward a proposal for a new EU instrument to provide Member States with loans backed by the EU budget of up to EUR 150 billion.
Where would these funds come from and how would they be raised? Answers to these questions are, finally, found in the most recent (27 May 2025) EU Council meeting whose results are described as follows:
Among the so-called ‘A’ items (no discussion [!]), the Council formally adopted the new investment programme for defence called SAFE (Security Action for Europe), an unprecedented instrument of €150 billion, which will boost EU defence capabilities.
As regards the ‘new investment programme for defence called SAFE’, it has its own dedicated website which contains links to relevant EU ‘laws’ (as defined above). It also reiterates the crucial detail discussed before, namely, that ‘disbursements will take the form of competitively priced long-maturity loans’ (my emphasis). As is evident, it took the EU Commission less than year to move from the declaration of its de facto sovereignty (October 2024) to the implementation of the said policy (May 2025).
The momentous nature of this shift cannot be emphasised, and here I agree with Polish EU Minister Adam Szłapka who hailed the move as ‘not only a success of the [Polish EU Council] presidency, but of the EU as a whole’ and, hardly able to suppress his evident euphoria, labelling it ‘unprecedented’. While this writer is in agreement with the uprecedented, paral-legal, if not illegal, nature of this accomplishment, I do not endorse Mr. Szłapka’s gleeful stance. We note, in passing, what this particular term means: something that has never happened before and which was expressly forbidden in the EU’s ‘primary law’.
As is so often the case with drastic policy shifts, the devil is in the details. In the context of the EU’s SAFE regulation (COM/2025/122 final), the above-related potential problems in regards to Art. 41 (2) TEU and Art. 173 TFEU were resolved — by taking recourse to the following path of action:
The legal basis for this instrument is Article 122 of the Treaty on the Functioning of the European Union.
Art. 122 TFEU, in turn, reads as follows (emphases mine):
(1) Without prejudice to any other procedures provided for in the Treaties, the Council, on a proposal from the Commission, may decide, in a spirit of solidarity between Member States, upon the measures appropriate to the economic situation, in particular if severe difficulties arise in the supply of certain products, notably in the area of energy. (2) Where a Member State is in difficulties or is seriously threatened with severe difficulties caused by natural disasters or exceptional occurrences beyond its control, the Council, on a proposal from the Commission, may grant, under certain conditions, Union financial assistance to the Member State concerned. The President of the Council shall inform the European Parliament of the decision taken.
Now we also know what kind of work-around has been chosen: the equivalent of a declaration of an emergency, which is used to usher in ‘exceptional’ measures. I, for one, won’t be holding my breath about these measures becoming extended (normalised) once the ‘emergency’ is over.
Needless to say, Article 122 is not exactly uncontroversial (to say the least) when it comes to its potentially abusive qualities, if this entire paper (of more than 50 pages) explaining, in no uncertain terms, ‘the peculiar nature of Article 122 TFEU as a non-legislative legal basis pursuant to which the European Parliament is not involved in the decision-making’. (Ab)use of this particular clause has been on the rise in recent years, and it ‘results in decision-making procedures with lower transparency and lower parliamentary involvement’. In other words: to avoid the looming legal (and political) challenges, the EU Commission is resorting to yet another questionable clause to push for joint debt obligations. To this writer, this move underscores the true nature of doing so: executive fiat, which, in conjunction with little-to-no oversight and no recourse to the judiciary breeds, historically speaking, both illegitimacy and tyranny.
On 17 June 2025 the above procedures were formally adopted under the title ‘Defence Readiness Omnibus’, with the next step telling everyone how upside-down this all is:
The legislative proposals are subject to negotiations in the European Parliament and in the Council, under the ordinary legislative procedure.
That this ‘ordinary [sic] legislative procedure’ was arrived-at in an unprecedented, paralegal, if not outright illegal, manner leads to the inescapable conclusion: the EU leadership class does neither live up to its professed ideals nor upholds its own ‘primary law’. In fact, there are few, if any, other actions that speak way, way louder than all the nice declarative words used to sugarcoat this power-grab.
Coda: The Brittle EU Régime
As much as the EU appears firmly ensconced (’Trust in EU at highest since 2007’, Reuters reported in late May), it is this writer’s opinion that there is more than meets the eye.
Yes, there are the increasingly shrill cries insisting that ‘there is no alternative’ across Brussels and most European capitals; at the same time, however, former German chancellor Gerhard Schröder (in office 1998-2005) and the co-architect of the Nord Stream 1 and 2 pipelines, has been de facto ‘de-banked’ in summer 2024. After leaving public office, Mr. Schröder joined the boards of several Russian oil and gas firms and made a stately living off these perks. No longer, for ‘according to BILD research, Sparkasse Hannover has blocked his account for certain transfers’.
What has been blocked were his monthly fees to the tune of (reportedly) 200,000 euros every six months, yet there is, of course, ‘more’ than first meets the eye. Although it remains unclear if Sparkasse Hannover did so on orders of the Green mayor of Hannover Belit Onay, what has happened is certainly worrisome. Mr. Schröder’s fees are supposedly wired from Gazprombank in Luxembourg, i.e., what has been proactively blocked is an intra-Eurozone (technically, a SEPA) wire transfer. We note, in passing, that this was done in the absence of any court order, sentencing, or even new sanctions imposed on Russia — and thus in direct contravention of one of the EU’s fundamental freedoms, that of capital (which Wolfgang Münchau, writing for the Financial Times, called the bloc’s ‘very essence’; for a more detailed account, see my take here.)
So much for the present — yet what about the proverbial bigger picture?
What is conveniently omitted from these accounts so far, however, is the following: in the wake of the so-called Glorious Revolution of 1688, there occurred what P.G.M. Dickson called The Financial Revolution (1967): the Anglo-British parliament was able to extract the Bill of Rights (1689) in exchange for the crown’s desire to secure government bonds issued by the Bank of England with lawful and regular taxation appropriated by parliament. (Dickson’s study is best read in combination with John Brewer’s The Sinews of Power, published in 1989.) Virtually the same mechanism — the close relationship of taxation and representation — was at the heart of what became known as the American Revolution. These issues also played a huge, if not overarching, role in the drawn-out struggle over the creation of a central bank in the US until the Federal Reserve Act of 1913.
Now, we are seeing comparable moves by the EU Commission, although the notion of EU residents having any ‘rights’ or the EU Parliament providing oversight by claiming the power of the purse is nowhere to be found. To the contrary, if the normalisation of what was once sold as ‘emergency measures’ (Covid Passports) and the accompanying distortions to public health in the name of the powers-that-be are any indications, it does not seem very likely that Brussels will share any of these powers it arrogated in the past decade. If anything, the EU Commission has made big strides towards drastic increases of centralised control, to which the impending introduction of a ‘digital euro’ perhaps as early as October 2025, will add yet another control mechanism. Yet, despite its high-tech hyper-reality, the EU is not doing something that is fundamentally at-odds with historical precedent: Brussels is following essentially the same path treaded by all other central banking-warfare states in history (although we note the partial exception of the Republic of Venice in the 16th and 17th centuries).
At the same time, it seems increasingly unlikely that representative parliamentary assemblies in the various member-states will do anything about their own looming obsolescence. Moreover, unlike in the American Revolution, it would appear that most European citizens (sic) have resigned themselves to be ruled that way, with very large question marks hanging over member-states’ electorates, politicians, and otherwise interested parties to uphold and defend their constitutional rights. In fact, we will probably see member-states’ transferring the remnants of their citizens’ sovereignty — which is not theirs to confer in the first place — in exchange for the functional equivalent of thirty pieces of silver (which, in true EU fashion, do not contain any precious metals).
In other words: the temple of democracy appears poised to be deserted once more in less than a century. Much like in the 1920s and 1930s, it is the continent’s elites that are cordoning off the premises and pushing the people towards a much more centralised and regulated future. Given the possibilities of the digital age, though, lingering questions bedevil this author, although not so much about the overall viability of this project (which I anticipate to eventually founder on the shoals of human nature) but the costs such a new system of order will impose, to say nothing about the ‘collateral damages’. But at least Europeans are enjoying passport-free travel, that is, as long as they submit to an ever-growing list of additional impositions, ranging from the sharing of medical records to biometric to AI-facilitated facial recognition counters poised to be replaced by biometric checkpoints before 2030 (see the Lufthansa group’s pioneering introduction and my personal account of encountering these devices in March 2025).
What a brave new world, indeed.
Postscript: for those interested in the none-too-distant origins of the present moment, Bernard Connolly’s The Rotten Heart of Europe (London: Faber & Faber, 1996), is a must-read.
[1] Although a bit off-topic, I highly recommend Margaret E. Bedford, ‘The Federal Reserve and the Government Securities Market’, Economic Review (April 1978), available also online via https://www.kansascityfed.org/documents/1338/1978-The Federal Reserve and the Government Securities Market.pdf (25 May 2025).↩︎
(Featured Image: “P051292-308650” by European Commission is licensed under CC BY 4.0.)
