Creating the North American Union

The agreement Dobbs was talking about was crafted a year earlier. On March 23, 2005, then-Canadian Prime Minister Paul Martin and Mexican President Vicente Fox met with President Bush in Waco, Texas, to discuss plans for integrating Canada, the United States, and Mexico. During that meeting, the three heads of state argued that the three nations are "mutually dependent and complementary" and need to work together more closely on a range of issues. "In a rapidly changing world, we must develop new avenues of cooperation that will make our open societies safer and more secure, our businesses more competitive, and our economies more resilient," the three leaders said in a joint statement. The standard diplomatic language was a prelude to a radical proposal calling for the merger of the three nations in several important ways. Under a so-called Security and Prosperity Partnership (SPP), the nations will no longer have separate borders, but will "implement common border-security." The three nations will no longer respond on the national level to emergencies but will have a "common approach to emergency response." And, in a move that has tremendous implications for the growing immigration crisis, the three leaders agreed that the United States' north and south borders would be eliminated. Under the SPP plan, the three nations will "implement a border-facilitation strategy to build capacity and improve the legitimate flow of people and cargo at our shared borders." This plan is nothing short of revolutionary. As Dobbs put it on his CNN program, it is "an absolute contravention of our law, of our Constitution, every national value." Though the plan sounds like a new innovation, it is not new. It is the next step in a progression of steps that, in a manner very similar to the process used in Europe to supplant individual nations with the European Union, will ultimately lead to the formation of a new government for the United States, the North American Union. If not stopped, the plan for a North American Union will supplant the former independent states of Canada, Mexico, and the United States. And this is not conjecture. The North American Union is official U.S. policy. Creating a regional, supranational government was always the aim in Europe. In 1990, the European Commission admitted as much in the publication Europe — A Fresh Start: "Monetary union and economic integration are two long-standing ambitions which the six founding States ... set themselves." The document continued, describing the intent of the EU's founders: "We see, then, that the institutions set up since 1950 on the initiative of Robert Schuman and Jean Monnet are responding well to the aim of their founders: broadening the scope of democratically and efficiently organized collective action to cover the new arenas of interdependence among Europeans." The end result of this gradual planning has been union in Europe. That union was the goal all along was not readily apparent during the decades of its development. The long-term aim of the ECSC was hidden by its purportedly narrow scope. From its name alone, it appeared that the six-nation arrangement had only to do with coal and steel. Later EU precursors followed the same plan. The European Economic Community, at first glance, appeared to be nothing more than a free trade arrangement. It was nevertheless founded on the Monnet doctrine that economic integration must precede political integration. Such deception, in fact, remained one of the key elements in crafting the EU, right up until recent years, a fact referenced by Villy Bergström, a recent former deputy of the Swedish central bank. "I have never before seen such manipulated, obscure and faked policies as in relation to Swedish relations to the EU," Bergström wrote a few years ago. "Information has been evasive and unclear, giving the impression that membership of the EU would mean much less radical change than what has been the case." The strategy of building the EU through piecemeal means paid off. Following the creation of the ECSC, European internationalists supported by the U.S. government added additional elements to the emerging European superstate. Though they suffered setbacks — a nascent European Defense Community was rejected by France, and initial plans for a European Political Community were shelved shortly after the creation of the ECSC — those setbacks were temporary. The Treaty of Rome created the European Economic Community in 1957. The EEC was the immediate predecessor of today's European Union. AN EEC FOR NORTH AMERICA North American integration got its big start with the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA). The arrangement was billed as little more than the creation of a free trade arrangement between Canada, Mexico, and the United States. But it really was the initial step toward regional integration. According to professor Guy Poitras of San Antonio's Trinity University, one of the factors motivating the creation of NAFTA was the view that it was an important early step toward further integration. In his book Inventing North America, Poitras noted that NAFTA's creation of regionalized interdependence gave "a structural foundation for the task of inventing North America." In a pro-NAFTA article in the Washington Post in 1993, William Orme, Jr. pointed out that the then-fledgling trade pact was indeed a steppingstone to further integration. "NAFTA," Orme admitted, "lays the foundation for a continental common market, as many of its architects privately acknowledge. Part of this foundation, inevitably, is bureaucratic: The agreement creates a variety of continental institutions — ranging from trade dispute panels to labor and environmental commissions — that are, in aggregate, an embryonic NAFTA government." That free trade agreements like NAFTA must evolve into political unions is taken for granted among academics that work closely with such issues. In 1998, Glen Atkinson, professor of economics at the University of Nevada in Reno, described this step-by-step process in an article entitled "Regional Integration in the Emerging Global Economy" in the Social Science Journal. Integration "must be an evolutionary process of continuous institutional development," Atkinson wrote. Indeed, the development of supranational governing organs is inevitable, though it will erode national sovereignty, he writes. "The need for shared institutions among the parties is critical for integration, which will lead to a weakening of national sovereignty in some areas of interest. Sovereignty, however, must reside someplace in order to enforce regional working conditions, intellectual and other property rights and other concerns." NAFTA, being a "free trade" arrangement, is only a preliminary step. According to Atkinson: The lowest level of integration is a free trade area which involves only the removal of tariffs and quotas among the parties. If a common external tariff is added, then a customs union has been created. The next level, or a common market, requires free movement of people and capital as well as goods and services. It is this stage where institutional development becomes critical. The stage of economic union requires a high degree of coordination or even unification of policies. This sets the foundation for political union. Now, according to those most concerned with creating a North American Union, it's time to move beyond NAFTA. Professor Robert Pastor of American University serves also as vice-chair of the CFR Task Force on North America and is one of the primary intellectual architects of North American regionalism. According to Pastor, even after NAFTA, U.S. policy has been too nationalistic. "Instead of trying to fashion a North American approach to continental problems, we continue to pursue problems on a dual-bilateral basis, taking one issue at a time," Pastor said in testimony to the Senate Foreign Relations Committee's Subcommittee on the Western Hemisphere on June 9, 2005. "But incremental steps will no longer solve the security problem, or allow us to grasp economic opportunities. What we need to do now is forge a North American Community," Pastor stated. This, in fact, has been a major goal of the Bush administration and of the Mexican administration of Vicente Fox. In a paper entitled Closing the Development Gap: A Proposal for a North American Investment Fund, Pastor and coauthors Samuel Morley and Sherman Robinson point out that Mexican President Vicente Fox has long advocated a North American common market. "Soon after he won Mexico's presidential election on July 2, 2000, Vicente Fox proposed a Common Market to replace the free-trade area," Pastor, Morley, and Robinson wrote. "He invited President George W. Bush to his home in February 2001 and persuaded him to endorse 'The Guanajuato Proposal.'" President Bush quickly signed on to the plan. In a joint statement with Fox released by the White House on February 16, 2001, Bush described the outcome of the meeting. "After consultation with our Canadian partners, we will strive to consolidate a North American economic community whose benefits reach the lesser-developed areas of the region and extend to the most vulnerable social groups in our countries," said the Bush/Fox statement announcing a new "partnership for prosperity." Read the rest: http://www.thenewamerican.com/artman/publish/article_4213.shtml

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