José Manuel Barroso seems to be planning a move to the position of Secretary-General of NATO. He would need to move neither house nor anything else. NATO and the EU practically merged years ago.
When did anyone last seek membership of either without seeking or already holding membership of the other? Sweden and the EU, I suppose. But see below on that one. And even in its own terms, that was altogether exceptional. Can you imagine either body acting without the prior approval of the other? Iraq or Libya was not a NATO mission, and even if it had been.
Why, Fine Gael is even murmuring that the Irish Republic should finally move towards formal membership of NATO. No more, it that comes to pass, of the fig leaf that the blatantly obvious treaty was nominally a secret, in the way that MI5 and MI6 officially did not used to exist. Let's just say "Shannon Airport", and the point is made. There is no economic case for Shannon Airport. It is purely strategic. And we all know what that means.
Consider Fine Gael and Fianna Fáil in the early Cold War years: rural, bourgeois, ultra-Catholic, with endless close family ties to the United States, and with no meaningful opposition to their duopoly except (if there was any) from what Attlee's and Bevin's Labour Party would have been like if its left wing had been cut off. As in Sweden, there were domestic political difficulties when it came to selling full NATO membership. As in Sweden, those were easily circumvented. Sweden, in fact, even co-operated in an attempt to obtain her own nuclear weapons. Will Ireland? I only ask.
Look at the number of demonstrations that there have been over the decades by Irish Communists and ultra-Leftists, and by those, sometimes the same people, who have continued to profess allegiance to the 32-County Republic of 1916. They themselves have never tired of pointing out the flagrantly true state of affairs that has for so very long given rise to so very, very many specific causes for demonstration, or on occasion for rather more than demonstration.
But NATO ought to have been wound up 20 years ago. Normally, one says that it ought to have been wound up because it had served its purpose. But the reality is that it ought to have been wound up in some ignominy, since that purpose had turned out to have been what any non-hysterical person, such as Enoch Powell no less than Tony Benn, had always known, said and explained that it was: a complete fiction, there never having been either any means or any will on the part of the Soviet Union to invade Western Europe.
Shorn even of that justification for its existence, NATO has been doing no good, and much harm, for a generation. Let the Irish formalise their membership of it if they feel so insecure, in the pop-psychological sense of the word, that they wish to behave like an otherwise floating offcut of Yugoslavia or like a Central Asian successor-state of the USSR. But we should have nothing further to do with it.
The appointment of Barroso as Secretary-General might cause certain organs of British opinion to turn against NATO, either genuinely or pretendedly unable to comprehend that his pro-Bush foreign policy when he was Prime Minister of Portugal was entirely of a piece with the agenda that he advances in his current office. That would be the wrong reason for those minds to change. But if that was what it took, then so be it.
When did anyone last seek membership of either without seeking or already holding membership of the other? Sweden and the EU, I suppose. But see below on that one. And even in its own terms, that was altogether exceptional. Can you imagine either body acting without the prior approval of the other? Iraq or Libya was not a NATO mission, and even if it had been.
Why, Fine Gael is even murmuring that the Irish Republic should finally move towards formal membership of NATO. No more, it that comes to pass, of the fig leaf that the blatantly obvious treaty was nominally a secret, in the way that MI5 and MI6 officially did not used to exist. Let's just say "Shannon Airport", and the point is made. There is no economic case for Shannon Airport. It is purely strategic. And we all know what that means.
Consider Fine Gael and Fianna Fáil in the early Cold War years: rural, bourgeois, ultra-Catholic, with endless close family ties to the United States, and with no meaningful opposition to their duopoly except (if there was any) from what Attlee's and Bevin's Labour Party would have been like if its left wing had been cut off. As in Sweden, there were domestic political difficulties when it came to selling full NATO membership. As in Sweden, those were easily circumvented. Sweden, in fact, even co-operated in an attempt to obtain her own nuclear weapons. Will Ireland? I only ask.
Look at the number of demonstrations that there have been over the decades by Irish Communists and ultra-Leftists, and by those, sometimes the same people, who have continued to profess allegiance to the 32-County Republic of 1916. They themselves have never tired of pointing out the flagrantly true state of affairs that has for so very long given rise to so very, very many specific causes for demonstration, or on occasion for rather more than demonstration.
But NATO ought to have been wound up 20 years ago. Normally, one says that it ought to have been wound up because it had served its purpose. But the reality is that it ought to have been wound up in some ignominy, since that purpose had turned out to have been what any non-hysterical person, such as Enoch Powell no less than Tony Benn, had always known, said and explained that it was: a complete fiction, there never having been either any means or any will on the part of the Soviet Union to invade Western Europe.
Shorn even of that justification for its existence, NATO has been doing no good, and much harm, for a generation. Let the Irish formalise their membership of it if they feel so insecure, in the pop-psychological sense of the word, that they wish to behave like an otherwise floating offcut of Yugoslavia or like a Central Asian successor-state of the USSR. But we should have nothing further to do with it.
The appointment of Barroso as Secretary-General might cause certain organs of British opinion to turn against NATO, either genuinely or pretendedly unable to comprehend that his pro-Bush foreign policy when he was Prime Minister of Portugal was entirely of a piece with the agenda that he advances in his current office. That would be the wrong reason for those minds to change. But if that was what it took, then so be it.
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