Jean Monnet's "Engrenage": Destination Unknown?

Above is a Virtual Model of the Antikythera Mechanism, considered one of the first analog computers ever discovered, dating from 150-205 BCE by the Ancient Hellenic Greeks. It was designed to: "Predict astronomical positions and eclipses for calendrical and astrological purposesas well as the Olympiads, the cycles of the ancient Olympic Games."

If you watch the video above you can see a clear demonstration of how the interlocking different sized gears and different number of "teeth" all orchestrate together according to the mathematical movements of the planets calculated and related to each other to therefore be able to mechanically turn and hence be "coded" for computation of future combinations of planet, time and position as per the picture:-

 Effectively small gears turn larger gears at a slower periodicity which simulates the different rates of the celestial movements.

To repeat a recent remark by Dr. RAE North for the third time: EU Referendum: flawed understanding

Described as a member of Business for Britain, one of Matthew Elliott's business ventures, this woman would have it that the EU was turning out to be a "flawed concept" because it had monetary union without fiscal or political union.

Seemingly a small detail, the EU cannot be regarded as a flawed concept for this reason. The very essence of the single currency was to launch an incomplete construct in the knowledge that the stresses would create political pressures which would drive further integration.

This is the mechanism of engrenage, at the core of the so-called Monnet Method, relying on the doctrine of the beneficial crisis. It is not, as they say, a bug, but a feature. The European Union was designed to act in this way.

To elaborate again from The Great Deception p.569:-

There  would  never  be  any  single,  clear  definition  of  these  terms. But  every ‘project’ insider would know what was meant by engrenage, or ‘gearing’. It provided a blanket  word  to  describe all  those  various  techniques  whereby  the ‘project’ could advance what was really its only underlying agenda: a steady, relentless pressure to extend the Commission’s supranational powers. Each new advance it  made would  merely be regarded as a means  of gearing up for the  next.

Each  new  addition  to  its  competences  might  begin  with  a  small, innocuous-seeming proposal to which nobody could object: until the principle was  conceded  and  those  powers  could  then  be  steadily  enlarged. Each  new problem or setback could be used as a ‘beneficial crisis’ to justify further extending the Commission’s powers to provide the remedy. Thus,  brick  by  brick,  would  the  great  supranational  structure  be  assembled. Above all it would be vital never to define too clearly what was the ‘project’s’ ultimate goal, for fear this would arouse the countervailing forces which might seek to sabotage it before it was complete.

In this sense, an intention to obscure and to deceive was implicit in the nature of the ‘project’ from  the  moment  it  was  launched. This  habit  of  concealment was to remain such a defining characteristic of the ‘project’ that it would come increasingly to affect all those caught in its spell.

The roots of deception

The big difference between The EU's "Engrenage" and the above he Antikythera Mechanism of course is that one is physical, the other is an organizational principle of systematic increase in it's competencies: The scale of each is different both is size and in scope of function. But as above the function is clearly defined and what's more cannot be "reversed" or otherwise significantly amended without breaking either device's inherent functioning. This example is made real from the mountain of evidence showing the flow of policy powers from Nation Members to the Supranational EU:-

Evolution of EU Competencies (policy powers) x1-Direction

We've already covered this in Can we have our cake and eat it too? with the "piling up of more Treaties over old Treaties. But as per How do you become a "eurosceptic"? where it was pointed out the observed gap between the EURO's performance and it's predicted or promised performance and the way Tim Worstall manages to dig into the history of the decisions, this is an exemplar of the Monnet Method as Dr. RAE North points out above: "It's not a bug, but a feature." From this insight we're recorded here, it follows that a fundamental consequence of EU Membership is:-

• The Nature of the EU Treaty Structures is to actively produce "Political Uncertainty" as part of the political gearing design of the EU.

When I read Tim Worstall's article it was not that I was surprised by the result and hence based by opposition of the EU off this even though it was very elegantly presented:-

The European and Monetary Union (EMU): A Road Less Travelled

It was reading the history involving the founders of the EURO

Many of the euro’s problems can be traced to its birth defects. For political reasons, countries were included that weren’t ready at the time. Furthermore, a common currency cannot survive on the long term if it is not backed by a political union. Even as the euro was being born, many experts warned that currency union members didn’t belong together.

But it wasn’t just the experts. Documents from the Kohl administration, kept confidential until now, indicate that the euro’s founding fathers were well aware of its deficits. And that they pushed ahead with the project regardless.

he government files from the founding phase of the monetary union reveal that this construct cannot function. The message the documents convey is that political opportunism will ultimately prevail.

The political dimension of the EURO and not realizing how typical this was of the whole EU "Le Projet" as it became known to it's advocates around Jean Monnet.

Time-line of the Major EU Treaties

What is the significance of this? We learnt the immense importance of the breadth of discussion/understanding for argument in How about a nice game of chess? We then looked at the direct agency of the Conservatives in very general terms connecting to historic patterns of "Centralization" in The Goldfinch and the Gilded Cage and then very specifically because power is already centralized the ability to deploy deliberately lower quality arguments by our Prime Minister David Cameron to fix the context ie breadth of the discussion according to narrower limits in Big Ben: The Four-Faced Liar

What this leads to as per Dr. RAE North of these "Johnny-Come-Lately's": Beware of semi-sceptics The problem is they manage to equally narrow the breadth of the discussion down and hence build an incorrect "intellectual architecture" for useful communication and hence democracy in action for a national referendum, also.

I'm starting to think a 'Brexit' is a good idea and I never thought I'd ever say that

It's a very reasonable piece. It's also a pattern that is now becoming acceptable. The Political Correctness of Pro-EU Membership fashions has been superceded by this "latest fashion". The reason I style it such is because the underlying arguments are built on levels of superficial reasoning, there's a clear pausity of crowd movement in the Pro-EU direction, the media attention is swinging around to this position encouraged by the Prime Minister and Business For Britain and people are imitating "Monkey See Monkey Do" this change in attention and reshaping of the narrative. We've seen it with Owen Jones, it's been the fashion of various Tory "eusceptics" for years and so on. There's very little indicatio of historic context to these emotional inferred "U-Turns" in opinion.

A little better is: Ten Reasons to Rethink U.S. Support for British Membership of the European Union but as with the above example all they can contextualize is the failure of the EURO and the context of greater future growth elsewhere in the World. This context shapes things as an economic arrangement not a political one which you can clearly see above.

Why should "The Monnet Method" of "engrenage" be so imperceptible and so vitally important to the central point of our argument as Brexiteers? Is such as Anna  Soubrey right about "eurosceptics when she says: Cabinet minister tells Eurosceptics: 'Get a life!'

Ms Soubry went on: “It means that they have this obsession that they will do almost everything and anything, they will devote all their time in a way that really is not healthy for them in this run-up to the referendum.” “Because as I say, they live it, they eat it, they drink it. You want to say to them For God’s sake, get a life. But they’ve gone beyond that. That makes it very difficult for us.” 

What could be so vitally important that people would argue from principle and not practicality as the new Orthodoxy over our discussions concerning the EU are now being shaped by Matthew Elliott's Business For Britain budding from Westminster to deliver as reported extensively by The Boiling Frog (see blogroll)

Epiphanies from Nassim Nicholas Taleb

The European Union is a horrible, stupid project. The idea that unification would create an economy that could compete with China and be more like the United States is pure garbage. What ruined China, throughout history, is the top-down state. What made Europe great was the diversity: political and economic. Having the same currency, the euro, was a terrible idea. It encouraged everyone to borrow to the hilt.