Greetings from Finland! We have had a beautiful Sunday between Christmas and New Year. The news are bad, as usual, with the Israeli air strike on the Palestinians in Gaza on top. In these days we also learn about the ongoing visit of president Nicolas Sarkozy and his wife to Brazil. The new arms deal which Sarkozy has made with Lula is noteworthy. On Christmas eve 2008, the Associated Press reported that

Brazil began a program to develop a nuclear submarine in 1979 and Silva last year announced $540 million in new funding for the program and for uranium enrichment efforts.
The nation has five conventionally powered submarines.
The two countries also agreed to build a submarine base and shipyard in Rio de Janeiro and to have 50 EC 725 Cougar helicopters built by Brazil's Helibras, which is controlled by Eurocopter, a branch of the French-German defense group EADS.
"The agreements will enable Brazil to give the technological leap needed to restructure its armed forces and set in motion its new defense strategy," Silva said.
Brazil said last week that it will beef up troops in its vast Amazon rain forest, build nuclear and conventional submarines to protect offshore oil fields and modernize its weapons industry under a new national defense plan."

The development of the military and industrial complex seems to be unstoppable. While the financial system has crashed and the economy has been hit by depression, the weapons producers and the arms traders flower. Has anybody heard of any 'bailout' plans for the arms industry? No, because there is no crisis in the war economy.

Our world is still floating in the direction which E.P.Thompson, writing at the beginning of the last decade of the Cold War, called 'exterminism'1

Therefore, Pierre Villard, the co-chair of the Mouvement de la paix and member of the international co-ordinating committee of Abolition 2000, really hits the nail on its head when he says that resolute action for the denuclearization of Europe is the best gift, which the Europeans can give to the world. C’est le plus bel acte de confiance que les Européens pourraient donner au monde!2

I am also with Villard when he demands that the IAEA be allowed to inspect all the military facilities of the nuclear states (what a shame that so is not already the case!). Furthermore, I agree with his pragmatic approach to the dismantling of the civilian nuclear power stations. Dans l’immédiat, dépêchons-nous de prendre des mesures efficaces pour couper tous les liens qui peuvent exister entre nucléaire civil et nucléaire militaire, Villard says. Yes, effective measures to cut the links between the civil and the military applications of nuclear technology are certainly needed immediately in, for instance, France and Brazil.

At the end of his speech, Pierre Villard added:

"Le parlement européen par sa résolution adoptée le 10 mars 2005 sur la mise en œuvre du TNP a rappelé que "l'objectif de l'union et l'objectif ultime du TNP sont l'élimination des armes nucléaires". Il faut donc maintenant passer à la mise en œuvre de cette résolution qui disait : "le parlement européen demande instamment à l'Union d'œuvrer résolument en faveur de l'établissement de la convention modèle sur les armes nucléaires, qui a été déposée aux Nations unies et qui pourrait fournir un cadre de mesures dans un processus de désarmement légalement contraignant".


Who is opposed to making a 'model convention' on global nuclear disarmament? Not me, I am all for it. Yet I wonder when the European Parliament, in addition to producing the 'model convention' , will proceed to drafting 'a model constitution' , not for the whole world, but for a European Union without nuclear weapons?

There is a precedent which ought to serve as the starting point . At the beginning of the 1980s, when both Western and Eastern Europe experienced a popular movement for European nuclear disarmament (END), the Italian MEP Altiero Spinelli drafted a constitution of the political European Union to come, based on the opinion that "the United States must be prepared to disengage itself militarily and to accept the denuclearization of Europe" .3

The draft Treaty Establishing the European Union (as the draft constitution was officially called) was adopted by a big majority of the European parliament in February 1984. However, the governments of France (Mitterrand), Britain (Thatcher) and Western Germany (Kohl) preferred to dump the projected democratic European state for their national reasons of state. Then Spinelli died, believing that the result of all his efforts had been "only a miserable little mouse, which many suspect is a dead mouse" 4.

The history of nuclear weapons policy is one of uncertainty and irresoluteness. So is the history of the European Union. The two histories are indeed intertwined to a degree that we might as well finally admit that they are one and the same history.

Despite the wars and armed conflcts that took place in the global South, the Cold War was fought over Europe. Did the Cold War over Europe ever end? If it did end, then why did the USA not disengage itself militarily from Europe? Why is France and Britain producing new nuclear missiles and new nuclear warheads? And why is the word 'disarmament' not to be found in the Treaty of Lisbon?

References:

1 Thompson, E.P.: "Notes on Exterminism, the Last Stage of Civilization", in New left Review (ed.): Exterminism and Cold War. London 1982, pp 1-35.
2 Pierre Villard's speech at the conference "A World Without Nuclear Weapons", arranged by the Socialist group of MEPs in Brussels, 9 December 2008. http://www.mvtpaix.org/actualites/actualites.php#Conference
3 Spinelli, A.: "Atlantic Pact or European Unity". Foreign Affairs 40, July 1962, p 552. The text of the Treaty Establishing the European Union is found (inFrench and English), at www.spinellisfootsteps.info.
4 Spinelli: Discorsi al Parlamento europeo, 1976-1986, a cura di Pier Virgilio Dastoli (Bologna 1986) p 369, quoted and translated by John Pinder: "Altiero Spinelli's European Federal Odyssey" (paper for the symposium "Altiero Spinelli - European Federalist", Brussels, 10 September 2007). Part of Spinelli's speech is reproduced on a video which was produced at the EP to commemorate him twenty years after his death (ca 5 min 30 sec into the video).