The Treaty of Lisbon

The Lisbon Treaty is basically the European Constitution under a different name. It offers many of the powers previously sought to create a Foreign Minister position that would speak for Europe. Regarding who that power has been given in the past, I will let the leaders speak for themselves.

Another interesting bit of information I just learned from a reader, the city of Lisbon was named after the river Lisso, meaning light or illuminate. That same river was also called Lucio. More on the history of Lisbon Some other information, in Latin, the word Lucifer means light bringer. I’m sure it’s just coincidence that the city chosen to bring about the consolidation of Europe into a super-state, the fourth kingdom, is so named.

In short, I will share some excerpts from this new European government structure and show also how it is connected to NATO and thereby the United States to have military and civilian assets available in the event of an emergency as determined by the leadership to conquer terrorist forces if need be to keep order, peace and security. And so by peace many will be destroyed.

The following are excerpts from the documents linked above. The purpose is to show in the documentation how power consolidation is being made such that all resources will be available to the High Representative over the military and civilian forces of the EU and UN:

Article 19 page 11 - With the LISBON TREATY Solana has a foot in the UN security Council and has the EU countries there work for his interests:

“Member States which are also members of the United Nations Security Council will concert and keep the other Member States, and the High Representative, fully informed. Member States which are members of the Security Council will, in the execution of their functions, defend the positions and the interests of the Union, without prejudice to their responsibilities under the provisions of the United Nations Charter. When the Union has defined a position on a subject which is on the United Nations Security Council agenda, those Member States which sit on the Security Council shall request that the High Representative be asked to present the Union’s position”[…]

Article 9e page 12

2. Furthermore, the Conference recalls that, as regards the High Representative of the Union for Foreign Affairs and Security Policy whose term of office will start in November 2009 at the same time and for the same duration as the next Commission, he or she will be appointed in accordance with the provision of Articles 9d and 9e of the Treaty on European Union.

from A/WEU [2007] DG 7 3 December 2007 FIFTY-THIRD SESSION
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TREATY AMENDING THE TREATY ON EUROPEAN UNION AND THE TREATY ESTABLISHING THE EUROPEAN COMMUNITY THE “LISBON TREATY” Provisions concerning the Common Foreign and Security Policy (CFSP), including the Common Security and Defence Policy (CSDP)

Article 15:

6. The President of the European Council

(a) shall chair it and drive its work;

(b) shall ensure the preparation and continuity of the work of the European Council in cooperation with the President of the Commission, and on the basis of the work of the General Affairs Council;

(c) shall endeavour to facilitate cohesion and consensus within the European Council;

(d) shall present a report to the European Parliament after each of the meetings of the European Council.

The President of the European Union shall, at his or her level and in that capacity, ensure the external representation of the Union on issues concerning its common foreign and security policy, without prejudice to the powers of the High Representative of the Union for Foreign Affairs and Security Policy...

Article 17: Commission duties

1. The Commission shall promote the general interest of the Union and take appropriate initiatives to that end. It shall ensure the application of the Treaties, and measures adopted by the institutions pursuant to them. It shall oversee the application of Union law under the control of the Court of Justice of the European Union. It shall execute the budget and manage programmes. It shall exercise coordinating, executive and management functions, as laid down in the Treaties. With the exception of the common foreign and security policy, and other cases provided for the Treaties, it shall ensure the Union’s external representation. It shall initiate the Union’s annual and multiannual programming with a view to achieving interinstitutional agreements....

Article 18: The High Representative of the Union for Foreign Affairs and Security Policy

1. The European Council, acting by a qualified majority, with the agreement of the President of the Commission, shall appoint the High Representative of the Union for Foreign Affairs and Security Policy. The European Council may end his or her term of office by the same procedure.

2. The High Representative shall conduct the Union’s common foreign and security policy. He or she shall contribute by his or her proposals to the development of that policy, which he or she shall carry out as mandated by the Council. The same shall apply to the common security and defence policy.

3. The High Representative shall preside over the Foreign Affairs Council.

4. The High Representative shall be one of the Vice-Presidents of the Commission. He or she shall ensure the consistency of the Union’s external action. He or she shall be responsible within the Commission for responsibilities incumbent on it in external relations and for coordinating other aspects of the Union’s external action. In exercising these responsibilities within the Commission, and only for these responsibilities, the High Representative shall be bound by Commission procedures to the extent that this is consistent with paragraphs 2 and 3.

Article 24:

3. The Member States shall support the Union’s external and security policy actively and unreservedly in a spirit of loyalty and mutual solidarity and shall comply with the Union’s action in this area.

The Member States shall work together to enhance and develop their mutual political solidarity. They shall refrain from any action which is contrary to the interest of the Union or likely to impair it effectiveness as a cohesive force in international relations.

The Council and the High Representative shall ensure compliance with these principles.

Article 42: Provisions on the Common Security and Defence Policy

1. The common security and defence policy shall be an integral part of the common foreign and security policy. It shall provide the Union with an operational capacity drawing on civil and military assets. The Union may use them on missions outside the Union for peace-keeping, conflict prevention and strengthening the international security in accordance with the principles of the United Nations Charter. The performance of these tasks shall be undertaken using capabilities provided by the Member States...

3. Member States shall make civilian and military capabilities available to the Union for the implementation of the common security and defence policy, to contribute to the objectives defined by the Council. Those Member States which together establish multinational forces may also make them available to the common security and defence policy.

Member States shall undertake progressively to improve their military capabilities. The Agency in the field of defence capabilities development, research, acquisition and armaments (European Defence Agency) shall identify operational requirements, shall promote measures to satisfy those requirements, shall contribute to identifying and, where appropriate, implementing an measure needed to strengthen the industrial and technological base of the defence sector, shall participate in defining a European capabilities and armaments policy, and shall assist the Council in evaluating the improvement of military capabilities.

4. Decisions relating to the common security and defence policy, including those initiating a mission as referred to in this Article, shall be adopted by the Council acting unanimously on a proposal from the High Representative of the Union for Foreign Affairs and Security Policy or an initiative from a Member State. The High Representative may propose the use of both national resources and Union instruments, together with the Commission where appropriate.

I believe the above alone to be a serious wake-up call to anyone who isn’t aware that there is a legal framework being put into place that may become the New World Order headed by the man of sin to deceive the world and implement his control over the world from Europe. The 27 members must still ratify the Treaty of Lisbon, but there is little opposition and little understanding in Europe regarding the ramifications to sovereignty. Ireland is the only member state who held a referendum allowing the people to voice any opposition, but even though Ireland rejected the Lisbon Treaty, it is clear that the rest of Europe is notstopping the push. So who has ratified it so far?

More Lisbon Treaty News...

Ireland Votes 67% In Favor Of Lisbon Treaty -Final Count Wall Street Journal (Link) - Quentin Fottrell (October 3, 2009) - Ireland voted 67% in favor of the Lisbon Treaty with just 33% voting against, according to the final count announced Saturday. The big swing to a Yes vote was helped by a 6% rise in voter turnout to 59%. But there was a big swing vote from No to Yes due to a series of EU protocols clarifying Irish neutrality and maintaining its antiabortion laws, safeguarded independence on taxation and the right to keep its own European commissioner, plus voter worries over Ireland’s deepening recession. The Lisbon Treaty was rejected by Irish voters in June 2008 by a 53.4% to 46.6% vote with a 53% turnout. Ireland is unique among the European Union’s 27 member nations in holding a public referendum on the treaty forged in Lisbon to replace the failed EU constitution.

Irish voters may back Lisbon treaty, poll reveals EU Observer (November 17, 2008) - A fresh poll has suggested the Irish could back the EU’s Lisbon treaty in a second attempt, repeating the same scenario as with the vote on the previous EU institutional reform. The survey published in Irish Times on Monday (17 November) indicates there has been a change of mood among Ireland’s voters since the June referendum, as 43 percent of respondents say they would vote for the Lisbon treaty against 39 percent who would vote No and 18 percent who have no opinion.

The poll asked people if they would vote for a modified document which would allow Dublin to keep a national commissioner in the EU executive. Under the existing version of Lisbon, the 27-strong commission should be reduced so that from 2014, two thirds of member states would rotate in being represented in the EU’s key law-proposing body.

The other modification suggested by the authors of the poll was that the Irish would get clear confirmation of their neutrality and their right to rule on issues such as abortions or taxation, in a document attached to the treaty - an idea already supported by several EU leaders as a way to enable a second ballot in Ireland.

The Irish Times pointed out that when the “don’t knows” are excluded this gives the Yes side 52.5 percent, with the No side on 47.5 percent, which compares to the referendum result in June of 53.4 percent No and 46.6 percent Yes.

The Irish government is due to decide on whether to hold a second vote in early December. “We will make that decision in advance of the December meeting,” Irish foreign minister Micheal Martin told RTE television on late Sunday (16 November), referring to the EU summit of heads of states and governments to be held in Brussels on 11-12 December. “We have looked at a variety of alternatives,” Mr Martin added in the TV interview, noting that the research carried out by the government “has shown up a range of issues people were concerned about.”

A similar scenario as suggested by the Irish Times poll was followed in October 2002 when the Irish voted on the EU’s currently-applicable Treaty of Nice for the second time, after rejecting it in a referendum held in June 2001. Back then, the government of Bertie Ahern received a so-called Seville Declaration on Ireland’s policy of military neutrality from the European Council, the gathering of EU leaders.

EU treaty in peril as Irish ‘No’ camp takes the lead Times Online (June 6, 2008) - The Republic of Ireland is set to reject the Lisbon Treaty, destroying ambitions to salvage a draft European constitution. Rejection by only one of the European Union’s 27 member states would mean that the treaty — ratified by five parliaments so far — would fall. Ireland has been the only country to put the treaty to a referendum. According to an opinion poll published today in The Irish Times, 35 per cent of people surveyed intend to vote “No” in next Thursday’s ballot, more than double the 17 per cent figure in the newspaper’s last survey three weeks ago. Support for the treaty has fallen from 35 per cent to 30 per cent, with 28 per cent undecided and 7 per cent intending to abstain. “It will take an unprecedented swing in the last week of the campaign for the treaty to be carried,” The Irish Times says. Pollsters said that many voters had admitted that they did not understand the treaty, or what they were voting on. A “No” vote by Ireland would upset plans to create an EU president and foreign minister. The Lisbon Treaty is intended to streamline the workings of the EU now that it has expanded from 15 to 27 members, which means many more issues being decided by majority voting and the effective loss of national vetoes. Many in the “Yes” camp fear that the referendum will be a repeat of the one held in 2001 for the Nice Treaty, when voters overwhelmingly said “No”, even though most of the country’s political parties were in favour of the treaty. The rejection was a major headache for European leaders, but was overturned when the vote was held again a year later. This may also be a factor in the current campaign, with voters believing that they can take a “guilt-free poke” — as one potential “No” voter said this week — in the knowledge that it could be overturned later.

MEPs to use budget power over EU president perks EU Observer (April 22, 2008) - Members of the European Parliament are prepared to use their hold over the bloc’s purse-strings to try and make sure that the proposed new EU president does not wield too much power. “The treaty is very clear about the duties [of the president],” the head of the parliament’s budget committee, Reimer Boege, told EUobserver, noting that it says the person can have an administrative role, “but not take over an executive function.” “Budget power is always used as a weapon. This is a principle,” said the centre-right German MEP. The parliament, wary of upsetting the fine balance of power between the EU institutions, will have a chance to use this weapon when it comes to negotiations later this year on the 2009 budget. Mr Boege said that MEPs will looking out to see that if any extra perks for the president – a private plane and a residence are rumoured to be under consideration – would be “linked to lowering the communitarian level in the treaty,” meaning reducing the power of the European commission and boosting inter-governmental politics. The MEP urged member states who are due to deliver a draft budget to the parliament before the summer to show a “flexible and responsible approach” and indicated that euro-deputies would be inclined to accept a staff set-up for the president that does not exceed that of the immediate staff of the European commission president (around 20). The first reading of the budget is due in October, but MEPs are already fretting about the institutional implications of the Lisbon Treaty, which is supposed to come into force by the beginning of next year. Earlier this month, senior MEPs, including parliament President Hans-Gert Poettering, met European Commission President Jose Manuel Barroso to raise certain points about the treaty, particularly concerning the remit of the proposed president. The treaty foresees a purely administrative role for the President of the European Council – the formal title of the post - organising the meetings of EU leaders. However, there is the potential for external representation overlap with the foreign minister and the commission president, while the role is also set to be defined by the person who gets the job. A powerful EU president that is neither subject to parliamentary control nor elected by citizens “would lead us to a pre-democratic situation,” German centre-right MEP Elmar Brok told the constitutional affairs committee earlier this month. more...

Small state, small job and a safe pair of hands European Voice (April 18, 2008) - Having Luxembourg’s Jean-Claude Juncker as president of the European Council would best suit the interests of the EU’s powerbrokers, says John Wyles. I have long thought that Jean-Claude Juncker could be a good prospect to win the new role of president of the European Council. While I would not bet my house on him, he must be the front runner following the recent publication of a Harris Interactive online poll conducted in five EU countries plus the US. Tony Blair may still be the candidate of French President Nicolas Sarkozy (though I doubt it) and others may think Angela Merkel prefers a European to a national role, but the smart money must be on Juncker. In the Harris poll he attracted 1% support in France as a candidate for the presidential role, 2% in Germany, 1% in Italy and even less in Spain and the UK. The Luxembourg prime minister is favourite not because he is uniquely qualified for the job. Nor is he a likely winner because his voice would command attention in Moscow, Washington or Beijing, where he may be accorded no more than a polite hearing. The prize will probably be his because, with the kind of public support and recognition unearthed by Harris, he is a perfect combination: no threat to the powers-that-be in national capitals while also a safe pair of hands. These advantages have earned several Luxembourgers top jobs over the last 50 years and have already made Juncker chairman of the Eurogroup of finance ministers. It has always seemed to me infinitely improbable that the leaders of the big member states would choose a political heavyweight such as Tony Blair as their first president of the Council. It seems equally unlikely that a political heavyweight would want the job, although good authority says that Blair aches for it. As one of the political godfathers of the Treaty of Lisbon and, therefore, presumably familiar with its contents, his ambition is difficult to credit. No matter how hard you try to stretch language, the tasks allotted to the president of the Council are perfectly suited to a retired Rotary Club chairman who knows how to drink his soup quietly. Formally, he/she has to prepare and preside over meetings of the Council and represent the Union on those formal occasions (signings of trade agreements, political protocols etc) at home and abroad that, in some people, sap the will to live. When they embraced the draft Lisbon treaty, there is no evidence that it was in the minds of the heads of state and government to appoint someone “who might actually walk tall on the international stage” as Philip Stephens, the Financial Times commentator, so hotly desired in a recent article. There are other reasons for opting for Prime Minister Juncker or his equivalent from another small member state. Damaging turf battles between the presidents of the Council and the European Commission and the High Representative (who is bound to be known to the media as “Europe’s foreign minister”) will be an ever-present danger, but rather less likely if the Council is led by someone who is not aspiring to be a master of the universe. It will be difficult enough to establish clear institutional coherence and responsibility with a High Representative anchored in both the Commission and the Council of Ministers, without the complication of a Council President competing for power in that narrow space occupied by a common foreign and security policy. more...

It’s the end of Britain as we know it Christian Science Monitor (March 24, 2008) - The Lisbon Treaty spells the end of a sovereign Britain. You might want to take that vacation in England just as soon as you can – before its 1,000-year run as a sovereign nation comes to an end. This winter, 27 nations of the European Union (EU) signed the Treaty of Lisbon. You may think, “Innocuous enough,” as Portuguese-inspired visions of the Tagus River and chicken piri-piri swirl before your eyes. But for England (Britain, actually) the Treaty of Lisbon isn’t that appetizing. That’s because, if ratified, it will become the decisive act in this creation of a federal European superstate with its capital in Brussels. Britain would become a province and its “Mother of Parliaments,” a regional assembly. And that’s no small humiliation for a country that gave the world English and saved Western civilization in the Battle of Britain in 1940. The Eurocrat elite in Brussels might not admit it, but the Treaty of Lisbon is essentially a constitution for a “country” called Europe. More bluntly, it’s a cynical repackaging of the EU Constitution rejected by French and Dutch voters in 2005. Former Prime Minister Tony Blair promised to put the EU Constitution to the British people in a referendum. But his successor, Gordon Brown, has reneged on that promise. He insists that the Treaty of Lisbon is shorn of all constitutional content and that it preserves key aspects of British sovereignty. On March 11, the bill to ratify the treaty cleared the House of Commons. And now the Brown government is poised to win passage in the House of Lords, too. But British resistance is stirring. In a recent series of mini referendums, almost 90 percent of voters gave the Lisbon Treaty an emphatic thumbs down and demanded a nationwide referendum. If all 27 nations ratify the treaty this year, it will begin to come into effect on Jan. 1, 2009. The British will then be expected to transfer loyalty and affection to the EU and devote themselves increasingly to its wellbeing. With its flag, anthem, currency, institutions, regulations, and directives, the EU has long been indistinguishable from a nation-state-in-waiting. Now the Lisbon Treaty gives it those requisites of nationhood it’s always lacked: a president, a foreign minister (and diplomatic corps), a powerful new interior department, a public prosecutor and full treaty-making powers. Add to those its common system of criminal justice, an embryonic federal police force, and the faintly sinister-sounding European Gendarmerie Force, and what this union becomes is a monolithic state with great power pretensions. Most alarmingly, though, is that the Lisbon Treaty can be extended indefinitely without recourse to further treaties or referendums. That 27 European nations are on the verge of being reconstituted as a federal European superstate is substantially the achievement of the fanatical French integrationist Jean Monnet, for whom the nation state was anathema. When British Prime Minister Edward Heath took Britain into the Common Market in 1973, the country thought it was entering a free-trade agreement. It hoped membership would sprinkle some European stardust on Britain’s shipwrecked economy. Mr. Heath, a passionate Europhile, assured the country that membership would not entail any sacrifice of “independence and sovereignty.” Like Europe’s fervent integrationists, whose plans for political union had always been disguised as increasingly beneficial economic integration, Heath maintained the fiction that he had simply joined a trading bloc. Britain had been a highly successful nation state and global power. Now, it seemed, she needed Europe to reverse a relentless decline. Thus when the British were asked to decide on continued membership in the Common Market in a 1975 referendum, almost 70 percent voted to stay in. The “Yes” campaign swept to victory on a platform of jobs, prosperity, and peace. But the implications for the weakening of national sovereignty went unheeded. Few recalled that in 1961 the Anti-Common Market League had warned that signing the Treaty of Rome (which created the Common Market) “would mean a permanent, irrevocable loss of sovereignty and independence” and that Britain’s affairs “would increasingly be administered by supranational bodies … instead of by our own elected representatives.” Surrendering to supranational rule is hard for Britain given its celebrated past. Its European neighbors, by contrast, their histories indelibly stained by tyranny, military defeat, and imperial barbarity, seem eager to subsume themselves in a suffocating superstate. The Treaty of Lisbon crystallizes the EU’s core belief that nation states are every bit as defunct as Stone Age tribes. In the case of Britain, though, it would curtail the freedom of action and global vision of a nation whose people are far from convinced that sovereign independence is a badge of shame. Britain could walk out of the EU today simply by repealing the 1972 European Communities Act. But political courage of that order is in short supply. Perhaps only Queen Elizabeth II can rescue her realm from the baleful Treaty of Lisbon. She could veto it when it comes to her for royal assent and – sensationally – declare that she’s not prepared to see her proud, independent, liberty-loving country swallowed up by an arrogant, authoritarian, and unloved European superstate. She would be in excellent company. Queen Anne refused assent to the Scottish Militia Bill in 1708. And that was only about a bunch of musket-toting rubes of doubtful loyalty. This is about national survival.