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The True Story Behind Those Weird EU 'Super-State' Conspiracy Theories

It helps – for believers, at least – that their starting points are mainly true.

In 2011, I went to a UKIP party conference. There, at the back of the hall in Eastbourne, I found a bunch of trestle tables, set up with a fete of cranky ideas, where the non-pasteurised milk advocates rubbed shoulders with the people who thought global warming was a con, who exchanged terse greetings with those who wished to see creationism taught in schools.

Among them was a retired copper who had a book out about how he was trying to have Ken Clarke and Douglas Hurd – as the surviving members of Ted Heath's 1970s cabinet – arrested. A pure PC Plod face – big bushy eyebrows like they don't make any more, wide plasticine jowls – we had a 20-minute chat about how, one day, he was listening to an audio CD of documents released under the Thirty Year Rule relating to Heath's decision to enter the Common Market in 1972. "Immediately, I thought, 'That's sedition, that is.'"

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He reckoned that, for the crime of having transferred powers to a foreign government, every cabinet minister over the past 40 years, by law, ought to be swinging from the gallows for treason.

His game, therefore, was to inspire ordinary members of the public to lay charges of treason at their local nicking shop. He reckoned "over 200" had done so. "Failure to investigate treason is itself an act of treason," he said. "The aim is to get every police station in the land investigating every other police station."

And that, in a nutshell, is a lot of what we're hearing in the EU referendum debate. The Plot to Take Over Europe. That the Grey Men of Brussels are coming for us, backed by an ideology none of us would share, formed by thinkers none of us have ever heard of, with methods that seem to mainly involve boring us to death. On 5Live, in the pubs, the natural fear that Brussels is too secretive, too high-handed, easily tips over into something more tin hat brigade.

It doesn't take much trawling of UKIP-ish forums to start coming up with handfuls of names from a hundred years ago, all of whose sole aim, it is regularly asserted, was to hoodwink the peoples of Europe into bowing before the supra-national metallic jaws of the EU beastie. It's not Bilderberg crazy – it's a more reserved, British level of harrumph enmeshed with fact. Not so much One World Government as A Transitional One of Several Regional World Governments Which Can Then Easily Be Yoked Together at Some Future Point.

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It helps that the tale is mainly true – that's always the best way to start out with a conspiracy theory. The faces are the same, the texts are the same; it's simply the malevolence of the motive you impute to them that changes. And who can prove or disprove what's in a man's heart?

These forefathers, it's argued, were men who believed in rule by philosopher kings. Democracy was bunk to them, and nationalism – or even the nation state – was the poison they sought to suck out of the continent. And it's easy to see how much weight the "men in white coats" mandarin case for abolishing governments in favour of unelected bureaucrats would have carried 90 years ago. This was the world where Brave New World seemed to sketch out a route-map for humanity. From the Soviet experiment outwards, everywhere a new class of technocrats were dividing mankind into little gelatinous cubes ripe to be perfected by leaps forward in the organisation of politics and sociology.

The conspiracy normally begins with a Brit. A man called Arthur Salter, a civil servant at the time of the First World War, who was in charge of organising the Anglo-French industrial co-ordination. Out of this experience, in 1923, he wrote a paper called "A United States of Europe", arguing for just that.

In doing so, Salter was hardly alone. Europe had been decimated, anything was better than more war. So he found an easy ally in his old pal from the other side of his Anglo-French industrial efforts – a man called Jean Monnet, his opposite number, who'd already run the Wheat Council and Allied Maritime Transport Council during the war.

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With his dull technocrat methodology established, Monnet would later carry the ball over the line – becoming the father of the European Coal and Steel Community, the bedrock of what is now the EU. We've never heard of him here, but in France he is sainted – buried in the Pantheon, his house outside Paris is a museum, and there's an entire university named after him in Saint Etienne.

The flag of the Paneuropean Union, Count Richard Von Coudenhove-Kalergie's organisation

At the same time, Salter and Monnet were playing second fiddle to a fellow dreamer with very similar ideals. The fruitily named Austro-Japanese Count Richard Von Coudenhove-Kalergie published a book in 1923 called Pan Europa. Three years later, the well-connected Count had managed to organise a conference on creating a pan-European state, attended by some of the biggest heads of the day: Sigmund Freud, Thomas Mann and Albert Einstein. It was CRVCK who first proposed that Beethoven's "Ode to Joy" be the EU's official anthem. He proposed a Europe Day, and a single European postal system.

If you were going to start a conspiracy theory, CRVCK would be a good opening gambit. He was a card-carrying mason. He was pals with Baron Louis de Rothschild. The Nazis, in fact, considered his organisation, the Paneuropean Union, to be "under Masonic control". There are doubts over whether he died via a stroke – in 1972 – or whether he committed suicide but had the act hushed-up to prevent besmirching his legacy.

CRVCK's ideas on race were certainly in keeping with his utopian vision of perfectible pod people: "The man of the future will be of mixed race. Today's races and classes will gradually disappear owing to the vanishing of space, time and prejudice. The Eurasian-Negroidrace of the future, similar in its appearance to the Ancient Egyptians, will replace the diversity of peoples with a diversity of individuals."

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What's undoubtedly true is that CRVCK saw the world as an ongoing empire-consolidation project, in which, by the turn of the 21st century, there would be only five states, "Europa" being one. Harry Truman loved his ideas. Churchill said the world owed him "a great debt". He had counted on the support, in the 1920s, of an ex-French Prime Minister, Aristide Briand, who published his own EU blueprint: "Memorandum on the Organisation of a System of Federal European Union", in 1930, shortly before dying unexpectedly.

The flag of the "EUSSR", a trope of hard-line Eurosceptic conspiracy theorists

But it wasn't until the 1950s that this shadowy underground network of politicians and intellectuals had their inciting incident. As Briand's plan had proposed, the idea would be to contain the German economy in such a way that it would be impossible for either France or Germany to produce enough new steel to go to war with each other again. That was what became the Schuman Plan – named after the French Foreign Minister who had his name boilerplated to the top of the paper that Monnet had presented to him.

Christopher Booker, the Private Eye founder, Telegraph columnist and professional global warming crank, has become an intellectual leading light to the Brussels Conspiracy movement. He even wrote a book on it, The Great Deception: Can the European Union Survive? :

"… A fourth man, Paul-Henri Spaak, a prime minister of Belgium, also made his own crucial contribution. It was he who urged on his friend Monnet the idea that, initially, the most effective way to disguise their project's political purpose was to conceal it behind a pretence that it was concerned only with economic co-operation, based on dismantling trade barriers: a 'common market'."

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Sniggering behind their hands, then, these functionaries are supposed to have then hoodwinked the political classes into signing up. The Common Market was only phase one. Total Union would be an inevitable by-product, but at every stage, the cloth-brained peoples of Europe would have to be told it was only this-far, no further.

In fact, Britain's own 1973 entry to the European Economic Community – the precursor to the EU – invites a sub-conspiracy, suggesting Prime Minister Ted Heath and, before him, Harold MacMillan knew that sovereignty would always be on the table, but tried to hide the fact from the public. There are Thirty Year Rule documents that now prove this.

Indeed, the conspiracy extends as far as the fall of Thatcher. Brought down not by her increasing battiness and post-poll tax unpopularity, but by a coalition within her own party of Europhiles, who could no longer accept her increasing resistance to Europe in general, and to the Maastricht Treaty in particular.

None of this is helped by the EU's genuine deafness to the word "no" as it spirals towards its goal of "ever-closer union". Even when the Constitution for Europe was rejected by the French and the Dutch in 2005, soon enough, its elements had re-formatted themselves into the Lisbon Treaty. When the Irish rejected the Lisbon Treaty in 2008, a stroke of luck meant that by 2009, with their economy suddenly on its knees, they backed a slightly revised version.

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And indeed, that's the conspiracy view of any Brexit. That it doesn't end there. The monster doesn't die when you stab it just once, and so you should always walk away facing it. That if we reject the EU, then the elites – the fabled "Establishment", who have as one come out in favour of Remaining – will double-down, do a deal, spray more dazzle-dust in our eyes, keep the proles sleeping, these bodies-in-jars that power their sinister federalist utopia, and continue bringing sinister trade prosperity and human rights with their sinister committees on the proper labelling of baby food. Creepy.

@gavhaynes

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