PROPHETIC END TIME EVENTS IN THE NEWS

 

Germany is a country to watch as the European Union crumples. They are going to play a key role in the unfolding of end time events. Germany will be the most powerful country in Europe and ironically the nation of Israel will look to Germany for protection.

 

 

Only Germany is holding together as separatists threaten to rip Europe apart.

The increasing predilection for fragmentation across the continent will result in Teutonic political hegemony - if we're lucky...

By Ambrose Evans-Pritchard http://www.telegraph.co.uk/finance/comment/ambroseevans_pritchard/11088265/Only-Germany-is-holding-together-as-separatists-threaten-to-rip-Europe-apart.html

9:10PM BST 10 Sep 2014

　

Europe is disintegrating. Two large and ancient kingdoms are near the point of rupture as Spain follows Britain into constitutional crisis, joined like Siamese twins.

The post-Habsburg order further east is suddenly prey to a corrosive notion that settled borders are up for grabs. "Problems frozen for decades are warming up again," said Giles Merritt, from Friends of Europe in Brussels.

The best we can hope for - should tribalism prevail - is German political hegemony in Europe. The German people so far remain a bastion of rationalism, holding together as others tear themselves apart. The French are too paralysed by economic depression and the collapse of the Hollande presidency to play any serious role.

The far worse outcome is that even Germany succumbs to centrifugal forces, leaving Europe bereft of coherent leadership, a parochial patchwork, wallowing in victimhood and decline, defenceless against a revanchist Russia that plays by different rules.

Former Nato chief Lord Robertson warns that a British break-up is doubly dangerous, setting off "Balkanisation" dominoes across Europe, and amounting to a body blow for global security at a time when the Middle East is out of control and China is testing its power in Asian waters.

He warns that the residual UK would be distracted for years by messy divorce, a diminished power, grappling with constitutional wreckage, likely to face a resurgence of Ulster's demons. Scotland's refusal to allow nuclear weapons on its soil means that no US warship would be able to dock in Scottish ports, while its withdrawal from all power projection overseas would push British fighting capability below the point of critical mass.

"The world has not yet caught up with the full and dramatic implications of what is going on. For the second military power in the West to shatter would be cataclysmic in geopolitical terms. Nobody should underestimate the effect this would have on existing global balances,” he said.

Europe has largely disarmed already. While America spends $76,000 per soldier each year, EU states are down to $18,000, largely earmarked for pay and pensions, according to the Institute for Statecraft. Almost nothing is being spent on new equipment. Europe has slashed defence budgets by $70bn over the past two years even as Russia blitzes $600bn on war-fighting capabilities by 2020 and turns itself into a militarised state, a Sparta with nuclear weapons.

A portrait of Peter the Great hangs above the desk of Russia's Vladimir Putin. One might conclude that Mr Putin will not rest until he has avenged the post-Soviet losses of Narva, Riga and Poltava, the triple victory sites of that mercurial Tsar. The first two lie across the EU line in the Baltics, the latter deep within Ukraine.

The Scottish precedent threatens - or promises, depending on your view - to set off a chain reaction. "If the Scots votes Yes, it will be an earthquake in Spain," said Quim Aranda, from the Catalan newspaper Punt Avui.

Madrid has declared Catalonia's secession to be illegal, if not treason. Premier Mariano Rajoy has resorted to court action to stop Catalonia's 7.5m people - the richer part of Spain - holding a pre-referendum vote for independence on November 9. Barcelona is already covered with posters calling for civil disobedience, some evoking Martin Luther King, some more belligerent.

There is a hard edge to this dispute, with echoes of the Civil War. One serving military officer has openly spoken of "1936", warning Catalan separatists not to awaken the "sleeping lion". The association of retired army officers has called for treason trials in military courts for anybody promoting the break-up of Spain, a threat since disavowed by the current high command.

Rioja's premier, Pedro Sanz from the ruling Partido Popular, seemed to threaten a massacre, warning Catalans that they "will die" (morirán) if they persist in playing with fire. That will not stop 1m or more taking to the streets this week for Catalonia's "Diada", the national day, evoking the fall of Barcelona to the Bourbons in 1714.

"If the Scots and Catalans go, the Flemish will follow. The precedent creates so much pressure," says Paul Belien, a Belgian author and Flemish nationalist. The separatist Nieuw-Vlaamse Alliantie is the biggest party in the Flemish parliament.

"I am not happy. I fear the Scottish experiment will end in economic disaster and discredit our cause. We are the ones who subsidize Wallonia, so we're really in the position of England," he said.

Less understood is how this domino effect is spreading to a new group of stranded people, the irredentists left on the wrong side of Europe's borders at the end of the Great War, victims of Versailles and Trianon. You can feel an icy chill of history. "We thought we had solved the problems of Europe's borders, but as the glue comes off in one place, it is losing its hold elsewhere," said Mats Persson, from Open Europe.

"Scotland is our example," says Eva Klotz, leader of Süd-Tiroler Freiheit movement in the Italian Dolomites. "What is happening in Scotland changes everything for us. That the Scots can vote - and crucially that England respects it - shows that it's possible to achieve self-determination democratically, without war and violence," she said.

Yet there is a twist. The sub-plot of the Süd-Tirol campaign is reunification with Austria, 100 years after it was torn away and handed to Italy as a strategic barrier, or spoils of war. There are many such pockets across Europe: the Swedes in eastern Finland, the Germans on the wrong side of the Belgian border or indeed across much of Alsace, the Irish Catholics of Derry, and soon perhaps the Shetlanders within a new Scotland. Above all there are the Hungarians.

Europe's stability since 1945 is built on the sanctity of borders, a universal acceptance that nobody will reopen this Pandora's Box, even if they have legitimate cause. It is why Russia's seizure of Ukraine has been such a shock, so dangerous since it drew a chorus of apologists within the EU, some aiming to exploit it, others useful idiots.

Hungary has it is own "Crimeas", the severed kin of the Székely Land in Romania, those left in Serbia's Voyvodina or southern Slovakia or Ukraine, together numbering 2m. Premier Viktor Orban has played on this burning grievance, granting passports to ethnic Hungarians with more than a whiff of Magyar chauvenism. He has to cover his flank against even more radical ideology from the Horthy revivalists in the ultra-Right Jobbik party, actively enflaming revanchiste claims.

Exactly where Mr Orban stands on Hungarian borders is a subject of intense debate, like everything about his movement. (Germany's Social Democrat statesman Peer Steinbruck wants Hungary thrown out of the EU for failing to abide by the EU's Copenhagen Criteria on democracy and the rule of law). He is an open convert to "market Leninism", admirer of the authoritarian regimes in Russia, China and Turkey, with a judicial and media clampdown to match. "The new state that we are building is an illiberal state," he said last month.

This is Europe in September 2014. The borders are breaking. The liberal order is crumbling. The contractionary policies and perma-slump of the EMU saga - and its effects on EMU satellites - is surely a major reason why the governing dispensation has been so discredited, but it does not explain the parallel debacle in the UK.

Germany has its own separatists, of course. Politician Wilfried Scharnagl has written a book calling for Bavarian secession, deeming Bavaria's vote to join the German Empire in 1871 to have been an unmitigated disaster. "Maps are not set in stone for eternity," he says.

Yet Germany seems largely immune to fragmentation fashion, a stark contrast to the late years of the Holy Roman Empire when Germans were ruled by a mosaic of princes and margraves, pushed around by powerful nation states in the rest of Europe. Even Sweden dictated terms to minor German kings in the 17th century. The historic roles have been reversed.

Some may view German dominance with alarm. Yet perhaps we should be thankful that at least one great European state is holding the line. It is hard to imagine a more reluctant hegemon, a vibrant democracy under the rule of law, defended by a first-rate court, with very strong antibodies against authoritarian mischief.

Yet Teutonic ascendancy is likely to grate. As southern Europe has discovered in the EMU crisis, Germany has a different view of events and different interests, and a pedant's certainty that its policy nostrums that are right for Italy, Spain, Greece or even France, when a dozen Nobel economists insist otherwise.

The EU was supposed to lock in a European Germany, not a German Europe. The grand design assumed a plausible level of parity between Berlin and Paris, buttressed by an array of cohesive nation states led by London. This is dying before our eyes.

Some swivel-eyed federalists in Brussels cannot hide their glee at Britain's all-too possible downfall next week. They should be careful what they wish for.