Our Man In Havana.......is a Bulgarian

Sir David Scott c. 1945 in full Diplomatic fig.
Nowadays Our Man In Havana is more
likely to be dressed in a rumpled
brown suit made in Sofia or Bratislava

An EU Foreign Minister ('High Representative for Foreign Affairs' in EU DoubleSpeak) only became a legal reality just 53 days ago. First appointee Baroness Ashton of UpMoscow has yet to be confirmed in office. The EU Diplomatic Service ('External Action Service' or 'EAS' in EU DoubleSpeak) likewise is 56 days old: yet already it has opened 50 'EU Embassies' across the world. That was quick, I hear you say.

Er, well, not really...........The EU Comrades were so supremely confident of getting the Treaty of Lisbon signed, sealed and delivered that they had, long before the final ratification by the Czech Republic just ten weeks ago, been spending, utterly unlawfully,Taxpayer's money on setting up both the service itself and having arrangements for Embassies - the ultimate vanity symbols of the EU's new-found statehood - securely in place.

Thus we are told by The Daily Telegraph's Bruno Waterfield:

Embassies in the key capitals of Beijing, Kabul and Addis Ababa, the seat of the African Union, are regarded as marking a major shift to giving the EU a role as a global player to rival nation states.
The embassies will takeover national bilateral missions in the 54 countries where they are set up, headed by ambassadors who are empowered to speak on behalf of the EU as a whole.

We should not, however, be in the least surprised by this news, for it has long been an open secret that the EU was preparing for this moment well in advance.

Two things are vital here.

The first is that we must take very careful note of the importance that the EU Comrades place on the rapid, nay instant, build-up of the physical embodiment of its new-found legal personality as an entity empowered to enter into foreign relations under Article 37 of the Treaty on European Union (TEU):

The Union may conclude agreements with one or more States or international organisations in areas covered by this Chapter.

That is no more and no less than the legal arrogation to itself by the EU of its right to enter into foreign relations in its own right, to which I shall return in a moment.There is also a second reason behind all this haste. It is the impending General Election for the soi-disant UK Parliament, an event which has been troubling the EU Comrades from the very moment that Smuggo Tony Blair graciously told the British People that they would, on this one occasion and as an act of great condescension, be allowed their say on the matter.

Since then both Labour and the Liberal Democrats have junked their commitments to a referendum as quickly as they could, leaving only David Cameron and his 'cast-iron guarantee' as a potential stumbling block.As we now know, Cameron's 'cast-iron' guarantee was also junked as soon as he could decently off-load an embarrassing and unwanted policy: within hours of the Czech ratification all pretence that he wanted us to have our say was abandoned with a huge sigh of relief.

But, pending that shameful and utterly dishonourable act of duplicity, the EU Comrades could never be sure that final ratification of the Treaty would come before a UK general Election and with it a UK Referendum which would kill Lisbon dead for ever - well, for as long as any Zombie is ever dead, that is. They were utterly terrified that the British People would, by the negligence of the Collabos in the Tory Wing of the collaborationist EU Party (Britain's ignoble heirs to the likes of Degrelle, Mussert and Laval), stop Le Grand Projet in its tracks.

Phillipe Pétain & Pierre Laval:

Collaborationists who came to a sticky end

Thus the EU Comrades have been getting their ducks in a row long before they had legal authority to do so. Until 1st. December last they had no right whatsoever to be spending Taxpayer's money on leasing/buying 'Embassy' buildings or on staffing them. Yet here we are but eight weeks into the birth pangs of EUtopia and we have fifty EU Embassies up and running. They had, in fact, been spending hard long before the result was known.

It is, far and away, the most visible sign to the outside that the EU is no longer just any old international organisation but that it is now able to say: "L'Etat, c'est moi!"

And why, you might be forgiven for asking, is that so important? Well, we have been here before. In fact here, here, here and, indeed, here.

Or, to put it another way, why is it, do you think, that so much of the energy of Lisbon is directed at the nuts and bolts of the office of EU Foreign Minister and of the EU's External Action Service?

If one looks at Treaty on European Union (TEU) and The Treaty on The Functioning of the European Union (TFEU) - the product of the road from Rome to Lisbon via Maastricht, Amsterdam and Nice - , the changes to the Institutions of the EU are actually not fundamental. But by comparison acres of space are devoted to the EU's 'common foreign and security policy' and its sibling the 'common foreign and defence policy'.

There is good reason for this. The Montevideo Convention on The Rights and Duties of States 1933 sets out the criteria for a state to be, in customary international law, identifiably a sovereign independent state:

Article 1

The state as a person of international law should possess the following qualifications:

a ) a permanent population;

b ) a defined territory;

c ) government; and

d) capacity to enter into relations with the other states.

Of these, (a) and (b) are indisputably satisfied by the EU.

As to (c) Lisbon's adumbration in Article 13 of the TEU of the institutions of the EU is merely a recital of the work done by Maastricht, Nice and Amsterdam. On any rational view those institutions are the institutions of government.

But the final link, the final piece of the jigsaw was missing. Sure, the EU had some foreign relations power pre-Lisbon. But Lisbon was, as a matter of international law, the final, missing piece of that jigsaw in providing that full capacity to enter into foreign relations and the physical capacity to do so (The EAS).

The news in the Telegraph today is simply confirmation of the fact that the EU is de jure and de facto a State in customary international law.

One of the effects of all this is that, as the Telegraph points out, many UK missions are being closed, the Foreign & Commonwelath Office being sutiably relieved at the saving of money thereby occasioned. For this Glrious Moment in the EU's history has arrived at a moment when the member states are faced, in effect, with the Perfect Storm of a major recession and economic crisis. The saving of money by cash-strapped Chancelleries from Dublin to Valetta and from Lisbon to Helsinki is nothing more than a moment of ectasy and opportunity for the EU Comrades.

Thus, when next you lose your passport after a night of salsa and rum on your next run to Cuba, you may well find out that 'Our' man in Havana is..........a Bulgarian.

The fate that awaited Laval was a rather

summary trial and an appointment

with the firing squad...........

FINAL NOTE: On 1st. December 2009 I posted a GrumpyPost suggesting Dan Hannan had not acknowledged my earlier posts on the Montevideo Convention. Indeed I sent him a GrumpyGram email to the same effect. He has now emailed to say that he reached the Montevideo Convention by other means, a proposition I now accept entirely and I thus withdraw any suggestion of larceny.......and hope he will accept this apology, in the spirit that, of course, great minds think alike............

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