Saturday 15 March 2008

God bless Poland (2)

Denis Cooper has done some more digging on Poland's attempts to retain at least a little of their national sovereignty, articles here, here, and here.

He sums them up thusly:

" ... the suggestion is not that the Treaty should be re-visited, but that the Bill to ratify it should have a preamble stating that 'Poland is a sovereign state and the country's constitution is its highest law'. A bit like Cash's New Clause 9, which was voted down by our patriotic MPs last week... this could all be very easily sorted out by Merkel issuing a few not-so-veiled threats about cutting funding to Poland, excluding Polish workers from Germany, and maybe mentioning that Poland had been put on the 'candidates for annexation' list along with Liechtenstein and the Sudetenland.

To remind you how it all ended up last time, let me repeat the famous words of one of Hitler's generals*, as they retreated into the Berlin Bunker in 1945 "Wenn das so weiter geht, dann können wir bald von der Westfront an die Ostfront mit der Straßenbahn fahren"**.

* I can't track down his name or precise rank.

** 'If things go on like this, we'll soon be able to take the tram from the Western Front to the Eastern Front'. Rather amazingly he was not taken out and shot for defeatism.

0 comments: