The German playwright Bertolt Brecht once wrote a poem in support of a peasant’s revolt. When he presented it to the leaders of the uprising, they told him, “Our people won’t like this. Can’t you change it?”

“There’s nothing wrong with the poem,” retorted Brecht, “Change your people”.

Old Bertie would have made a fine President of the EU Commission in Brussels, for that comes very close to the European elite’s reaction to Ireland’s No vote in yesterday’s referendum on the proposed EU constitution.

Quick Recap for the Uninitiated
The original European Union constitution was rejected two years ago in referendums by the French and the Dutch. Had Britain been allowed the promised vote, it would have been slaughtered, but the No results on the continent saved Tony Blair’s face.

The bureaucrats of Brussels, urged on by Blair and Germany, then shuffled the pack, cut out a few cosmetic bits and renamed the document the European Reform Treaty. This is now in process of ratification around Europe. Only Ireland was given a referendum on it. Britain’s treacherous government under Gordon Brown defaulted on its manifesto promise and is currently forcing the treaty through Parliament to bypass the inevitable verdict of the people.

Yesterday, the Irish said No! … emphatically.
/Recap

This morning the EU is urging the other 26 countries to continue with their own treaty ratification processes, even though it requires unanimity to become law.

The simple fact is, Europe’s political class wants this “constitution” — so-called because it gives the EU a legal identity for the first time — while the people do not.

There are half a billion people against half a thousand politicians. Who will win?

The Commission’s legal team is already working on how to implement most of the constitution’s contents without the need for a treaty. In other words, smuggling most of it into law by the back door.

Why does Britain, the most Eurosceptic nation in Europe, put up with this ghastly authoritarianism? For the same reason we sleepwalked into two world wars in the last century. We preferred not to think about it until it became inevitable.

Sometimes apathy can kill.

A man turns up at a small hotel for a night’s stay. He speaks urgently to the landlady and says he’s allergic to apples. “Please don’t serve me apples,” he asks.

“I promise you’ll get no apples here,” she replies.

That evening the man is tucking into dessert which is described as fruit pie. To his horror he suddenly feels very ill.

“You promised me no apples,” he cries out to the landlady.

“It’s not apples,” she says, as his head doubles in size, his lips turn blue and he goes into acute anaphylactic shock. “It’s apple pie.”

Now consider the ongoing saga of the European Constitution — newly renamed an “Amending Treaty” despite being 98 percent the same as the constitution. British Prime Minister, Gordon Brown, made a manifesto promise that the British people would get a referendum on it. He has reneged on that promise because he knows he would lose by a very big margin.

The promise referred to a constitution, he says, and the treaty is no longer a constitution.

The original document has been shuffled around a bit, as you would a deck of cards, some cosmetic stuff has been removed, and the name changed.

It’s not a constitution, claims Brown. Sure, it’s constitution pie.

I’ve spent a lot of time this week thinking about Energy Analysis, which is a central part of the Superdemocracy project I’m working on.

Energy Analysis is a different way of viewing how organizations work. Instead of seeing people in particular “jobs” — which are ragbags of roles inherited from earlier empire building and power grabs — we examine the energy flows through the whole unit. We also look at the type of energy involved. This method always points up people placement as the main source of rigidities in any large organized group.

It’s a simple enough procedure, but breaks away from our normal worldview in which people are the natural drivers and shakers of all corporate activity. At first sight, it can leave you a bit disorientated, but think of Google. From the outside, the Googleplex looks like a giant energy plasma instead of a normal corporation, like Microsoft or IBM. And yet even Google has still fully to evolve into a true superdemocratic organism.

Then, out of the blue, a perfect example of an energy-driven corpo landed with a thud in my lap : the European Commission.

Basic background
The EU Commission is a board of quasi civil servants, drawn from the political classes of EU member states, and based in Brussels. Unlike normal secretariats it exercises considerable executive powers by proposing new Europe-wide legislation which eventually becomes legal throughout the community.

It has steadily amassed a lot of influence and control, backed by a tame supreme court which almost always supports the central orthodoxy. Its methodology has been “salami-slicing”, taking power in small increments that they think will not be noticed by busy people, but will accumulate over time into a vast control console for the whole of Europe.

The Commission is widely regarded as a political graveyard for national politicians who see it as western Europe’s equivalent to the Siberian salt mines of the old Soviet Union, where out-of-favour opponents were conveniently deposited. Britain’s commissioner, Peter Mandleson, a friend of Tony Blair, was twice forced out of the British Cabinet for alleged dishonesty. He now controls trade negotiations for all 27 countries in the EU.
/Basic Background

Now just imagine what all that negative energy will do if concentrated in one supranational body given the power to use it.

Naturally, that resentment and loss of status back home will fixate on stripping power from national governments and lodging it in Brussels. This will compensate Commissioners psychologically for the assumed shabby treatment these people had received from national politicians.

In short, the Commission will inevitably become a kind of politburo, hoovering power to the centre and spewing out hundreds of thousands of prescriptive “directives” for the folks back home. It will be job justification and revenge politics writ large by a powerful bunch of losers.

And that’s just what has happened over the past 35 years, ever since the UK joined an inoffensive “Common Market” with “no political or sovereignty implications”. The energy map of the institution predicts perfectly how it has evolved over the decades. It’s also a fact that the Commission’s accounts have not been cleared for 13 years by their own court of auditors on the grounds of massive fraud.

This week a constitution was signed by national politicians which paves the way for yet more power grabs and the downgrading of democratic procedures and accountability.

You would rightly guess that most ordinary people are totally against all this. Indeed, two years ago both France and the Netherlands voted it down in referendums, and Britain would have done the same if allowed to have a say by the slippery Blair and Brown. The constitution has now been repackaged and renamed — an amending treaty. This time they’ve walked away with the whole salami.

So the transition from common market to legal jurisdiction is almost complete, with not a referendum of the people in sight. And it’s all been driven by the energies funnelled into the Commission by short-sighted, short-termist national politicians. Stitch-up is too mild a comment for what has taken place.

This week also sees the 350th anniversary of the Flushing Remonstrance which was issued by English settlers in New Holland, now New York, in protest against religious persecutions by the then Dutch rulers. In retrospect it was the model for all the other Declarations and freedom documents that followed.

So do we need our own Flushing Remonstrance here in western Europe? It would be a good start, but we should also look at the energy makeup of the Brussels Commission and so-called Court of Justice. Then we could get back to free trade and dispense with the futilities of failed politicians.

As Shakespeare put it, we must renounce “the equivocation of the fiend that lies like truth”.

Energy Analysis is a useful tool for that in any organization, especially when aimed at finding the points of maximum competence for the taking of critical decisions. One thing’s for sure, pushing up decisions to Brussels is the worst of all possible worlds — the point of maximum incompetence.

But then we hardly live in a sane universe.

I don’t normally get caught up in the spasms of patriotic fever that grip the nation whenever England or a GB team reach a major sporting final — which thankfully is quite rare.

However, Saturday’s Rugby World Cup final in Paris between what was recently a no-hopers’ England team, and the seemingly unbeatable South Africa, is catching everyone’s attention, not least in that sleepy hollow of scholarly values, the Syntagma office.

One of the reasons is that in the next few days the Prime Minister, Gordon Brown, is about to enact one of the great betrayals in history — signing the shamefully dishonest and authoritarian European Constitution while reneging on his promise of a referendum.

This act by Brown has been described by the all-party House of Commons Scrutiny Committee as “akin to Neville Chamberlain’s appeasement of Hitler in 1938″.

The rugby final provides a distraction for the dire political events happening not so many miles away in Lisbon. So, while Syntagma wishes “the lads” well in Paris, we simultaneously call down a multitude of plagues on the houses of all those involved in the Great Brussels Stitch-Up.

Oh, and I should mention that Englishman Lewis Hamilton could become Formula One World Champion in Brazil on Sunday.

We wish our great sportsmen the best of British over the weekend, while to our unsporting politicians, deep, unremitting gloom.