Workers' Liberty

A survey of the attitudes to the EU and the draft European constitution of the two main link-ups of the European left, the Party of the European Left (Communist and ex-Communist parties) and the European Anti-Capitalist Left (which includes some revolutionary groups).

Excerpted from an article by Martin Thomas in Solidarity 3/55, 15 July 2004.

The EACL is more militant about denouncing the EU as it is. But its vagueness gives the denunciations a paranoid-nationalist edge. "Governments are more fragile, but the EU... is a machine to destroy the social and democratic gains that the working classes have won in 150 years of battle".

As if the EU were, right now, pushing to abolish universal suffrage, the legal existence of trade unions and socialist parties, universal state education, public health insurance, old age pensions, and social security.

As if the actual attacks in the EU against social provision and workers' rights were mainly driven by the EU as such, as distinct from the national governments in it.

As if those attacks would be stopped or softened by forcing a return to higher barriers between the countries of Europe.

As if capitalism were a conspiracy engineered in Brussels.

The EACL's main practical conclusion is "No to the EU constitution". It does not satisfy itself with refusing to endorse the undemocratic, market-dogmatic constitution, and counterposing a sovereign democratic Constituent Assembly to both the constitution and the old system of EU integration via less systematic haggling.

Nor does it call for levelling up workers' rights and social provision across the EU. No, full stop. The constitution "cannot be reformed. It can only be thrown out".

Simultaneously the EACL manifesto proposes the most naïve demands on this same capitalist EU which "cannot be reformed". It advocates that the EU "renounce the use of war" and champions the Tobin Tax (an international tax on foreign-exchange transactions) as "a step to attack neo-liberal capitalism".

In other words, de facto: keep EU integration as slow and informal (i.e. done by behind-the-scenes haggling) as possible. If not quite turn the clock back to walled-off nation states, at least try to slow down forward movement as much as possible. And, simultaneously, pose illusory demands for the capitalist EU which "cannot be reformed" to become a haven of peace and justice.

In Denmark, France, Sweden and the UK, militant anti-EUism still appears as a big popular cause which can be profitably annexed by the left. Sweden's Left Party (ex-CP) was, as far as I know, the only leftist party in June to advocate its country leave the European Union. At the other end of the Euro-spectrum, in other countries, some left parties are very pro-EU, tending towards an idea that the EU can be gradually improved into a positive social (if not quite yet socialist) alternative to "American" neo-liberalism and militarism. Synaspismos in Greece, for example, positively endorsed the Maastricht Treaty and "insists firmly on its European orientation and struggles so that the future of the necessary European integration carries the seal of a ‘Left Europeanism'."

Both EACL and PEL straddle these two contrary directions, rather than advancing to a positive working-class alternative.

The PEL's agreed joint stance is to "want to act so that the elected institutions, the European Parliament and the national parliaments... have more powers of action and control". It is very weak, but better than the EACL's. It has at least some positive content.