By Colin Foster
On the evidence of the EU summit of 15-18 June, France’s “no” is leading not to the “social Europe” which many “no” voters wanted, but to a hobbled Europe.
Many aimed their “no” at the neo-liberal consensus visible in the draft European constitution, but it turned out to be an unintended “yes” to those capitalist interests, just as neo-liberal or more so, who want to slow down European integration. Workers in France would have done better to refuse both the “yes” and “no” options which Jacques Chirac offered them, and instead to turn to fighting for a socialist Europe by increasing Europe-wide workers’ unity.
Former Tory Chancellor Norman Lamont claimed in the Financial Times (22 June) that “the EU crisis is a triumph for British foreign policy”, with the aim (which he plainly believes Blair shares, in private) “to ensure Europe does far less and does it much better”. Lamont would like to see the powers of the European Commission cut down. At least social harmonisation like the 48-hour work-week regulation can be stalled.
There was much theatre in the budget crisis. After his referendum defeat, Chirac wanted to be seen to stand up for French interests and for Europe against Britain’s “selfish” demands to keep its rebate. Blair too wanted to play to his national gallery. He had every interest in delaying a deal on the 2007-13 financial framework until he takes over the EU presidency in July, and no interest in conceding to Chirac and Schröder, lame-duck leaders who may soon be replaced by successors more to Blair’s liking, Sarkozy and Merkel.
The 2000-6 financial framework was not agreed until spring 1999, so the EU leaders can continue quarrelling for almost a year longer and still be ahead of the game. Blair has already signalled the shape of a deal — the British rebate is “an anomaly that has to go”, but in return he wants a review of the Common Agricultural Policy’s large subsidy payments, a lot of which go to French farmers. Since the CAP outline for 2007-13 is already agreed, he will probably get the review.
Bigger issues, however, lurk behind the budget crisis and the collapse of the draft EU constitution.
The EU budget has grown slowly from almost nil before 1965 to 0.4% of total EU income in 1970 and over 1% today. It has continued to grow although the CAP has declined slightly, as a percentage of EU income, since 1985.
The logic of greater integration and expansion is that the EU budget should continue to grow relative to EU income. In fact, however, the “gang of six” — Britain, France, Germany, the Netherlands, Sweden, and Austria — have already forced the European Commission to agree to a relative shrinkage of the budget in 2007-13. The tighter total, at a time when the EU needs to spend a lot on integrating its ten new member states, makes quarrels within the total more difficult to resolve.
Most of the new EU spending since 1985 is aid of various sorts to poorer regions and countries, designed to ease their integration into a common economic area with the richer old EU core.
Since 1986, when the Single Market was agreed, Ireland’s output per head has increased from 66% of the EU average to 120% in 2000 (measured by purchasing-power standard) and 120% again of the “old” (15-member) EU average in 2003 (measured in euros). Spain’s has risen from 72% to 91% in 2003, Portugal’s from 58% to 68%, and Greece’s from 62% to 74%.
Despite successes also in the introduction of the euro in 2002 and the entry of ten new member states in 2004, growth remains low in the EU, especially in France and Germany, and unemployment high. The “Lisbon agenda” of 2000, which was supposed to ratchet the EU into high-tech growth, has been a failure.
Thus the richer countries’ new determination to be less “generous” to the EU. As former EU commissioner Peter Sutherland points out, “the budget... has already been significantly undermined... Important policies - proclaimed as recently as the European Council’s spring meeting as essential for EU competitiveness, such as boosting investment in research and innovation - have been jettisoned... Ad hoc solutions are being sought to buy off difficulties” (Financial Times, 15 June).
All this, together with the unwieldiness of decision-making procedures in the bigger EU until the EU chiefs can quietly introduce some cut-down version of the streamlining proposals which were contained in the draft EU constitution, points towards a postponement (perhaps indefinite) of the entry of Rumania, Bulgaria, Turkey, and Croatia; further delay in the full integration of Poland and the other new East European EU member states; less of the slow “levelling-up” which has operated in the EU since the 1980s; and more friction and fractiousness, more national self-assertion, in EU negotiations.
The talk by Italy’s Northern Leagues about Italy leaving the euro is unlikely to come to anything, since such a move by Italy would bring it a damaging inflation of its foreign debt as it was converted from euros into (weaker) lira. But longer term the euro has problems, since the “stability pact” supposed to protect it is now openly flouted by not only Portugal or Greece, but also France and Germany.
Meanwhile, the French and Dutch “no” will not stop the national governments pursuing cuts, privatisation, and the stripping away of protective laws for labour.
Workers’ unity across Europe, of the sort being pioneered by the Europe-wide network of truck drivers’ union representatives, is the only adequate response.
Comments
Marxism and Anarcho-syndicalism
You conclude what is generally a very good article with the comment,
“Workers unity across Europe, of the sort being pioneered by the Europe-wide network of truck drivers’ union representatives, is the only adequate response.”
Do you really believe this statement? If so then it seems ironic given the other articles in the same edition of the paper. The unity of the working class across Europe is undoubtedly a fundamental requirement. However, elsewhere in the paper, you reprint the sections of “What is to Be Done”, where Lenin specifically criticises Economism – the counter posing of purely Trade Union struggle to political struggle, and the idea that workers will automatically arrive at a socialist consciousness through this struggle. Yet to suggest that workers unity, such as that of the truck drivers, is the only “adequate” response to the very real political issues confronting workers in relation to Europe is precisely to counter pose Trade Union organisation to political struggle. This seems a move away from Marxism, and towards the kind of Anarcho-syndicalist position, which the IS/SWP used to be famous for back in the 1970’s/80’s, and against which the AWL’s predecessors correctly argued.
The position of abstaining on the Constitution and counter posing instead a socialist Europe flows inevitably from this anarcho-syndicalist approach. Engels criticises this approach in a letter to Theodor Cuno. Engels was criticising Bakunin and the Anarchists abstention from all political activity, and elections but the same argument can be used against abstaining in the referendum on the Constitution. Engels writes,
”But the mass of the workers will never allow themselves to be persuaded that the public affairs of their countries are not also their own affairs; they are naturally politically-minded, and whoever tries to make them believe that they should leave politics alone will in the end be left in the lurch. To preach to the workers that they should in all circumstances abstain from politics is to drive them into the arms of the priests or the bourgeois republicans.”
There are occasions when calling for an abstention is the correct thing to do, for example when the choices are so bad that the mass of the workers are likely to be capable of being persuaded not to vote in order to completely undermine the validity of the result. That was not the case here. An abstention would have merely helped the “Yes” camp, and given the green light for the kind of neo-liberal policies that dominate Britain to have been enshrined in the Constitution. Whilst it is true that the “No” vote might help Blair to resist implementation of the Working Time Directive a “Yes” vote might well have spelled the end of the 35-hour week in France, and Germany with the Working Time Directive to follow shortly after. I find the other arguments used in other articles on the question of the “No” vote, and in some ways similar to the political method of the SWP now, which the AWL criticises. For example, the question of whether the “No” vote was actually a victory for the Left is clouded by discussion of how many “No” votes were cast by Le Pen supporters and other right wing parties. Quite honestly I do not care how many of Le Pens voters voted “No.” The question of how other parties decide to vote should not form any part of the consideration of how the Left should vote. I am prepared to leave this kind of “My enemy’s enemy is my friend” approach to the SWP. Instead the Left should decide what is in the working class interest and act accordingly irrespective of whether that leads them to the same conclusions as their class enemy. Both the working class and the bourgeoisie have an interest in replacing feudalism, the workers should not support feudalism just because the bourgeoisie oppose it. Nor indeed should they abstain on the issue if the only possible advance available at the time is capitalism rather than socialism.
Yes the choices were bad compared to a socialist Europe, but no worse than the choices presented in Britain in May with which the AWL found no difficulty in dealing i.e. the referendum on which capitalist party should rule Britain – Tory or Labour. A socialist Europe has to be the goal of all Marxists, but unfortunately it is not an immediate prospect. To abstain on political struggle now, to have just two modes of operation - immediate trade union solidarity and propaganda for a socialist Europe some time in the unknowable future is indeed to be guilty of the kind of Anarcho-syndicalism Engels criticised above, and which the AWL’s predecessors used to criticise in relation to the IS/SWP.
The EU is a proto state. It may progress to its logical conclusion as a fully-fledged federal state (whatever the Euro-sceptics say you cannot have a single market without ultimately all of the laws, tax regimes, and other trappings of a state that go with it), or it may collapse. Leon Brittain in an interview with Simon Hobbes on CNBC last week stated openly that when they had all the discussions on the formation of the Euro, it was implicit that a single currency would cause frictions and economic dislocation in some countries, and that this was the method by which individual governments would be forced to introduce “reforms” and to take on the working class, just as Thatcher had done in Britain during the 1980’s. Incidentally, you describe the Lisbon Agenda’s purpose as being to turn the EU into a high tech economy. That is not technically correct. The stated aim of the Lisbon Agenda is to make the EU the most competitive trading bloc by the end of the decade. Although, this might involve shifting towards high-tech/high value-added production, the main concern of the Lisbon Agenda is “liberalisation” i.e. the removal of various restrictions on the movement of capital and labour within the EU. The Services Directive was developed as part of that Agenda. Alternatively, the EU may collapse into warring nation states.
The working class has an incentive to ensure the latter is not the case, but of engaging in the political debate on how the EU should progress; a debate that has been sadly lacking. Indeed, the Left in general has completely failed to organise any kind of meaningful campaign for a democratisation of Europe. It seems odd that the Left can develop all kinds of demands for democratic reform for countries in Africa, Asia and the Middle East but completely fails to campaign on any of these issues within the EU itself. The French vote was announced whilst I was in Ireland, and watching Irish TV, I listened to a young man (I can’t remember who he represented) who argued that the referendums should have taken place simultaneously throughout Europe, but that they should have been preceded by, effectively, Constituent Assemblies convened to discuss the future of Europe, to encompass all organisations that wished to contribute to the framing of the Constitution, and to stimulate debate amongst all the people of Europe. That seemed to me to be an excellent proposal. Such Constituent Assemblies would not be likely to propose a socialist Europe, but they would provide the basis for workers and their organisations to at least have a say in the future of the (proto) state they live in. And let us put it this way if it is right to raise the demand for workers in Iraq to have this right to shape the, hopefully, developing liberal democratic regime in which they live rather than simply counter posing a socialist Iraq, then does not the same apply to workers throughout Europe.
The “no” votes in France and Holland have raised the level of interest even in Britain, and that should be used not to allow the bourgeoisie to have a free reign in how Europe develops, but to encourage workers to fight for their political interests to be furthered as far as possible. At the very least workers should demand that the European Parliament become a real democratic and sovereign institution, which dominates rather than is dominated by the unelected Commission. We need a European Workers Party which can fight within this Parliament for workers interests across Europe, and help develop working-class unity across Europe not just on the economistic, anarcho-syndicalist basis of mere Trade Union struggle suggested in the article, but on a political level too.
In the same edition of the paper John O’Mahony correctly taunts the IS/SWP about the way they have now adopted the positions of those they criticised 20 to 30 years ago and before. Ironic that at that time the predecessors of the AWL argued against the IS/SWP’s characterisation of the Soviet Union as state capitalist, a position the AWL has now adopted, and argued, particularly in relation to working in the Labour Party, and to participating in elections, against the anarcho-syndicalism of the SWP in focussing on the Trade Union struggle and propaganda for the socialist millennia, an attitude at least in relation to the EU Constitution that the AWL now seems to be mirroring. Perhaps that time machine would make for interesting experiences for more people on the left than just the SWP.
Arthur Bough