The left must unite Europe

Submitted by Anon on 30 September, 2001 - 11:26

Those who cry against a European single currency, that it would mark a fundamental “surrender” of British sovereignty, are correct. It would. A single currency will be a giant step in the direction of European unity and a decisive move towards the creation of a European state. Europe has already achieved an irreversible though uneven and incomplete level of economic integration and unity. “Europe” already determines much of what happens within the member states of the European Union. The question is not whether there will be a united Europe, but, what sort of European unity?

The creation of a properly democratic European state would be a great step forward. But the development of Europe-wide democratic institutions lags far behind the development of European economic unity.

Now national parliaments are overshadowed. Bourgeois democratic politics which within the national states of Holland, Britain, Belgium and France took centuries of popular struggles to win, have been increasingly weakened. Though the power of national Parliaments has become, in fact, more and more attenuated there is no European-wide equivalent of the National Parliament. The European Parliament has very limited powers, and in the gap between growing “European” power and the shrinking real power of the parliaments of the EU component states, Europe, not too far now from forming a common state, is governed by haggling in the Council of Ministers.

Europe today is what it is because its unification is historically belated and because it is being united by the bourgeoisie and not by the working class. During the decades in which the European bourgeoisie has been integrating Europe to the point where a European state is the next logical step, opposition to European unity, “under capitalism”, has been one of the pillars of much of the European left, a left that under Stalinist and nationalist influences had uncoupled from the historic goals of the uncorrupted real left. To put it back in perspective we must start with the fact that European unity, even now, lags decades behind the objective need for it. We must look back over the history that has shaped the European Union.

By the beginning of the 20th century Europe needed unity because the existing big nation states were too small for the enormous economic dynamic which had developed within the borders of the bigger ones. The economies of the great European states, in the first place that of Germany, were stifling within their too-narrow national boundaries. The question posed by history was: who would unite Europe, the bourgeoisie or the working class?

The unification of Europe — under the German jackboot — had been the programme of the Kaiser in World War One, as it was later to be of Hitler. The Kaiser failed. In 1919, the victorious powers imposed a predators’ peace on Germany and thereby laid the basis for a second World War, two decades later. In 1940 at the beginning of that war, Hitler succeeded in achieving European unity. From the Pyrenees, on the borders of the Iberian peninsula, north to the borders of Sweden and east as far as Poland. Hitler united most of Europe. It was a Europe of peoples united by chains rather than bonds of international solidarity, a Europe of enslaved peoples yoked together by conquering German armies, not a Europe of free nations that had voluntarily come together in a United States of Europe.

Yet — and sixty years later there can be no doubt of it — that European unification, even under Hitler, was a horribly distorted expression of a great historical necessity. It is now forgotten, but demoralised segments of the old European left — the mirror image of the contemporary left wing opponents of European unity under the bourgeoisie — justified collaborating with Hitler on the grounds that this unification of Europe was, ultimately, progressive work, though history would have to clean it up. It was a variant of the thinking of those on the left such as the ex-Trotskyist Isaac Deutscher, who attributed historically progressive work to Stalinism, despite its horrors.

How did the bourgeoisie, which presided over two Europe-ruining world wars in the first half of the 20th century, come to bring Europe within sight of a United States of Europe?

The Anglo-American invaders of Europe in 1944-5 came to destroy German hegemony and to break down the walls of the Nazi prison-house of nations which Europe had become. All across Europe, the invaders were supported by uprisings of peoples seeking national self-determination — French, Belgians, Italians, Poles, Serbs, Czechs. A hundred and thirty years earlier, the French Empire of Napoleon Bonaparte had evoked a similar nationalist reaction against itself in Spain, Prussia and other parts of Europe. After Germany was beaten and overrun, the peoples of Europe outside of Stalin’s new East and Central European empire reverted to independent nation-states under the protection of the USA.

Indeed, one consequence of Hitler’s brutal German-imperialist attempt to override the peoples was to stoke up a new intensity of self-liberating nationalism and its malignant extension, chauvinism, all across Europe. In the East, ethnic Germans were its main victim. Germans to the number of perhaps 13 million were driven out of East Prussia (nine million), Czechoslovakia (three million), Yugoslavia (half a million) and other areas where Germans had lived for hundreds of years.

Much of Europe was in ruins. Old states were being rebuilt. European-wide political unity, even in areas outside USSR control, was politically impossible — less possible even than it had been before Hitler’s rapist “unification”.

Recent European history worked to make political unity impossible; yet European unity was not only necessary, but for the bourgeoisie unpostponable. Russia had control of nearly half of Germany and of much of Eastern and Central Europe. It was universally believed, there would be war with Russia, whose vast army would, with Germany disarmed and divided, advance quickly from the centre to the Western end of Europe. An attempt in the late 1940s to create a single West European army proved still-born. (In fact, the prospect of a third World War gave way to the prolonged balance of nuclear terror after the USSR developed an atom bomb in 1949.)

At this point, the European bourgeoisie (the British stood aside) started work to lay the ghosts of recent European history by drawing on the experience of German history. Most of the big and little early 19th century German states had been drawn together inside a customs union (17 states in all), the Zollverein, from 1834. The basis was thereby laid over decades for the unification of most of Germany, under Prussian predominance, in 1871. Prodded by the US and afraid of the antagonistic USSR, the bourgeoisie of Western Europe resolved on a “Zollverein” strategy for uniting Western Europe. Work to create economic unity — and eventually the rest would follow. And so it is following, slowly, unevenly.

First, they created in 1951 the Coal and Steel Community (Germany, France, Italy, Belgium, the Netherlands, Luxembourg). They signed the Treaty of Rome in 1957, under which there would be a series of moves over time to eliminate internal tariffs and make common external tariffs. In 1973, the UK, Denmark and Ireland adhered to the EC; in 1981, Greece; in 1986, Portugal and Spain; in 1995, Sweden, Austria and Finland. There are now 15 states in the European Union — almost all of Western and Northern Europe. Expansion to the east is in prospect.

This movement towards union had bypassed the insoluble political obstacle presented by the recently re-won, precious sovereignties of the states and concentrated on economic knitting-together. The independent states of the EU still stand half a century later, but, while the facade and the many different doors are preserved, the economic walls separating the states have been largely eliminated.

But this Europe, which is at its core economically united, politically still resembles a shanty-town: something thrown together higgledy-piggledy. Democratic politics hobbles far behind economic unification. Over time, a ramshackle growth of Europe-wide political and economic institutions has grown up alongside and on top of the institutions of the nation-states, piecemeal, unfinished.

Half-united Europe is run by a bureaucracy responsive to the needs of the bourgeoisie. Though it increased its powers not so long ago, the European Parliament is only a feeble shadow of what a sovereign parliament should be. It does not have effective control over the civil servants or the Council of Ministers. Relations between the component states and the EU are disablingly ill-defined. In short, much that the nationalist and other critics of the EU say against it is true.

The European Union is a great cartel, confronting the underdeveloped countries as a predator and confronting migrant workers from outside its walls as “Fortress Europe”. Many things about it outrage the spirit even of serious liberal democracy, not to speak of the spirit of international socialism. It is stamped in the image of the bourgeoisie which has achieved it. The fact that the European working class, which would have unified Europe and created a fully-democratic Socialist United States of Europe, was defeated in the decades before World War Two has determined that.

Yet, even politically, despite all that needs to be said against the present EU, Europe is more united than at any time since the breakdown of the Western Roman Empire 1,500 years ago. Undesirable aspects of the European unity which the bourgeoisie has created notwithstanding, it is much better than the older Europe of separate, often hostile and sometimes warring nations. Before 1945, by which time much of Europe had been reduced to ruins inhabited by starving people, European history had more resembled what happened in ex-Yugoslavia in the 1990s than what it has been in the last half-century. The basis exists now as never before for working-class unity all across Europe; for a Europe-wide working-class struggle to create a democratic and socialist United States of Europe.

There is a great deal to object to in this quasi-united bourgeois Europe. But it is where we are. What policy will best serve working class interests within this EU of the bourgeoisie?

There are two basic lines of possible policy. Build on what the bourgeoisie has built and unite the working class across the EU to fight the bourgeoisie for democratic and social reform and in the course of doing that build towards the possibility of socialist transformation by working-class revolution on a European scale. That means:

l Fight to democratise the EU by way of scrapping existing bureaucratic structures and replacing them with a sovereign elected European Parliament;

l Fight to level up working class living standards, and for a plan to eliminate unemployment and social exclusion (cut the working week, expand public services);

l Fight to rebuild a European international socialist movement.

Such an approach does not commit socialists to support, or forbid us to oppose, any specific bourgeois measures. Support for European unity does not have to imply backing what the dominant capitalists and their servants do, or the way that they do it — for example the Maastricht Treaty. It does not commit us to vote yes in the referendum that the British bourgeoisie may hold on the question of a single currency. It does commit us to European unity and to opposing politically all those who advocate the break up of the European Union and the restoration of the old, long-bankrupt, European bourgeois national-state system. It does commit us to counterpose working class measures on a European scale to the bourgeois system.

That is one clear line of response to where the working class movement is in the evolution of Europe. The alternative is to respond to the bourgeois character of the existing process of European unification by advocating regression to an outlived earlier stage of bourgeois rule — the era of competing and sometimes warring European national states. It is to stand for a political version of the “Irish” joke in which a man asked for directions responds, “Well, if I were you, I wouldn’t start from here at all…” It is to want to go back to a decades-past stage on the road and start again. It is not desirable; and it is not possible either. Despite its advocates’ sometime concern with working class self-defence, this is a reactionary policy. It is a break with the best traditions of the working class movement and of Marxism.

The unification of Europe was a policy of the working class left long before any sort of union became the policy of the ruling bourgeoisie. Trotsky raised the call for a United States of Europe in the middle of the First World War. In 1923 the Communist International adopted the slogan for the Socialist United States of Europe.

Marxists, including Trotsky, rightly dismissed feeble bourgeois talk (in the ’20s) of a capitalist united Europe as utopian. It took the Second World War, the destruction of large parts of Europe and the long-term threat of USSR conquest before bourgeois quasi-unification, in the form described above, became possible.

Because of the successive series of defeats the working class movement suffered at the hands of fascism, Stalinism and plutocratic “democracy” we have not the Socialist United States of Europe advocated by revolutionary socialists, but the quasi-democratic bureaucratic European Union of the bourgeoisies — that is the way that history has answered the objective need to unite the European economy. Socialists now start from that. We cannot start from anywhere else!

Issues similar in principle have confronted labour movements for over 150 years. There is a strong Marxian tradition on such questions. The bourgeoisie industrialised much of Europe in the 19th century. In the long term, they were creating the precondition of socialism — a high level of labour productivity and thus the possibility of abundance for all and the elimination of ruling classes and class exploitation. In the lives of many millions and of whole generations they created industrial hell-holes and foetid slums. They worked young children to death. They tore down all the old defences of the working people. The pioneer new technology, that of the British cotton industry, made it profitable for the cotton kings to get their raw material by way of black slavery in the USA, where chattel slaves were worked to death in seven or eight years of hard labour to feed machines run by the child and woman wage-slaves in the cotton mills.

Some early working-class rebels and good-willed observers wanted to “rescind” industrialisation and go back to an earlier historical stage. Describing such ideas as “reactionary socialism”, The Communist Manifesto, the foundation stone of modern socialism, proposed instead that the working class should in the short term organise to protect themselves and in the longer term aim to win political power and, by way of that power, take over industrial society, humanise it and use it to build a socialist society. There was no other way to build a socialist society, a humane working-class system, except on the basis of the economic achievements of the bourgeoisie: socialism is in history the child of bourgeois society. Thereby, The Communist Manifesto established the basic working-class approach to bourgeois society and its development — to simultaneously fight it in self-defence and in the longer term aim to build on its achievements.

Fundamentally the same issues arose at the start of the 20th century. Imperialism bestrode the world. Great trusts and cartels united with powerful states to fight other states and their industries for markets and colonies. In response, there arose a movement against these “unacceptable” manifestations of capitalist development. Proposals were made to break up the giant industries, to unscramble and undo what the organic evolution of capitalism was doing. In America, such ideas were made law, and Standard Oil was broken into parts — most of which then developed into giant corporations… It was, even if desirable, simply not possible to roll the film of capitalist development backwards.

Lenin, Luxemburg, Trotsky and that whole generation of revolutionary Marxists mocked at the ideas of the “trust-busters” and denounced their programme as a petty-bourgeois utopian aspiration to “devolve” capitalism back to a stage it had long passed, never to return to. Lenin saw the gigantism of capitalist organisation as a potentially progressive work of social integration and organisation: the answer to its exploitative and brutally capitalist character was for the working class to win political power, and by expropriating the bourgeoisie take over the economy and put it under humane, rational working class control.

Historically the knitting-together of peoples and states is one of the great progressive works of capitalism. But, as with “globalisation” now, it proceeds universally, inhumanely, destructively — in short, in a bourgeois way.

To say, as some do, that because socialism is now possible, therefore capitalism is completely reactionary and must be opposed when it tries to unite Europe, is both foolish and sectarian. Who says? Who knows that? Who decides and how? Capitalism does not come to a dead end: for example, the microchip revolution over the last two decades is a tremendous capitalist-era addition to humankind’s power over nature and potentially over its own social affairs. These and other contemporary technological advances will be taken over by the working class, which develops and redevelops with and within capitalism and its constantly changing technologies. Capitalism develops and, in its own bourgeois way, continues to socialise production. It continues to create the material basis for socialism.

Though it will always remain itself, capitalism will go on developing until the working class, led by the socialist movement, overthrows it. The European Union represents a necessary development. It is reversible only by regression to economic chaos and probably war.

Fighting the bourgeoisie within their system, conducting the working-class struggle for trade union and social rights, for the best achievable wages and conditions, for the fullest democratic rights and procedures, and ultimately for the overthrow of capitalism and its replacement by socialism, socialists in Marx’s tradition know only one viable anti-capitalism: the conquest of political power by the working class and the transformation of advanced capitalism into the beginning of socialism. Anything else is reactionary anti-capitalism in the muddled form of a utopian drive to go back to stages capitalism has outgrown — in relation to Europe, back to the system, that, two times in the first half of the 20th century brought Europe to ruin and devastation and turned it into a vast abattoir for tens of millions of human beings.

The predominant position on the left in Britain has for decades been to “oppose” the European Union as such and to champion “British withdrawal”. Often it is implied that this has something to do with socialism, or that it would better the prospects for socialism in Britain. But the immediate alternative to British capitalism in Europe is British capitalism out of Europe. The alternative to the EU is an independent capitalist Britain, or, rather, one oriented more to the US than to Europe.

It is nonsense to sloganise: “No to Europe”, “No to Maastricht”, “No to the single currency”, or whatever and link such slogans with “Yes to the Socialist United States of Europe”. The road to the Socialist United States of Europe has to be the road of building European working-class unity, the road of class struggle, the road of fighting one’s own bourgeoisie and one’s own nationalism and chauvinism, in the spirit of Karl Liebknecht and Rosa Luxemburg, who raised the cry in 1914: “The main enemy is at home.”

Anybody who thinks that “Britain out of the EU” means the Socialist United States of Europe or that a campaign for British withdrawal can be part of the struggle for the Socialist United States of Europe is a fool or a liar, or both. The notion that these British nationalist ideas can play any positive role in rousing British workers against either the British or the European bourgeoisie has been shown by decades of bitter and shameful experience to be utter nonsense. The right, and the forces of working-class disunity, gain from such nationalism, not the left.

When the bourgeoisie unite Europe and integrate the European capitalist economy, in their own way and for their own objectives, socialists who learn from Marx, Engels, Luxemburg, Lenin and Trotsky can not propose to roll the film of history backwards, or want Europe to regress to the old “Balkanised” system of antagonistic bourgeois states and alliances. The way forward lies not in a vain and reactionary attempt to unscramble capitalist Europe back into its component parts but in a campaign to democratise it, and for a Socialist United States of Europe.

Nor can we want the British working class to stand aloof from the working class of Europe. We seize the chance to unite the European working class; we propose that the working class should set as its goal the creation of a fully democratic Europe, the overthrow of the bourgeoisie and the creation of the Socialist United States of Europe.

Socialists advocate not British withdrawal from the European Union but the creation of a democratic European Parliament with full powers; British socialists need to unite with European socialists to win it. An EU-wide working class campaign for such a democratic transformation would help show the working class its own immense strength and convince it of the feasibility of radical social transformation.

But how will such a European parliament be achieved? By piecemeal evolution? That is slow, uncertain and blind. It leaves both power and initiative in the hands of the bourgeoisie and their bureaucrats.

When great democratic states have been in the making, a Constituent Assembly or Parliament has been called to work out constitutional arrangements for the new state. That is what the USA and revolutionary France did 200 years ago; what England did at the dawn of Parliamentary sovereignty, over 300 years ago. It is what Europe should do now. The European Union needs a Constituent Assembly.

A European Parliament should be elected to work out a constitutional framework for the United States of Europe. In that way the boundaries between the present national parliaments and the future sovereign European parliament, and similar perplexing questions, can be democratically and publicly worked out.

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