Europe

The European crisis

IN THE WAKE OF THE FRENCH REFERENDUM

Tony Blair and his French colleague, Jacques Chirac, almost came to blows, like vulgar thugs, during the last meeting of the European Union in Brussels . They were discussing, according to the press, the chronic budget deficit of the European Union, and British contributions. London does not want to contribute a penny more because the United Kingdom does not finance its farmers while the Paris-Berlin axe does. With this, says Blair, they hurt all the rest.

The current president of the Union, the Luxembourg Junker, said without mincing words: “We are in a deep crisis”.

It is true, and this crisis has such depth that it goes back 30 years; it has its origin, therefore, prior to the creation of the EU. And a crisis of three decades does not only express circumstantial problems. Not at all: we are before a structural crisis that has its roots in the historical process of construction of the European Union, in its failure to repair the cracks in the delicate international balances subsequent to the Second World War.

Every crisis implies a process, it does not appears suddenly. However, even though with a certain quota of arbitrariness, it is possible to situate the beginning of this quasi bankruptcy at the time the oil prices blew up in the first years of the decade of the seventies and caused a recession whose force can still be felt, except in convulsive periods that were simply preparing for a new fall.

Since then, the offensive of the European bourgeoisie against the gains of the masses has been systematic, carried out by governments of any color: right, centre-left or of the so called “plural left”.

The collapse of this postwar equilibrium found one answer in the attempts of the European imperialist bourgeoisie to reinforce its coalition. That is how the European Economic Community paved the way for the European Union, which, from the beginning, constituted a new Holly Alliance against the European working class, now suffering a rational and planned attack in all countries.

Moreover, this agreement attempted to cushion the contradictions between the different European imperialisms. Finally, but no less important, the EU tried to rebalance its political role and its economic space in order to better compete with US imperialism.

Almost none of this could be achieved. The EU never managed to overcome its contradictions. The French-German axis, which tried to build progressively a Europe with enough cohesion to oppose -even from the military point of view- US imperialism, always clashed with Great Britain’s interests, allied and subordinated to the Unites Sates since the end of the war. Continental Europe was not strong enough either to do without the United Kingdom or to force it into European integration.

“We are so deep in crisis, the Soviet empire has fallen and no-one is in the mood to celebrate”, once declared Henry Kissinger, former State Secretary of Richard Nixon, now a lobbyist for big corporations in his country, and a permanent US foreign policy ideologist.

Actually, there was just little or nothng to celebrate. The collapse of the USSR and the stalininist regimes of eastern and central Europe , far from bringing a new worldwide equilibrium, aggravated the unstable situation and worldwide and European contradictions.

No

The catastrophe of the draft European Constitution in the French referendum was a clear rejection by the working class of the European Union, which attacks wages, social security and pensions, public health and education; in sum, against the living and working conditions of the masses.

An analysis of the French vote according to social class shows that 80 percent of the industrial proletariat voted No, along with the majority of the workers, whether industrial workers or not. It shows: it was beyond doubt a left vote.

This disaster of the imperialist bourgeoisie sharpens the conflicts, which is why ‘Mister’ Blair and ‘Monsieur’ Chirac are upset and almost come to blows, and it is necessary to separate them as if they were a couple of drunks in the back alley of a low-dive bar. The constitutional treaty actually no longer exists, and for European imperialism this is a disaster, from any angle it is viewed. It is now therefore evident that the Europe of the imperialist bourgeoisies is in a complete crisis today.

The European Union is creaking at all the joints, and at the same time, the European States cannot do without it because then acting alone things would be even worse. What will they do? Nobody knows, but what is certain is that they will continue their attacks against the working class: on this point they have no divergences.

The dead weight of the working class leadership

The imperialist policy of the EU today finds its most determined defenders in the center-left parties, such as the German SPD, the French SP and the Italian SD. Which is why these currents have suffered the worst defeats in the French referendum.

Others, who voted No, like a minority of the French SP and several communist and socialist parties grouped into the Party of the European Left, led by Fauto Bertinotti, offer no positive answers to the European crisis. What is more, many of them backed the subjugation of the working class in name of “the interests of Europe”. Its present position, contrary to the EU Constitution, is purely opportunist.

For instance, the Italian Partito della Rifondazione Comunista (Communist Refoundation Party), has returned to the center-left coalition, led by former prime minister Romano Prodi. If the Olive returns to the government in 2006, as expected, the “re-founders” will certainly grab one or another ministry in that bourgeois and imperialist government. A similar path is being followed by the French CP.

Meanwhile, the “extreme left” of the No [movement], such as the Liga Comunista Revolucionaria, enrolled in the so-called United Secretariat of the Fourth Internacional, does not go one step beyond proposing a perfectly capitalist but “democratic and social” Europe, an extreme as reactionary as utopian at a time in which capitalism is decomposing at a fast pace.

They are indistinguishable from sectors like Attac, which fight for the unfeasible goal of a “social and democratic Europe”. All of them dream with a return to the “Welfare Sate” of the postwar, duly idealized, which cannot come back. But, in name of that utopia, they are preparing themselves to govern with the bourgeoisie .

For the United Socialist States of Europe

The proletariat will need to search for its own way out of the crisis, on the basis of the important success obtained in the French referendum. That is: its complete class independence.

The crisis of the EU shows that Europe cannot unite on a capitalist basis. Its necessary unity will only come about through socialist unity.

It is necessary for the political and trade union forces of the workers movement unite independently in a united front of struggle to confront the counter-reforms of the European Union, for a plan to defend the necessities and living conditions of the popular masses, against direct and indirect wage cuts, labor flexilization, the attacks against the social State and retirement benefits; against unemployment, for the reduction working hours without flexibility, and for wages to be paid unemployed workers.

It is necessary to struggle against the imperialist war, for the immediate withdrawal of the troops of all countries from every occupied nation (Iraq, Afganistan, the Balkans, and others).

To each bourgeois government, of any color, let us counterpose the perspective of the workers government (dictatorship of the proletariat).

This is how we will respond coherently to the question of an alternative to the Europe of capital, already formulated by the vote of the French proletariat, a question which cannot find its definitive answer in any other context than that of the United Socialist States of Europe.

The indispensable construction of revolutionary parties in the countries of Europe, in the perspective of the refoundation of the Fourth International, could have no other perspective.

(Written on the basis of the international resolution of the Executive Council of the Coordinating Committee for the Refoundation of the Fourth International)