The victory of the “No” vote in the French referendum on the so-called European Constitution has had profound consequences on the political scenario of the old continent.
First of all, the results of the referendum have registered and amplified, in its turn, the enormous crisis of consensus accumulated by the policies dominant in Europe over the last fifteen years. The profound difficulties experienced by the various imperialist governments in their relationship with the social blocks of consensus themselves had a determining role in the crisis of agreement over the community proposal for the European Union. The persistent economic crisis of European capitalism in the framework of world-wide competition contributes, in its turn, to the impasse.
Secondly, the French vote constituted a detonating factor on the more strictly political contradictions of the EU. And the war in Iraq has evidenced and aggravated the deep contradiction between the European imperialisms: on the one hand, the Franco-German axis, oriented towards the construction of a European imperialist pole under its own hegemony; on the other hand, an English imperialism, traditionally linked to US imperialism. The French vote, striking a blow against a constitutional treaty driven principally by the Franco-German axis, offered British imperialism a broader space for political maneuvering. The overall result is very simple: the entire construction of the EU has registered a substantial paralysis.
The crisis of the EU has placed in evidence that the European center-left finds itself in a singular situation. No political tendency has collaborated in such a special manner in the main European countries, in the direct administration of the structural policies of the EU against the working class and the popular masses. For this reason, the withdrawal of authorization produced by the vote could not be more ruthless. On the other hand, for decisive sectors of the imperialist bourgeoisie, the current European crisis itself tends to demand once again a role for the center-left. The bourgeoisies of the old continent have a double exigency. On the one side, they must relaunch a new anti-popular offensive, that has become much more necessary due, precisely, to the worsening of the European economic and political crisis. On the other, they have the need of preventing the social impatience revealed by the French vote from turning into a massive radicalization and an explosion in the struggle. How to respond to this double exigency? By investing once again in the center-left: in liberal social democracy in France, in the Union coalition in Italy.
Paradoxically, the left of the “No” to the European treaty offers no real answer to this plan.
Such is the case with the so-called Party of the European Left, led by the Italian PRC, which has formally defended the “No” against Maastricht. It so happens that almost the totality of its members have already collaborated, in the course of the nineties, with the construction of the imperialist Europe: for example in the case of the FCP, in the Jospin government of 1997-2001, which carried out the brunt of the privatizations in France; in the case of the Italian PRC, already involved in 1996-98 in the worst anti-working class policies of the last decade (flexibilization and casual labor, a record number of privatizations in all strategic sectors, tax exemptions and tax increases for those with the lowest profit levels, detention camps for immigrants). These same parties have refloated today the contradiction between words and actions in a manner probably even closer to caricature. On the one hand, they have exalted the “No” victory against those dominant policies which they themselves supported in the past. On the other, they salute the call to enter the government in which they are led by the center-left, in order to go on and relaunch those same policies which the French “No” has rejected. In this way, the United Left of Spain already forms part of the majority in the Zapatero government, which supported and promoted the “Yes” to the European treaty. The FCP once again presents itself as a candidate in the perspective of a government together with liberal social democracy, which was blown away by the “No.” The PRC, in particular, is preparing to participate, for the first time in direct fashion, in a center-left government.
On the other hand, the obsessive propagandistic relaunching of a “social, democratic Europe at peace” throughout the galaxy of the so-called “anti-capitalist left,” headed in particular by the French LCR and the so-called Unified Secretariat, is revealed to a much greater extent today as a petite-bourgeois utopia. Today more than ever, not only the imperialist nature of the EU, but the same precipitation of its internal crisis after the French “No”, lays bare the fact that there is no conciliation possible between capital and work, between imperialism and peace. In practice, the other side of the coin, concretely, and the political significance of that utopia is two-fold: on the one hand, it provides, in actual fact, ideological coverage for the propaganda of the European Party of the European Left and the pro-governmental vocation of its sections, to the point that, in its wake, the French LCR seems to insinuate, for the first time, its own participation in a future “anti-liberal” government of the Left Union commanded by French Imperialism. On the other hand, that ideological utopia helps to preserve, in the workers and mass movements, starting with the “anti-globalization” movement, those reformist illusions which obstaculize the development of its mobilization and its political coherence.
The Coordinating Committee for the Refoundation of the Fourth International and its sections in Europe reject all reformist utopia. All the vicissitudes of the construction of the EU over the last fifteen years show the timeliness of Lenin's analysis: “European unity on the basis of imperialism is either impossible or is reactionary.” To encourage the illusion that under pressure of movements it is possible to develop in a progressive manner, means turning reality on its head. For this to happen at the same moment in which huge masses are rebelling against the European ruling classes represents a paradox. Actually, the growing impatience of the masses towards the dominant policies and the governments supporting them, can and should develop in a single real and progressive perspective: that of a revolutionary struggle for the overthrow of the ruling classes in Europe in favor of men and women's workers power, for the refoundation of Europe upon socialist foundations. Only this slogan can block the road, from a class struggle perspective, against the development of anti-Europe and nationalist positions of a xenophobic and reactionary sign.
The victory of the French “No” shows the centrality of the development of a Communist and class struggle opposition to all the governments of the European bourgeoisie. More now at a moment in which the return effect of the center-left in key European countries aims at combining an anti-popular offensive with the deactivation of the social reaction.
