The Lisbon Treaty is deeply flawed

A United States of Europe

by Robert Griffiths, Spectrezine, June 4, 2009

Robert Griffiths looks at the situation in Britain on the eve of the European Parliament elections.

It is hardly surprising that the mass media has concentrated so much of its coverage on the Westminster MPs' expenses abuse scandal. The electorate has the right to know how much has been paid for their parliamentary representatives' acquiescence to policies to wage war, constrict our civil liberties, renew Britain's weapons of mass destruction, privatise our public services, bail out the City of London and lubricate the Westminster puppet show.

Inflated salaries, allowances and expenses are only the half of it. The other half consists of the corporate directorships, consultancies, sponsorships and political donations handed to MPs and their parties. The purchase by big business of MPs, political parties, governments and whole sections of the state apparatus is an inevitable tendency of state monopoly capitalism, where the economic power of the capitalist monopolies fuses with the political power of the state.

One significant casualty of the recent revelations has been the European Parliament election campaign. Important issues relating to the European Union and its trajectory have been buried under the avalanche of sleaze. Yet the drive to construct an undemocratic, militarist, capitalist, monetarist United States of Europe is entering a new and dangerous phase.

Every EU member state will have ratified the Lisbon Constitutional Treaty by polling day this Thursday, except one. The people of the Irish Republic are to have a second referendum on the treaty in the autumn, having failed to vote in favour of it last June.

The Lisbon Treaty is comprised of two treaties - the Treaty on the European Union, which is a slightly amended version of the EU Constitution rejected by the French and Dutch electorates in 2005, and the Treaty on the Functioning of the European Union, which amends and consolidates the founding treaties of the European Community.

The Lisbon Treaty also adds 11 new protocols to 26 existing ones. And it adds 65 declarations, plus a Charter of Fundamental Rights - most of which can be counteracted by national legislation or the European Court of Justice.

All of that is bewildering enough - and deliberately so, according to former French president Giscard d'Estaing, who chaired the commission that drafted the EU constitution.

But the main provisions and consequences of the Lisbon Treaty are clear enough. The treaty sets in concrete:

"The commitment to secure the free movement of capital, goods, services and super-exploited labour across the European Union-principles which fundamentally reflect the interests of big business
"The unrivalled powers of the European Commission to draft every type legislation, set the budget and jointly police the economic and financial policies of the EU and its member states - confirming its position as the most powerful unelected bureaucracy in the world.
"The substantial financial powers of the unaccountable European Central Bank, even specifying numerical limits to public-sector borrowing and debt in a way not found in the fundamental laws of any country on Earth.
"The powers of the European Court, whose recent judgements threaten national legislation and trade union agreements to protect jobs, union recognition and terms and conditions of employment including pay.

The Lisbon Treaty also establishes

"A new post of EU president, an embryonic European government - the General Affairs Council - a high representative for foreign and security policy, who will also be an EU Commission vice-president, and a Foreign Affairs Council.
"A European Defence Agency to promote military expenditure and the construction of an EU military-industrial complex.
"The terms on which European multinational armed forces can be enlarged and deployed outside the spheres of Europe and NATO to engage in "operational action," ie war.

Although the treaty proposes a convoluted process by which the European Parliament can block primary legislation, its own legislative proposals have to be initiated by the European Commission, and its amendments must be endorsed by the EU Council of Ministers. Nothing more surely confirms the role of the EU Parliament as a pseudo-democratic fig leaf for a fundamentally anti-democratic set-up.

Yet giving it more powers will not solve the contradiction between its democratic form - the election of 736 MEPs by secret ballot - and its undemocratic essence, whereby 375 million electors have no real organic link with their "representatives." The European Union is effectively sucking economic and financial decision-making out of democratically elected parliaments and governments at national level, placing them beyond electoral and constitutional pressure and control.

The capitalist ruling class has found a way of circumventing the challenge posed by the popular franchise, itself conceded in Britain only after the struggles of the Chartists, the labour movement and the Suffragettes. The anti-democratic, monetarist and militarist policies of the EU are all but irreversible, embedded in fundamental law.

Influencing decisions still taken in the EU Council of Ministers will, as the Lisbon Treaty drastically reduces the national veto, be beyond the labour and progressive movements of any single country. International solidarity and co-ordinated action will be more important than ever. But this is no more an argument in favour of a monopoly capitalist United States of Europe than is the need for working-class solidarity an argument for accepting anti-trade union laws. And substantial social, economic and financial powers will still remain with the British state - especially outside the eurozone - along with its capacity to wage war and restrict democratic freedoms. That is why the main struggle is still here at home, against the British ruling class and for British state power.

But the No2EU - Yes to Democracy electoral alliance has exposed the growing dangers presented by the drive to an imperialist United States of Europe. It has linked the EU to the current capitalist crisis and the refusal of governments, central banks and EU institutions to defend productive industry, public services, jobs and living standards, and to the spread of racism as capital and super-exploited labour are moved across the map of Europe by monopoly corporations.

During the imperialist Great War, Lenin argued that a capitalist United States of Europe would be either impossible or reactionary. Temporary agreements were possible between capitalist states, but "only for the purpose of jointly suppressing socialism in Europe, of jointly protecting colonial booty against Japan and America."

So we see today the EU championing big business at home and promoting neoliberal policies of privatisation, "free" trade and free movement of monopoly capital at the World Trade Organisation and through bilateral agreements with Third World countries. It even designed a European emission trading scheme so as to produce up to £65 billion in windfall profits for the gas and electricity monopolies.

The European Union is not a staging post on the road to a "social Europe," still less to a United Socialist States of Europe. It is an absolute barrier to the struggle for socialism at home which, given the uneven economic and political development of capitalism, is an essential precondition for a new socialist world order.


Robert Griffiths is No2EU-Yes to Democracy lead candidate for Wales.