European radical left opposes Lisbon Treaty

Why the European radical left opposes the Lisbon Treaty

Spectrezine, August 25, 2009 8:14 | by Steve McGiffen

There is an idea abroad in North America* that the European Union represents some sort of progressive alternative to US-sponsored neoliberalism. I have come across it in person on trips to the US, in books such as Jeremy Rifkin's The European Dream, and in numerous articles in left-leaning journals. Yet nothing could be further from the truth.

At the behest of the European Commission, the EU's powerful unelected executive, member state governments are busy dismantling welfare states, enhancing their military forces, enacting illiberal political measures and neoliberal economic policies, and expressing undisguised contempt for anyone who disagrees with them. This includes the peoples of France, the Netherlands and Ireland, each of which has had the nerve to vote against the neoliberal project. The Irish, having been given a 'second chance' to get the answer 'right' this time in a referendum scheduled for October 2nd, are currently being subjected to a tidal wave of pro-Lisbon Treaty propaganda financed from their own taxes. Not a word of the Treaty has been changed as a result of their rejection of it, which within the EU's own rules should have killed the proposal stone dead. All that has happened is a number of non-legally binding interpretative declarations have been appended which, as the so-called 'Protocol' containing these declarations openly states "will clarify but not change either the content or the application of the Treaty of Lisbon.". The people of France and the Netherlands have been given no second chance, though the Lisbon Treaty is almost identical to the European Constitutional Treaty which they rejected at the ballot box, in the Dutch case by a landslide.

The EU's much-vaunted 'successes' are open to question, to say the least. We have indeed now had more than six decades without a major war, but whether or not this is a result of the European Union is impossible to say. A degree of economic integration, beginning in the 1950s with the European Coal and Steel Community, can almost certainly claim some of the credit, but building on the back of this integration a permanent, unquestionable, constitutionally established neoliberal economy is another matter. In fact, like so many aspects of EU-style integration, the institutionalization of the misleadingly-named 'free market' can be seen as taking advantage of people's natural desire for peace and prosperity to build what is rapidly becoming a capitalist dystopia.

Let's take a few examples. Firstly, and most notoriously, the 2005 Directive on Services in the Internal Market. This has exposed almost all services to market-based competition. Despite assurances to the contrary, the directive is being applied across the board, making it increasingly difficult for local or national public authorities to provide services designed for people, rather than profit. Covering everything except transportation, financial services, certain services provided free of charge by the state, and those already covered by other directives, the Services Directive forbids member states to refuse permission to trade to any operator authorized to do so in any other member states. Despite claims from social democrats in the European Parliament (nowadays indistinguishable from conservatives in all but rhetoric), the Country of Origin Principle (COP) introduced by the Services Directive remains, in all its essentials, intact. The COP means that a company may register in one member state, operate in another, and follow the labor and environmental protection laws prevailing in its 'home' state. This has been confirmed by a series of European Court of Justice rulings which have declared that the right to establish or operate a business takes precedence over the rights of labor unions or national governments to negotiate or fix rates of pay per trade, for example. In addition to undermining workers' rights, the Services Directive, by making it illegal for governmental authorities at any level to 'discriminate' in favor of local businesses, makes the application of an effective regional development plan impossible. Finally, although the status of health care under the directive is ambiguous, a measure adopted earlier this year will oblige national authorities to cover costs incurred by anyone who goes to another member state for medical treatment which would be paid for had they undergone it at home - and forbids them from requiring 'prior consent'. Presented as a consumer rights measure, the real purpose of the directive is to enhance the private sector share of European health care, a sector dominated by social ownership offering universal access.

In the last decade the EU has used competition policy to undermine social ownership in sector after sector. Fully aware of the extent of public opposition to privatization of essential services, the European Commission claims neutrality on ownership structures, yet passes measure after measure forcing socially-owned enterprises to compete in the capitalist market. This enables private corporations to cherry-pick profitable elements of sectors such as postal services, water, energy and health care. The shareholders of these corporations then pick up the profits, while the taxpayer picks up the tab for essential but unprofitable services.

To list all of the EU's malign policies would require far more space than available. Suffice it to say they are not limited to undermining both individual and social wages: the Common Agricultural Policy has ravaged Europe's countryside and handed our agriculture en masse to corporate 'farmers'; the Common Fisheries Policy has emptied the seas of fish, throwing families that in many cases have relied on the sea's bounty for generations of employment out of work; trade and development policies are designed to benefit EU-based corporations, with no thought given to their social, economic and environmental consequences for developing countries. Irish voters are also particularly concerned by the threat to the country's neutrality posed by a treaty which is, in part, a military alliance. EU defence policy, the institutional and constitutional basis of which will be hugely enhanced by the Lisbon Treaty, is based not on the real security needs of Europe's peoples, but on the interests of the biggest, most powerful member states and their corporations. These interests will be served by a policy which pursues two related goals, both of which are made explicit in the Treaty: to see an ongoing increase in defence spending by all of the 27; and to encourage the consolidation of European arms manufacturers so that they become more powerful and competitive global actors. This policy is not part of a solution to the problem of security, it is part of the problem, which is that dangerous concentrations of power are in the hands of governments and corporations who would convince us that peace can be achieved through bigger and better weapons.

There has never been a single popular demonstration in favor of European integration. What we are witnessing is a classic Gramscian 'passive revolution', in which an elite, lacking popular support, is using legalistic devices to enforce its will. The 'Lisbon Strategy', with its absurd ambition to make the EU's economy the most 'competitive' in the world by 2010, comes closest to admitting this. To understand the reality of what is happening in Europe it is merely necessary to note that for the elite 'competitiveness' = 'efficiency' = profitability, and the last of these must be enhanced at all costs.

The EU is not an internationalist project at all. Internationalism is, as the name suggests, about cooperation between nations and peoples. The EU is, instead, a universalist project which seeks to impose universal 'values' and universalized structures on a large group of countries with very different economies, histories, traditions and constitutions. There are, in truth, no 'European values'. The values which underlie this instance of universalism are those of a hegemonic elite, an elite which has decided that the misnamed 'free market' is a cornerstone of 'democracy', undermining the latter by transferring powers from elected to unelected institutions and drastically narrowing the policy space available to policy space available to parliaments and national governments.

The Lisbon Treaty represents a further deepening of this corporate project. It would massively increase the voting power of big member states, more than doubling Germany's to 17% while halving Ireland's to below 1%. It would give the EU the power, for the first time, to harmonize indirect taxes. It would remove the Irish government's right to propose and approve an EU Commissioner. It would underline and enhance the precedence of EU law over national legislation, including national constitutions. It would abolish the national veto in thirty-two new policy areas and thus all-but eliminate the power of national parliaments and any possibility of popular influence on decision-making. It would permit heads of state and government to add to the list of areas where policies can be adopted without unanimous approval, with no need for a new treaty. It would create a powerful new office of EU President, an office over which the electorates of the 27 member states would have no influence. And it would require member states, including neutral Ireland, "progressively to improve their military capabilities" and to aid and assist other member states experiencing armed attack "by all the means in their power".

These are the reasons why any progressive Irish voter would be seriously deluded in casting a vote in favor of a treaty which will remove the destiny of the Irish people, for which they have fought and died within the memory of the country's oldest inhabitants, from their freely elected representatives to those who represent only the corporate capital whose interests the European Union has been molded to serve.

Steve McGiffen is Spectre's editor.

* This article was originally written for US periodical Foreign Policy in Focus, which recently published an edited version.