How Far The EU Is

Seumas Milne writes:

For the true face of the European Union, look no further than the war now being waged on Greece by its troika of euro creditors.

No people have suffered more from the eurozone crisis than the Greeks.

The victim of rapacious European banks, a corrupt elite, and a half-baked, lopsided currency union, Greece has paid a pulverising price for the financial crash and eurozone meltdown.

After bailing out Europe’s banks, the European establishment handed the job of punishing Greece to the European Commission, central bank and IMF.

Five years later, ravaged by a US 1930s-style depression and 25% wage cuts in the service of self-defeating austerity and unrepayable debts, the Greeks rebelled.

In January they voted for the leftwing Syriza party to halt the troika-imposed programme destroying the country. Five months on and the Syriza government is being ground down by an implacable European elite.

Elected on a platform of ditching austerity while keeping the euro, the Syriza prime minister Alexis Tsipras has been forced to retreat by the Brussels moneymen and their political masters.

One by one, Syriza’s red lines have been crossed, from debt cancellation to privatisation. But the troika wants more: pension cuts, VAT increases from food to electricity, faster debt repayments.

Syriza fired a warning shot by refusing to pay 300m euros to the IMF last week, but the crunch is coming later this month and Tsipras has warned that failure to agree a rescue package would spell “the beginning of the end of the eurozone”.

The signs are that Germany and the troika are prepared to face the Greeks down.

Despite overwhelming evidence that crippling austerity has led to a mushrooming of debt that can never be repaid, the EU elite will not even hear of a realistic write-off. Greece must pay up or its liquidity lifeline will be cut and it will be forced out of the eurozone.

What’s become clear in recent weeks is that the masters of the eurozone are not even prepared to provide Tsipras with a figleaf.

From the Brussels perspective, Greece must cave and be seen to cave. Otherwise, other eurozone states that have suffered the troika treatment will get ideas.

Even if the day of reckoning is postponed, Syriza must be seen to fail if the rise of other anti-austerity parties such as Spain’s Podemos is to be halted.

Tsipras has cards of his own if he wants to play them. He can trigger new elections or call a referendum.

Capitulation would destroy Syriza, and Greeks are divided on whether the government should bend the knee. It could still default and leave the euro.

Grexit would certainly be painful, but less so than destructive austerity without end. It could also lead to an unravelling of the eurozone.

But for large parts of southern Europe in particular, restructuring this cockeyed currency union, which has entrenched economic stagnation, is anyway essential.

The Greek radicals hoped they could change Europe. But their experience has underlined how deep is the elite’s resistance to genuine reform.

It’s not just that the rich EU states don’t want to pay for the fiscal transfers essential to make currency union work. They have given austerity and a shopworn neoliberal economic model the force of treaty in the interests of Europe’s banks and corporations.

And far from bringing people together, the eurozone is driving Europeans apart.

But what’s true of the eurozone is also true of the wider European Union, where privatisation, deregulation and lack of democratic accountability have been built into successive treaties.

That’s epitomised by the secret EU-US negotiations over the TTIP trade deal – a debate in the European parliament had to be called off on Wednesday because of the scale of opposition – which would enforce “liberalisation” through corporate arbitration tribunals.

It’s a long way from the days of former commission president Jacques Delors, when the European Union was sold to a British labour movement, punch drunk from Margaret Thatcher’s onslaught, as a “social Europe” that would deliver social and employment rights to sweeten the pill of the corporate-controlled single market.

Even some of the modest protections that were eventually delivered (the most dramatic was the guarantee of four weeks’ holiday) have since been watered down by the “free market” judgments of the European court of justice.

But the corporate juggernaut has thundered on, driving the Brussels agenda.

If radical progressive change were on the cards in Britain – or any other European state, for that matter – the EU treaties enforcing free markets, privatisation and corporate privilege would be a serious obstacle.

As it is, British governments have consistently used their influence in Brussels to intensify corporate “liberalisation” and protect the City interests which played such a central role in bringing the economy to its knees in the crash of 2008.

And when David Cameron kicks off his negotiations on Britain’s EU membership ahead of the planned in-out referendum, they certainly won’t be focused on democratisation, the protection of public services from private takeover, or the scope of state intervention in the economy.

What he’ll be after instead are restrictions on EU migrants’ rights to claim in-work benefits, a few more treaty opt-outs and, as London mayor Boris Johnson made clear yesterday, an end to the“nonsensical” EU social rights that are actually popular in Britain.

Once a half-presentable package of regressive reforms has been assembled to appease the Tory party, it will then be put to a public vote, accompanied by a barrage of big business-led scaremongering about the economic consequences of voting no.

With the entire establishment and both main opposition parties signed up to a blank cheque yes vote, there are likely to be no mainstream demands for progressive EU reform.

And short of another breakdown in the eurozone, it’s hard to see such an orchestration delivering anything other than the endorsement Cameron wants.

But it’s essential that the case for radical change in Europe – and a break with its anti-democratic, corporate-controlled structures – is not abandoned to the right.

The experience of Greece and other troika-blighted eurozone states has hammered home how far the EU is from the benign oasis of progressive internationalism its supporters claim.

As things stand, however, voters in Britain will next year be offered the choice of a yet more corporate-controlled EU, shorn of social protections – or withdrawal on the terms of the nationalist right.

In the interests of both Britain and Europe, that needs to change, and quickly.

Whatever arrangement with the EU has been renegotiated to the satisfaction of David Cameron will be horrendous from the point of view of British workers and the users of British public services.

But then, the economic, social, cultural and political power of the British working class, whether broadly or narrowly defined, cannot exactly be said to have increased since 1973. Any more than Britain has fought no further wars since joining a body as successful as NATO or nuclear weapons when it comes to keeping the peace.

We had full employment before we joined the EU. We have never had it since. No job in the real economy is dependent on our membership. Or were trade with, and travel to, the Continent unheard of, because impossible, before our accession to the EU?

Not for nothing did Margaret Thatcher support that accession, oppose withdrawal in the 1975 referendum, and go on, as Prime Minister, to sign an act of integration so large that it could never be equalled, a position from which she never wavered until the tragically public playing out of the early stages of her dementia. "No! No! No!" was not part of any planned speech.

In anticipation of Cameron's Single European Act on speed, Labour needs to get its retaliation in first. All of the candidates for Leader and Deputy Leader need to demand immediate legislation.

First, restoring the supremacy of United Kingdom over European Union law, using that provision to repatriate industrial and regional policy as Labour has advocated for some time, using it to repatriate agricultural policy (farm subsidies go back to the War, 30 years before we joined the EU, and they are a good idea in themselves, whereas the Common Agricultural Policy most certainly is not), and using it to restore the United Kingdom's historic fishing rights of 200 miles or to the median line.

Secondly, requiring that all EU legislation, in order to have any effect in this country, be enacted by both Houses of Parliament as if it had originated in one or the other of them. Thirdly, requiring that British Ministers adopt the show-stopping Empty Chair Policy until such time as the Council of Ministers meets in public and publishes an Official Report akin to Hansard.

Fourthly, disapplying in the United Kingdom any ruling of the European Court of Justice or of the European Court of Human Rights unless confirmed by a resolution of the House of Commons, the High Court of Parliament. That would also deal with whatever the problem was supposed to be with the Human Rights Act.

Fifthly, disapplying in the United Kingdom anything passed by the European Parliament but not by the majority of those MEPs who had been certified as politically acceptable by one or more seat-taking members of the House of Commons.

Thus, we should no longer be subject to the legislative will of Stalinists and Trotskyists, of neo-Fascists and neo-Nazis, of members of Eastern Europe's kleptomaniac nomenklatura, of people who believed the Provisional Army Council to be the sovereign body throughout Ireland, and of Dutch ultra-Calvinists who would not have women candidates.

And sixthly, giving effect to the express will of the House of Commons, for which every Labour MP voted, that the British contribution to the EU Budget be reduced in real terms.

All before Cameron even set off for his renegotiation, never mind held a referendum on that renegotiation's outcome.

After all, which privatisation did the EU prevent? Which dock, factory, shipyard, steelworks or mine did it save? If we needed the EU for the employment law that, since we do not have it, the EU is obviously powerless to deliver, then there would be no point or purpose to the British Labour Movement.

Far from preventing wars, the EU has done nothing to prevent numerous on the part of, at some point, most of its member-states, not least this member-state. It was a key player in, and it has been a major beneficiary of, the destruction of Yugoslavia, a process that events in Macedonia more than suggest is ongoing even after all these years.

The EU is now a key player in, and it seeks to be a major beneficiary of, the war in Ukraine, which is the worst on the European Continent since 1945, and which is a direct consequence of the EU's expansionist desire to prise a vital buffer state out of neutrality and into the NATO from which the EU is practically indistinguishable.