This is a short, dense, collective work published following a conference organised by Mémoire des luttes (http://www.medelu.org/) and the journal Utopie critique at Paris 8 University in June 2008, under the direction of Bernard Cassen, founder and former president of ATTAC, to whom, as we recall, the "no" vote in the 2005 referendum owes much.

The central thesis of this work is that "Europe" is, and always has been, a machine for liberalisation, above and against the people.

Putting an End to Euroliberalism

Bernard Cassen (ed.) - Mille et Une Nuits, 2008.

By Bernard Gensane

November 1, 2008

In "The Democratic Fracture," Christophe Ventura revisits "the Monnet method," which consisted of having foundational treaties drafted in the utmost secrecy, in the face of public resistance, by armies of diplomats, lawyers, and representatives of the business community. Since the early 1990s, when people were consulted by referendum after genuine public debate, they have often expressed their hostility to programs emanating from Brussels: the Danes opposed the Maastricht Treaty in 1992 (the vote was "rectified" the following year), the Irish rejected the Treaty of Nice in 2001, the French and the Dutch said "no" to the TC in 2005, and Ireland rejected the Lisbon Treaty in 2008.

To counteract the popular will, 22,000 lobbyists work continuously in Brussels. More than 70% of them serve industrial interests, 20% represent the interests of local authorities or international institutions, and 10% are NGOs and trade unions. [GL: NUMBERS AS OF 2008 — PLENTY MORE IN 2026]

The basic strategy is to technocratise problems, to administer, to integrate by force, while denying politics as a form of organising the balance of social power and the conquest of power for and by the people.

This denial of democracy was theorised more than sixty years ago by Friedrich von Hayek, inventor of the concept of "limited democracy" (to which, for example, Dominique Strauss-Kahn subscribed), in which the distribution of labor and wealth, as well as money, would be entirely removed from the political sphere and the vagaries of elections. Limiting the rights of the people amounts to eliminating the social dimension, as Corinne Gobin explains in "When 'Social' Means Anti-Social."

With Jacques Delors' arrival as President of the Commission in 1985, Europe gradually began using Community policies as instruments to dismantle all previous social gains. The labor movement was conditioned to accept the "harsh laws of the market," to be content with a minimum level of social rights, or even a complete absence of rights altogether—in other words, a minimum standard of rights "whose level is destined to decline due to the very development of competitiveness and flexibility." Employment was considered a "factor of production" serving the competitiveness of businesses and increased profits, within the framework of the commodification of all social rights. Social policy was to preserve the major macroeconomic balances. New concepts will be sold like bars of soap: “employability”, which reduces the human being to “variable capital”, “lifelong learning” which organises the permanent deskilling of the worker, “flexicurity” which makes the fixed-term contract the new norm of employment.

We [THEY] will create a situation of resource scarcity to "de-socialise" the financing of social rights and turn these rights into spaces to be "re-commodified through privatisation and the invention of financial products." An artificial scarcity will be imposed on the people, even though European countries have never been so wealthy. Social rights will be subordinated to the "freedoms" of trade, the movement of capital, "free and undistorted" competition, and the right of establishment. Only unprofitable elements will be able to remain "social" and fall under the umbrella of solidarity. The others will be considered market spaces, and therefore subject to competition law. This sorting will primarily affect the public service sector and mutual pension and healthcare funds.

In "Ecological Imposture," Aurélien Bernier explains how the fifty billion euros that the European Union devotes annually to its agriculture constitutes an enormous incentive for pollution, despite strong public demand for a model that is more respectful of ecological balance. Organic farming is never presented as a potential avenue for agricultural development in Europe, but always as just another way to do business. In this area too, the system is tightly controlled, since the decision to authorise a variety or uphold a national moratorium falls not to the Council of Environment Ministers, but to the Council of Agriculture Ministers of the member states, which are closely aligned with the technology lobbies.

Julien Landfried denounces this "destructive free trade." In this area, the boundaries have been crossed, and there are no longer any limits. For example, the ruling issued in December 2007 by the Court of Justice of the European Communities now makes it legal for a foreign employer to apply the social standards of their country of origin to their employees. A Romanian entrepreneur can establish a company in France, recruit Romanian workers, and impose the social security coverage of their country of origin on them.

This social deflation, this ever-increasing race to the bottom at work throughout the world, is the direct consequence of unfettered free trade based on the search for the cheapest production sites. The ruling classes can therefore orchestrate the struggle of one working class against another. Europe, which one might have hoped would protect workers from these thuggish practices, legalises and encourages them.

Jean-Luc Gréau questions the merits of the euro ("The Euro in Question"). The euro, he very aptly observes, was decided upon at the precise moment when the largest economy in what would become the future monetary zone was in crisis due to the reunification of the two Germanies. Politicians, economists, and trade unionists mistakenly believed that Germany would dominate the world through its reunification. It was therefore necessary to "find a way to prevent this economic superpower from being accompanied by monetary superpower that would have shattered the currencies of its partners." “In 1990 and 1991, the years of preparation for the Maastricht Treaty, France presented a more than respectable economic and financial record. French public accounts were the best among the major signatories of the treaty, with a deficit equal to 1% of GDP. The franc was not threatened.”

But currency traders, convinced of the new Germany's impending superpower, revalued the mark. The franc was also revalued against the dollar, Asian currencies, and other European currencies. The franc's revaluation was accompanied by "a level of monetary austerity never before seen in our modern economic history. Thousands of businesses and hundreds of thousands of jobs were sacrificed." Public debt nearly doubled. This overvaluation coincided with the spectacular growth of emerging Asian countries, which, after having heavily invested in the US market, targeted the European market. Since then, Europe has been the most open trading bloc in the world, and therefore the most vulnerable.

Almost ten years after the euro's introduction, the economies linked by the single currency "are more divergent than ever." Germany sees itself primarily as an export-oriented country. It bases its entire future prosperity on gaining market share at the expense of its European neighbours and on consolidating its trading base in emerging countries. It is going it alone. Spain is likely to wait a long time for a miraculous stimulus from the ECB. Italy is finding it increasingly difficult to compete internationally. France is hampered by an overvalued euro and is seeing its exports depressed by the surrounding economic slump.

For Antoine Schwartz ("Allegiance to Washington"), Europe's foreign and military policy is fundamentally Atlanticist (as was Jean Monnet's, in opposition to De Gaulle). The enlargement to include Eastern European countries fully met the wishes of London and business lobbies to extend the free trade area to a new periphery where labor is cheap. When Poland, the Czech Republic, Bulgaria, Romania, and Slovakia joined the European Union, they took care to integrate into Europe only after being admitted to NATO, sometimes symbolically, just days after their accession. It is worth remembering that only France, Germany, and Belgium distanced themselves from the war in Iraq.

According to the author, European defense policy implies “neither a European defense nor a European army. The demand for an autonomous command centre would be considered an affront.” The United States now wants to change the nature of the alliance by expanding its missions, from the “war on terror” to the protection of oil supplies. Hence, of course, the war against Iraq. Initially a defensive alliance, NATO could be increasingly perceived by countries of the Global South as “an offensive alliance whose real aim is to impose Western domination on the world.”

Louis Weber analyses the “perversion of citizenship.” Elected by a minority of voters, the members of the two main groups in the Strasbourg assembly (the PES and the EPP) are becoming more and more alike and systematically vote for texts that never challenge the Commission’s liberal orientations. The unions have fallen into the trap. To become part of the European Trade Union Confederation, they had to adhere to the basic principles of European integration: open markets and competition. The CGT (General Confederation of Labour) was therefore excluded for a time. The unions ultimately chose to participate in the "European social dialogue."

Bernard Cassen ("Long Live the Crisis!") uses a vivid metaphor: "The European fruit was conceived around the liberal worm." In January 1957, Cassen reminds us, Pierre Mendès-France denounced the founding principles of the future Common Market: "The Common Market project is based on the classical liberalism of the 19th century, according to which pure and simple competition solves all problems." The ECB is a worm in itself: it is completely independent of governments and citizens, but not of financial markets. It manages the single currency without any concern for the impact of its decisions on employment and growth. Cassen revisits various instances of democratic backsliding: in February 2008, the European Parliament in Strasbourg overwhelmingly rejected a draft resolution in which it would have committed to respecting the outcome of the Irish referendum of June 12.

Following the French and Dutch "no" votes, which legally and undeniably sealed the fate of the Constitutional Treaty, the Parliament voted on a resolution calling for its entry into force. The only times, the author concludes, that the Atlanticist and liberal framework of European integration has been (temporarily) challenged have been national events: the failure of the European Defence Community in 1954, the French and Dutch "no" votes in 2005, and the Irish "no" vote in 2008.

Anne-Cécile Robert calls for a radical overhaul. She observes that no political entity has ever existed in history that corresponds to the 27 member states of the Union. It is entirely misleading to speak of a "reunification" of the continent upon the accession of new states, as it has never been "united." Robert questions the EU's effectiveness in economic projects: "It is intergovernmental Europe that builds airplanes and rockets (Airbus), it is integrated Europe that forces it to relocate to the United States." (A recent analysis by Bernard Cassen on this subject can be found at http://blogbernardgensane.blogs.nou...). Should we leave the EU, she asks? The question should be reformulated as follows: "Under what conditions do we remain members?" These conditions are twofold: firstly, democracy, without which no power is legitimate; secondly, social progress. […] The main source of all our ills lies in the denial of popular aspirations by a political class that co-opts itself into power and that makes European integration the lock for its betrayals and the guardian of new privileges.”

In conclusion, Bernard Cassen calls for “an inaugural act of dissent,” based on the principle that the EU has become an active protagonist of neoliberal globalisation, and not a bulwark against it. He denounces the fact that the EU machine has freed itself from the power of citizen intervention and that none of the three “no” votes has led to a change of course for the Union.

Ending Euroliberalism - Bernard Cassen (ed.) - Mille et Une Nuits, 2008.

https://www.legrandsoir.info/en-finir-avec-l-euroliberalisme-bernard-cassen-dir-mille-et-une-nuits-2008.html

TRANSLATION BY JULES LETAMBOUR

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