RS

The obvious question I would like to put to left Remainers is, what of the treaties of the European Union do you agree with? The answer would not be very extensive. Someone might say, “Well, the Schengen zone I agree with,” but even there you have to qualify it by saying, “But it’s a pity that it’s tied to Fortress Europe.” Someone might say they’re in favor of the social chapter, but they would also have to say that it’s a pity that the social chapter comes with neoliberal competition state aid law. And so on.

If you look at the treaties they’re overwhelmingly restrictive in terms of what national governments can do with their budgets, with their industrial strategy. They’re not really able to have an industrial strategy. They’re required to maintain balanced budgets. That’s austerity budgets for most of Europe.

As for reforming the European Union in a progressive direction, have a look at what happened to Syriza. There was a political party that was elected precisely to try this strategy of pursuing a humanitarian agenda. Essentially, it was a humanitarian bailout: “We’re going to stop people from killing themselves and dying of starvation and suffering needlessly without medicine. We’re going to have a bailout for our people rather than the bankers.”

They used debt as an instrument with which to pummel Greece, to force Greece into privatizing most of its existing public sector industries, selling them off at fire sale prices, cutting pensions. This is the standard EU agenda.

Now, can the European Union be reformed in a progressive direction? I don’t foreclose the possibility that some serious mass political struggle could result in a reformed European Union. I don’t think it would become a progressive institution, but it could become less worse than it is. But we have to think seriously about the scale of disruption and rupture that would be required to make it happen.

I was just reading today’s news about the Italian government. The Italian government is locked in a battle with the European Commission over its budget. Now, the Italian government is pretty far right, but it has a populist anti-austerity budget. It’s mainly anti-austerity for the rich and the middle class, but it has some sops to the poor as well. And it breaches the balanced budget rules of the European Union.

The deal is when you draw up your national budget on an annual basis, you take it to the European Council and they decide whether it’s compatible with your treaty obligations; with your obligation to manage your debt, whether wages are too high, if they risk driving up inflation. That’s a key issue at the heart of the European Union. They can decide whether or not you’re spending too much.

And if you are found to be pursuing an untenable budget within EU rules, you will be told you have to go away and change this and then come back and we’ll approve it. If you don’t do that, then you have what has happened to the Italian government. They have been referred by the European Commission to what’s known as the “excessive deficit procedure.” That’s going to result in a series of steep and deepening fines on a regular basis.

Now, they’re not relying just on the fines. If it was just about the fines, the Italian government probably wouldn’t have much to worry about. It’s the way in which political pressure intersects with financial pressure. In other words, the European Commission would be relying upon the financial markets to punish Italy. And the Italian government is playing a bit of a game: it’s trying to avoid a speculative attack on Italy at the same time it’s trying to weaken the European Commission’s position by facing it down on its budget.

It’s possible that defiance of this type could result in a weakening of the European Commission’s position. But let’s just be realistic about what we’re up against. The European Commission has all the power here. It is an unelected civil service bureaucracy, and it runs things on the basis of a rule system, a code devised for Europe’s rich, for Europe’s investors, for Europe’s corporations, and it’s completely aloof from democratic decision-making.

So when [European Commission president Jean-Claude] Juncker said during the Greek crisis that there can be no democratic decisions against the treaties as far as he was concerned, he wasn’t saying anything particularly controversial. This is a condition of being a member.

In Greece you had a series of emergency governments, a massive political crisis, near-insurrection among organized workers. Governments were falling one after the other. Then you have a radical left government elected by a big margin, and they achieve victory for a referendum against the European Union’s settlement. And the European Union still isn’t moved by this. That tells you something about how entrenched their resilience is in the face of democratic pressures.

That’s the problem with the European Union: despite what some silly Remainers say, it is even less democratic than national states. It is probably more insulated from the popular world than even the House of Commons.

That’s the reality we’re up against. It’s going to be a hard-fought struggle.