19.06.1997

Bosses call for ‘tough discipline’

Smiles all round this week at the Amsterdam summit - even if they were a bit strained. After much talk of a Franco-German split over the infamous Maastricht criteria, particularly over the so-called stability pact which is meant to be its backbone, Helmut Kohl and Lionel Jospin - the new ‘socialist’ prime minister - appear to have papered over the cracks, at least for the time be­ing. In the words of the Dutch EU presi­dent, “A consensus has been reached on all the major points.”

The biggest grin however was, as al­ways, on the face of Tony Blair. After ticking off the Congress of European Socialists in Malmo last week for their “statist policies” and lack of appreciation for the marvels of the free market, he has once again stood up to the evils of the European ‘superstate’. Blair and Robin Cook - still regarded as a leftwinger by some - have secured a “wa­tertight” legal deal that will entrench permanent British control over borders, asylum and immigration policies. As the national boundaries inside the EU look set to come down, Blair wants to erect a ‘fortress Britain’ inside a fortress Europe. The new Labour team are patriotically batting for Britain, as Cook proudly boasted: “We’re going to come away with a good deal for Britain, a better deal than the Conservatives would have got.”

The justification for Britain’s exceptionalism on this matter is irrational and utterly absurd - yet it is presented to us by the bourgeois media as the height of common sense. As Britain is an is­land, they tell us, ‘we’ need border and immigration controls far more than the European nations (such as Belgium, sandwiched as it is between France and Germany). As The Guardian puts it in all seriousness, border controls are “ap­propriate for our islands, whose borders (except in Ireland) are defined by nature, not by man” (June 18).

‘Let’s face it, the British are just differ­ent to the Europeans’, is the message thrust down our throats. Perhaps it is in our DNA or something. Or maybe the British bourgeoisie think the plebs would be driven mad by too much exposure to garlic or Belgium chocolates.

This is all reactionary rubbish of course. Communists support the de­struction of all border controls and the scrapping of all immigration controls, whether they be ‘racist’ or non-racist. Those measures in the Maastricht Treaty which, however contradictorily, go to­wards this aim are objectively progressive, no matter who designed them or what their motivation was. In that sense, and that sense alone, the Maastricht Treaty does not go far enough, as all it talks about is the “abolition of internal bor­ders over five years”.

Blair also had other reasons to be pleased with himself. He managed to defend ‘our’ fish, by securing support for new curbs on foreign fishing in British waters. More fundamentally, he blocked Franco-German plans to merge the EU with its defence wing, the Western Eu­ropean Union. British imperialism is keen to maintain its so-called special re­lationship with US imperialism and Blair feared that such a merger would under­mine US commitment to Europe (as manifested primarily in Nato). Patheti­cally, British imperialism still hankers for its old glory days and the ‘special rela­tionship’ enables it - just - to maintain this feeble fantasy.

The only major disappointment for the European leaders in Amsterdam was the inability to go forward with its plans for ‘enlargement’ - ie, expanding the remit of the EU into central and eastern Eu­rope. This has led some bourgeois com­mentators to talk of a ‘fudge’ summit storing up trouble for the future.

Communists oppose the EU’s impe­rialist ambitions - but not from a ‘Little Europe’ perspective. The Europe of Amsterdam and Maastricht is a Europe of mass unemployment, growing in­equality and poverty. Already there are 18 million on the dole in Europe - which amounts to one in eight European adults. This is the future being planned by Kohl, Chirac and Blair, and the one which the 40,000 people who went to the Euromarch on Saturday in Amsterdam were protesting against. The number of unemployed will inexorably rise and the EU bosses want to export this misery eastwards. In reality of course, Kohl and co are eager to exploit the cheap labour market which is opening up in central and eastern Europe.

As the Euromarchers protested, the bourgeois politicians all agreed that “tough financial disciplines” were needed for countries taking part in the single cur­rency, and Helmut Kohl made clear that any sort of massive European job crea­tion programme was “unacceptable”. He much prefers an anti-social Europe.

At the Saturday Euromarch Eddie Izzard, the British comedian, presented a petition on behalf of the European Movement - whose president is Sir Edward Heath - calling for a more “open” and “representative” Europe. We also saw 331 eminent economists hand in a letter to the Amsterdam summit de­manding radical changes to the plans for monetary union, protesting that the Emu project “not only falls short from a so­cial, ecological and democratic perspec­tive, but also from an economic one”.

The meek and mild approach of Eddie Izzard and the 331 is not the way for­ward, as it plays by the capitalists’ rules and is hide-bound by the capitalist agenda. To fight for the united states of Europe we need requires a revolution­ary struggle from below, uniting Euro­pean workers around a proletarian internationalist perspective - something Ted Heath would definitely not sign up to, for all his no doubt genuine love of Beethoven and classical French literature.

This is the only way forward for so­cialism. On the other hand it would be a massive step backwards to merely say ‘no’ to European and monetary union, as do Arthur Scargill and the SLP lead­ership. That would be to drink from the same saloon bar as James Goldsmith with his dreams of Britain ‘going it alone’ in the world.

Paul Greenaway