Exposes EU pretensions

Reviewed by William Podmore, 2001-05-17

THIS BOOK gives a fascinating picture of the European Union's strategy for creating a single European state, and it does so by focusing on Jacques Delors' career as President of the European Commission. Creating a single European state was the EC's aim from its beginning. Ross observes that "In contrast to ordinary international organisations, the European Community was set up to contain a supranational `motor' which would constantly press forward towards more integration."

Deception about this aim was also built in from the very beginning. Pascal Lamy, Delors' chef de cabinet, explained, "The people weren't ready to agree to integration, so you had to get on without telling them too much about what was happening." Ross sums it up very well: "the `Monnet method' politically had a `stealth' side to it. The Community's founders had never been confident that the response would be positive if Europeans were asked clearly whether they wanted European integration. From its origins EC Europe was an elite operation."

Delors (like Blair now) did everything possible to `bring capital on board' for his schemes. The result was to exclude and alienate the working class. In this, as in all else, the European Union is classic social democracy: reformist in words, reactionary in practice. Delors' aim of building a new Europe defeated itself, given that his method was to work with capital and its existing structures.

Now people are increasingly wised up to the economic and political costs of political union. People now know that EU decisions affect them. This causes problems for the EU and creates opportunities for our class to oppose it. Every move by the EU generates greater resistance. For instance, in 1986 Thatcher signed the Single European Act, which carried a commitment to "enhance the Community's monetary capacity with a view to economic and monetary union." This Single Market, that was sold to us as a great creator of jobs and production, destroyed jobs on a huge scale.

The Exchange Rate Mechanism was also supposed to enable productive investment to create jobs. Instead it has brought higher unemployment, which is now well over 10% across the EU. The EU's social programmes mask another 5% more unemployed. In return for losing jobs, Delors gave the trade unions `social dialogue'. The Single Market, the Exchange Rate Mechanism and the convergence criteria laid down in the Maastricht Treaty, together caused the current recession. This in turn slowed the EU's momentum towards integration.

Delors had aimed to find "proposals that played enough to British neo-liberalism to lower the British guard against `the further pooling' of sovereignty down the line." These proposals were enough to seduce successive Conservative Governments into accepting huge losses of sovereignty.

What Delors hoped would be a great advance for the EU, the unification of Germany, has turned into a disaster for the EU, threatening its whole future. Unification imposed vast costs on West Germany, slowing its economic growth and increasing its budget deficit to way above the Maastricht ceiling.

Now the EU faces a killing dilemma: widen, to include the countries of Eastern Europe, or deepen, by moving to a single currency. Ross writes that widening to include the East European countries "would have wiped them out economically as swiftly and surely as German reunification had wiped out East Germany." It would also, as German unification did on West Germany, impose vast costs on the present EU members, especially the richer ones.

Deepening is also creating its own problems. The Maastricht Treaty, and the single currency, was supposed to be the great turning point from market-building to state-building. The French Prime Minister Juppe recently said, "The European single currency is a political issue. It is destined to be the bedrock of the European Union." On present form, it looks more likely to be its gravestone.

The EU increasingly resembles the old Austro-Hungarian Empire, sprawling, unwieldy and bureaucratic, with Delors as its Metternich. In every member country, workers are learning the costs of losing national sovereignty, and in every country, workers are starting to assert a new nationalism, a workers' nationalism, designed to rebuild their country.

Now we must seize the chance to unite Britain against the European Union. We have to take responsibility for solving Britain's problems, for finding a way out of the present mess. We must rebuild Britain by working out ways of getting everybody back to work, and by planning how to improve our area of work.