EU LURCHES FROM ONE CRISIS TO ANOTHER
Socialist Resistance in print2000sScanned print read by OCR, and not yet proofread: expect run-together words, dropped letters and, where a piece began partway down a page, a few lines of its neighbour. The printed page is the authority.
European Union leaders met in Brussels two weeks after the trouncing they received in the referenda on their proposed BU constitution in France and the Netherlands in May.
The summit resolved nothing. The constitution was dead but they could not agree on how to bury it with the least damage.
This was a stunning victory for the left and for the European working class. European political integration had been brought to a full stop by the peoples of two of the founder states of the European project.
The NO votes were not just a huge blow to the neo-liberalism enshrined in the constitution.
Nor were they just a defeat for the voting reform it contained, aimed at giving more power to the big countries at the expense of the smaller ones.
They threw into reverse the process of political integration which had started with the Single European Act of 1985 and the Maastricht Treaty of 1991 and created the single currency launched on January 1,1999.
The single currency itself, which now had no political union on which to base its precarious stability, was thrown into question.
EU leaders at the Brussels summit also, for the first time, failed to agree a budget for the EU. France and Germany demanded concessions on Britain's long-standing rebate.
Blair, however, refused to budge unless they opened negotiations on the future of the Common Agricultural Policy (CAP) at the same time - with a view to cutting the subsidies to French farmers in particular.
Germany and France have been unable to play their traditional role as brokers in a crisis it is much harder to control. Chirac has been mortally damaged by the referendum vote and Schroder by the disastrous defeat of his RedGreen Alliance in the recent elections in North Rhine Westphalia.
The defeats on both the constitution and the budget flow from the hostility of the working class to the neo-liberal 'reforms' being thrust on them.
For example the EU Bolkestein directive proposed that companies based in the new member countries of East and Central Europe be allowed to compete for services across Europe on the basis of low wages and inferior conditions.
Not that the British government has always been so keen to reform the CAP - which along with the increasing subsidies paid to American farmers is the source of major impoverishment of farmers in third world countries.
When reform has been proposed in the past on the grounds that the CAP benefits big agribusiness much more than small farmers, Britain did not want to know.
No doubt the Queen does not want to lose the £545,000 CAP money she gets for her Sandringham and Windsor estates or Prince Charles the £680,000 he receives for his Duchy of Cornwall and Highgrove estates.
The Duke of Westminster would equally want to defend the £448,000 a year he is awarded from the CAP.
Blair, of course, is relieved that he does not have to organise completely unwinnable referendum in Britain.
His approach, along with that of Gordon Brown, has been to use the NO votes as an opportunity to press ahead with an agenda of neo-liberal reform - the imposition of the British or "Anglo Saxon' model on the rest of Europe.
In this he is lining up with Berlusconi in Italy and some of the new East European members states.
The NO votes in France and Holland, however, have changed the political landscape across the EU. Few countries, probably even including Germany could now win a referendum on the constitution.
It will be harder for governments across Europe to ettectively pursue the neo-liberal agenda than before these votes took place.
At the same time the left needs to discuss urgently how LU build on the success achieved and ensure that the rulers of Europe are not allowed to regroup and achieve the objectives of the constitution by other means.