The struggle for Europe’s soul

On 25 March, Europe’s leaders will
meet to celebrate the 50th
anniversary of the signing of the
Treaty of Rome, which laid the
foundation for today’s European Union
(EU).The occasion will be marked with
a Berlin declaration laying out the ‘goals
and common values of the EU’.

This will, no doubt, be accompanied
by several bouts of backslapping,
banquets and high-sounding bluster
about peace and prosperity.There will be
celebrations of a Europe at peace, and
warm words about pooled sovereignty –
if not explicitly in the sense of ‘ever
closer union’, then at least some
Blairspeak about ‘achieving more
together than we can alone’. But when
the conversations turn to a new
constitutional treaty, the assembled heads
of state may be forgiven for looking a
little twitchy.

When Angela Merkel addressed the
European parliament at the start of
Germany’s six-month EU presidency, she
announced her intention to draw up ‘a
road map’ for the adoption of the
constitutional treaty. ‘A collapse in that
process would be a historic failure,’ she
said, adding that a constitution was
needed to ‘give a soul to Europe’. But
this process is already in trouble.

Constitution at the crossroads

The constitution, as it was originally
conceived, was a delicate compromise
between the demands of Europe’s varied
political elites. But when French and
Dutch voters had the temerity to reject
this fait accompli, they ushered in a
‘period of reflection’ from which the EU
is only now emerging.

One immediate consequence is that
referendums are now distinctly frowned
upon.The EU president, José Manuel
Barroso, who supported calls for a
referendum when prime minister of
Portugal and promoted a Plan D (‘for
democracy, dialogue and debate’) in the
aftermath of the French and Dutch
votes, is now encouraging countries to
‘think twice’ before calling referendums
on the constitutional treaty. He reasons
that they make the approval process
‘much more complicated and less
predictable’ – this unpredictability being,
in fact, that people might once again
come up with the ‘wrong’ answer.

This assumes that a common way
forward on the constitution can be
found. But a recent Madrid meeting of
the ‘friends of the EU constitution’,
involving representatives of the 18
countries that have ratified the existing
treaty, showed the extent of the splits.

Spain’s foreign minister, Miguel Ángel
Moratinos, called for the EU to expand
the scope of the treaty – a ‘magnificent
document’, which he insisted should
remain the basis for any future
settlement. But a senior French diplomat
in Brussels dismissed the group as ‘the
equivalent of a group of mourners
showing their grief over a dead body’.

French support is crucial if any new
treaty is to succeed, with much riding on
the result of the presidential elections in
May. Nicolas Sarkozy, the right-wing
UMP candidate, now favours a ‘mini
treaty’ that would include measures to
create a European foreign minister, and
promote the use of qualified majority
voting – a measure likely to
disenfranchise a significant number of
EU states. His opponent, Ségolène
Royal, favours a further referendum, and
there is little to suggest that French
public opinion has warmed to the
constitution since the resounding ‘no’ of
May 2005.

The British government has also set its
eyes on a stripped down, mini treaty.
Here, too, a combination of popular
pressure and press and political
opportunism, could make calls for a
referendum irresistible. Denmark, Ireland,
the Netherlands, the Czech Republic
and Poland also fall into the ‘sceptics’
camp – and would find it difficult to
approve any document based closely on
the existing constitutional treaty without
a fight. Little wonder, then, that Merkel
is now attempting to advance the debate
behind closed doors, using bureaucratic
‘sherpas’ to sound out various
governments’ bottom lines.

But those on the left who think that
no news is good news and stasis the
best result would do well to be
cautious. For one thing, whatever the
form that the revived constitution
eventually takes, it is unlikely to address
the fundamental problems that saw
most progressive voters in France and
the Netherlands reject it in the first
place. ‘The member states will attempt
to change as little as possible, while
making it look as if they have made
substantial changes,’ says Steve
McGiffen, editor of European left
website Spectrezine and author of The
European Union:A Critical Guide.

The rejected constitution was an
attempt to give existing EU policies a
higher legal status, which, once agreed,
would be extremely difficult to amend.
‘It was an attempt to fix some basic
policies for decades to come, subjecting
future generations to these economic and
political choices of the present,’ says Erik
Wesselius of the Amsterdam-based
Corporate Europe Observatory.

Caroline Lucas, Green Party MEP for
South-East England, agrees:‘The
constitution committed us to open
markets, more and more competition,
and the increasing militarisation of the
EU. Putting those binding policy
commitments in a constitution was a big
mistake first time around.’ She sees some
possibility that a pared-down version of
the treaty might drop the third part,
which accounted for almost three
quarters of the original document – this,
at least, would be a welcome
development. But Erik Wesselius is less
hopeful, emphasising that such a
document ‘will not change the free trade,
free market orientation of the EU’.

Crisis, what crisis?

A stalled constitution doesn’t mean a
stalled EU, however. In June 2005, the
Luxembourg prime minister, Jean-
Claude Juncker, announced that:‘Europe
is not in crisis. It is in a deep crisis.’ But
supporters of the neoliberal EU project
might now be tempted to say:‘What
crisis?’

The EU is continuing its piecemeal
implementation of aspects of the
constitution regardless. For example,
efforts to construct a European Defence
Agency, which the constitution envisaged
as central to the forging of common
security and defence priorities, have
continued without impediment.The
EDA, included in the treaty as a result of
heavy arms industry lobbying, is
intended to advance common weapons’
procurement policies across the EU –
which, in the context of an injunction
that member states ‘undertake
progressively to improve their military
capabilities’, should mean lucrative new
defence contracts.

More generally, there has been no
fundamental change or reassessment of
the EU’s neoliberal trajectory – the
‘period of reflection’ has left these
fundamentals largely untouched.

In fact, several of the key EU initiatives
since the ‘no’ votes on the constitution
further entrench the EU’s free market
stance.The EU budget of 864.3 billion
for 2007-2013, agreed in April 2006, ties
funding more closely than before to the
Lisbon Agenda, which sets out the EU’s
strategic objective to become ‘the most
dynamic and competitive knowledgebased
economy in the world’.This is true
of both rural development – the
Common Agricultural Policy which still
accounts for the largest share of the EU
budget ( 88.75 billion) – as well as the
45.5 billion allocated for the Seventh
Framework Programme, which requires
that EU-funded research be designed to
enhance ‘global competitiveness’ through
partnerships with industry and the
private sector.

It is also having a pernicious role on
debates in Brussels, according to Caroline
Lucas. ‘Ostensibly about EU
competitiveness, the Lisbon Agenda has
come to be used as a crude instrument
to attack valid and legitimate social and
environmental legislation,’ she says.

The EU services (or ‘Bolkestein’)
directive was intended to push the free
market agenda even more crudely – in
this case, by creating a single market in
services.This was far from an unbridled
victory for neoliberalism, with popular
pressure in several EU states resulting in
a compromise to remove its most
controversial clause, the ‘country of
origin’ principle – which would have
meant, for example, that a company
could employ someone within one EU
country according to the labour
standards of another.

The scope of the directive was also
restricted, with some sectors, such as
social housing, removed from its remit.
Yet the compromise text, as adopted by
the council of ministers in December
2006, still contains measures directed
towards further ‘market freedom’.
Ambiguities in its wording will give
greater interpretative scope to the court
of justice, which, if past experience is a
guide, tends to rule in favour of greater
competition.

In October 2006, meanwhile, EU
trade commissioner Peter Mandelson
launched a new international trade
strategy, which emphasised EU ‘activism
in opening markets abroad’.The Global
Europe – Competing in the World paper
promises new bilateral free trade
agreements.The aim is to force countries
and regions of the global South to open
their markets to EU goods and corporate
investment, denying them the range of
economic protections and subsidies that
most European countries have
themselves used to further their
development, and entrenching current
global economic imbalances in the
process.

Such policies are already being
developed in the guise of EPAs
(Economic Partnership Agreements) with
African, Caribbean and Pacific countries,
which threaten job losses and cuts in
public services as new markets are
opened up for European corporations.

Closer to home, a similar strategy is at
work in the rapidly developing EU
neighbourhood policy, which
encourages economic integration and
free trade with 17 countries bordering
the EU from the former USSR, the
Balkans and north Africa.This, too,
promotes policies ‘designed to deliver
further liberalisation and privatisation
than has been agreed within the EU or
within the negotiations on trade in
services at the EU,’ according to David
Hall of the Public Services International
Research Unit.

EU enlargement has also been used to
entrench liberalisation. Bulgaria and
Romania, in common with other central
and east European states joining the EU,
had to prove their ability to operate a
‘functioning market economy’ before
being admitted to the club.This has
clearly had some positive effects, such as
pressure to curb corruption, but these are
offset by these countries’ terms of entry
– which look designed to ensure that
they remain on the periphery of an
increasingly unequal, multi-speed
Europe.

Beyond grand pronouncements about
aims and values for the future, this range
of key policies – which bring with them
an array of new market openings and
financial straightjackets – is already
setting the trajectory for the EU’s future
development. It may lack a soul, but the
EU has kept its economic head.

Seeds of another Europe

‘Fifty years ago it was very clear what
the European Economic Community
was for: building peace in Europe
through a free trade economic project.
Now those economic policies have
become a goal in themselves,’ says
Caroline Lucas. ‘And that’s one reason
why people feel distant from the EU,
because economics have taken priority
over environmental, social and other
concerns.’

Rebalancing this agenda is crucial. In
economic terms, this means a rejection
of the EU’s one-size-fits-all prescriptions:
the stability and convergence criteria that
prescribe deregulation as the basis for
political co-operation.

‘One of the dilemmas that you face as
an EU critic is that nowadays it is hard
to imagine how Europe would look
without an internal market,’ says Erik
Wesselius. But it is nevertheless
important, he says, to conceive of
‘European alternatives that have genuine
co-operation rather than the internal
market’ as their focus, offering the
possibility for a diversity of economic
models rather than the current, one-sizefits
all approach.

If the idea of a European social model
is to have any meaning, then there are
plenty of alternative economic measures
that the EU could be taking, as Susan
George of the Transnational Institute
points out.These range from a tax on
corporate profits, to a politically
to borrow by issuing bonds.

It is not just a question of economics,
however. ‘It would be better to do less at
EU level, but ensure that the EU is
doing what needs to be done
collectively,’ says Caroline Lucas.
‘Sustainability and climate change could
offer a real focus for what the EU could
add. It is clear that action by individual
states is not enough, whereas the
momentum of 27 states acting together,
and taking these issues far more seriously
than the EU is doing to date, could show
that we’re serious about tackling these
problems, and engaging with China and
India on these issues, through technology
transfers and our policies, whether
contraction and convergence or any
other fair formula.’

Achieving these ends would require
fundamental shifts in both the way that
the EU operates and the balance of
political forces at work within it.Yet the
EU’s current political composition is
hardly conducive to this – the European
Commission and parliament currently
have a centre-right majority, even setting
aside the fact that much of the centreleft
enthusiastically advocates further
liberalisation. And the eastward
expansion means that this is unlikely
to change any time soon. As Steve
McGiffen points out, ‘One of the broad
effects of EU enlargement has been to
move the whole political frame to the
right.’

On a more fundamental level, though,
it is the institutional basis of the EU itself
that remains the key problem. From the
Rome Treaty onwards, the EU has
tended to isolate economic forces from
democratic accountability.This is partly a
result of ‘inter-governmentalism’ – the
fact that EU decision-making ultimately
rests with the European Council (of
heads of government), who meet in
secret.

The constitutional treaty promised
limited improvements here, although
what it offered with one hand it took
back with the other – since, by giving
neoliberal policy a higher status, it would
have rendered meaningful discussion on
the major economic issues, transparent or
not, largely redundant.That settlemtnt
remains in trouble, but its spirit lives on
in both the EU’s existing constitutional
arrangements and the policies that it
produces.

This continued tendency to place
liberalisation before democratic
accountability is Europe’s true ‘historical
failure’. Another Europe remains possible,
and it is easy enough to imagine the
principles on which it could be built –
but it will be harder to construct the
conditions under which its soul can be
set free.