The EU, Blair and a sense of disgust

Amid all the speculation about Tony Blair seeking to become the first president of Europe, any questions about democracy are put to one side. No wonder the polls show a growing contempt for politicians.

When the Czech Republic is finally browbeaten into signing the Lisbon Treaty, the carve-up of jobs will begin. There is absolutely no suggestion of elections for any of the posts that will the follow the treaty’s implementation.

Instead, candidates will be appointed to jobs like the president of the European Council or put in charge in of foreign policy after the usual horse-trading that goes on between member states. This is yet one more example of the undemocratic nature of the European Union project in particular and the general tendency towards bureaucratic forms of political rule.

Few countries were allowed a vote on the Lisbon Treaty itself and where they were, as in Ireland, voters were in fact compelled to vote twice until they came up with a “Yes”. Yet the treaty imposes sweeping changes to the way the EU is run and deepens the role of the market in the economies of member countries.

For example, public services will be subject under article 16 to new “economic and financial conditions”, meaning that services like health care and education, would be subject to the rules of competition. This will inevitably result in further privatisation.

The European Council and Commission is given 100 new powers across a wide range of policy areas and the new voting arrangements will reduce the voice of the smaller of the 27 nations. National parliaments are given minimal oversight powers but no real clout in relation to decisions taken in Brussels.

Increasingly, the EU is seen as a counterweight to the US and China when it comes to fighting for a share of world markets in a period of economic crisis. The EU, for example, is resisting proposals for a new climate change treaty so as not to be put at a disadvantage against rival trading blocs.

The spectacle of Blair being manoeuvred into position to become president only feeds the sense of disgust with the whole business and encourages an anti-European xenophobia that benefits the Tories and the far right. They are able to play the nationalist card and stoke up hostility to anything “foreign” or non-British. New Labour’s response is yet more undemocratic politics and a contrived pro-Europe attitude which is everything to do with promoting big business (and their own careers) and nothing to do with ordinary working people’s interests.

As we mark 20 years since the 1989 revolutions that swept Eastern Europe, it is the appropriate moment to consider how we renew and take that movement forward. Countries like the Czech Republic won and then quickly lost their new political freedoms to the EU while in Britain, the old political system has decayed beyond recognition.

The perspective has to be one of extending democracy in new ways across the whole of Europe to prevent the right-wing and nationalists seizing the initiative, as they threaten to do. A new democracy cannot be built, however, on the foundations of an old capitalist system but needs to be brought together with a transfer of economic, financial and political state power to the disenfranchised majority in every country. That has to be our internationalist perspective.


Paul Feldman
Communications editor

Irish voters make a stand

So Ireland has voted the "wrong" way yet again. What can you do with them, those pesky Irish voters who have chosen to bite the hand that once fed them so generously, how exasperating! If it weren't for the European Union (EU), Ireland would still be mired in poverty and unemployment – or so the story goes.

Now God forgive 'em, the ungrateful lot have gone and forgotten all that and voted the Lisbon Treaty into oblivion, alone of all the 27 nations who didn't even get that chance. They did it once before with the Nice Treaty, until after being roundly scolded they were made go right back into the polling booths and vote again until they got it right, which they duly did. That's not going to happen this time however, partly because it would be just too blatant but mainly because the margin of victory for the No vote at 53.4% for to 46.6% against, was too substantial to question.

It could have been a larger margin however if the issues involved had been clearer and the No campaigners had not involved some of the murkier characters and issues in Irish life and politics. Against the Lisbon agreement were ultra-fervent Catholics and right-wing nationalists. They were terrified about abortion, more foreigners coming to take jobs, compulsory euthanasia, loss of sovereignty and traditional neutrality.

They were joined by smaller left-wing political parties, dissident Republican groups, republican socialists, anarchists and the left of the unions. They raised other issues: fears of even more privatisation of public services, further loss of trade union rights and the forcing down of pay and worsening of conditions that a market in services and increasing liberalisation would entail. They also questioned the consolidation of a move towards the militarisation of the EU, the lessening of national sovereignty and a consequential compromising of Ireland’s neutrality.

A degree of overlap therefore, which for those who see themselves as progressive and liberal in the better sense of the word, muddied the waters a little too much and gave them no choice other than to vote Yes and so distance themselves from the, lost in the past bog-trotters, on the one hand, and the left on the other. So some genuine xenophobia there and plenty of concerns portrayed as xenophobic by the Yes neo-liberals. Even that is not the whole story since the No side was also occupied by some business interests and one or two maverick millionaires, fearful that the low corporate tax enjoyed by investors would be forfeited. The Yes campaign meanwhile involved all the vested interests imaginable, from the bishops, to business people and corporations, the right wing of the trade unions and all the mainstream political parties, including the Greens.

The pro-treaty campaign lost because the political establishment was too complacent, it is claimed, and indeed they did take things for granted. But it was also apparently the broadcast media's “fault” because they gave equal time to both sides, which by law they were forced to do. Balance in reporting all sides of issues - bad. But in the end it was the Irish people who for all sorts of reasons, not all noble it's true, but mostly out of a general wariness of the European bureaucrats and as clear-eyed a reading of the potentially dire effects of this deliberately obscure document allowed, voted it out, albeit on a low turn-out.

The decision of Jose Manuel Barosso, Gordon Brown and other EU leaders? Oh well, what's the electorate got to do with it anyhow? Let's just plough on regardless and ratify. Can't let a little thing like democracy spoil the Euro party, especially something as dangerously populist as a referendum. Fighting for genuine participative democracy is the only way to ensure that we are not steam-rollered into an all powerful supra-EU state, or any other kind of oppressive state or set of institutions for that matter. The vigilance of the Irish electorate in throwing out Lisbon is as a good as starting point as any to launch such a campaign .


Fiona Harrington