IV: Why our German friends are wrong on EU Constitution

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http://www.internationalviewpoint.org/article.php3?id_article=798

Alex Callinicos, Daniel Bensaïd, Francisco Louçã, Domenico
Jervolino, Stathis Kouvelakis, Francisco Fernandez Buey

In a ’tribune’ in Le Monde on May 3rd, some distinguished
German intellectuals (including Jürgen Habermas, Gunther
Grass and Wolf Bierman), called their “French friends” to
account. They exhorted them to approve the constitutional
treaty. Our German friends are welcome in the French debate,
but they seem ill-informed of its content. This is no doubt
because parliamentary ratification in Germany has deprived
them of a fruitful public debate. If France had adopted the
same parliamentary procedure, it would have been recorded
that 90 per cent of deputies and senators ratified the
treaty, whereas the result of the referendum remains up to
this day uncertain.

For our German friends a French “No” would be a betrayal of
progress and the Enlightenment (sic). And why not of “the
meaning of History”? The serious nature of what they say
calls for some clarifications.

Partisans of a “No from the left”, we are attached to the
perspective of a Europe that is social, democratic, open and
not limited to the uncertain frontiers of a Judeo-Christian
civilisation. That is why we reject a treaty which gives
constitutional force to a neoliberal Europe, continues to
demolish social solidarities and public services, confirms
the mandate of the European Central Bank to be outside any
political control and favours (by the absence of social and
fiscal harmonisation) social dumping and unequal development.

A European Union without a social programme, given over to
the competition of all against all, is necessarily
anti-democratic. Declared neoliberals, who know their
Montesquieu by heart, thus become enthusiastic for an
institutional arrangement in which the executive arm
(Council and Commission) and the judiciary (the Court of
Justice) make laws, whereas the legislative arm (the
Parliament) is a consultative ectoplasm.

Our German friends know, however, how heavily the
Bismarckian bureaucratic unification on the ruins of aborted
democratic revolutions has weighed in German history. To
raise to constitutional status a treaty concocted behind the
backs of the peoples, without an effective exercise of their
constituent power, will in the end produce nothing but
disappointment and resentment. The European idea itself will
as a result be discredited.

It would have been more in conformity with reality to
consider this treaty, draped in constitutional solemnity, as
a “useful set of internal regulations”, according to the
sober formula of Michel Rocard. To raise it to the rank of a
Constitution does not however have a purely symbolic
function. What is involved is to give constitutional force
to orientations (detailed in Part III) which should be the
affair of elected bodies, so that what one majority has
done, another majority can undo.

In engraving them in a Constitution that is practically
impossible to modify, so improbable is a revision procedure
involving twenty or thirty countries, popular sovereignty is
caught in an iron grip and, in the name of untrammelled
competition, policies which would give priority to the logic
of needs and common well-being over the ruthless logic of
the stock market are forbidden.

Carried away by their fervour, the proponents of the “Yes”
vote attribute magical powers to a benevolent European
spirit: peace, social rights, Airbus, all that is supposed
to be thanks to Europe. Social rights were not however
accorded by a benevolent ghost, but won dearly through real
social struggles.

Peace is not a generous gift of the Brussels Commission, but
the result of tragic historic ordeals and of the
relationship of forces produced by the Second World War (not
forgetting that the corollary of sixty years of relative
internal peace has been participation in all the colonial
and imperial expeditions, in Africa or in the Gulf). As for
Ariane and Airbus, they are not the fruit of a future
Constitution, but the result of industrial cooperation
backed by really existing states.

According to our German friends, the constitutional treaty
is necessary to “balance relations with the United States”.
However, by accepting the tutelage of NATO, it confirms
Europe’s subordination to the hegemonic power of the United
States, whose military budget is more than double that of
the European Union. Seeking to reduce this gap significantly
would lead either to renewed public deficits of vertiginous
proportions or (which is obviously the most likely
hypothesis) to a drastic reduction of social spending.

If there really exists a new “American challenge”, it cannot
be met by copying its liberal model. A response to imperial
hegemony would on the contrary have to win the sympathy and
the friendship of the peoples by presenting a real
alternative model of social justice and peace.

If the European Union is sick today, it is not from the
possibility of a French (or Dutch) “No” to the
constitutional treaty. It is from a defect that is built
into its genetic code. The scenario laid out in the Single
European Act (1986) and the Maastricht Treaty (1992) did not
take into account three major events. First of all, liberal
globalisation has led to a concentration of capital that is
transnational rather than European: the Union has as many
and indeed more industrial partnerships with American or
Japanese firms than it has what could properly be called
European champions.

Secondly, the sudden collapse of the bureaucratic regimes in
Eastern Europe precipitated the question of enlargement,
which is heavy with social contradictions, but politically
inevitable. Lastly, the disintegration of the Soviet Union,
German unification and the rupture of the precarious
equilibrium of the post-war period have put on the agenda a
new division of the world and a new realignment of alliances.

Thus the ingredients of a historic crisis have bee brought
together. Only a radical change of logic, giving priority to
social, democratic and ecological convergences as against
the egotistical calculations of profits and stock exchange
revenues, could defuse it.

According to those who plead for a “Yes” vote, the choice is
this treaty or nothing: “There is no alternative”, Mrs
Thatcher was fond of proclaiming! This rhetoric of
resignation contributes to discrediting politics. We on the
contrary are not only convinced that social convergence
criteria (in terms of salaries, employment, public services,
social protection) would constitute a measure of elementary
social justice, but also that they would be the best means
of avoiding social dumping.

They would lay the basis on which enlargements could be
negotiated. Such criteria would, it is true, be of a nature
to “interfere with free competition”. They would therefore
be in contradiction with the sprit and the letter of the
present treaty.

Our German friends are worried that a “No” vote would
“fatally isolate France”. Their solicitude is the expression
of a static view of the world. We can imagine on the
contrary that such a “No” would break the vicious circle of
timid steps and of the lesser evil that that often leads to
the worst. It would invite the peoples of Europe to become
actors of their own history. In reality, the isolation that
is feared concerns only the governments and not the popular
movements against war, the European Social Forums, the
marches of women or of the unemployed. The governments pass,
the peoples remain.

Our German friends fear a “populist No to the constitution”
and the imprisoning of “left nationalists in a bunker”. That
shows how little they know the supporters of a “No” from the
left. They are to a large degree, militants of the global
justice movement, initiators of the Euro-marches, organisers
of the European Social Forums. What can tip the balance of
the vote on May 29th is on the contrary the progress of a
“No” that is social, a “No” of solidarity, and not the
chauvinistic and islamophobic “No” of the old Right.

Our German friends entreat their “French friends” to “not
make the European Constitution suffer the consequences of
their discontent with their government”. However, the
experience and the common sense of working people make the
logical connection between the policies that have been
followed for twenty years and Giscard’s treaty. If the
Constitution that is proposed is the spirit of liberalism,
the social counter-reform that people experience daily is
liberalism in flesh and blood, and Chirac and Raffarin are
its secular arm.

The main line of division now opposes a “No from the left”
to an ecumenical “Yes” that, as the newly returned Jospin
admits, illustrates the Euro-compatibility between the
liberal Right and the liberal Left. If this Left,
voluntarily enslaved by the constitutional straitjacket,
returns to power, it will therefore have to pursue the road
of Maastricht, of Amsterdam and of the Stability Pact.

Three years ago, François Hollande made his pilgrimage to
Porto Alegre, where the World Social Forum was proclaiming
that another world was possible. Barely a year ago, the
Socialist Party was campaigning in the elections to the
European Parliament under the slogan: “Now for a social
Europe”. “Yes” to the liberal treaty would signify today
that another Europe (not to mention another world) is
impossible. François Hollande can indulge in promises of a
social Europe, for Easter or for some undetermined date in
the future, but he cannot make people forget that in 1997
there were thirteen socialist governments in the European
Union. Nor that Lionel Jospin, a year before becoming Prime
Minister, attacked the Stability Pact that had been
“absurdly conceded to the Germans” and denounced the Treaty
of Amsterdam as a “super Maastricht”.

As for Jacques Delors, who has just thrown the full weight
of his experience into the battle for the “Yes”, he
confessed, scarcely two years after having helped to give
birth to the Treaty of Maastricht, to not having “ardently
defended“ it, because he “wasn’t madly in love with it”.
Today we can conclude from that that either he has fallen
madly in love with Giscard’s treaty, which he is ardently
defending, or that he doesn’t like it any more than he did
the Treaty of Maastricht, but that he will only tell us that
in two years’ time.

- Alex Callinicos is professor of politics at the University
of York in Britain and a leading member of the SWP.

- Daniel Bensaid teaches philosophy at the University of
Paris-8, and is a leading member of the LCR.

- Francisco Louçã is an economist and a Left Bloc member of
the Portuguese parliament.

- Domenico Jervolino teaches philosophy at the University of
Naples

- Stathis Kouvelakis teacher philiosophy at Kings College in
London

- Francisco Fernandez Buey, philosopher, Pompeu Fabre
University, Barcelona

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