[D66] The real face of the European Union

[Antid Oto]

The real face of the European Union
6 April 2012

On March 25 of this year, the European Union celebrated the 55th anniversary of
its foundation with the passing of the Treaties of Rome. The celebrations were a
quiet affair compared to the pomp, and pageantry which marked the EU anniversary
five years earlier. On that occasion leaders of the continent’s political
parties and states met together with trade union leaders in the German capital
city of Berlin to indulge in an orgy of self congratulation.

To the strains of Beethoven’s Ode to Joy the assembled dignitaries drank
champagne and celebrated themselves. The text drawn up for the occasion began
with the words: “For centuries Europe has been an idea, holding out hope of
peace and understanding. That hope has been fulfilled. European unification has
made peace and prosperity possible.”

The EU Berlin Declaration continued: “We are striving for peace and freedom, for
democracy and the rule of law, for mutual respect and shared responsibility, for
prosperity and security, for tolerance and participation, for justice and
solidarity.”

Far from guaranteeing “peace, prosperity and solidarity,” the European Union has
been exposed as a reactionary trap, with increasingly devastating consequences
for the working population of Europe. This assessment has been underlined by a
series of recent events across the continent.

On Tuesday, a 77-year-old Greek pensioner committed suicide in broad daylight in
front of the nation’s parliament building. Before shooting himself, Dimitris
Christoulas left a suicide note comparing the current government in Athens with
the Greek regime which collaborated with the fascist German occupation forces
during the Second World War.

Christoulas shared the fate of hundreds of thousands of elderly Greek citizens.
Having worked his entire life as a pharmacist, he had been stripped of his
pension due to the budget reforms of the Greek government. In his note he states
“…since I cannot find justice, I can find no other means to react besides
putting a decent end [to my life], before I start searching the garbage for food
and become a burden for my child.”

He concludes his note by predicting the same fate for the current Greek
political elite as that of the Italian fascist leader: “Young people without a
future will one day take up arms and hang the traitors upside down in Syntagma
Square, as the Italians did to Mussolini in 1945.”

On the same day, a 38-year-old Albanian man who had been unemployed for some
time leapt to his death from the second-floor balcony of a building on the
island of Crete. Local news outlets reported that the cause of his suicide was
financial hardship.

As a consequence of the vicious austerity measures dictated by the European
Union, the European Central Bank and the International Monetary Fund, pensions
in Greece have been slashed by an average of 40 percent. The country’s
unemployment rate of 21 percent is one of the highest in Europe. A few years
ago, Greece had one of the lowest suicide rates in Europe. According to police
reports this rate has doubled in the course of the past two years.

The destruction of living standards and prospects for the future is not confined
to Greece.

Also on Tuesday this week, a 78-year-old woman threw herself to her death from
her apartment in Sicily. She had recently been informed that her monthly pension
was to be cut from 800 to 600 euros. The toll continues…

On Monday a picture frame-maker hanged himself in Rome. His suicide note
referred to overwhelming economic problems. His death was preceded by two
attempted suicides last week in northern Italy. In separate incidents two
men—both involved in the building trades—tried to burn themselves to death.
Severely burnt, both survivors had left notes claiming that their desperate
financial situation was the cause of their actions.

The social crisis in Europe is not just affecting adult workers and retirees.
Increasingly the prospects of entire families and young children are being
sacrificed to the demands for “fiscal consolidation” and “welfare reform” by a
tiny privileged financial elite. A recent report in the Le Monde newspaper
revealed that tens of thousands of Italian children are leaving school early in
order to find work and support their families. The article reports on
ten-year-old children working 12-hour days for wages of one euro per hour or less.

Poverty and extreme social polarisation are ravaging the entire continent.
According to the EU figures available for 2009, which are already grossly
outdated, over 20 percent of the population in the western European countries of
Spain and Greece live in poverty. These rates are exceeded in a number of
central and eastern European countries such as Latvia, Lithuania, Romania and
Bulgaria.

All of these countries have been subjected to massive austerity programs
dictated by the EU and the IMF. As a direct result of the social crisis, the
population in Romania has declined by 12 percent in the past ten years—due to a
combination of declining life expectancy, declining birth rates and the mass
emigration of young people seeking a future abroad. Similar declines in
population levels have been recorded for Bulgaria and Latvia. At the heart of
Europe, poverty and social polarisation are also increasingly dramatically in
the biggest Europe economies—Germany and France.

The wiping out of living standards and prospects for the future across the
continent is unprecedented in peacetime. It is a devastating indictment of the
capitalist European Union and in particular, its apologists in the trade unions
and ex-left parties.

The desperation which led Dimitris Christoulas to take his life this week cannot
be explained solely by his economic plight. Working people and their families
are capable of overcoming even such dire problems when they feel they have the
backing of an organisation or party prepared to fight on their behalf. But this
is precisely what is lacking in the current situation.

All of those organisations which still nominally claim some allegiance to the
working class have long since passed over to the opposing side. There is no more
resolute supporter of the EU and its policies today than the European trade
unions and their pseudo-leftist adjutants, such as the Greek SYRIZA, the German
Left Party and the French NPA. All their talk of reforms and the possibility of
a “social Europe” is merely aimed at disguising the umbilical cords which link
them to the EU bureaucracy and its think tanks and lobbyists in Brussels.

The only alternative to the social devastation currently enveloping the
continent is the mobilisation of the working class all over Europe against the
trade union bureaucracy and its hangers-on, and the formation of workers
governments. Such governments would immediately repudiate the austerity and debt
repayment programs dictated by the banks, withdraw from the EU and all of its
institutions and begin the process of constructing a genuinely democratic
alternative based on satisfying the needs of the broad masses of the population,
the United Socialist States of Europe.

Stefan Steinberg

http://wsws.org/articles/2012/apr2012/pers-a06.shtml