Why Should Labour Support the Undemocratic European Union?
- Details
- Published on Tuesday, 14 June 2016 23:00
- Written by editor
~~~~~~~~~~~~~(((( T h e B u l l e t ))))~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
A Socialist Project e-bulletin .... No. 1269 .... June 15, 2016
__________________________________________________
Why Should Labour Support the Undemocratic European Union?:
The Case to Leave
Maurice Glasman
The origins of the European Union (EU) are, in many ways, inspiring and almost miraculous. Co-operation in the iron and steel industries between France and West Germany was built on an economic strategy that gave not only dignity, but some power to workers, through the balance of power in corporate governance which gave a parity to capital and labour. It recognised a mutual interest between nations that had engaged in two abominable wars in the previous forty years. Co-determination in industry underpinned co-operation. Extending this to uphold a non exclusively commodity status for agriculture, was also, in its way, sublime. France and Germany retained human scale agricultural production and slowed the... trend toward the elimination of the small holder.
The agricultural and iron and steel treaties that formed the basis of the Common Market were built around bilateral agreements between France and Germany and did more to improve the lives of ‘workers and peasants’ than the Soviet Union ever could. This is not coincidental. This was a Europe that had been unable to resist Fascism and in the late 1940s and 50s Communism was an imminent reality. Germany itself was divided and the outcome of that contest was yet to be decided. European banking and business elites had a great deal to fear, and to lose, and they shared power with unions and the church in order to do things differently. That was the basis of the social market economy in which Christian and Social Democracy agreed to a decentralised resistance to the domination of finance capital and a centralised state in the new Federal Republic of Germany. Unfortunately, probably from the outset, and certainly by the Rome Treaty of 1957 a Jacobin tradition of unmediated space, emptied of decentralised institutions had asserted itself, particularly through the head of the High Authority, that became the European Commission, Jean Monnet. He asserted that economic exchange and legal uniformity would, over time, produce political unification.