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 t might seem strange to recall but only a
little more than two years ago Tony Blair and his new Labour
party made one of their biggest pitches for general election
votes the fact that they alone could be depended upon to
provide leadership in Europe. Surveying the wreckage of
the recent elections to the European Parliament it is clear
that the leadership offered to Labour voters in Britain
has been woefully inadequate.
Throughout the period of the campaign the
party utterly failed to offer the electorate a convincing
argument as to why Blair's acolytes should be trusted to
take the message to the Strasbourg Parliament, or even that
there was any distinctive message to take there in the first
place. Neither was this just a blimp caused by local national
difficulties and the fact that the prime minister's thoughts
were concentrated on the Balkans.
Right across the EU member states the message
was the same: the closer the national government to the
Blairite third way, the more unconvinced the electorates
that it had anything useful to say on Europe. Two years
of alleged leadership on this question has brought the European
project to its lowest ebb ever in terms of popular support
and appeal.
It may seem ironic, but new Labour's loss of its grip on
the popular politics of Britain came at the same moment as
its leader's biggest triumph. Detestable as the nightly newscasts
were of NATO bombing raids 15,000 feet above Serb cities and
Kosovar refugee convoys, the Balkans war did achieve its immediate
goal of expelling Milosevic from the province. The fact that
it is likely to prove one of those historic victories where
the real problems start when we all have to learn to live
with this triumph is perhaps another matter. The European
leaders who did so much to uncork the genie of ultra-nationalism
and release it from the bottle in which it had been contained
by Tito's federal republic seem, for the time being, to be
bereft of ideas hinting at a long-term solution. We can be
assured that the one idea they do have, of keeping NATO forces
in the region for many years to come, is not a long-term solution.
On the European front - is there any evidence of Blairite
leadership in the face of crisis? Go back 18 months - to the
period of the UK presidency of the European Council, a time
when key decisions needed to be taken in relation to the Amsterdam
treaty revision of Maastricht and the euro was struggling
to be born - and we find the widespread view in Europe was
that Blair's leadership was generally considered to be lost
time for the EU. During the whole of the past two years, Labour
has stirred itself out of a torpor only on issues regarded
as crucial to narrow British interests - from harmonised tax
regimes, through to the attempt to preserve duty-free perks
- rather than expanding the role and vision of a genuine European
political and social entity. Maybe the tone and demeanour
of the British politicians and civil servants was changed
over this period - with less table banging and a bit more
francophone touchie-feeliness - but Britain remains firmly
in the middle of the pack when it comes to efforts to solve
all the really big problems that lay before the countries
of the region.
How could it be any different when the country remains outside
of the biggest and boldest leap into the 'new' currently around?
Make no mistake about it, the future of the EU as a steady-as-
she-goes, don't-frighten-the servants, middle-of-the-road
project of the comfortably off bourgeoisie hangs of the fate
of its wretched single currency. Get the euro right, and centrist
Europe will have the means to grease its modest growth rates
in the period ahead, to expand its reaches into the countries
of central Europe, and to offer the US dollar a degree of
competition as the world's leading currency. Get it wrong,
and it's a whole different ball game. A permanent dip in the
value of the currency would kill off the signs of economic
recovery which have emerged in recent times. A flat EU economy
means one unable to do battle with the US in the world markets.
A further erosion of the position of European traders and
manufacturers means pressure on the national governments for
expenditure cut-backs, and the loss of services and public
goods associated with the distinctive feature of liberal capitalism
in European - its welfare state systems.
These are all pretty big issues, and yet the best that Blair
can say to the Europeans he purports to offer leadership to
is, you work on it, make the sacrifices, sort the whole thing
out, and when you've done that, we'll be happy to join.
This is not a pretty sight. It is however just about what
you would expect from a politics of the European Union which
is so fundamentally contingent on the economic component of
its project. The post-war architects of the EU believed this
to be the virtue of the scheme for pulling all the countries
of the region together into a structure in which the benefits
of cooperation would outweigh the desire to win the permanently-waged
battle for hegemony and dominance. Strap their economies sufficiently
tightly together, reasoned Monet and his co-thinkers, and
cooperation through federal political systems would naturally
fall into place. The problem that they were not required to
confront in the early days of the project, in the 1950s and
60s, was the fact that privileging the position of the economy
meant simultaneously privileging the position of the property-owning
classes.
Within the context of the essentially social democratic policies
which ruled the roost in the post-war decades, the relative
strength of the bourgeoisie could not have been a cause for
great alarm, since the power of the state was always that
much greater. But what if that power fell away, allowing the
leverage to pass more decisively in favour of entrepreneurs
whose wealth and influence made even the largest and most
important of the national governments tremble? In other words,
how has the liberalisation, de-regulation and privatisation
drives of the 1980s and 90s unbalanced the fundamental proposition
at the heart of the European project at its inception, that
national governments wedded to economic interests lead naturally
in the direction of a united, federal Europe?
The answer is that de-regulation has unpicked much of the
logic that allowed the European architects to believe that
economics led the way to political union in Europe. The predatory
capitalists of the modern epoch hunt the world for their own
kind of fish - other multinational operations which hold out
the prospect of freedom from the national context, rather
than subordination to its own plans for development and progress.
Particular political arrangements have their attractions
at specific moments of time, and for whole periods a Murdoch
might identify with a Blair, a Toyota might throw its lot
in with the North East of England, or the stock markets might
speak up for the single currency. This temporary identification
is no basis to build a movement for the radical restructuring
of national states however, because the modern-day capitalist
simply has too many options ever to want to tie him or herself
to a project which is fraught with uncertainty and will at
the very least go through periods of falter and set-back.
The up-to-date world-devouring bourgeois sees no reason to
sit around and endure such problematic periods, and will move
on to areas of greater and more immediate profitability. For
this reason the European Union project flounders; economics
is no longer its ally, but rather a deep and pervasive problem
area which has to be tackled and overcome.
The swing to the right that became discernible across virtually
all member states during the parliamentary election has produced
some new, novel features. Eurosceptism - that political ideology
of egoistic mega-entrepreneurs and carpetbaggers - has moved
beyond its eccentric British form to become a powerful force
in the Scandinavian countries, France, and even Germany. They
will grow more powerful in the future as they pick up the
message of serious global big business, that regional free
market agreements interest them a lot less now than they did
a decade ago. The whole world has gone free market during
that time, and the terms of global trade have been made sufficiently
secure by the dominance of the US economic super-power to
make it seem that they do not require regulations and directives
from the mandarins of Brussels to shore up their world wide
activities.
For socialists and radicals, the really gloomy message for
the future is not so much that the European Union heralds
a capitalist super state, but that the capital at its core
seems less and less interested in the European Union. Free
market economics, contrary to the good old religion, will
not bring political union in their wake, but a barren desert
at the level of political control, where neither regional
union nor national states have very much influence at all
over the really important decisions which decide the future
prosperity of millions.
And this is the moment that Labour has chosen to abandon
its historic traditions and throw its lot in with the bourgeoisie.
It makes no sense, and quite possibly it is the nonsense of
the Blairite version of the third way that has been perceived
by the people of Europe, and led to this comprehensive rejection
of new Labour leadership.
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