Why Socialism is Effectively Impossible in the EU

It is because the EU Treaties not only contain procedural protections for capitalism, they also entrench substantive policies which correspond to the basic tenets of neoliberalism. 

The EU is based on two core functional treaties, the Treaty on European Union (TEU, originally signed in Maastricht in 1992) and the Treaty on the Functioning of the European Union (TFEU, originally signed in Rome in 1958 as the Treaty establishing the European Economic Community). These lay out how the EU operates, and there are a number of satellite treaties which are interconnected with them. Mostly they have been repeatedly amended by other treaties over the years since they were first signed, so a consolidated version of the two core treaties is regularly published by the European Commission. The EU can only act within the competences granted to it through these treaties and amendment to the treaties requires the agreement and ratification (according to their national procedures) of every single signatory.

Reforming the EU to make Socialism Possible

The methods of Treaty amendment are laid down in Article 48 TEU. Under the ordinary revision procedure, Member States must agree by common accord the amendments to be made to the Treaties. Under simplified revision procedures (used to revise Union policies), the European Council also must act unanimously. In each case, changes must be confirmed by all the Member States in accordance with their respective constitutional requirements. Crucially, irrespective of which procedure is used, only one national government can veto treaty change. All 28 governments would have to want to give up capitalism simultaneously to change the Treaties such that socialism is possible. In other words, the treaties are designed to make socialist change impossible

Privatising Public Utilities

The socialist position would be that Member States should determine how big their own public sectors are. But EU liberalisation legislation consolidates privatisation. Nationalising sectors such as gas, electricity, telecommunications and postal services is prevented by giving corporations the right of accessing any market. The sort of extension of public ownership brought in by the 1945 Labour government could therefore be prohibited because the new public enterprises would have to compete with private firms in a capitalist market, and that is not socialism! It is the “competitive public ownership” sought by Labour right winger, Anthony Crosland, trying to undermine the efforts of the Attlee government and the welfare state it introduced after 1945. The EU makes publicly owned companies act like private companies--eg run for profit not for public benefit like the NHS--particular when the Treaty provisions on state aids are taken into account. Similar legislation on railways is presently going through the EU institutions.

All legislation in the EU has to come from the EU Commission and be submitted to  the Council and Parliament. Supposing that a socialistic national government sought to introduce EU legislation to allow all Member States a free choice over the public or private ownership of their energy, postal, telecommunications and rail sectors, it has to rely on the Commission to make and submit the proposal. Under Article 352 TFEU the Council must act unanimously, so a single national government can instruct its minister in the Council to veto the proposal, and ALL 28 must therefore agree from the outset their support. Once again it is impossible.

TTIP

Assuming TTIP is agreed before the next UK general election, the prospects of the EU discarding it are even less likely. Assuming withdrawal is permissible, the TEU and TFEU do not make provision for how the EU actually does it. On the face of it, Article 352 TFEU with its unanimity requirement would have to be used, again allowing a single government to stop withdrawal from the TTIP. Again it is easier to do for a single independent state.

Facing up to the Constitutional Obstacles to Socialist Advance

Campaigners claiming it is possible to make the EU more left-wing, have the duty to explain it can be done in the face of EU treaty requirements of unanimity and common accord. At present, these requirements make socialism within the EU nigh on impossible. Those pretending there is a way forwards within the EU like Yanis Varoufakis, the Democracy in Europe Movement 2025 (DiEM 2025), and “Another Europe is Possible”--have to show what the practical means are they propose to use to make progress against the EU constitution without tearing up the treaties which amounts to all 28 Member States rejecting the EU as it is.

Let us leave now, while we have a reasonable chance.

D. Nicol, ‘Is Another Europe Possible?’ U.K. Const. L. Blog (29th Feb 2016) (available at https://ukconstitutionallaw.org/

The meaning of TTIP

The Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership (TTIP) is a free trade and investment treaty being negotiated in secret between the European Union and the USA. TTIP negotiations were first announced by President Barack Obama in his State of the Union address of February 2013, and negotiations between European Commission and US officials began that July. The talks are to be rushed through swiftly with no details entering the public domain, so they can be concluded before the peoples of Europe and the USA find out the scale of the TTIP threat.

Officials accept TTIP is not really to stimulate trade by removing tariffs between the EU and USA, as they are already minimal. Its aim, they admit, is to remove regulatory “barriers” which restrict the profits possible by both US and EU based transnational corporations, “barriers” that are actually standards and regulations important to us, such as labour rights, restrictions on GMOs and food safety rules, limits on the use of toxic chemicals, fracking, digital privacy laws, and financial and banking safeguards meant to prevent another bank-led financial crisis. TTIP also seeks to open public services and government procurement contracts to transnational corporations, threatening a wave of privatizations in sectors like health and education. These costs to us could not be higher.

Worst of all, TTIP gives investors a right to sue sovereign states, in customized private tribunals, for loss of profits from any of their governments' decisions that reduce corporate profits. This ISDS (Investor State Dispute Settlement) puts transnational capital on the level of national states, thereby challenging or destroying popular democracy in both the EU and USA, and instituting a corporatocracy as the NWO!

So TTIP is not a negotiation between trading partners, but an attempt by transnational corporations to deregulate markets on either side of the Atlantic. EU and US citizens are equally concerned at the threats posed by TTIP, and civil society groups, trade unions, academics, parliamentarians, and others are uniting to prevent pro-capitalist bureaucrats from signing away valuable social and environmental standards. Join this resistance in an existing union or local campaign, or by starting one.

Free trade is an ideology of the powerful and can be a very effective means of engaging in lobbying. Critics are right to seek to prevent TTIP. For the real danger of TTIP is beyond well-known headings such as chlorinated chicken, hormone-treated meat and GM food—the attempt of commercial lobbyists to establish undemocratic procedures which would give corporations substantial influence, on two continents and thus worldwide.

www.rosalux-europa.info

A Warning From Canada

The free trade agreement with Canada has been under negotiation since 2009 and has now been largely completed—but not published. The EU Commission probably fears that the text of the agreement will be met with so much public outrage that TTIP negotiations would fail immediately and permanently.

The EU Commission has already experienced twice how dangerous public outrage can be—the multilateral Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement (ACTA) was blocked in 2012, as was the international investment agreement MAI in 1996. Thus, the EU Commission is silent on what it has negotiated with Canada. Until now, all we have are rough summaries and some excerpts that have been leaked. But even this meagre amount of information is sufficient to alert experts.

A principal witness is the Canadian lawyer Howard Mann, who has been dealing with investor protection agreements for more than 15 years and has co-operated with more than 75 governments on issues of investment clauses. In December 2013, Mann was commissioned by the Canadian parliament to assess the free trade agreement with Europe. His assessment was devastating—This agreement was the most “investor-friendly” contract the Canadian government had ever negotiated.

It can thus only be concluded that we cannot trust the EU Commission’s assurances that it wants to restrict investor protection. Instead, it is presumably going to enter into agreements which go far beyond prior agreements.

The agreement with Canada is, however, not merely a blueprint of what could be expected from TTIP. It is worse. The German Macroeconomic Policy Institute (IMK) warned that TTIP would not even be necessary, should the agreement with Canada be ratified. For the US and Canada are both members of the NAFTA free trade zone. Put simply, a branch in Canada will be sufficient to rely on the investor protection clauses.

Nothing speaks in favour of free trade agreements, (http://www.rosalux-europa.info/userfiles/file/FreeTrade_UHerrmann.pdf) be it with Canada or the US. The risks are enormous, and the benefits minimal.

Talking Back against European Union Naivety

The Germans are wonderful people in my limited experience of them, and so are most other Europeans, and their parties are doubtless heavenly compared with the Tories, but it is all quite irrelevant to our being all members of the same EU international bund.

The EU was set up as the Common Market to be run by bureaucrats with a mockery of a parliament, and it still is 40 years later. Knowing that, and the rest that we now know, would any of us want to vote “yes” in a referendum today? We are told the EU is not imposed on us externally. We have freely joined it. Then why cannot we decide to exit it? Because it suits our ruling class, which, some say are worse than the ruling classes of our fellow Europeans, but our rulers are not so stupid they do not realize they are stronger while they have these virtually unbreakable ties with almost every other country in Europe, not to mention the threat of NATO looming in the background should anyone show dissent. It is harder to blow a hole in a big wall than it is in a small one, it is harder to untangle a large skein of legal threads than a small one. The longer we stay in it the harder it will be to get out.

And it seems we shall soon have another layer of courts to deal with, besides the ECJ, as a condition of the TTIP. If EU membership offers us any crumbs of benefits, the shackles and conditions imposed for them render them worthless.

In discussing our predicament in the EU, some light-hearted contributers, think it is fun to propose various hypothetical stances, but we actually are in a real situation, right now! It has never been the game some depict it as. While we remain in the EU, all thoughts of socialism are wishful thinking—the very rules of the neoliberal club exclude it. And for those who are loath to lose their European identity, we were Europeans before we joined the EU. If we leave it, we shall still be European, besides being British. That we would be rejecting the people of Europe by leaving the EU has always been one of the main false lines of the pro-European media. Lastly for those of a Marxist inclination…

The US–EU Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership (TTIP)

The US–EU Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership (TTIP) was agreed on at the G8 summit in Northern Ireland in June. It would be the world’s largest trade agreement, and Obama has declared it a priority for his administration, intended to be signed by the end of 2013. Over 98 percent of EU tariffs would be eliminated. The first round of the trade negotiations has now happened, and a further round will yet take place, but the earlier rounds were delayed by the US shutdown and the NSA spy scandal revealed by Edward Snowden.

NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden leaked information showing the extent of US espionage on allies abroad. EU diplomats weren’t satisfied with the answers they received in Washington regarding the spying on EU leaders by the US. France and other EU members said there could be no trade negotiation unless the US guaranteed it would halt spying operations on EU allies. Germany threatened to be particularly tough after the revelations of US NSA special surveillance on 80 European leaders and embassies as well as Chancellor Angela Merkel’s mobile phone, and implied it would want data protection guarantees as a condition for signing the treaty. US Secretary of State John Kerry amazingly said he thought the trade partnership is “separate from any other issues”. Germany with Brazil submitted a draft resolution to the UN General Assembly calling for an end to excessive electronic surveillance, and data collection methods. But the US has given no guarantees it will curb spying on its allies.

Non-tariff barriers such as different standards and definitions increase the cost of business, and, as NASA’s mix up of metric and imperial showed, can be dangerous. A car, crash-tested in the USA, need not be tested again in Europe. But limiting health, safety and environmental regulations to boost trade will leave the ordinary citizens worse off in these respects. Glyn Moody, journalist and author, says the US and EU are “putting the corporation above the nation”. Giant corporations like Monsanto would use the new trade agreement to sue the EU for billions of dollars if they refuse to import their products like GMO.

The agreement is being sold as a huge boost to trade with the potential to boost economic growth by $100 billion per year in reduced tariffs, lifting employment on both sides of the Atlantic, and disposable income. The extended bilateral trade ties (the Pacific one as well) will cover about 50 percent of global economic output, 30 percent of global trade and 20 percent of global foreign investment. UK Prime Minister, David Cameron, said at the G8 summit the TTIP could add US$157 billion to the EU economy, over $125 billion to the US economy, and $133 billion to the rest of the world. The EU says (“Reducing Transatlantic Barriers to Trade and Investment”, March 2013) it means an extra $730 (€545) in disposable income for a family of four in Europe and an extra $875 (€655) per family in the US.

These figures however are largely conjectural. Moody rightly commented that people may not want to have their food less safe or environment polluted for the sake of more money. All that is certain is that transnational corporations will gain immensely in profits and in power to stop governments from regulating against them. Their profits are at the expense of ordinary workers, who will suffer a loss of quality as a result, and the supposed household gains, if they ever emerge, will soon disappear as the huge additional corporate power is used to squeeze wages as well as standards, leaving any gains to be accrued by the rich. Socialist legislation would be impossible, change would require revolution, and the country that took it on would then be treated as a pariah state like Syria is now, and will be forced into conformity. Menacingly, President Obama has called it the “economic NATO”.

In summary, Glyn Moody said that there would be fewer constraints and companies will benefit, but:

The public will pay in terms of regulation reduced protection and that is never calculated in these trade agreements. It’s always about the bottom lines of the big companies.