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XXth CENTURY EUROPE:
FROM COLONIAL STATES TO "THE ONLY STATE"?
Seen from the perspective of close to half a century, the history of the European Union amounts to little more than the enlargement of markets and the defence of corporate interests through political procedures, in the purist capitalist tradition. This is so much clearer now that the institutional rhetoric attempting to present the project as one of European peoples in search of unity and peace has been buried in Bosnia. A space for the market, whatever the size, is never large enough for an economic system that has genetically inscribed in it the drive for indefinite accumulation and concentration of wealth and growth.
In the aftermath of World War II, the rulers of the main European countries understood that the model of the European colonial empires had come to an end as a privileged mechanism for the continuous extension of their respective markets. Forthe vanquished countries, like Germany and Italy, it was obvious that the defeat cancelled any hope of obtaining an empire of their own. Yet for the victors (France and the United Kingdom, and also the Low Countries), the victory far from secured the preservation of the big colonial empires on which they had depended, the ones that had defined the very form of their states and also their domestic and foreign behaviour.
The war gave birth to two new indisputable superpowers, both non©colonialist in the traditional European fashion, but with massive domestic markets and untouchable areas of influence well©defined in Yalta. One or the other started almost immediately to stimulate and support, for the sake of world freedom or world revolution, according to the particular case, the movements for independence that had existed in the main African and Asian colonies since the 1930s. With a friendly smile, from the other side of the Atlantic, and with open
ideological hostility from the other side of the Iron Curtain, both superpowers thus weakened the international position of their former allies, and strengthened their respective hegemonic positions.
Large European national business and capital were horrified at the prospect of a future where their markets would lose their former possibilities of expansion in the overseas colonies, well©protected from competition, and would be restricted to their metropolitan possessions, with borders definitely set by the war.
Obviously, neocolonialism was still a concept unborn and, though the internationalization of capital had a long story behind it, international trade, in terms of real competition, had always played a minor role in the whole of economic activity. The big developments of international trade reached after a century of "free trade" until the 1929 crash and the subsequent protectionist wave, had been based to a large extent on transaction between the metropolis and their respective colonies, statistically accounted for as "international trade". In any case, postwar conditions did not seem to be very convenient for war©ravaged economies to compete in the field of trade with large American corporations, which had emerged not only untouched but greatly strengthened.
Large European businesses were, in brief, caught between East and West in the pliers of the two superpowers, forced to withdraw from their overseas colonial possessions in the South, and left with the prospect of being constrained to their narrow domestic markets with populations pauperized by the war, which, in a number of cases, were to a large extent still rural and self©sufficient. The only solution left to them was to, in some way, "colonize" themselves, that is, to rebuild on the shoulders of their own citizens the large markets that the new world geopolitics denied to them.
"THE EUROPEAN IDEAL": A SELFINTERESTED INVENTION
The discourse of European unification was far from novel when the "Fathers of European Union" reshuffled it. From the end of the last century, Victor Hugo, Zola and other thinkers had been advocating a future of fraternity on the basis of the "United States of Europe". In their time, the era of full colonial expansion, not only did these visionaries find no institutional or social resonance, but were labelled traitors and anti©patriots. Half a century later, these same visions, proclaimed in virtually identical terms by the new "Fathers of Europe" with the occasion of the second postwar, were surprisingly well©received. The same ruling classes that had been disputing the large markets and precious resources of the overseas empires, sending their young men to die in battle one generation after another, suddenly embraced the ideals of peace, unity, and the fate of solidarity for the peoples of Europe, expressed in the guise of a grand common market.
There was, as might be expected, some resistance. Some colonial bourgeois tried to preserve their privileges, restraining the rush for independence, but in vain. Their attempts at maintaining power caused wars for France and its colonies, and took other countries, like Belgium and even the Netherlands, to the verge of the abyss. The United Kingdom, with its proverbial obstinacy, tried to grasp for a while longer the dream of a grand market of its own through the
Commonwealth, but less than a decade later had surrendered to evidence.
In fact, from the beginning of the 1950s ©©the Paris treaty was signed in 1951©©, the die was already cast. The leading elements of European capital were convinced that the grand market they needed in order to secure a long period of expansion and accumulation for themselves had to be built, first of all, within their own frontiers. This position was favoured by the lack of a new wave of social unrest after World War II ©© such as existed after the First World War ©©
that might have been expected again due to the consequences of destruction. The negative experience of war reparations imposed by the Treaty of Versailles was not repeated.
The 1947 Marshall Plan provided a financial balloon that made it possible to take advantage of the social peace seemingly guaranteed by the partition and allotment of Europe in Yalta and Potsdam. The collaboration offered by Social©Democratic and Communist parties in the national reconstruction governments secured the social agreement needed for the European project.
It should not be forgotten, however, that the European project was, from its very beginning, closely associated with the new manner of confrontation among European countries, the soªcalled "Cold War", which sanctioned as few periods before in European history the sharp split of the European continent in two irreconcilable blocs. The "European Project" was the name given to the unification project of one of these blocs in confrontation, a bloc which did not even represent the majority of the European population.
This division was formed under the shadow of nuclear weapons and to a good extent it was imposed by a superpower foreign to the European continent: the United States of America. Since its inception, "Europeanist" structures existed side by side with the military structures of NATO.
That the headquarters of both institutions are located at a short distance from each other in the same town should come as no surprise. Whereas one administered the economic "European project", the other presided over a military strategy based on maintaining an arms race in which Europe's two halves would prepare to mutually annihilate. At the same time, any attempt to follow an alternative political path was put under tight control.
"THE EUROPEAN REALITY": THE EUROPE OF BIG BUSINESS
Though it may seem so from a contemporary perspective, Europe's build©up was not undertaken with the primary aim of promoting the competitiveness of European markets in the world market. In the fifties, the current concept of world market
and global competition simply did not exist. In 1950, American exports were merely 3.6% of the US GDP that was, in turn, half the world's monetary economy. Japan was a heap of ruins and was not present as an economic power, much less as a trade power.
In the same year, the value of world exports, in real terms, was about the same size as the historical peak reached in the 1920s.
The initial aims of trade unification were basically domestic. An attempt was made at a deep transformation of traditional European economies and societies, transforming them into modern industrial states, mutually open to trade, in which large private capitalist corporations might reach the hegemonic dimension and role already being played by thosefunctioning within the giant domestic market of the United States.
Despite the economic growth between both world wars, most of the European population still relied to a good extent on agriculture, and the urban population received most subsistence from small local or regional businesses, most of which functioned at a family level. Some large companies had been nationalized, others had been dependent on the exploitation of empires due soon to disappear, or on successive national rearmament programmes. In summary, most
large companies had been seriously destroyed by the war and could not face the task of reconstruction counting only on the support of their small domestic markets. European big business could not go on feeding its need to accumulate and grow on such a basis.
Moreover, other serious concerns were appearing in the international scene for European big business. Not even the large dimensions of the American domestic market seemed to be enough to indefinitely absorb the massive production capacity reached by American industry by the end of the war. To continue expansion, large American industry would soon have to resort to foreign markets to a much heavier extent than they had to that time. In fact, the USA immediately started to prepare the ground for such expansion. It sponsored the Breton Woods talks, the aim being to create a system of institutions able to direct and control the functioning and development of the world economy in accordance with their interests: the World Bank, to channel large international investment flows: the International Monetary Fund, to secure monetary stability
and impose capitalist orthodox economy: and the World Trade Organization, to lead the expansion of international trade.
Although conversations to establish the World Trade Organization arrived only at the midpoint in relation to its initial goals, they resulted in the signing of the GATT agreement in 1947. In that accord, the US imposed a method of regulating international trade in accordance with its own tradition of the "principle of reciprocity" (reciprocal equivalent concessions in every negotiation), generalized to all signatories of the agreement through the principle of "most favoured nation" (the obligation to treat every signatory country as "the most favoured nation"). Given the technological and production superiority of American industry, the mechanism of generalized reciprocity would make possible the accumulation of a permanent surplus in international trade, necessary to maintain the deployment of the American navy and armed forces all over the world. This is, in fact, what occurred over the following decades.
European governments did not escape the reach of these agreements, obliged as they were to accept them by force of American power. Even supposing that GATT could achieve its goals of stimulating global commerce, something not so certain
at the time, European industrial corporations were in no condition to confront the North Americans in terms of reciprocity, or at least not until they could count on adomestic market base large enough to permit expansion to continental dimensions.
Confronted with all these problems, old Europe had to change. Rural population had to be drastically reduced, supplying new waves of salaried workers to sustain the expansion of production and enlarging the ranks of urban consumers fully dependent on market supplies. The extensive trade space of millions of small farms and traditional businesses had to be transferred to large corporations, operating on a European scale, without customs or barriers of any kind. In the successive rounds of GATT, the interests of European corporations would have to be expressed in the most unified possible way, with a view towards defending their positions in the face of the unforeseeable developments of international trade.
This corporate character has been from the very beginning, and continues to be, the real identity of the European union. It has been an attempt to build not so much the Europe of marketeers as the Europe of corporations, or to put it another way, the Europe of Grand Marketeers. It is in this sense that the construction of "Europe" has, from the beginning shown to be simply a conventional process of enlarging markets and the expression of corporate interests. Nothing especially original has been seen in the repeated history of this type of process. The imposition of unified, and more important, oligopolist
markets on human communities and previously separate and selfªsufficient economic systems has always been based on the same principles: liberalization of commercial exchanges; normalization of products and technical standards; subordinization of autonomous social structures; homogenization of differentiated cultural spaces; absorption of non-centralized economic systems; creation of transportation and communication infrastructures for the integration of territory on a grand scale; establishment of unified systems of administration and social and political control; imposition of a unified currency; and finally, the gradual implementation of a unified language.
Reviewing these principles one by one, it is clear how each and every one of them tend to modify the rules of the economic game, as well as sociopolitical and cultural structures -- in the sense of granting the advantage to large corporations, with small productive units and local communities paying the cost. Moreover, all of them are in some form bound together by the very dynamic of the facts. For thirty years, from the time of the Treaty of Rome in 1957 when the "European ideal" took on the prosaic form of a customs union, baptised as the Common Market, until the signing of the "Single Act" in 1987 pushed forward the implementation of a single market, the grand corporations operating in the European area have known how to take advantage of the opportunities that the unification process has offered them.
To assure themselves control of the day to day management of community affairs, business interests established "lobbies" and other highly effective means of pressure within the darkframework of the Brussels bureaucracy, infiltrating from all directions, placing representatives from all the various branches of industry in key posts. The pressures placed on Brussels are reproduced, in turn, in the form of pressures on the various national governments by the respective owner's organizations. Such structures of political pressure finally took open form with the creation of institutions such as the ERT (European Round Table of Industrialists).
In this manner the fundamental objectives of the Common Market were actualized. Europe profoundly changed in the expected direction. Local communities continued to lose control over their resources and their capacity for economic and social self©organization. The process of the urbanization of the population advanced practically to its limit. Local small scale agrarian activity, as well as many other traditional local activities were swept away by successive waves of technological modernization, commercial rationalization and industrial reconversion. Millions of men and women watched as their labor skills and qualifications became obsolete and useless, their very selves slowly becoming unnecessary, nothing more than dead social weight in the common business of modernization and unification. The large corporations grew more powerful with the resources and markets placed at their disposition, establishing productive structures and commercial alliances across the continent. With this new power now achieved, they directed their activity towards exterior markets, particularly the South, competing efficiently with the United States, and later, Japan, in the renewal of a global new©colonialism even harsher, if that is possible, then the old colonialism of the nineteenth century.
Once having achieved this stage in the process of unification, and having obtained such encouraging results, it was not difficult to prove the "need" to go some steps further. The passing of the "Single Act" in 1987, with a view towards establishing the Single Market, was the logical consequence of this entire process experienced in the previous decades.
MAASTRICHT: FROM THE SINGLE MARKET TO A NEW CONCEPT OF "SINGLE
STATE
The essentials of the process of European unification, from the point of view of the corporations benefitting from it, culminated on January 1, 1993, with the implementation of the Single Market. A single market is a very different thing from a free trade area or a customs union, like the Common Market that started the process of European unification. It is not based, like those, on passive policies of eliminating trade or custom barriers, but on a collection of policies and active transformations permitting and aiding the economic agents present in the unified market to operate on a truly new territorial scale. It permits and helps these interests to function without social or political administrative hindrances, and from there to project afar this accumulation of power gained from the amplification of their own domestic market base.
Such policies present themselves in a multitude of forms (financial, fiscal, technological, industrial, labor policy, infrastructure, etc.), and can only be efficiently formulated and applied through some kind of unified authority. Such
authority implies adequate powers and administrative instruments, from legislative and judicial to police, and in the end, military control. For this reason, the construction and management of a unified market requires the establishment of a collection of unified political institutions capable of exercising this authority, in effect operating like a "single state".
The construction of this political-administrative superstructure on the scale of a Single Market was the result of Maastrich Treaty. Its goals were formulated in five points, written in a diplomatic yet very explicit language, in Article B of the Treaty. The contents, extracting literally the essential aspects, are the following: first, the establishment of an economic and monetary union, implying, in turn, a single currency; second, to realize a common foreign policy and security apparatus, which could lead, at some point, to a common defence; third, to reinforce the protection of the rights of citizens through the creation of citizenship of the Union; fourth, the development of strict cooperation in the areas of justice and internal affairs; and fifth, to maintain and develop the community common ground which could assure the efficiency of the community mechanisms and institutions.
For its later development in successive treaties to come in the twenty©first century, the "single state" which began to take form in the Maastrich Treaty already shows in its founding text some of which will be its essential characteristics. The Treaty manifests special interest in economic and monetary aspects, while carefully developing such concerns as military, policing and administration - all of which propose substantial advances in the process of unification. Yet aspects such as labor relations and social and environmental concerns are pushed to the side, reduced to vague declarations of intentions. The harmonization and reinforcement of said concerns not only doesn't suppose advantages for the large corporations benefiting from the unification process, but indeed could serve as obstacles towards the development of such benefits.
The treaty also reflects the situation of Europe at the time when it was conceived and lobbied, from the first negotiations in 1989 to its signing in Maastricht in February 1992. It was the period of the fall of the Berlin Wall, German reunification and the Gulf war, with the breakout of hostilities on the southern rim of the Mediterranean. The text of a historical treaty which at first was destined to symbolize the triumph of the market economy over existing socialism in Europe, thanks to the success of a process of commercial unification begun forty years before, ended up with the aroma of defensive entrenchment. This has lead many to qualify the project as one of the construction of "fortress Europe". This image of the Europe of Maastrich as a defensive fortress is reinforced by the clear attempt to reserve the immediate bordering areas (North Africa, Eastern European countries...) as zones of European influence, all within the precarious new world order which arose at the end of the "cold war".
The new form of the European "unified state" taking shape in the twenty©first century is far from being well©defined at present, due to the strong internal tensions which exist. But projecting from observable tendencies, in all probability it will be quite different from the national states we have known in Europe in the second half of this century. It will keep its hands out of economic processes, assuring complete liberty of commodity, capital and value movement for the large economic and financial agents. It will strictly limit its
intervention in social areas, obliging citizens to individually resolve their problems and needs, according to their own capacities, aptitudes and competence. It will leave the production of culture and information in the hands of the large private communication conglomerates. Meanwhile, of course, it will fully assume the military, judicial and policing functions necessary for the protection of the above mentioned interests. Every kind of state throughout history has come to defend the economic interests of the dominant minority, and to reflect its cultural, political and ideological values.
FEEDING ON THE SOUTH TO MAINTAIN THE "EUROPEAN IDEAL"
Not even the rhetoric of European brotherhood and ideals (buried in Bosnia but already having died long before), much in circulation at the beginning of the European project, presents an exception to these types of processes. Every construction of colonial empire, or grand national unification, has obscured its real mercantile ends and concentrations of power behind grand charitable ideals. Such pretence has only been subject to change over a long period of time to allow for adjustments in the socio-cultural values of each historical epoch and place. The Christianization and eternal salvation of the infidels, the civilizing and education of the savages and the fulfilment of various forms of "manifest destiny" of peoples are obvious examples of predecessors to the current "European ideal". In their time, they appeared to the majority of their respective contemporaries to be as noble, irreproachable and disinterested as the European ideal has appeared for decades to the majority of today's Europeans.
Nevertheless, history has also shown that such presumed ideals, brilliant as they may be, have never been sufficient to maintain the support of the majority of the population for the grand projects of capitalist unification, expansion or modernization. In each of these processes large social segments have seen their own interests, their forms of life or their cultural expressions threatened, and in one way or another have resisted the transformations imposed upon them. In some cases, these protests have been quieted by the use of arms (when the protesters were "pagans", "savages", or "underdeveloped" peoples incapable of understanding the good being done for them). In other cases revolts were calmed by some form of distribution of wealth (when the cries of protests were heard too close to home).
The construction of Europe has been no exception in this sense. It has been a typical case of the second of the above cited adjustments of capital. The welfare state - to a great extent established thanks to colonial, and later, neocolonial exploitation - furnished an invaluable counterpoint of material satisfaction to the European ideal, especially in the critical decades of its construction. The innumerable subsidies to those effected in agriculture, in reconverted industries, or to less competitive countries and regions, have worked to mitigate the protests, saving the unification process from social and political obstacles encountered through its various stages.
Yet what the citizens didn't imagine is that these palliative measures were merely temporary, that they would lose their reason for being and be gradually dismantled once the desired political and economic structures had been financed and established. Now the beginnings of this dismantling process can be seen, with the argument that international economic competition no longer permits such benefits. While Europe was being built to recover the competitiveness which it had lost, it was of course possible to maintain such social programs. Curiously, this has become no longer possible just at the point when the European project is about to reach its goals.
The truth is that the great European corporate interests perceive a general weakness on the part of workers; they see that unions have been seriously, politically weakened by rising pressure from competition on businesses and on the labor market. They note that traditional economic sectors have by now been virtually dismantled, and that their residual effects are moving towards generational extinction. They see that unification has now advanced to a point disallowing changes of course for the less competitive countries, those which have opened their markets in exchange for structural and cohesion funds. Moreover, the globalization and liberalization process of the world economy, which the institutions and corporations of the European Community have activity collaborated in stimulating, pushes towards a global lowering of social conditions. In this way, the transitory redistributions of wealth meant to facilitate integration and placate social reactions are increasingly losing their reason for being in the face of competitiveness, as much at the national as the global scale.
With each turn of the screw in economic restructuring processes, certain social groups suffer the consequences with particular intensity. In Europe, as in other parts of the world, the social crises has a pronounced bias towards one gender: in recent years it is women who are subject to new forms of discrimination. Unemployment more strongly effects women than it does men. Liberalization of labormarkets facilitates the substitution of stable, well-paid positions with irregular, part-time, badly paid jobs, often falling outside of legal labor protections. Statistics indicate that these jobs are being occupied primarily by women, forced to accept them in some cases by the lack of other work opportunities, and in others by the deterioration of domestic economies.
Cuts in social spending also progressively hit at homes, particularly effecting women in weak and conflictive social areas. The social deterioration in those communities most effected by restructuring processes, or in marginalized immigrant communities, falls in large part on women. Weakening of family relations and fissures in the nuclear family, particularly in large cities, forces many women to confront alone all family responsibilities. All of these functions, which are supposedly supported by the presumed benefits of the "competitiveness" and "flexibility" of neoliberal policies, remain invisible for the official economy and social conscience, when not openly undervalued and scorned.
Minorities existing on the social periphery constitute yet another group especially effected by the unification process. The stable settling, in some countries of the European Community, of a good part of the temporal immigrant workforce from outside the Community, has provoked increasingly severe policies of control and the restriction of migrant flows. This has lead, in turn, to the conversion of the immigrant into a "problem", feeding xenophobic, racist attitudes. Today, social and political rights for immigrants on par with the rest of the population is put forth as something which cannot be delayed. evertheless, the Maastrich Treaty and the Schengen accords have come to legalize a grave and indefensible discrimination against a group made up of several millions of European citizens.
GUNSHOTS IN BOSNIA AND THE AWAKENING OF EUROPE
The fascination that the European ideal exerted for decades lay, in short, in its ability to associate two different kinds of expectations, spiritual and material. The construction of Europe offered its citizens a lovely combination: a certain sense of moral progress, seen through the exaltation of values such as internal and external solidarity; and palpable material gains, perceived in the continual rise of income along with the above mentioned social benefits. This double vision came to make up what was called "the European dream", a version supposedly more just and cultured - as it was, in the end "European" - than the discredited "American dream".
But the world of the nineties is quite different than that in which the European dream was born and nurtured. In the southern part of the planet, for the most part, hopes raised by decolonization have transformed into a nightmare whose end is not in sight. In the East, the fall of bureaucratic socialism has provoked in Western Europe a certain vertigo in the face of an economic and social vacuum which no one quite knows how to fill. There has been a proliferation of violent conflicts, producing a level of atrocities naively thought to have been forever left behind in Europe. Within Western Europe itself, together with the North, social conflicts and inequalities are amplified with each cycle of stagnation and recovery. All the while, the ghost of global environmental crisis hovers above. This reality, with each step, refutes the credibility of an economic and political model of organization to whose design and dissemination throughout the world Europe has decisively contributed. It is a model which Europe has sought to exemplify to its highest level in the admirable and peaceful construction of the European Union.
The European project initially attempted to orientate itself within the unity grown out of the fight against fascism during the war. Periodically, homages in the old concentration camps or at the scenes of principle battles, serve as reminders that the unity of Europe as been constructed on the basis of peace, democratic freedoms and cultural tolerance. But these "European pillars" have crumbled at the first test of their strength. The attitude of the European Union and the national governments - actively or passively, according to the case © in ex©Yugoslavia, has opened the path to successive, genuinely fascist aggressions against the last European community pretending to maintain a truly multicultural coexistence. Concentration camps, massive deportations and genocide have again appeared in Europe under the new denomination of "ethnic cleansing". Meanwhile European institutions and governments pressure the victims into accepting "peace plans" assuming the distribution, between the aggressors, of territory of a legitimately constituted European state, one which is internationally recognized, led by Europe itself.
It is the end of innocence, for those who have managed to maintain it until now. In the current context, it is difficult to continue believing in the ideal of a Europe of unity and solidarity, destined to spread its culture and prosperity in all directions. For years, it was easy to maintain agreement around this collective dream of moral and material progress. Dreams of this kind are radiant. They have no dark sides, or if they do, they are hidden behind the brilliance of the unlimited horizons they promise. Yet it is not so easy to maintain this agreement when, waking from the dream, one is offered a panorama of confusion and anxiety.
For this reason, in a gradual, subtle yet clearly notable manner in recent years, the European project has taken on a defensive, even negative and irrational character (such as was described earlier). For a long time, political discourse in favor of European construction has contained increasingly less references towards the greatness of its goals, emphasizing in their stead the dangers facing Europe if it doesn't manage to attain the union. Said dangers especially pertain to the member countries, or candidates thereof, who fail to comply with the conditions necessary for forming part of the hard and secure nucleus of unification. In this situation, and above all since the bumpy - in many countries coerced - approval of the Maastrich Treaty, growingnumbers of citizens, at an individual or collective level, have begun to openly wonder if European construction is in their interest. Such questioning had, in fact, been effectively prohibited earlier, when the uncontested strength of the founding ideal automatically marginalized those who dared to question it, socially excluding them from any debate accepted as rational or constructive. Now, more than ever, it is legitimate, from one's own personal or political perspective, to ask what exactly the European union has to offer towards solving today's principle problems.
What does it offer, for example, en relation to the problems of the South, or the East, whose dramatic deterioration seems to compromise, at first glance, not only the conservation of those economic and social gains upon which the European continent prides itself, but which will without a doubt destroy global political stability in the long run. Or what has it to offer in relation to the internal problems of social and territorial inequalities, and the deterioration of social cohesion, problems which have not stopped growing for years in practically all the countries of Europe. Or what does it offer in relation to the continental and global environmental crises, which has not ceased to worsen at any moment.
One must begin by remembering that it obviously does not offer a deepening of democracy. The creation of grand markets and economic spaces always brings with it the concentration of power, and this concentration always ends up manifesting itself in some form of authoritarianism, or in diverse forms of democratic degeneration. True democratic relations can only blossom and survive on a small scale, and are degraded with each successive stage of representation. The more power and dominance are ceded to higher demands, the more democracy is degraded. At this point of the European construction, with the deterioration of democratic values on the continent, no one should be surprised by ethnic cleansing in Bosnia, nor by the re-opening of the nuclear race by France © willingly accepted (in an explicit or underhanded way) by not a few political forces, including various European governments.
Nor does the project offer help to those European communities, villages or nations desirous of advancing towards diverse forms of real autonomy, including in this case political selfªdetermination. Hopes that were in its day raised by the new European framework among the various nations-without-a-state spread throughout the continent, have vanished before the consolidation of community structures. Such structures legitimize and recognize as interlocutors only the state governments of the member countries, while collectively impeding the political expression of said secondary entities. As such, far from opening the way towards coexistence and collaboration between European peoples from the starting point of the self©identity of each, the process has favored clashes between peoples and communities. Finally, the project has accelerated, within the European context, the processes of political-cultural standardization marking the current stage of capitalist globalization.
EUROPEAN PEOPLES IN THE EUROPEAN UNION: UNITED TO GROW?
The truth is, that which the European Union offers, or tries to offer, is international competitiveness for the recovery and relaunching, time and again, of European economic growth. That is to say, its goal is to continually support the growth of the grand corporations of unified Europe, the extension of their power and their wealth. This is its reason for being, for all that is said and done (although increasingly less is said, because it is increasingly less necessary to adorn the agenda with certain social touches or civil rights).
Yet more growth and competitiveness in Europe means, primarily, a further distancing from the South and East, and larger differences of wealth and power in different regions of the world. The theory that Northern economies act as the "locomotives" of Southern economies, which serves as the central catechism of the IMF and the northern governments which direct it, has been time and again disproved by the facts. It is simply false.
More competitiveness, more growth and more investment in Europe also imply, beyond the good intentions populating official discourse, more internal inequalities of all kinds, as much between individuals as between peoples and nations. More "salary moderation" is demanded, that is, a further opening in salary range, while solutions to the problem of employment are not offered. The Community has not managed to bring the number of unemployed below twelve million - not even in the most intense phase of the eighty's mini-boom, a boom universally recognized as unrepeatable. In the economic structure reached by Western countries, the problem of employment, or better put, of work, is today not solved by growth. This is another false idea.
Furthermore, continued economic growth and competitiveness in Europe means more consumption of energy and other resources and increased environmental deterioration, some of which inflicted within the European setting, the rest exported to the South or discharged over the global environment. Studies realized by their own European institutions in relation to key economic sectors such as transportation or energy are conclusive in this respect. The idea that conservation of the environment in underdeveloped countries is only possible through more development is, if imaginable, still more false than the earlier mentioned ones.
The conclusion would be distressing if, for some reason, that which European citizens needed more than anything were "growth", that is, the increase of production and consumption of goods and services, as much in monetary terms as in its physical and material reflection (which today continue to be strictly associated). But fortunately, this is not so.
It is difficult to understand precisely why a group of countries which count on an average income per person of twenty-thousand dollars (around fifteen-thousand in Spain) would need more "growth". Or, put in another way, what kinds, of actual social problems can these countries hope to be able to solve with still higher incomes, instead of confronting as of yet unsolved political and social structural transformations, problems indeed aggravated by such concerns.
The obsession for growth and development, their acceptance as "summum bonum" or universal panaceas, is one of the worst sicknesses of our era. It offers a justification for the continued abuses brought upon innumerable groups and communities by economic, political and social policies. It deflects the energies of social agents who should be concentrating on the resolution of real problems. The entire process of European construction, in particular the Maastrich Treaty and the programs working towards the culmination of the European Union in a few years, is an unmistakable example of this pathological obsession. The process can only exacerbate the problems which have been growing, offering as it does only bigger doses of the same medicines which have caused those problems.
If the peoples of Europe want to help themselves, finding solutions to their real problems, and to collaborate efficiently towards the resolution of global problems, they must find a way to leave behind, as soon as possible, the labyrinth of tunnels represented by overemphasis on growth and development. They have been losing themselves more deeply in this maze until now, with no exit in sight. The way out will clearly not be discovered following the road to the European Union; this will only lead more deeply into the darker parts of an economic labyrinth and towards social, cultural and ecological decline. Only by confronting its real problems from its own social and economic reality, its own historical and cultural personality, and its own territorial and political identity can Europe escape this maze.
The moment has arrived for the peoples of Europe to begin, from the point of autonomy and mutual respect, to discuss the establishment © among themselves and with other peoples of the world - of new forms of collaboration and new principles of political relation. These will be entirely distinct from and incompatible with those which have been imposed all along the process of European capitalist unification, a process which is anything but irreversible. This does not imply restarting the economic debate about protectionism, free commerce and the organization of competitive markets. It is a debate about the recuperation of goods and communal, collective resources, about the regeneration of local production and exchange, about respect for the rights of communities and peoples of Europe to a free and sovereign existence, about protection of the environment, about the defence of social and gender justice, and about the alliance between all of these struggles. It is a debate, in summary, about two political alternatives: to allow that control and power continue to accumulate in the hands of multi©national and European national elites, or to decisively work towards the recuperation of such power and control by the peoples of Europe and its communities.
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