Brussels’ sprouts

 

We want you, Social Union!

 

 

The neoliberal offensive is already running. Not only, but with particular fervency, also in Europe. The most recent and maybe one of the most salient examples of that is the “restructuring” at Airbus that threatens to cost thousands of jobs in Great Britain, Spain, France and Germany. But just as significant as the EADS policies is the reaction of the concerned: Of course, people protest and strike, however, they’d rather stay in their own country and act independently from one another. The greeting notes exchanged on the occasion seem like a part of protocol only.

 

Europe-wide resistance, in particular of the Left forces against neoliberalism and neoliberal EU policies, is urgently required and must become significantly stronger, publicly effective and sustainable. However, it must also be linked with constructive, social and democratic alternatives. No political force could be more pro-European today than the Left if it were to conduct the struggle for a social orientation of the EU not only in a verbal way. For that purpose, it must face the conditions and the question, whether it wants continued integration, what kind of integration it wants, what answers it has to the grave challenges. Explicitly and implicitly, there exist, also among the German Left, anti-European positions that are defended in part with arguments to be taken seriously.

 

I share the criticism of EU-European reality: of the dominance of market radicalism, of the cutting-off towards the South, the restriction of citizens’ and human rights, of the deficit in democracy, of the power politics and the military ambitions in international relations and the extremely underdeveloped readiness to redirect European foreign policies towards the strengthening of the UN and international law. The disintegration and renewed nationalisation, in the meantime no longer quite inconceivable, and a secret joy of part of Left over the failure of the EU are no responsible alternatives. Because at the end, there would also stand a neoliberal and socially destructive, Europe-wide free trade zone that, in distinction from the EU, however, would offer not only difficult and inadequate, but no democratic and social possibilities for fashioning things at all any longer.

 

If the Left wants to effectively oppose the destruction of social security and justice in the nation-states, it must at the same time step in for social cohesion and solidarity in the EU, for a different European internal market policy, for a reform of the Maastricht pact for stability and growth, for the change in the monetary policy of the European Central Bank, for a re-regulation of the world financial system as well as for European standards for entrepreneurial taxes, wages, social benefits, trade union rights etc.

 

The struggles for a social alternative and for a unified Europe are inseparably linked with one another in this respect. The deep crisis of European integration is at the same time the chance for its fundamental renewal. In the final analysis, continued European integration is only possible if it ushers in an employment and social union. The Left has to face up to this challenge – as it did also this week-end at the conference of the Rosa-Luxemburg-Foundation and the left fraction in the European Parliament in Berlin.

 

The former campaign head of the PDS, among other things, is currently a deputy of the Left Party in the European Parliament.