ource: FigaroVox 6/12/2018
author: Coraie Delaume
translation: doxa-louise
YELLOW VESTS: «Macron is tied hand and foot
by the European Union»
FIGAROVOS/OPINION - For Coralie Delaume, the demands of the
Gilets Jaunes may be quite legitimate, but no changes will be possible
without putting the workings of the European Union in question.
By the current terms of treaties, no member State is free to forge
independent economic and commercial policies, she explains.
Coralie Delaume is an essayist and has just published Le Couple
franco-allemand n’existe pas (Michalon, October 2018). She also
keeps a blog, since 2011, L’Arène nue.
Upping the SMIC (minimum wage) and retirement incomes, taxing very
large corporations, protecting French industry, ending government cut-backs
and reopening public services: these are the demands of the Gilets Jaunes
just published in the press. Re-establishing true democracy is also a recurrent demand.
Europe as an issue is notably absent from themes and slogans. Yet
none of the demands made explicit is possible within the current European
Union, in the Common Market and Eurozone, which create the framework
for national policies. National governments are finally little more than consenting
mid-ways of the EU, representatives satisfied with powerlessness.
The european Union is more than a mere international
organization
Democracy is impossible within the framework of the European Union
The European Union is more than a mere international organization. It is not
international but supranational. Jurists point out that the Court of Justice of the
communities has ‘constitutionalized the treaties’ by way of two decisions in 1963
and 1964. In other words, the Court has created a new legal order and laid the basis of protofederalism without consulting the peoples concerned - without even a notice -
of the coming into being of a quasi-Constitution.
The French were eventually consulted but... forty years later. The 2005 referendum
on the European Constitutional Treaty came down to asking voters to make legitimate
a posteriori a long standing situation. Which is one of the reasons why the French ‘no’
(and the Dutch ‘no’) were ignored, and why the text was re-introduced as the «Lisbon
Treaty». To make good on the election decision, one would have needed to admit that
one had validated a process of ‘furtive federalization’ for Europe, and gone back on part
of the road already travelled.
The European Parliament isn’t one
Where the quasi-constitutional transformation of treaties started early, the process
of removing democracy took the relay. Ending the requirement for unanimity within
the European Council, for example, aggravated matters. As the German jurist Dieter
Grimm has explained, this has effectively broken the ‘legitimacy chain’ between the
peoples and the Council wherein the essential link was national elected governments.
Given the end of unanimity, a State can very well see applied to itself a law which had
been explicitly rejected by one of the links of its own national will, even if the weight
of France within the Council grants it immunity from this particular outcome.
To counterbalance the ‘democratic deficit’ within the Community, the Treaty of Lisbon
has given more power to the European Parliament. There is here a problem: this Parliament
isn’t one. It cannot represent the European People (there aren’t any members) but makes
do with letting national representatives from twenty-eight States cohabit. Moreover, it
cannot be, even if it wished, the principle purveyor of Community Law. This role belongs
to the Court in Luxembourg, putting out directives in a steady stream, as jurisprudence and
without consulting with anyone. Finally, the European Parliament has no means of altering
the treaties even where these contain elements of economic policy. A left-wing or
sovereignty-leaning majority could be sent to Strasbourg and nothing would change.
Whatever happens at the 2019 European elections, the jurisprudence package made
up of the treaties and Court Judgements will continue to impose more free trade, more
austerity, more competition.
No reorientation of economic policy is possible within the framework of the Common
Market and the Euro
The various European treaties are the ‘economic constitution’ of Europe. Their over-riding
position explains why the economic policy coming out of France has been the same
since 1980, although the Head of State position has been held by men of quite different
ideas. As Michael Michéa has put it, we are dealing with ‘ever the same change’, a
succession which appears different but never is. Within the European Union, voting
never changes anything.This is why the ex-commissioner Vivian Reding could say: ‘One
needs to slowly but surely understand that there are no more domestic national policies.’
Within the European Union, voting never changes anything.
The governments of member countries possess very few instruments to forge
economic policy. No willed industrial policies are possible because the treaties
forbid ‘impeding competition’ with state intervention. No protectionist commercial
policy is possible because commercial policy is the ‘exclusive domain’ of the Union.
Nothing can be done on the exchange rate because this is looked after by the European
Central Bank. Finally, no budgetary policy is allowed because the countries within the
one currency are expected to use ‘convergence criteria’, specifically the infamous -
arbitrary - 3% public deficit rule. Moreover, since 2010 and within the calendar called
the ‘European Semester’, the Commission oversees meticulously the elaboration of
national budgets.
Given these operating conditions, national governments are left with only two tools:
tax policy and the ‘cost of labour’.
With respect to taxes, they generally choose to lighten those on easily mobile Capital
and augment these on social classes that cannot escape taxation. In 1986 was established
the principle of the ‘free circulation of capital’ within the Common Market.
since that time, Capital has been free to engage in veritable blackmail on every State
by threatening to move to a neighboring country. Member States are thus engaged in a
frenetic fiscal competition with some (Luxembourg, Ireland) opting to become fiscal
paradises and living off the possibilities for tax evasion they offer multinationals.
Remuneration guidelines and labour law are some of the favorite
themes of the supranational level
As for remuneration and labour law, these are some of the favorite
themes of the supranational level. To recognize this, one but needs to read the
framework documents incessantly produced by the European Commission,
from the ‘rules for employment’ to ‘annual overview of growth’ without forgetting
the ‘recomandations of the Council’ drafted every year in the context of the European
Semester. All of the changes to labour laws having been put forward in member
countries, from the Jobs Act in Italy to the El KHomri Law in France, were prescribed
in one or the other of these heavy documents.
Finally, the principles of ‘free movement of persons’ and ‘open provision of service’
within the common Market favor lower social coverage. Despite great differences in
salary levels between one country and the other, these liberties put all salaried employees
in Europe in competition one with the other. They make possible a whole series of practices one might call social dumping, the best known among these being recourse to
piece work. For the countries constrained by the Euro, this is all the more serious:
not being able to devalue their currency to make themselves more competitive, they
are forced to practice ‘internal devaluation’, hence to making salaries go down.
Why have a succession of French governments worked toward the building
of such an Europe?
The use of traditional Marxist categories helps us make sense of current events. If, as
Jérôme Sainte-Marie has argued, the Gilets Jaunes movement brings back to fashion
class conflict, the latter, in fact, had never disappeared. The Europe of markets and
currency is a class-based Europe. It will try to erode ceaselessly payment for work
and destroy all redistribution tools, in particular public services, arguing for ‘ openness to competition’ on the one hand, and ‘overseeing of public spending’ and ‘debt resorption’ on the other.
As this is often the case in History, this class politics works very well through an
‘occupation regime’ helping the governing class avoid responsibility and/ to give over
to someone stronger than they are responsibility in enforcing a certain Order.
Clearly occupation stricto sensu, by a foreign power having invaded the territory
militarily, is of course not possible, the post national lot of French elites has elaborated
modalities for a soft occupation. The ex-president of the Commission José Manuel
Barroso liked to say of the European Union that it was a’non imperial empire’, an
expression that properly suggests that the aggregation of territories to the Empire had
been the work of the economy and the law, and not by force. Once continental
unification achieved, the rules of the Community kick in to play the roles they need to,
that of exterior constraint chosen for a regimen of voluntary servitude.
To become masters of their destiny once again, the citizens of France need to
demand that national sovereignty be returned.
One of the most prominent slogans heard in the Gilets Jaunes demonstrations or
on the roundabouts is «Macron, resign!» Given current conditions, the sacrifice of
one man would be far from the mark. To become again masters of their destinies,
the French (and all peoples of Europe) must insist that the European playing cards
be reshuffled in a thorough fashion and that national sovereignty be returned, another
name for ‘the rights of peoples to decide’.
And one needn’t fear: the end of the European Union, a contingent set of rules and
institutions serving private interests, will not be the end of Europe, an old continent,
nor of the countries that make it up.
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