Europe – a miserably Elite Project.

The European project has always had a huge democratic deficit – it remains a project run by elites who privilege business interests and pay scant regard to the concerns of ordinary people. A small but recent example is the failure once again of European institutions to open the motor trade to competition, thereby flouting supposed EU trading principles and continuing the decades-long scandal of inflated UK vehicle prices. The arrogance of the Eurocrat elite is shown by the fact that the EU website home page already carries a map of the European Union which includes not just Hungary, the Czech Republic etc., but even Turkey with its appalling human rights record. The small matter that the Irish constitution makes any expansion into Eastern Europe dependent on a referendum which is still to be held is totally ignored.

Meanwhile, national governments which have done so little to address the underlying causes of economic migration from the third world are starting to get nervous as the contradictions of the European project grow acute, and the possibility of an electoral backlash looms. The planned 2004 extension of the EU into eastern Europe entails opening up the current borders of the EU to a large influx of labour, as well as facilitating outflows of investment (and jobs) to areas of cheap labour and low environmental and social protection in the east.

It is implausible that the EU will insist on standards there to match the rest of Europe: since when did the rest of Europe (and especially the UK under Thatcher and Blair) accept uniform cross-Europe standards on workers’ rights, for example? So why shouldn’t Poland, Estonia etc. equally go down the well-trodden path of derogations and subsidiarity? Western continental European unemployment rates are already high, and in the UK real unemployment is masked by schemes forcing workers into low-paid jobs.

Discontents can only grow more acute if jobs start moving to eastern Europe, especially from the UK which persists in a regime of light regulation of business matched by inadequate employee rights and welfare benefits.

Social Europe is supposed to be the Europe of a reliable repertoire of human rights and substantial benefit levels, to compensate workers for the instabilities of a single European market where investment and jobs leak away across porous state boundaries. But social Europe has always taken a very poor second place to the Europe of market capitalism, served by compliant, disempowered labour. The UK is particularly disadvantaged: UK governments from Thatcher to Blair have decried and blocked and watered down social Europe, and applied various derogations and legislative manoeuvres to reduce the rights and protections available to ordinary people.

The fact that there was no move to expel Britain from the EU for attacking workers’ rights, reducing benefits and deliberately creating unemployment during Mrs. Thatcher’s term of office confirms that the EU isn’t really about spreading social benefits at all. It’s about maximising opportunities for making money, and covering this with a mere pretence of a social policy for the victims of capital movements and the greater freedoms and privileges the EU accords to business. The Blair government has not significantly changed this position, as witness its shelving even the highly anodyne European Charter of Fundamental Rights.

No European state has dared to call a referendum on the proposal to expand of the European Union. Hardly any dared to call a referendum on entering the euro. Ordinary people are right to feel insecure, and experience gives them no reason to trust the EU to place social goods above the interests of capital. Widespread fears and concerns cannot be wished away or ignored, or sidelined by bringing charges of populism, which is merely a vacuous term of political abuse. If the public will as expressed in a referendum, for example, accords with the plans of the political class, that outcome is likely to be described as European democracy working well. If a referendum comes out against the political class (Denmark over entering the euro, Ireland over the Nice treaty) it is denounced as the triumph of populism - and the referendum is re-run until the voters do as they are told by their betters. If populism means that governments pursue policies which the majority of a population favour, isn’t that precisely what liberal democracies (mostly spuriously) purport to deliver? And what kind of democracy is it, anyway, when the only referenda which are never re-run are the ones which governments win?

The British political class, much of which supports UK entry into the euro, may well experience a rude shock if and when the UK euro referendum occurs. There is a tradition of using referenda less to pronounce judgments on their ostensible subjects than to express deep-seated political discontents.

There is a respectable case for building a strong European Union as a countervailing force against an increasingly irresponsible USA, and building up the euro to challenge the hegemony of destabilising dollar flows. This case is likely to be lost as a result of neglecting social Europe, allowing most of the key decisions on Europe to be taken over the heads of the people, and allowing European institutions to remain remote and unaccountable, and to deliver so few benefits to ordinary citizens.