MEP Esko Seppänen in the left youth
organisations´ meeting in Turku
21.2.2003
The most important redistribution of power in Europe
since World War II is now being discussed under the
auspices of the Convention for the Future of Europe. It
will take the form of a new constitution for the
European Union, which could be adopted as early as
December this year in Rome. The goal, in accordance with
the desire of the all-European political parties, is to
make the EU a federal state, a state of nation states.
The preparations are formally taking place in the
Convention, in which the governments and parliaments of
Member States and candidate countries, the European
Parliament and the Commission are represented.
The Convention is, however, non-representative, as
the vast majority of its members want the EU to become a
federal state.
EU critics, sceptics and realists have established a
“Forum for Democracy” that transcends national and
party boundaries. The forum is preparing an initiative
to keep the EU as a federation of independent states and
not to create a federal state as such. Of the 105
members of the Convention only 6, and a slightly larger
number of alternate members, are participating in this
work.
There is no other opposition against the
federalisation and militarisation of the union.
Although outwardly it may look as though the Convention
is preparing a draft constitution and that its members
are free to mould it as they please, this is actually an
illusion.
Given that EU decisions are rarely prepared where
they are claimed to have been prepared, it is hard to
believe that a constitutional convention could be free
to propose a more democratic distribution of power in
the EU. It is inconceivable that the large countries
will give up what they gained at Nice. The Nice Treaty
was their Coup d´Etat.
The constitution under preparation concerns the
EU’s jurisdiction and its tasks.
On the one hand there is the jurisdiction of the central
power and, on the other, the jurisdiction of the Member
States.
When the Member States and their democratic
decision-making bodies no longer have the power within
the Community, a decision will have to be made on
whether the distribution of power within the Union will
be developed according to the Community method or the
intergovernmental method.
The Community method means that decisions on
the future of the EU are made within the EU institutions.
This is the federal state method.
According to the Commission, the Community method
involves 1) the exclusive right to initiate legislation,
2) codecision procedure for all legislation, 3)
qualified majority decisions in all matters and 4)
monitoring and interpretation powers for the European
Court of Justice. The Member States’ right of veto in
legislation and important decisions is in complete
contradiction with the Community method.
The Commission wants its own position strengthened.
If it obtained extra powers they would come from the
Council and from national parliaments.
The Community method is essentially the power of the
civil servants, the eurocracy. However, in this kind of
supranational decision-making, the biggest loser is
national democracy.
We have to ask if the EU, in becoming the second
largest federal state in the world and potentially
having 27-28 member countries, is too big to be
democratically governed. Is democracy as we know it only
possible in national states, and where there is no
supra-national decision-making?
Previously, it was thought that the EU would become a
federal state only by the Community method, which is why
the federalists support this way of doing things.
The Intergovernmental method means that
decisions are ultimately made within member countries.
Clearly, the EU will not develop into a federal state
in the short term through one method or the other, but
through both methods. It is, however, certain that a
small country will not be able to stop the large
countries from doing as they please. This was
illustrated by the case of Ireland where the other
countries dismissed the “wrong” result of the Irish
national referendum.
Development towards a federal state is also taking
place via the formation of groups of states which are
taking the Union in a particular direction even though
not all the countries are involved. Proof of this is the
introduction of the federal state currency. Not all
countries have the euro, and neither are all countries
part of the common monetary policy of Euroland.
There is constructive abstention whereby
decisions are made in the EU but those in disagreement
do not exercise their right of veto.
There is enhanced cooperation whereby a
particular country group creates its own insider group;
i.e. a kind of avant-garde group with its own
decision-making bodies. EMU is an example of this, and
this approach to cooperation has also infiltrated
defence questions.
The federalisation of the EU through the
Franco-German inter-governmental method is the new
dimension in the discussion of the future EU.
The alternative to this proposal to create the
skeleton of a new type of federal state is not the
Community method, but the democratisation of the
intergovernmental method, which is based on
parliamentarianism: the right of parliaments to exert
control over their own governments.
The Convention represents the power of large
countries and their ability to dictate. Its working
method is from the top down.
Who is at the top?
Formally speaking, the Presidium is at the top, and it
has not representatives from all member countries. It
holds closed meetings which can have a major influence
on policy.
Subordinate to the Presidium is the Secretariat,
which has not representatives from all countries, and
which is said to be the place where the drafts of the
constitution are written.
It is also possible that the draft constitution will
be prepared within pro-Europe conservative and social
democratic parties and presented to the Convention in
the name of the representatives of those parties. This
would mean that the final result of the Convention would
be a compromise between these stances, and there would
be no ambiguity about the direction of the draft
constitution; i.e., the conservatives have openly stated
their aim of a federal state with its own constitution,
whereas the European social democrats are – less
openly – the most federal party group in the EU, with
tight European party discipline.
If the Convention is able to reach any conclusions,
one of the most likely is that foreign policy will be
communauterised. The process is, however, complicated.
Not a single one of the large countries that want to
speak on behalf of the EU as a whole seems ready to
relinquish control of its own foreign policy. Instead,
these large countries want to coordinate EU foreign
policy amongst themselves, without the smaller countries.
The draft constitution of the Convention is unlikely
to be able to specify clear lists of tasks for the
central power, or to categorise the tasks that will
remain under the jurisdiction of Member States. The EU
will still be governed by diversity for a long time to
come, and this Convention is unlikely to convert it into
the United States of Europe just yet.
The new constitution under discussion appears to
leave little room for military non-alignment.
Germany and France have proposed to militarise the
Union. A request that the 5th article (the mutual
security clause) of the Western European Union Treaty be
written into the constitution has been made in the
Convention working group on defence. The EU is being
made a "solidarity union" in the military
sense. It endangers the identity of non-aligned
countries. A non-aligned country can neither accept
militarisation of the Union nor the fact that this would
be written into the constitution.
In the short term the militarisation of the EU will
take place in cooperation with NATO. If the EU were to
become a European super state at some later stage, the
Americans would then have to be driven out of Europe.
Europe and America nonetheless share a common concern of
ensuring the sufficiency and availability of the world's
raw materials. This is the military fate that binds them
together.
In the Helsinki Summit in 1999 the EU Member States
committed themselves to being able to assemble by 2003 a
military force of 50,000-60,000 within 60 days and to
maintain it for a minimum of a year. Where did the
figure of 50,000-60,000 come from?
EU Member States have around two million soldiers at
arms. Of these, however, only one tenth are trained and
equipped so that they can be used in international (crisis
management) tasks. Of these 200,000 qualified troops,
only around 60,000 can be deployed at short notice. Thus
the number of Eurotroops available for crisis management
tasks was dictated by the total number of troops
available.
There is also ongoing process to restructure the
European defence industry as "strengthening the
European industrial and technological defence base".
It means: more arms, more precision arms, more arms
electronics and more military comnmunications.
Does any attack of the European army on another
country require a mandate from the international
community, i.e. the UN? The official interpretation is
that the UN mandate is not needed. And the EU’s crisis
management troops are not restricted by geographical
limitations: larger numbers of heavily armed troops
could be sent to incidents close by, whereas for more
distant operations fewer troops would be sent and for
less demanding tasks.
The documents of the Convention’s defence working
party state that the European Security and Defence
Policy (ESDP) makes it possible for the first time in
the existence of the European Union "to deploy
military forces to promote and defend its interests".
In other words the idea of the Euroarmy is to defend the
EU’s interests outside the EU’ borders.
It is possible that a national referendum will be the
desired way to decide on the EU constitution during the
final stages.
The possibilities are as follows: 1) EU-wide national
referendum and 2) national referendum in each Member
State.
Federalists want a single vote because this would
favour the countries with large populations.
Eurosceptics, however, want a national referendum
separately in each country as this enables small
countries to mobilise the people to defend their
interests by opposing a draft constitution approved by
the elite.
Democracy is the language and terminology of the time
when nation states were born. The nation state has
nurtured democracy, which was born of the rebellion of
the oppressed and developed into participation
orchestrated from above. Nation states can also
subjugate and be undemocratic, and in such cases there
should be the freedom to act against domination by the
state.
Democracy is not a system, and is certainly not a
system of capitalist control. Political or economic
democracy are not the trademarks of capitalism.
The economy is a realm of freedom, with no
restrictions on the wielding or flaunting of power. The
most undemocratic feature of the markets is that rights
are owned in the markets which close them off to others.
There is a need for anti-trust legislation to ensure
that new entrepreneurs can enter the market. This is
inhibited by supranational corporations obtaining
monopoly positions, backed up by all sorts of patents. A
monopoly is not democracy. Therefore small companies
require market protection against large corporations.
Democracy cannot be created out of thin air; it is
rooted in history. It is freedom from rule by one
doctrine, and it is not ordained from on high or by the
almighty. There is no absolute (single, correct)
democracy, nor is there any standard format. It is
interaction and roleplay by people: there are subjects
and objects of power. It is a struggle for power and it
is self-sustaining decision-making. It is contracts and
the peaceful resolution of disputes.
Lasting democracy cannot be produced from the top
down, nor does imported democracy work: imported
democracy violates historically rooted institutions and
may erode the sovereignty of its recipients. If order is
based on compulsion and violence, world democracy is
non-democracy. Force-fed democracy must not be used to
break up tried and trusted patterns of existence and
social bonds.
Democracy is national sovereignty. It is freedom from
external control and it is autonomy. It is the right to
restrict the wielding of power by others in one’s own
affairs.
There is no supranational state democracy. The greatest
obstacle to this is the lack of a common language and
culture. There are other obstacles too. If the EU
becomes a federal state, it will be a state without a
people.
An essential feature of national independence is an
identity, the distinguishing features of which have been
biological blood ties, tenancy of a regional area,
linguistic community and a shared history and culture. A
separate currency is another aspect of sovereignty, as
are military forces under independent control, unlike
NATO troops or a Euroarmy. National legal systems also
embody important collective historical experience.
Membership of a nation does not, however, require common
ethnicity. It can also be based on a common desire by
individuals for freedom, fraternity and equal
opportunities for all.
If the power of nation states is run down, it will be
supplanted by a new international order and a world
without frontiers for capital: globalisation. This is
unipolar rule. The USA will control – if necessary by
violence and illegally – all realms: the earth, the
sea, space and information.
Democracy is voluntary participation by the people in
power. It is self-government by the members of a
community, but mere autonomy is not democracy. Democracy
means autonomy with its own set of rules and
conflict-resolution procedures.
Full autonomy is not possible in a federal state that
imposes shackles on national democracy by transferring
legislative and/or executive power to the centre. Since
the EU – or Europe – is not a nation, it cannot be
governed with people´s power but supranationally. The
EU, therefore, is not democratic, and power ought not to
be handed over to this supranational federation in the
hope that once it has power it will become democratic. A
superpower is being created whose power is based on
taking diversity and forcing it into a standardised
mould. This will require powerful rule from the centre,
and will mean a departure from self-government by
nations and citizens. The EU’s central power is the
ethos of a new political elite: federalist hegemony.
By its nature, socialism is democracy: political
liberalism for all and markets that are free of the
power of monopolies. Socialism is also communality: the
obligation to care for one’s fellow human beings.
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