One Europe or Many Europes: Under Construction or Deconstruction?

Add together Europe’s entire working-class population and its entire GDP (gross domestic product) and you will see that it is the most powerful economy in the world. We are told that even if the European project were thought up in Washington at the beginning, it was soon to become a working reality, allowing Europe to be on equal footing with the United States and to assert itself as having the gravitational pull within the world system.

This argument is not logical, simply because the nation-states associated with the European Union (EU) continue to be founded on national capitalisms which when put together are more competitive than they are complementary, or at least, are only complementary in unequal terms; that is to say, only if the weakest play­ers submit to whatever is dictated by the strongest player.

The European Constitution does not allow the EU to go beyond its current set­up; it is not possible to move towards a ‘confederal’ and multinational ‘European state’. This set-up has done nothing more than ratify the desiderata of the national capitalist monopolies. Apeldoor was right in 2002 when he said that the European Round Table of Industrialists had practically drafted the constitution without con­sulting any elected bodies (Carroll, ibid: 155).

And yet the strategies employed by European monopoly-holders lean on a con­sensus with only one objective: to make it impossible for the elected authorities to question the exclusive domination of said monopoly-holders (as Giscard d’Estaing confessed ‘to make socialism an illegal objective’). The consensus thereby halts the progression towards a transnational state, if it were possible, despite the diver­sity of national European bodies.

The euro crisis has shattered this reality and brought to light the irregularities that characterise the European construction. Amongst the reasons I gave for ‘the impossible management of the euro’, I emphasised Germany’s objective to ‘domi­nate Europe’. Just as our Greek friends I mentioned in my analysis may recall, Germany’s objective is to achieve through economic means what they failed to achieve twice through military conquests: a ‘German Europe’.

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