What to do with the EU?

To most on the revolutionary left it’s seen as remote, undemocratic and a vehicle for international capital. The European Union project has been under way in one form or other for 60 years, yet it still inspires loathing across the political spectrum. For leftists it stands as a barrier to transformation of the socio-economic order through its insistence on “free” markets and restraint of state intervention, and as an enemy of the world’s poor through its featherbedding of European big business at the expense of progressive reform of the international trading and financial system.

To condemnation of the Union’s economic bias and perceived democratic deficit, critics add the defence of national independence against a remote supranational authority remote from the lives and interests of workers. The demand for national sovereignty can certainly be progressive, but is this the case among the imperialist powers and reactionary statelets of today’s Europe? The EU is inevitably problematical for any advocate of revolution which is naturally easier to embark on at national level than across an economic union of 500 million people. But complaints of an over-powerful multi-ethnic "superstate" and alienation of national authority hardly chime with the case for wholesale socialisation and amity of peoples. Nor have its critics come up with much in the way of evidence that the restoration of unlimited sovereignty to national regimes would offer an effective advance for workers in the event that the hoped-for socialist revolution doesn’t come off.

Those who wish an end to EU participation need first to demonstrate that its peoples would really be better off outside a project that’s undoubtedly raised living conditions in its member countries and provided a counter (albeit a grossly flawed and often ineffectual one) to some of the worst excesses of national elites locally and US neoliberalism internationally. I want a unitary socialist Republic of Europe as a stepping-stone to its eventual dissolution in a true global commonwealth: if doing away now with the present EU is a prerequisite to getting there, then so be it. But denunciation of “superstates” or lamenting the alienation of bourgeois power from its national citadels merely lends credence to the claims of national chauvinists and local bourgeois kleptocracies. Reluctance to reject the EU doesn't mean that we stop demanding a stronger parliament and more accountable executive, or that we accept its right to veto progress at national level. But until advocates of withdrawal or dismemberment can convince me its nationals are really better off outside or that a weakened or abolished EU would really be a good thing for the world given the likelihood in its absence of heightened US paramountcy, then for now I’ll take my chances with Brussels.