What comes after the European Union?

  Third international Forum

16-18 September – Chianciano Terme, Siena, Italy

The betrayal of its self-proclaimed principles of justice, fraternity, freedom, cooperation, solidarity and peace by the institutions of the European Union appeared clearly in occasion of the recently signed treaties with the United Kingdom and Turkey. The mask has fallen and the real nature of the EU has appeared in front of the public.

During its formation, only a little minority denounced the absurdity of imposing a common currency and common institutions on such different economic areas and societies. The monetary regime is de facto based on the monopoly of money emission by a supranational, hyper-financialized system that speculates against the states and the peoples.

Though what may seem absurd has its own rationality: the demolition of national states corresponds to the convergent interests of the different bourgeoisies and first of all of the big financial and industrial transnational corporations, since a long time acting together.

The europeist narrative tries to hide the neo-liberal ideology (which is the essence written in the Union treaties) which states that any political intervention into the market is unacceptable. All obstacles against the dictatorship of capital over labour have been dismantled; no restriction should limit the free movement of capital. Public propriety has to be privatised.

The majority of the European left is guilty for having qualified this reactionary construction as progressive and having justified it. It was an outrageous betrayal of the interests and aspirations of the popular classes. It was like a second “4th of August”1 committed in the name of neo-liberal globalisation cynically sold as being something internationalist.

The European Union nearly imploded under the blows of the financial storm coming from the United States. The collapse could only be prevented through emergency measures with enormous social costs, a load that has to be carried by the working class and the peoples of the so-called “PIGS”2 and/or “peripheral” states.

The peoples tried to resist the social massacre in different ways, with big mobilisations and protests, by polls, giving birth to new movements and political parties. These new movements and parties, sometimes without clear ideological commitment, often transversal and socially heterogeneous, not only express the rejection of social cuts and austerity policies, of the neo-liberal mechanism of extortion and fraud, but also the aspiration to regain the lost or betrayed national and popular sovereignty.

The European rescue packages in form of austerity measures which are still being applied in the member states, have destructive effects.

Indeed, the ongoing development shows that the European Union and the Euro are in a dissolution process. The attempts of the ruling classes to avoid this dissolution can only extend the agony of the EU. The end of the European Union is inexorable. The pro-EU elite, increasingly challenged by the people, will have to give way to political and social forces standing up for change. These will be called tomorrow to lead the nations that have regained their sovereignty. These forces have different class character and pursue different, sometimes even opposing aims. Whereas in some countries reactionary and xenophobic right wing parties are growing (some of them even more liberal and antidemocratic than the ones ruling now), in other countries political mass movements strive for the restoration of democracy and the reduction of inequalities. With these movements it’s possible to build a united front in order to break the European “prison”, re-establish democracy and social justice. Each people can thereby regain its sovereignty and independence.

We know: liberation will not be easy. We all have seen in which way in Greece the state has been robbed of its sovereignty and the people transformed into a mass of individuals without any rights. The neo-liberal supranational institutions can indeed be labeled as social terrorists.

The peoples need courageous political parties with clear ideas and goals, the opposite of Syriza. They will not be able to liberate themselves unless the process of democratic revolution is followed until the end. Any failure of this attempt in the frame of the current crisis of neo-liberal globalization and the disintegration of the European Union and the Euro could easily result in an upcoming new barbarism.
The Third International Forum will open a place for discussion among different democratic forces. This should contribute to the development of a new common strategy as a basis for an internationalist alliance among peoples and nations on the common ground of exiting the Euro zone, the European Union and NATO. Facing neo-liberal globalization we need a process of deglobalization to be conceptualized and put into practice in each of our countries.

All those who want to contribute to this great task are invited to participate in the Third International Forum.

European Coordination against the Euro
• Antikapitalistische Linke Nordrhein-Westfalen, Germany
• EPAM, Greece
• Euroexit Personenkomitee gegen Sozialabbau, Austria
• Initiative for a Communist Left, Greece
• Manifiesto Socialismo 21, Spain
• P101, Movimento di liberazione popolare, Italy
• Pardem, Parti de la démondialisation, France
• Salir del Euro, Spain

1 The 4th of August 1914 Social Democracy betrayed the Principle of defending peace by voting in favour of the fratricidal war among the European peoples.
2 PIGS is the abbreviation first used in 2008 by journalists for the following four countries of the EU: Portugal, Ireland, Greece and Spain.