Socialist View (Spring 2008) - The Lisbon Treaty

Ireland is the only one of the 27 member States of the European Union which is holding a Referendum on the EU Lisbon Treaty. The vote will probably be in late May or early June. Former TD Joe Higgins looks at the real agenda behind this treaty and the impplications for working class people. In this feature he examines the impact of the Lisbon Treaty on three important areas of the EU - economic policy, foreign policy/ militarisation and workers’ rights.

The Lisbon Treaty referendum is not due to the democratic credentials of the Fianna Fail dominated government, but results from a court case in 1987, taken by a private citizen, Raymond Crotty . He was vindicated in his claim that The Single European Act pushed through by a Fine Gael/Labour coalition government needed to be ratified in a referendum. The Court held that any EU Treaty that might impact on the Irish Constitution should be put to the people. The Lisbon Treaty follows on the rejection of the proposed EU Constitution which was defeated in referenda in France and Holland in 2005. Working class people in both countries rejected the Constitution because of the further intensification of neo-liberal policies implied, following on from extensive privatisation of public enterprises and attacks on workers’ rights such as pension entitlements already attempted by their governments.

Lisbon, in fact, contains most of the provisions which were in the proposed Constitution. Some constitutional trappings were dropped for cosmetic reasons. The fact that this new treaty is not being put to a vote of the people in France or Holland reflects the fear of their governments that it would be defeated again and is symptomatic of the deep cynicism which characterises the behaviour of the political establishment despite the EU boast that it is a model of democracy.

Competition and liberalisation

The European Union is now a major economic power with a population of just under 500 million. The major corporations that dominate the economies of the EU member states are household names. Royal Dutch Shell, Siemens, Total and Tesco are but a few of the more familiar ones.

Shell is known around the world for its massive profits and its ruthless approach to making and maintaining those profits. Siemens, a German based technology giant, in 2006 had a turnover of nearly US$111 billion, profits of over $4 billion and employed 472,500 workers, equivalent to almost a quarter of the total workforce in the Republic of Ireland. The major EU based corporations are big players, not just in Europe, but around the world with subsidiaries in every continent. Because of their economic power they carry enormous political clout with the EU Commission and EU governments They drive the right-wing neo liberal agenda that is being pushed by the Commission and by all the major political parties within the EU.

From its very inception with The Treaty of Rome in 1957, the entity that eventually became today’s European Union - was about developing the capitalist market with big business at its heart. An important aspect of this was extending the possibilities for private corporations to extend their power within Europe. This meant a major push to privatise state-owned enterprises and facilitate big business moving in to take over public services. The Lisbon Treaty gives a further significant push to this process by increasing the pressure for “competition” and “liberalisation.” These are code words for the right of the major corporations to muscle in on public services and transform them into “for profit” enterprises from which they can make a financial killing.

A Protocol attached to Lisbon states, “The internal market as set out in Article 2 includes a system ensuring that competition is not distorted.” Paragraph 158 of the Treaty itself calls for “the achievement of uniformity in measures of liberalisation.” “Ensuring that competition is not distorted” and “liberalisation” are code words for the undermining of public services and their privatisation. This is achieved by hiving off to the corporate sector profitable parts of a particular public service, with serious consequences for the integrity of what remains. This is what is planned for the postal service in this state. From 2011 private firms will be allowed in to provide postal delivery services in competition with An Post, courtesy of an EU Directive. But does anybody think for a minute that private companies, including multinational players, will be delivering letters to individual houses and villages on the slopes of Errigal or Mount Brandon?

They will cherrypick the most lucrative parts of the service where the biggest profit can be made and leave the social obligations to An Post, with very serious consequences for many communities, especially in rural areas. As Nick Wells, Chief Executive Officer of TNT Mails UK, patronisingly put it when they entered the “liberalised” British postal services, “Us handling your granny’s postcard is unlikely.” With “liberalisation” of the refuse disposal service, we now have private operators entering the most densely populated areas of Dublin, offering a service that may be initially cheaper than the local authority service. They do this without having to provide the full range of services that an integrated waste management systems demands. Naturally if the local authorities withdrew from these routes, the private operators’ prices would sharply increase. Incidentally, the Socialist Party warned about all this in advance when we fought the new stealth tax, called bin charges, which were imposed on householders in Dublin in 2002.

The powerful European based corporations have already made huge headway in extending their operations and increasing their profits. In Ireland, for example, the French based Veolia corporation has extensive involvement in crucial areas of life. Veolia, worldwide, had a turnover of $36 billion in 2006 with 300,000 workers. It can be readily seen how privatisation of public services is a key strategy for this company. Veolia has the contract to run the Luas tram service in Dublin. It is extending its waste management operations and has won several “design, build and operate” contracts for water supply from local authorities. Undoubtedly, it would be a major player if water services were completely privatised in this country, as happened in England, where like companies make massive profits.

A very strong attempt was made in the mid-nineties to extend water charges to households in the Dublin area in the 1990s. This was stoutly resisted by a mass boycott coordinated by a powerful community campaign in which the Socialist Party played a major role and which obliged the government to abolish the charges nationwide in 1996. Were it not for this, most likely water services would have been privatised in the same way as the refuse service in most local authority areas. What this would mean was spelled out by the Minister for Education, Mary Hanafin, when she recently stated that, if water charges had remained each household would now be obliged to pay up to ?700 per year. The most far reaching economic amendments in the Lisbon Treaty concern the future of our health and education services. Already the Fianna Fail/Green Party/Progressive Democrat government has given huge tax breaks to speculators to build “for profit” hospitals and now public lands beside existing public hospitals are being handed over to them for this. Few doubt that the private entities will cherrypick those parts of the service where profits can be made, while leaving the public hospitals to deal with those patients and conditions where there is no profit to be made.

This facilitation of private corporations moving into health care is being sanctioned by the Irish government, reflecting its right wing agenda. If Lisbon is ratified, however, all member states could be obliged to open up their health services to privateers. The EU Commission negotiates international trade agreements with bodies such as the World Trade Organisation. The Commission is dominated by a neo-liberal and pro-privatisation agenda and reflects the thinking of EU big business lobbies such as the European Roundtable of Industrialists, which acts as a concerted campaign group for many of the most powerful EU companies.

According to the the Lisbon Treaty, should the Commission negotiate agreements which would require public services such as health and education to be opened up to private corporations within the EU, no individual member state could exercise a veto except “where these agreements risk seriously disturbing the national organisation of such services and prejudicing the responsibility of Member States to deliver them.” But of course the EU Commission and many right-wing governments do not believe that privatisation causes such problems. The fact that trade union leaders support these provisions show just how far they have gone in the acceptance of a market dominated by multinational corporations.

Militarisation and war

Another key plank of the Lisbon Treaty is to equip the European Union with a foreign policy structure and a military wing which will add weight to its economic power outside the borders of the EU. EU big business and its political representatives believe it is imperative that they should be able to stride around the world stage on an equal footing with the United States. They are very concerned also about the rise of China as a major world power. China is conducting an aggressive trade policy around the world and especially in Africa. It is buying up raw materials including oil at an enormous rate, and increasingly is being seen as a rival both for primary products and markets.

European big business and its political elite believe that the Common Foreign and Security Policy backed up by an EU army will significantly strengthen its position in the economic and political struggles of the future. It is for this reason that Lisbon demands an intensification of military spending by member states. Paragraph 49 states baldly; “Member States shall undertake progressively to improve their military capabilities.” It then goes on to elaborate what the already established European Defence Agency must do to promote the armaments industry in the European Union: “The [European Defence] Agency in the field of defence capabilities development, research, acquisition and armaments shall ... contribute to ... implementing any measures needed to strengthen the industrial and technological base of the defence sector, shall participate in defining a European capabilities and armaments policy.”

There is already a very significant armaments industry in the EU. The Stockholm International Peace Research Institute 2007 Yearbook reports that, excluding China, of the one hundred largest arms producing companies in the world, 32 European companies account for 29% of sales amounting to ?56 billion. Among the biggest arms producers are British Aerospace, Finmeccanica of Italy and the EADS group based in Germany, France and Spain. Sweden, despite its boast of being a strong neutral state, also has a large arms industry. This “military industrial complex” wields huge power with the EU Commission and EU governments. On 15 February 2003, over 100,000 people marched on the streets of Dublin against the threatened invasion of Iraq and against the use of Shannon Airport to assist that invasion. Worldwide, millions similarly demonstrated. These demonstrations made a powerful statement, saying that super powers don’t have a right to trample over other countries in pursuit of their strategic interests – oil and control of the Middle East in the case of the Iraq invasion.

Very many Irish people believe it obscene that massive resources should be put into weapons spending each year. That thousands of scientists and hundreds of thousands of industrial workers should be exclusively engaged in the research, design and manufacture of ever more horrific weapons of mass destruction. The Lisbon Treaty flies in the face of this anti-war sentiment in its militarisation strategy. Lisbon introduces a very new and sinister provision relating to how military actions should be conducted. Essentially it says that European Heads of State, acting unanimously, shall “identify the Union’s strategic interests, determine the objectives of and define general guidelines for the common foreign and security policy.”

Following on from this the Council of Ministers “may entrust the execution of a task, within the Union framework, to a group of member States in order to protect the Union’s values and serve its interests.” That group of member states is formed as follows; “Those Member States whose military capabilities fulfil higher criteria and which have more binding commitments to one another in this area with a view to the most demanding missions shall establish permanent structured cooperation within the Union framework.” Among the tasks envisaged are, “joint disarmament operations ... military advice and assistance tasks, ... tasks of combat forces in crisis management, including peacemaking and post conflict stabilisation. All these tasks may contribute to the fight against terrorism, including by supporting third countries in combating terrorism in their territories.”

This group of member states with bigger military capabilities would in effect be an internal military alliance. Their mode of operation is provided for in rules related to what is called “permanent enhanced cooperation” in the Lisbon Treaty. The rules provide for decision making relating to military actions that might be undertaken by this group on behalf of the EU to be confined to those states. This is clearly intended to remove the burden of states whose populations might demand their governments to strongly oppose a particular action, that the EU majority might sanction. The foreign policy chapter in the Lisbon Treaty is filled with high sounding ideals. Paragraph 24 states: “The union’s external action on the international scene shall be guided by ... democracy, the rule of law ... human rights and fundamental freedoms, respect of human dignity, the principles of equality and solidarity...” Similarly the United States Constitution speaks of establishing justice and securing the blessings of liberty. Unfortunately this hasn’t stopped US governments from supporting the most repulsive dictatorships around the world. Nor did it stop the Bush administration invading Iraq. As we know that invasion was carried out in the name of liberty.

The supporters of the “Yes” campaign get very exercised when suspicions are raised about the military aspects of the Lisbon Treaty. They counter that the EU is a “project for peace” and could never be involved in something like the invasion and occupation of Iraq. This is wishful thinking of course. Big business interests in the EU are every bit as ruthless and greedy as their American counterparts, and their political representatives are as willing to be their tools. There is no doubt that if a situation arose in the future where significant economic or political interests were at stake, the EU establishment would be quite willing to use military force outside its borders. The Lisbon Treaty provides for the EU Heads of State selecting a President who can serve for a maximum of five years. “The President ... shall ensure the external representation of the Union on issues concerning the common foreign and security policy.”

Former British Prime Minister and co-leader of the criminal invasion of Iraq, Tony Blair, is being tipped as one possible candidate to be the first President of the EU Council. It is not too difficult to envisage a scenario where Blair and a group of the more military powerful EU states would intervene in an outside conflict and conduct, say, an Iraq like operation (fifteen EU states participated individually in that occupation.) The supporters of the Lisbon Treaty make a big play of the fact that Ireland is a “neutral” country and could not be forced into any military operation in which it did not want to participate. Of course it is an utterly sham neutrality that assists a million US troops to use Shannon Airport to go to and from the occupation of an invaded country as the Irish government has done.

However, the Lisbon Treaty fatally undermines any claim to neutrality, because it explicitly demands an end to any concept of an independent foreign policy that differs from that pursued by a majority of governments in the Union. Lisbon dictates that Ireland support such a policy. “The Member States shall support the Union’s external and security policy actively and unreservedly in a spirit of loyalty and mutual solidarity and shall comply with the Union’s action in this area” (Para. 27). “The diplomatic missions of Member States ... in third countries and international organisations shall cooperate and shall contribute to formulating and implementing the common approach”. This has really serious implications for the Irish people and indeed for public servants who represent this country in foreign embassies and diplomatic missions, as well as for Irish aid workers in poorer countries. We would be seen as part of a military adventure even though a big majority of the Irish people could be strongly opposed. The fact that the Green Party supports these very far-reaching plans for militarisation shows just how politically degenerate that party has become in government with the parties of big business in this state.

Fundamental rights?

The Lisbon Treaty proposes to give the Charter of Fundamental Rights the same legal standing as the main treaties which govern the EU. The Charter sets out many rights which citizens in the European Union should enjoy. These include freedom of expression, assembly and association, the freedom to conduct a business and the right to free collective bargaining.

The Labour Party and trade union leaders are attempting to justify their support for the Treaty because the Charter is to be formally incorporated in EU law. They are trying to give the impression that if Lisbon is passed, then exploitation of workers who are paid a lower rate than those negotiated by trade unions for particular industries would be illegal. This is utterly untrue and even a glance at the Charter itself will bear this out. Chapter VII of the Charter makes quite clear that limitations can be placed on these rights: “... limitations may be made only if they are necessary and genuinely meet objectives of general interest recognised by the Union or the need to protect the rights and freedoms of others.” It further states, “ rights recognised by this Chapter which are based on the Community Treaties or the Treaty on European union shall be exercised under the conditions and within the limits defined by those treaties.”

What this amounts to is that some fundamental rights are not absolutely fundamental at all and can be overridden by other provisions of the EU treaties. The “objectives of general interest” referred to includes the rights of companies to engage in trade with no “distortion in competition,” while the “rights and freedom of others” includes the right of business to make profits. The European Court of Justice (ECJ) has made it abundantly clear in various cases that it has ruled on that workers” “fundamental rights” take second place to the rights of business to trade and make profits. The latest example of this is the ECJ judgement in the Laval Case given on 18 December 2007. This case originated when Swedish construction unions picketed a construction site where a school was being built by the Laval company from Latvia because the company was not paying the rate of pay negotiated by those unions with Swedish bosses.

The Court ruled that Laval did not have to observe the trade union negotiated rate of pay for the industry. All it was bound by was the legal hourly rate of pay if there were no legally binding agreements for a particular industry. The Court based this judgement on the freedom for companies to provide services enshrined in EU treaties. It is very clear, however, that the right of business to trade profitably, even if this involves blatant exploitation, is put before the right of workers to defend decent wages and working conditions. This ruling gives legal underpinning to, for example, the employment of agency workers in Ireland who can be required to do the same, or even more onerous, work as permanent colleagues for much less wages. In these cases the Charter of Fundamental Rights entitles workers to the national minimum wage of ?8.65 an hour – nothing more. And this minimum wage is already in Irish law. The harsh reality, and the truth, is that putting the Charter of Fundamental Rights formally into EU law changes nothing from before.

For a democratic socialist Europe

The debate on the Lisbon Treaty will provide an invaluable opportunity for exposing the right-wing, pro-big business agenda of the EU elite and the utter bankruptcy of the trade union leadership which supports it. In the course of the debate, the Socialist Party will show that its opposition to Lisbon is not based on narrow nationalist grounds and will outline its alternative of a Europe where workers democratically control the major resources and reorganise society for the benefit of the big majority rather than for the super-profits of the corporate few. That would be a democratic, socialist Europe where the arms industries would be transformed into an undertaking to help resolve the acute problems of our epoch, such as environmental degradation and address crucial issues such as the eradication of disease and the supply of clean water to every individual in every continent.