WORKERS across Europe are linking up to confront the austerity of the Maastricht criteria: but there are those in the British trade unions and Labour Party who argue for a different approach.
From the right comes the reformist argument that the "Social Chapter" of Maastricht, which Robin Cook has made great play of signing on behalf of the new Labour government - while repealing none of Thatcher's brutal anti-union laws - offers workers a significant improvement in employment rights and working conditions.
Trade union bureaucrats who years ago gave up any perspective of fighting against British employers for decent pay and conditions have implied that these things might be achieved through the back door of economic and political integration, and that compliance with Maastricht is the price to be paid for So instead of seeking crumbs from the bosses' table, we are now being urged to wait for scraps of paper from Brussels.
Others, like the TUC (in common with the CBI) go further, and tell us that any improvement in workers' living standards has to be linked to a future expansion of capitalism, which in turn is supposedly to be ushered in by the launch of the Euro.
Reluctant to admit their real motives, a cowardiy refusal to fight the employers or the government in defence of workers' interests, many of these bureaucrats shelter behind the claim that action against Maastricht - or any opposition to the further integration of the EU - is somehow "nationalistic" or Little England" in approach.
Unfortunately for these Euro-reformists, far from heralding expansion and prosperity, the laws of the capitalist market, spurred on by the austerity packages required for most EU states to meet the Maastricht convergence criteria for the single currency, are leading to a full-scale Thatcherite offensive against jobs, wages and welfare rights throughout the continent. Renault workers were the first to see the flimsy protection of the Social Chapter contemptuously torn up by a management hell-bent on ensuring European car plants match the levels of exploitation achieved in Britain after 18 years of Tory rule. German miners, too have had to resort to old-fashioned class action rather than Euro-laws to defend their jobs.
The spread of unemployment across Europe - and the accompanying onslaught on benefits and on welfare state provision - give little comfort to those who argue that the Euro wilf open up a new golden age of benevolent capitalist expansion.
But there are those on the left, too, who stand back, arguing that Maastricht is an irrelevance, and that even if it were not for the single currency the capitalist class would in any event be attacking workers throughout Europe. The key issue, they tell us, is that during the Thatcher years the British working class allowed the bosses to cut real wages and cut their contributions to pensions and welfare benefits.
Of course there is a degree of truth in this. The fight against Maastricht should not be allowed to divert from the fight against national capitalists and capitalist
WELKOM IN MET EUROPA VAN DE VRIE CONURRENTTE HEYMAN "Welcome to the Europe of free competition"
Instead of seeking crumbs from the bosses' table, we are now being urged to wait for scraps of paper from Brussels.
governments which are attacking the working class.
But the problem of such a simplistic "class struggle in each country" approach is that it ignores the new, concerted onslaught being waged by big business throughout Europe, driven on by the deadlines and criteria of Maastricht. Each capitalist nation-state is urging the others along, with the goal of meeting Maastricht's 1999 deadline.
This is turn gives a material incentive, an urgent need for the working class movement to respond in kind by synchronising and co-ordinating its resistance on a continental level to defend its jobs, wages and welfare services. Those who minimise the significance of Maastricht as a motor force of the current bosses' offensive also ignore the fact that if the Euro is established, along with a European Bank policing the actions of member states, the scope to force concessions or socialist policies at national level from any genuinely left wing government is virtually non-existent.
While leftists who ignore Maastricht denounce the "nationalism" of those fighting back, they have no answer to the fact that the oppressive power of an unelected central bank would create new national divisions and conflicts between member states. New demands for self-determination, for democratic rights could easily emerge from areas suffering the heaviest austerity at the hand of the new European Central Bank. The danger is that these new tensions could take a reactionary, nationalist turn, offering scope for right wing and fascist parties which trade on the divisions and defeats suffered by the workers' As millions of workers are becoming painfully aware, with cherished pension rights, jobs and living standards under attack, the Maastricht process is driving forward a continental offensive.
If workers throughout the EU are not to be driven down to the conditions imposed by Tory rule in Britain - and then progressively further in the name of competition with low-wage economies world-wide - they must unite in common struggle.
The fight is not to defend the pound, the mark or the franc, or even against the concept of a single currency: it is against the concerted effort of Europe's bankers to solve their crisis - the crisis of their rotten capitalist system - at our The only genuinely "social Europe" will be one in which the wealth and the means of production are socially owned and democratically controlled by Europe's workers. That's what we're fighting for.
Long countdown to the single currency • December 1991: Maastricht • December 1995: Madrid Summit agrees to create single Summit confirms 1999 as target currency in 1999. Tory government start date for monetary union and insists on right to "opt out" of single currency.
Social Chapter, and out of single Treaty).
• November 1996: Tony Blair currency.
promises Labour would hold a • September 16 1992: "Black referendum before joining single Wednesday": Britain withdraws currency.
from the Exchange Rate • December 1996: Dublin meeting Mechanism having lost £18 billion in reserves. of heads of state again confirms 1999 start date for single currency • January 1993: Maastricht and adopts far-reaching economic Treaty comes into force. Maastricht "stability pact".
Bill passed by Commons in May. • June 1997: Amsterdam Summit.
The fight is not to defend the pound, the mark or the franc, or even against the concept of a single currency:
it is against the concerted effort of Europe's bankers to solve their crisis - the crisis of their rotten capitalist system - at our expense.
Not dealing directly with single currency issue but with greater political integration, with hopes of new "Maastricht 2" (Amsterdam • Spring 1998: decisions must be made on which EU countries will join single currency, based on their performance against Maastricht criteria in 1997.
• 2002: Scheduled date for circulation of Euro notes and coins in participating countries.