Last week the United States gave its first response to the French and German proposal for a European army, in an interview by the US ambassador in Britain, Raymond Seitz.
Seitz was not amused. In a nontoo diplomatic way he told the Europeans that it was not on.
Why has this proposal come forwaro, ano wity are the rulenca is su hostile to it? The run up to December's Maastricht summit show the race for European monetary and poltical union is ac celerating.
New world order The basis for European capitalist Integration is the new shape of the 'word order. This is not so much a question of the collapse of the Stalinist states, but the decline of absolute US economic dominance. Today there are three contenders for interational economic supremacythe United States. Europe and Japan.
Undermined
After the second world war, the United States towered over the world economic and political scene. Butby acting as the motor force to rebuild the shattered European and Japanese economies. ward off the threat of 'communism'. the US undermined its own longterm postion.
While West Germany, the largest of the European economies, rebuit, Japan developed high technology industries based on a low-wage ganisation.
The long-term crisis of intemational capitalist proftability has hit US manufacturing industry particularty hard. Japan now equals the US in manufactured goods. But the Unted stakes sul nas dy ta tie didn The crisis in eastern Europe throws the three way inter-imperialist conflict into sharp relief. Japan is buying into US banking and real estate, as well as taking over manufac turing firms: there is a side of antJapanese chauvinism in the US.
To compete with the US and Japan, the ruling classes of Europe must go for economic integration. But economic integration, to be effective, requires common laws, and that means political integration.
As the Cut war showed. boltica and economic power are intimately linked with military power. Because of its overwhelming dominance militarily, the United States is able to partially compensate for its declining economic position.
Deadly dynamic
The idea of a Euro-army has a deadly dynamic. In all of preceding capitalist history inter-imperialist competition has led to war.
The rapid decline of the 'common enemy' - the military power of the USSR - puts in question all preced. the vital question is to maintain the framework of NATO. NATO has beon the key mechanism for maintaining the dominance of the United States in Europe for forty years. NATO is not just the co-ordination of national armies, but a poitical framework which links European domestic poitics to the US at every level Sinister The signiticance of the Gulf war was that it pointed the direction for a new revamped NATO under US leadership. This is an utterty sinister project - to swivel the gun turrets of NATO 'southwards", against the third The problem is precisely that the Europeans and the Japanese know exactly what the US is doing; but unti now the Europeans have feared a direct confrontaton with Hush and Baker. During the Gulf war the German government in particular gave cast-iron guarantees to the US that on all key aspects of miltary and security policy it would not go outside the NATO framework.
But already there is agreement to create a 10,000-strong European rapid deployment force. But wil it be inside, or outside of NATO controi? A compromise the US could accept is control by the Wester European Union, on which the US is repre sented.
The function of the deployment force is itself likely to be intervention in the third world. Over the past few weeks French and Belgian paratroopers have been imposing order in Zaire. It is a sign of things to come.
For the left, a Euro-army is in no way preferable to a NATO army. It is one more sign of the shape of an integrated capitalist Europe - an undemocratic fortress Europe' which offers nothing positive for the working class, immigrant workers, or the oppressed. The left must demand -no to NATO, no to European militarism!
Nov. 9, 1991
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