MAASTRICHT is a break with the previous economic process. It goes beyond harmonisation to deregulation.
Therefore one can no longer speak of continuity within a co.
herent economic project.
Unification responds to the European bourgeoisie's real need for co-ordination. This requires setting up elements of a supra-national state. But this development is unfolding in the conceal old contradicton On the one hand, European construction is not taking place through a simultaneous convergence on the level of production and on the level of state apparatuses.
On the other hand, the functions that must be taken on by an embryonic state are being only partially displaced towards the European level.
For the most part, class strug.
gle is being managed on the national level. The European Union is thus not so much a state wholly equipped with the attributes of a state, as a sort of trustee for several bourgeols states.
Completing.
Maastricht is one road among ser- amending or eral possible roads, improving and it is a particularly narrow road. Maastricht is a The principle of Even defending Derabandoned in favour of simultane. basic objectives, ously pruning the welfare state, nibbling away at pub- requires fighting lic services and the dominant social protection, and setting social systems in competi. tion with one another.
The lever of this unification freedom for capital and a single currency. The convergence criterla sum up this way of proceeding: they have been fashioned so as to meet monetary and financial requirements, and constitute a burden on social budgets and wages.
The Maastricht process is therefore contradictory. it une derestimates the diversity of dir. ferent national situations (class relationships, solidity of currencies, industrial policies).
I nis should be seen in the col lapse of the European Monetary System. There has never been so much exchange rate instabil. ity as since the goal of a single currency was procitimeoThis leads to an enormous political problem, with increased fragmentation of various bourgeois orientations and the project of a Europe at several different speeds.
The Maastricht process is nonetheless "rational", since it enables governments to intensily neo-liberal austerisy in all-ics forms.
Budgetary austerity results from convergence criteria that are class criteria, because income derived from capital is increasingly free of tax.
Social austerity comes with the offensives against social protection and public services.
Wage austerity is justified with arguments about competitive.
ness and defending the national currency.
Paradoxically, the Maastricht process makes policy co-ordination more difficult. Even meas.
ures that the bourgeoisie could take in another framework and with another relationship of forces are in reality unattain.
aDIe Maastricht Europe Is thus a region of unemployment and instabilicy.
All the basic documents, such as the White Book, explicitly reject the idea of a generalised reduction of the working week.
The Idea that wages have to rise more slowly than productiv.
Ity is put forward as a norm: in other words, the share of wages In the economy must continue to fall and inequalities must get still deeper.
The preferred formula is "choice of working time". ie dismantling the legal framework of the labour contract; and austerfalse perspective. Ity is Count DoCO the supposedly outdated idea of like social housing, concerted counter-cyclical policies. Supporting a social Europe therebourgeois projects fore means opposing Maastricht, which stands for a Europe that is by its very nature anti-social.
The idea of completing. amending or improving Maas. tricht is a false perspective, because it ignores the deep logic of the process. Even defending such basic objectives as public housing requires fighting against the dominant bourgeois projects.
To think that we can influence them is a fallacy.
This is an important point, because our disagreements with reformists have to do not so much with the kind of demands or goals to fight for, as with the character and scale of the obstacles we face We have to integrate the European dimension into our thinking, because it has become the level on which demands can be conerent on which the argument about competitiveness can be countered.
Turning back to the national level means inevitably turning back to the national bourgeoisie (or at least to some of its fractions). We cannot break with free trade without breaking with capitalism.