A GENERAL election and three abortion referendums took place on November 25 in the 26 counties, the formally independent part of
Ireland. The Fianna
Fáil/Progressive Democrat
(FF/PD) government broke up because irreconcilable evidence was given to a tribunal by the two coalition party leaders, Des O'Malley and Albert Reynolds.
The tribunal, which is still sitting, is investigating one of the many financial scandals to hit the 26
Counties in the last few years. It concerns the activities of Larry Goodman, owner of Anglo-Irish Beef Processors (AIBP). This firm is under "administration", a legal device preventing liquidation, although it is insolvent to the tune of at least half a billion Irish pounds (about $0.7bn - 5% of the state's Gross National Product). JOHN MEEHAN - December 2, 1992 T HE results were a major defeat for the traditional rightwing parties Fianna Fáil (FF) and Fine Gael (FG) and an unprecedented victory for the Labour Party (LP). The figures tell their own story (see table). FF won its lowest share of first prefe-
----- pull-quotes on this page -----
Irish elections register
by the Supreme Court verdict to stand. The Catholic hierarchy did not know which way to turn. It issued a very ambiguous statement, but individual bishops then called for all three proposals to be rejected. The result was a very big blow to them. *
December 21, 1992 rences since 1927 and its lowest percentage of seats in the Irish parliament, the Dáil, since the
General election 1992
IRELAND participant in talks about a coalition with the rightwing
FG party. The picture may be
% (1989 result)
same date. FG got its lowest percentage of first preferences
FF
39.2 (44.2)
since 1948.
FG
24.2 (29.3)
Labour got its best result ever. Even more telling, it has
19.3 (9.5)
Labour recovered from 1987, when it
PDs only got 6.4% of the vote, its lowest share of the vote in over
DL/WP
50 years.
Politically, the most signifi-
Others cant point about Labour's success is the dramatic swing to the party in
Dublin, the most urbanized part of the 26
Counties. Labour seriously underestimated the growth in their support and did not run enough candidates to take full advantage. In Dublin, the party's share of the vote rose from just over 10% to
33%. They ran only one candidate in nine of Dublin's 11 constituencies. Ironically, their caution saved at least two seats for their rivals, the Democratic
Left, including that of DL leader Proinsias De Rossa.
Labour's growth is based on a line of opposing coalition with the big bour-
Seats (1989 result)
67(77) 45(55) 33(16) 10(6) 5(7 6 (5) geois parties, but this is a purely tactical decision for the Labour leadership. In 1987, Labour abandoned 17 years of coalition with G and their historic gains this year are the fruits of the independent policy.
Here is the Achilles Heel of the Labour Party's success. Indications are that party leader Dick Spring may try and use the spate of financial scandals as an excuse for some sort of "emergency coalition".
Unfortunately, the signs are that he will succeed. The DL, humbled by its battering at the polls is now a willing clearer by December 14, when the Dáil reconvenes, but there are no guarantees.
Various combinations are possible.
The underlying cause of the
4.7 (5.5)
extreme electoral instability is a massive social and economic crisis. Unemployment stands at nearly 300,000, 20% of the workforce according to official figures, but in reality closer to nearly 30%. There is a major cloud loo ming over the state airline Aer Lingus which stands to lose thousands of jobs. A similar catastrophe is threatening Water-
The only policy tolerated by the ruling class is one of job-cutting and privatization. It is the only way forward for the
Changes on the left
THE Workers Party (WP), which originated in the so-called Official side of the split in the Republican movement in the late
The abortion referendums THREE referendums on abortion took place at the same time as the general election. Harry Whelehan, the Attorney General, unintentionally fired the first shot in this campaign at the start of 1992 when he began the "x" case, trying to intern in Ireland a 14-year old, suicidal, girl who had been the victim of a rape because her parents were organizing an abortion for her in Britain. A huge wave of popular protest defeated Whelehan and the religious far
The Supreme Court was asked by the politicians to save the state's neck by saying it was alright to travel abroad for an abortion. But the Court had already issued several judgements against people providing information and counselling (implying that travelling abroad for an abortion was unconstitutional).
So instead of looking like complete idiots, the highest judges in the land decided an abortion in the 26 Counties, in this particular case, was legal; in other words, the danger of suicide was a potential ground for an abortion in Ireland itself.
The referendum results were a qualified victory for pro-choice forces and an unqualified disaster for both the governing Fianna Fáil party and the Catholic hierarchy. Two of the results were clear. In the wake of the "x" case, the government proposed to prevent anyone banning information on abortion and to prevent legal injunctions on women intending to have an abortion abroad. Both of these proposals were carried by two to one majorities.
A third referendum sought to modify the Supreme Court ruling in the "x" case. This proposal was defeated. It attracted opposition both from pro-choice forces and the far right. The far right wanted a "no" vote because they are campaigning for a constitutional amendment, even more draconian than the 1983 version they succeeded in winning.
The pro-choice forces preferred the limited victory represented
1960s and has been under strong Stalinist influence, made spectacular gains from Labour in the 1980s being seen as an "anti-coalition" left party. Their main base was Dublin. Labour's turn away from coalition in 1987 gradually produced an identity crisis for the WP.
The Democratic Left (DL) split from the WP in 1991, producing significant organizational problems in the election. A couple of months ago, searches of the archives of the Soviet Communist Party revealed a £1 million begging letter, signed by De Rossa (now DL leader) and Séan Garland (then and now WP General Secretary). The letter also referred to "special activities" - that is, robberies by the "Official" wing of the Irish Republican Army (IRA).
The WP/ DL are British imperialism's favourite pet in the six Northern Counties still under British rule and as a result their "fund raising" activities have been indulged. However, in the 26 Counties they have recruited on a moderate social democratic basis, resulting in contradictions that eventually led to splits, especially in De Rossa's local area.*
• #241 International Viewpoint
----- photo credits and running heads -----
7
Why farmers are
International Viewpoint # 241 • December 21, 1992
IRELAND / FRANCE bourgeoisie which has sold itself to Maastricht, and has to meet the treaty's draconian timetable for economic and monetary union. This mean reducing the national debt from 104% of GNP to 60% in five years. The cutbacks that have already taken place have laid the basis for the electoral earthquake.
THE fragile compromise reached between European and
Any DL/Labour participation in a coa-
US negotiators on November 20 concerning cuts in lition government will put the responsi-
European Economic Community (EEC) farm subsidies as bility for such a policy squarely in their part of the current GATT negotiations, has been threatened laps. * by the vociferous opposition of French peasants to the accords. The issue has affected the French political scene
PEOPLE'S both in terms of relations between the major political
DEMOCRACY formations preparing for the legislative elections scheduled
PEOPLE'S DEMOCRACY, Irish for early next year, as well as the French role in the section of the Fourth International, ran Joe Harrington as a candidate in Limerick where he is a local
European unity process.
councillor. The campaign highligh- KEITH MANN — December 8, 1992 ted opposition to the Maastricht treaty on European union, and the need for an opposition to the capitalist offensive based on mass
PD called for a vote for Sinn Fein "to help bring imperialist domination to the centre of the elections" and for Labour "without illusions". Joe Harrington expressed PD's firm rejection of deals and coalitions with the rightwing parties.
Defence of women's rights was at the centre of the campaign. According to the election state-
"Anyone tuning in to media reports and discussions on the abortion issue in the 26 Counties can hardly avoid blushing with shame. Women are heaped with insult after insult as the most intimate functions of their bodies are discussed with gusto - usually by male "experts". The old medieval debates about how many angels can dance on the head of a pin are as nothing to the fine distinctions being drawn between a woman's life and health.
"Like the angels, women are to be silent and invisible in this discussion - even the threat of suicide is not to give them a voice. Nothing indicates more clearly that the major parties' records on women are totally incompatible with even the most minimal forms of equality and democracy.
"The present government policies are products of an alliance between church and state - the real face of a confessional state that has to be dismantled if Irish people are to know any real freedom and 8 independence." *
N spite of US "concessions" on French production of oilseeds, the agreement still involves a 21% drop in subsidies paid to agricultural products destined for exportation. Approximately 15% of French land currently cultivated would be taken out of production. In human terms, the price paid for such an agreement by France's dwindling family farmers would be high. It is estimated that only 300,000 of the 800,000 farmers and their families who currently produce food for their livelihood, will still be able to live from agricultural pursuits by the year 2000.
### Declining farm incomes
Farm revenues have declined by 5.9% in recent years. Today, the average family farm in France only earns about 153,000 francs annually (roughly $28,000). Ironically, French farmers are victims of dramatic increases in agricultural efficiency. In 1950, each farmer produced enough food to feed seven people; today they produce enough for forty.
On December 1, 80,000 farmers from all twelve of the EEC countries plus Switzerland and Finland responded to a call by the National Federation of Agricultural Unions (FNSEA), the National Center of Young Farmers (CNJA) and other farmer organizations to demonstrate in Strasbourg against the accords. Though it is French farmers who will bear the brunt of the effects of the accords, other European farmers will will also suffer. German and Irish livestock farmers are called upon to drastically reduce beef production. Dutch farmers who produce ten million tonnes of dairy products a year face a 25% loss in revenue and the elimination of at least 2,000 jobs. Contingents from Japan and
Korea also participated in the demonstration. Japan's 1,600,000 farmers are threatened by proposed agreements to allow imports of rice in a country which has traditionally protected its farmers against the vagaries of free trade for this staple.
The plight of the French farmers has received much public support - hardly surprising in a country where the majority of the population was still rural as late as 1934. A recent opinion poll indicated that 82% of the French support the farmers' opposition to the agreements.
However, those who rule France have spoken from both sides of their mouths, calling for rejection of the treaty for public consumption, but declining to take any measures which would actually lead to its rejection.
Presidential hopeful Jacques Chirac, the mayor of Paris and leader of the neo-Gaullist political party, the RPR, loudly denounced the treaty as an "Agricultural Munich" a reference to the 1938 agreements that opened the door to the German invasion of Czechoslovakia). Socialist Party (SP) prime minister Pierre Bérégovoy and agricultural minister Jean-Pierre Soisson have also declared that they would block any deal that would hurt French agriculture.
But these same forces have made it clear that they refuse to actually take the necessary measures to block the accord. The most obvious measure would be for the French government to use its right to veto the agreement as provided by the 1966 Luxembourg agreement. A recent poll indicates that 69% of the French population favours the invocation of the veto. However, the political and media organs of the French bourgeoisie refuse to consider this option. The French daily Le Monde in an article in its November 22-23 weekend edi-
----- pull-quotes on this page -----
protesting
French Prime Minister Pierre Bérégovoy
December 21, 1992 • # 241 International Viewpoint tion expressed opposition to the accord, justifying any measures except the use of the veto. The right wing daily Le Figaro wrote that "a new spectre is haunting Europe: the French veto". The National Employers Federation, the CNPF, declared that a veto would "provoke a very serious European crisis". The reasons for this refusal to invoke the treaty have to do with considerations far more important to the French bourgeoisie and their Social Democratic partners than defense of the farmers: their plans for European capitalist integration.
The rocky road from Maastricht
The use of the veto - which has never been invoked - by one of the pillars of the European system, would create a dangerous precedent that could contribute to undermining the fragile European edifice already weakened by the Danish "no" in last June's Danish referendum on the Maastricht treaty and further bruised by the narrow ratification of the treaty in the September referendum in France as well as the the mounting turmoil around the exchange
Other news organs came to the aid of the government like the weekly news magazine Le Point which wrote that "it is not at all clear that the accord will hurt the French farmers". Likewise, when faced with the actual prospect of a veto Chirac and former president Valery Giscard d'Estaing stated that they were "not ready to die for the Beauce" — in reference to one of France's major agricultural regions.
President Francois Mitterrand and his Socialist Party are hoping to deflect attention away from the agricultural aspects of the treaty by pointing out that it is only one of fifteen aspects of the GATT treaty. They are stalling for time in an attempt to put off decisions around the accords until after the legislative elections. Those elections are expected to result in a right wing parliamentary majority which will allow the SP to shift the onus for dealing with these problems onto the shoulders of the right.
The French Communist Party (PCF) has given strident support to the farmers. For over a week, its daily newspaper L'Humanité devoted front page coverage to the plight of the farmers. Both 'Humanité and the PCF parliamentary delegation loudly called for the veto. Its appeals have an unmistakable protectionist and nationalist tinge. Many PCF declarations end by claiming that the treaty goes "against the interests of France"
More generally, in an era where the old
Cold War divisions have disappeared, the
US-French conflict reveals the potential for sharp inter-imperialist conflict in the context of a world-wide recession.
Proponents of the treaty maintain that it will lead to a $200bn expansion in world trade. In reality, there is no evidence that anything of the kind will result from this treaty. The sharp tone of the US and French negotiators reflect a sharp struggle over the division of the market as it currently structured. The United States and France are respectively the two largest agricultural exporters in the world. By demanding that the EEC reduce by 21% its agricultural production, the US is merely trying to grab a larger share of the already existing agricultural market.
The US currently produces one third of the wheat and 75% of all corn on the world market, as opposed to 19.9% and 1% respectively produced by the EEC. The portion of the market currently controlled by France and other EEC countries that would be reduced by 21% would be taken over largely by the United States but also by Canada, Argentina and Australia.
US penetration into the European food market also takes more subtle forms. For years now, French livestock has been fed cereal products imported from the US. These often include products of questionable nutritional value like corn residue and other agro-industrial waste products.
"Unfair competition"
The arguments advanced by the US negotiators in the calls for reduced French and EEC subsidies centre around the claim that the level of these subsidies amounts to "unfair competition". In reality, subsidies paid to US farmers are nearly as high as those paid to French and other European farmers. In 1991, wheat importing countries paid $103 per ton of wheat. American wheat producers received $147 per ton in subsidies as against $151 for their European counterparts.
All together now... "The Marseillaise"
FRANCE
US farmers do face serious problems, but it is not EEC farm subsidies that threaten them. Rather, it is US agricultural policies that favor huge agribusinesses at the expense of family farmers. US price supports have been cut nearly in half since 1986 and at least 26,000 farmers currently face foreclosure and eviction. Half of all US grain exports are controlled by giant companies like Cargill and Continental.
Struggle for agricultural markets
The accords clearly reflect US hegemony in an inter-imperialist struggle to grab a larger share of the agricultural market at a time when US industrial products face stiff international competition. In fact, the US negotiator Edward Madigan openly rejoiced over the agreement characterizing it as favorable to the US. However, by limiting their demands to protests against the US "diktat" and "free trade", farmers risk falling into the protectionist trap whose logic leads to alliances with one of the main forces attacking them - their own bour-
French farmers are also hampered by agricultural organizations that do not distinguish between small family farmers and larger agricultural producing units. The current treaty proposes to replace agricultural subsidies for some products with across the board payments which will exacerbate the gap between small and large farming
Demands for the reduction of food production at a time when the world is focused on the tragic spectacle of famine in Somalia is an eloquent testimony to the absurdities of the capitalist system. Never before has the land produced so much food, yet never have there been so many staving people. *
PLANTA 9
The end of the
International Viewpoint # 241 • December 21, 1992 into the Czech Republic, the Czech right is winning popular support for a full separation of Czech and Slovak citizenships and the introduction of a physical, guarded border.
Since most of the 300,000 Czech Romanies are registered as Slovak nationals, new general legislation to deny Slovaks work
UNLIKE in former Yugoslavia, the ruling elites in both the
Czech and Slovak republics hope to gain from the peaceful break up of the Czechoslovak federation on December 31,
1992. In the first of two articles, Adam Novak looks at the dynamics of separation in the richer, Czech Republic.
ADAM NOVAK —December 9, 1992.
VER since the elections this
E
June, Lidove Noviny, the one- time dissident newspaper still considered closest to ex-President Vaclav Havel, has led the Czech press in a campaign to present the Slovaks as primitive, Balkan, over-religious, communist
Slovak complaints that the federation was dominated by Czechs were countered by the simplistic claim that the Czechs subsidized Slovakia. In fact, the Slovak economy was built up by the Stalinists to produce primary and semi-finished inputs for
Czech factories. New orders for Czech firms in Germany and Austria are dependent on cheap petrochemicals, steel, aluminium and labour from Slovakia.
The market-oriented economic reforms have meant unemployment of 6% in the
Czech Republic, but over 13% in Slovakia.
What little foreign investment there is is concentrated in the Czech Lands, while nine out of ten foreign tourists come to the
Czech capital, Prague.
For all these reasons, many Slovaks began to see a de-centralization of the federation and a more interventionist economic policy as in their national interest. The
Movement for a Democratic Slovakia
(HZDS) of Vladimir Meciar won the July elections on such a programme.
The Czech right, however, reduced the choice to "the present federation or separation" while starting the anti-Slovak media campaign described above. Once Czech premier Vaclav Klaus understood that the range of reactionary schemes. At the same time, opposition to Klaus is presented as anti-Czech, communist, anarchist. The mid-November vote of the federal assembly to change the federation into a loose union rather than destroy it was presented as an "attempt to sow confusion" by Klaus, who has no intention of respecting a federal parliament he considers irrelevant.
The lure of the West
The Czech right is convinced that without Slovakia, the Czech Republic will be more quickly integrated into Western Europe. As the Czech weekly Respekt commented after the elections, "Alone into Europe or together into the Balkans". Klaus, repeats after all his foreign visits that "Germany understands us". Prague's Western business community expects the Czech Republic to benefit from the split, once it adjusts to the smaller size of the economy.
The bureaucracy's new attitude was summed up by Czech member of parliament, Vrata Votava, a Fourth International supporter, in his maiden speech to parliament in July: "The new government of the Czech Republic is made up mainly of politicians who hold direct responsibility for the sharpening economic, political, social and moral decline of society in the last two years. The way they see it, the Czech lion should threateningly gnash its teeth to the east over the river Morava, while peacefully bending its spine and waving both tails to the permits in the Czech Lands are, in fact, measures for the deportation of a national minority, the break-up of families and an invitation to open racism.
Petitions are already circulating in industrial centres like Most for the internment of Romanies in special camps, or their confinement to specific suburbs. There is talk about reintroducing old Austrian legislation confining minor criminals to their home district for a period of time, of "on-thespot" punishments, of compulsory public labour for minor criminals and so on.
Parliament is not likely to deal with these problems. Most deputies did not even react when Farmers Party leader Frantisek Kondelik threatened a journalist with a knife in late November, when he and a group of drunken MPs were observed chanting Sieg Heil! in the Czech parliament members'
Murder attempt
The latest political outrage here was the attempt to murder Czech Communist leader Jiri Svoboda on December 5. The unknown knife wielder was undoubtedly encouraged by the press campaign against Svoboda. Cesky Dennik, the paper closest to Czech premier Klaus, even exploited the fact that Svoboda has one leg shorter than
Only one journalist, Jiri Hanak, of Lidove Noviny, protested against such personal
According to the pro-government weekly, Respekt, "no one else had the courage to risk the bucket of dirt that goes along with any such activity nowadays. And this new fear of conflict with the new "guardians of order is more dangerous for the right here than all the speeches of [leftwing leaders] Ivan Svitak and Milos Zeman together". *
Population of Czech Republic Western powers would blame any split on the Slovaks, he began openly talking of Czech statehood, calling for national unity.
(including Moravians He has paralyzed the Czech National Council (parliament) by insisting that all important decisions be negotiated by his ODS party directly with the strongest party in Slovakia, Meciar's HZDS. The Czech national interest is now defined by Klaus as a series of neo-liberal and police measures designed to contain "Slovak" leftism. 10 Separation fever is legitimizing a whole
Intolerance is slowly
Czechs spilling over into violence in the Czech Republic, with fascist demonstra-
Romanies tions winning the tacit
Slovaks approval of the crowd for
Poles their anti-Gypsy slogans, and with attacks on Gyp-