A "democratic"
* Mexico / European Union
Thatcherites and the neoliberals.
They would have disrupted any possibility of fighting back and contributed to a loss of morale and to political and moral disorganization.
If they had thus yielded, those who would benefit from the discontent and resistance of the masses would be the PRI GERMAN Foreign Minister Joschka Fischer, the man who forced chieftains and the Mafias, who would through the decision to bring the German army out of its barracks appear as defenders of the people, as the and borders for the first time since 1945, has reopened the debate on corrupt heads of the dismantled Communist Party of Russia did with a certain success when people began to resist the excesses of Boris Yeltsin
On the evening of July 2, Cárdenas made two declarations: he recognized Fox's electoral victory and said that his party would constitute the opposition to the new government. Chiapas, social rights, workers, migrants, the indigenous population, the Mexican countryside, secularism, liberties, culture, free education, sovereignty, democracy, tolerance, are some of the themes of that opposition.
The victory of Fox and the neoconservatives it is an overwhelming defeat for the PRI, but also a strange kind of defeat for the PRD, which over 12 years fought the regime of the PRI while the PAN was its accomplice and sustained it.
### Strange defeat
A strange defeat because Cárdenas realized his objective of ending the party-state but at the cost of a victory that gave state power to the continuators of the policy of Salinas and Zedillo,
To head the resistance, to defend the rights and the heritage of Mexicans and to prepare the future, the PRD will have to face this new reality with the instruments of renewed thought and organization, not with old themes now overtaken by the facts.
What matters now is developing a correct approach to the regime of the modern conservatives and the risks entailed by the disintegration or fragmentation of the PRI and its form of state.
The declaration by Cuauhtémoc Cárdenas on the night of July 2 was the culmination of a three month electoral campaign, the answer to those who in every corner of the country filled the plazas and streets with fervour and enthusiasm, those who voted for his candidacy and his program, and those who will constitute the heart and soul of regroupment, organization and resistance. * 4 International Viewpoint #323 July-August 2000 the future of the EU. FRANÇOIS VERCAMMEN W THAT he has just said is neither new nor spectacular. But it is certainly not anodyne. The EU should give itself parliamentary institu tions and settle once and for all the relationship between the national states and the supranational structure of the UE. And he, Fischer, chooses a Federation of national States, based on a Parliament with two chambers: one would be made up of members of Parliament who would also be members of their national Parliaments (elected or appointed?), the other, the second chamber (of the US Senate or German Bundesrat type), made up of members of Parliament "directly elected" in their respective countries.
In addition, Fischer's speech proposes to put order, "horizontally", , in the relationship between the existing Community institutions. Fischer introduces the idea of a (future) European government, without defining its precise form: either by the development of the current European Council (based on the national governments of the member states), or "by directly electing a president equipped with vast executive powers while being based on the current structure of the Commission". He also envisages an intermediary formula.
Three problems
In raising the question of the "political Europe", Fischer is attempting to respond to three urgent problems:
1.The risky turn towards the creation of a European power (after the Euro, enlargement and defence) postulates a new stage in European state institutions.
2. It will be necessary to ensure the success of the French presidency of the EU (July-December). Indeed, the agenda of the Intergovernmental Conference, derisory in relation to these problems, limits itself (officially for the moment) to some institutional reforms: size of the Commission, changes in the votes of the different countries in the Council and reduction of the veto by extension of the areas decided on by qualified majority vote.
3. Precisely at this time the EU continues to lack popular legitimacy, for historical (no European nation, no pan-European bourgeoisie, multiplication of national States and heterogeneity of economies and societies) and immediate (the progress of the EU has for 15 years coincided with the strongest social regression for 40 years reasons.
### Major obstacle
It is a major obstacle to the settlement of the contradictions between states in the EU. Fischer thus employed a tried and tested method, mixing ideological discourse and political-institutional perspective to allow the maximum of effective measures to be pushed through amid the confusion.
At first sight, the speech, which raises the thorny problem of a supranational political Europe, should have been badly received. It risks recreating and reinforcing polarization between "Europeanists" and "sovereignists" at the head of the established political parties. Actually the solution that Fischer (and his accomplices) propose should help the pro-EU governments facing "nationalist" opposition of the left or right. Not only in France and Germany, but also in the Great Britain of Blair and the City of London.
Because Fischer very explicitly buries the European federalism which has been the official underlying ideology at the summit of Europe. And he buries "the institutional model" which went with it: from now on, the European institutions
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swindle
will no longer have the vocation of absorbing the national states, replacing them with a supranational federal state of Europe.
This represents the abandonment of not only the European goal of Monnet, but also his method which involved successive transfers of shares of national sovereignty to Europe. For Fischer, the EU will be a federation of states, with the national state as basis. His project also sidelines European citizenship, on the level of political decision-making: "this Parliament would gather the various national political elites (!) and then the various national public opinions".
Two chambers
That means two chambers, both based on elected officials from the member states, and seems to exclude the possibility for all European citizens to directly elect other European citizens, independently of their nationality. As well as unified European lists in all the member countries. The project proposes a strong but partial democratic breakthrough: finally a parliamentary system for the EU! A great innovation, at the beginning of the 21st century!
It would put an end to the current institutional omnipotence of the European Council, which today concentrates in its hands almost the totality of executive, legislative and constitutional power. Legislative power would return to a Parliament (with what powers exactly?).
It also envisages a Constitution, i.e. a new treaty, which would fix the fundamental laws clearly (distinguishing them from the current laws), and would cover "basic rights and human and citizenship rights". It is not certain that Fischer's attempt will hold together until the end of this year, or will succeed in gaining a high political and media profile. But the attempt is serious, decided in high places and targets precise objectives.
Fischer's project is unacceptable, indeed intolerable, for two reasons. The first is that the democratic advance is partial. If the model suggested of the future EU is parliamentary-democratic, this is not the case for the proposed method of getting there. Because who will decide on this "constitutional refoundation of Europe" and its constitution, how will the decision be made, and when?
One can deduce from Fischer's text that it will be the governments. And it will be "well beyond the next decade"!
There is worse, indeed a real swindle: while we wait for this "democratic" EU, it will be constructed through the "strengthened co-operations" which are the exclusive resort of the EU governments (the European Council).). Fischer's real practical-political objective is the summit of December 2000 in France: to register this new constitutional norm in the existing treaties thus widening the agenda of the intergovernmental conferences.
These "strengthened co-operations " between the member states which agree relate to partial but not secondary aspects: currency, army. The idea has always existed. But the "justification" is reinforced because the EU, through enlargement, diversifies. To await the unanimity of a growing number of member states is to risk paralysis: the enlargement of the UE would be done to the detriment of its cohesion (at the state level).
That seems rational. Why is it being done by violating the most elementary democracy? Because, on this occasion, the European Council would see its despotic powers reinforced and prolonged, as Fischer puts it "strengthened co-operation than strengthened intergovernmentalisation"!
### Vanguard
And there's more. By systematically applying the method of "strengthened cooperations" one arrives logically, by selection, at a "vanguard" or "centre of gravity" comprising the most committed, most powerful states. These latter will adopt a new treaty starting from which the other states will be "dealt with".
Thus in the name of a coming democratization, we will "provisionally" (for at least 10 years!) strengthen the anti-democratic character of the EU. Goodbye, the "parliamentarisation of the EU", goodbye "fundamental democratic (and social?) rights"!
The first task is to alert public opinion and the labour and social movement, and to say: stop right there! We have to halt this reinforced autocratic process. And to oppose it, suggest an alternative democratic line of march. It is not in 10, 15 or 20 years that the people should have the right to speak and decide, but immediately. It is now that we need a wide-ranging debate with the support of modern means of com-
European Union *
EU leaders meet, but democracy is not on the agenda munication.
It is not the governments, but the people of Europe who must decide on their future. For that we need the vote for everybody and proportional representation, and the convention of a democratic Congress of the Peoples of Europe. The second reason why we should reject unreservedly Fischer's project is that the priority it gives to the "Europe of nation-states" axis aims at sidelining any idea or discussion of social Europe. Read and re-read the text, the term "social" does not even appear there!
### Logical
In the EU it is logical: it fears democracy because it fears the eruption of the popular forces in institutional mechanics. But a Constitution does not speak only about state institutions and their respective prerogatives. It deals above all with society, and its social, economic, ecological, cultural and individual bases. The omission is not a lapse of memory. The social Europe was sidelined in 1989-90 under the employers' pressure, with the complicity of Jacques Delors. The EU is a legally antisocial construction.
While waiting for a really democratic constituent Congress of the peoples of Europe, it is necessary to force our governments, ie. the Intergovernmental Conference (this closed session Constituent assembly of the elites of the dominant class), to incorporate now in their treaties all the social rights and norms that working people have imposed, through historic struggles, on the bourgeoisies and their states. The democratic and social Europe is well worth the crisis of the EU.* International Viewpoint #323 July-August 2000 5
"To change the rules of the game"
(CAP), its imbalances and its injustices. In South America it involves the fight for land reform or against the multinationals which expel hundreds of thousands of peasants to monopolize their lands.
This struggle is global and not merely rural: during the demonstration in Seattle, the AFL-CIO, the largest American trade-union federation, accepted that a peasant
ON June 30 and July Ist, French farmer Jose Bove and nine others appeared in court in the southern French town of Millau for demol-
İshing a McDonald's restaurant. The French revolutionary Martist newspaper Rouge questioned him on the case. his fight agains neoliberal globalization and the "new internationalism". The Intersiew has carried out by Manu Arvols and Sylvain Pattieu.
INTERVIEW
• IN the book you have written with
François Dufour you describe the collusion between the French Farmers'
Union and the state to impose a productivist agriculture. How could an organization like yours, which opposes this, have any place in the farming world?
In the same way as any trade-union organization: when people feel cheated, they understand the logic of an apparatus which is supposedly there to represent them, and in fact betrays them and eliminates them. From there on, people decide.
They become conscious of the nature of their work and the way in which they are exploited, and also of how to defend themselves collectively against the multinationals, the banks or the State.
• In connection with the repression against you and others in your
Confederation, but also the sans-papiers or the unemployed, you speak of the
"criminalisation" of a social movement.
I think that it is due primarily to a social climate where the state has a responsibility. The social movements or the organizations are increasingly less taken into account. Things are done above their heads. The second aspect is a change in the behaviour of the magistrates, who are increasingly repressive with regard to small offences, without ever dealing with basic problems like financial rackets and the widespread networks of money laundering.
Today they prefer to crack down on petty crime or the social movement. So we need to rethink the role of the magistrates'
6 International Viewpoint #323 July-August 2000 organizations and also the ministry for Justice, so that there is another, more coherent, conception of the kind of society and justice we intend to create.
• What link do you make between your struggle as a trade unionist in France and struggles on an international scale, with the peasants of the South or US trade unionists for example?
Today, the fight against neoliberal globalization cannot be corporatist. It is a fight by everybody who is a victim of this form of globalization. We have to change the rules of the game. At the farming level for example, we have created an international structure which is called Via Campesina.
It includes peasants from every continent, who fight together for the same objectives. In Europe it involves a fight against the Common Agricultural Policy from each continent would be at the head of the demonstration.
• There is talk of a "new internationalism": do you subscribe to this formula and on what bases?
We subscribe to it insofar as what we have already set up is a form of peasant international. It is the first time that something like this has been set up.
Today, more than 50% of humanity lives from agriculture. To bring together the peasants of the whole world around a global project of agricultural production, to fight against the multinationals, and to make it possible for people to live from their production and to feed their population, is effectively a challenge to an economic order which also implies new ways of conceiving the exchanges between people.
I also think that a new form of international is emerging at the trade union level and through all of the movements which fight today against globalization. It is a form of internationalism which is being built in a very diversified manner, starting from each person and their realities, and where we try to implement common short and long term objectives to transform things. * 1. "Le monde n'est pas une marchandise" ["The World Is Not For Sale"], by José Bové and François Dufour (éditions La Découverte).
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* France