EU accession: The Only Game in Town?

In the wake of Nice, Michael Hindley takes a look at the EU's plans for eastward expansion.

The story is told of the gambler who kept going out to the same card game and losing, but he never complained, even when his friends told him that the game was crooked one run by cheats who were fleecing him of his money. " I know it's crooked, but it's the only game in town", he mournfully replied. The great success of the EU project has been to convince the European political elites that a federal Europe based on a free market economy is "the only game in town". The great alternative, the Soviet Union, collapsed in economic ignominy and is unlamented by the vast majority of citizens who experienced day-to-day life in actually existing socialism. It will be many years before "socialism" ceases to be a dirty word throughout the former Soviet Empire.

It has taken a good decade for the situation to clarify in the East after the turmoil of the revolutions of 1989. The early charge, dismissed at the time as cynicism, that the EU's funds (mainly the PHARE programme) were to be used to open up the East for western capital has proven more than accurate. Warsaw, Prague and Budapest were flooded by yuppie carpetbaggers proclaiming a more virulent form of privatization than even the Thatcherites attempted back home. A desperate and gullible public swallowed yet even the official Court of Auditors reports on the PHARE programme criticized the fact that the funds were going to western consultancies rather than building national local capital. In those early days I recall asking a Polish Minister what he needed. "Please, please, NOT another feasibility study".

Where the East has "advanced" is in being a source of cheap, skilled labour. The old Soviet system at least put a premium on basic technology training and the fruits of such investment are now available to rapacious and mobile western capital shy of paying decent wages and social protection costs.

Whereas the West remains resistant to what the East wants to export – agri-goods, textile and steel – it has insisted that the East opens to its consumer goods. Local production for local markets has collapsed in the East.

Not only capital, but the NATO military establishment benefits from the lemming rush of the east to embrace all things western. Such was and remains the desperation to finally turn their back on the brief and erstwhile ally, Russia, that Poland, Hungary and the Czech Republic were anxious to rush into the arms of NATO offering to dispatch their own troops to anywhere that NATO needed. However, their belief that there may be a reciprocal guarantee that NATO would defend those countries from any future threat from an aggressively nationalistic and expansionist Russia seems ludicrously and hopelessly naive.

The reality is that western Europe is getting as much as it wants out of Eastern Europe and sees no point in offering any further concessions and this is the real reason for the slow down in admitting the east to the EU.

Little can now be done about NATO membership but the East Europeans' application to join the EU does still give some room for manoevre and scope for social solidarity. Within the EU itself during the drive towards the completion of the Internal market, the "1992" programme, the Left got quite a broad based campaign going to say "no internal market without a social chapter". That is, an "even playing field" for capital was not in working peoples' interest. Inadequate as the eventual "social chapter" was, it did nonetheless act as a rallying point for forces from Social Democrats leftwards. With daily news of western firms moving production eastwards, a call for no enlargement without a social chapter would be a good and practical step for pan-European labour movement solidarity. Unless we do this, relocation of production to the east could lead to a xenophobic and truculent reaction in the west.

Finally, on the constitutional level, the broader the EU grows, the harder it becomes to enclose the enlarging entity within the narrow confines of the Federalists' agenda. It took eastern Europe under fifty years to get rid of the dead hand of the Kremlin, I cannot believe it will take so long to rally decisively against the Berlaymont.