Committee for the Abolition of Illegitimate Debt

The logic of the EU is competitiveness on the worldwide market – in relation to China, for example, with its low wages –, which implies driving down wages and social rights in Europe that have been won through valiant struggle

The EU, more than anything, is an economic structure aimed at broadening and optimizing a shared market on which companies can sell their products… and at exploiting working people and putting them in competition with one another by leveraging differences in wages (the legal minimum wage in Bulgaria is 330 euros, or six times lower than in Belgium and Holland, where it is 2,000 euros, or in France where it is 1,767 euros), social statuses and labour legislation. The logic of the EU is competitiveness on the worldwide market – in relation to China, for example, with its low wages –, which implies driving down wages and social rights in Europe that have been won through valiant struggle.

What is more, companies in The Netherlands or Germany can employ workers who are under Bulgarian or Polish contracts, and thus are subject to the minimum wage in their respective countries. Wage differences, differences in social-benefits systems and differences in taxation enable employers to exert pressure on workers by threatening relocation and engaging in “dumping” – importing products that create competition with local products and with the weakest social legislation.

The EU imposes constraints promoting “free competition,” but also through rules regarding public debt. An example is the famous rule that limits member States’ government deficit (to 3% of GDP GDP
Gross Domestic Product Gross Domestic Product is an aggregate measure of total production within a given territory equal to the sum of the gross values added. The measure is notoriously incomplete; for example it does not take into account any activity that does not enter into a commercial exchange. The GDP takes into account both the production of goods and the production of services. Economic growth is defined as the variation of the GDP from one period to another. ) and debt (60% of GDP). These constraining rules provide the governments of the various countries with tools for imposing austerity and deregulation, and in particular privatization of public services and attacks on labour and social rights.

The lobbies Lobby
Lobbies A lobby is an entity organized to represent and defend the interests of a specific group by exerting pressure or influence on persons or institutions that hold power. Lobbying consists in conducting actions aimed at influencing, directly or indirectly, the drafting, application or interpretation of legislative measures, standards, regulations and more generally any intervention or decision by the Public Authorities. have strong influence over the EU Commission and its members, but also over the members of the EU Parliament

Elections will be held in the EU between 6 and 9 June 2024 in the 27 member States to elect the members of the European Parliament. It is important to participate in these EU elections and to study the platforms of the different parties. However the European Parliament is clearly not the equivalent of a national parliament: it has much less power, since it is the EU Commission and Council that make the treaties and rules, and not the Parliament.

Another important political factor is the power of the lobbies who represent capital – that is, major transnational corporations as well as European ones. The lobbies have strong influence over the EU Commission and its members, but also over the members of the EU Parliament – as became clear with the “Qatargate” scandal that compromised Belgian, Greek and Italian MPs. It showed the extent to which both States and private companies work to corrupt officials and buy influence over decisions to make sure they are favourable to them.

“Big Pharma” is a perfect example of this kind of influence over decisions taken by the EU regarding the CoViD-19 vaccine. The same goes for the decisions made regarding the pesticides and herbicides that are dangers to public health. In that case, Commission President Ursula von der Leyen decided not to apply the measures that had been planned, yet which were already insufficient. It was a victory for major corporations like Monsanto and Syngenta. Her pretext was farmers’ demands, when in reality it was the interests of the private multinationals that were being catered to.

As for the “power” of the EU itself, it is either incapable or unwilling to act positively regarding the extremely serious conflicts now being played out within or near Europe’s territory. In the case of the extremely serious conflict in Ukraine following the invasion by the Russian Federation, the EU’s influence is very weak, since Europe’s situation within NATO NATO
North Atlantic Treaty Organization NATO ensures US military protection for the Europeans in case of aggression, but above all it gives the USA supremacy over the Western Bloc. Western European countries agreed to place their armed forces within a defence system under US command, and thus recognize the preponderance of the USA. NATO was founded in 1949 in Washington, but became less prominent after the end of the Cold War. In 2002, it had 19 members: Belgium, Canada, Denmark, France, Iceland, Italy, Luxembourg, the Netherlands, Norway, Portugal, the UK, the USA, to which were added Greece and Turkey in 1952, the Federal Republic of Germany in 1955 (replaced by Unified Germany in 1990), Spain in 1982, Hungary, Poland and the Czech Republic in 1999. is that of subordinate. Within the alliance, it is the USA that makes the decisions about the course of the war or whether there are negotiations to end it. But one thing is certain: European officials are taking advantage of the war to encourage increases in military spending and strengthen Europe’s military-industrial complex. In Palestine, the USA is directly supporting Israel, and the EU follows suit and does the same. Thus the EU is allowing Israel to conduct a genocidal policy against Gaza’s people and to reinforce its illegal colonization and its brutal repression against the Palestinian people as a whole. The EU refuses to suspend its trade and cultural agreements with a country that practises apartheid and crushes the Palestinian people.

In Palestine, the USA is directly supporting Israel, and the EU follows suit and does the same

Yet the EU has considerable power when it comes to behaving like “Fortress Europe” – for that, it expends resources unstintingly, providing the border agency Frontex with a huge budget, along with helicopters, aircraft, ships and boats and numerous personnel for preventing potential refugees and migrants in general from entering European territory.

The EU also enters into economic partnership agreements with countries or, often, regional groupings such as the Economic Community of West African States (ECOWAS), the Andean Community and MERCOSUR (Brazil, Argentina, Uruguay, Paraguay), currently under negotiation. These agreements generally require these countries or groups of countries to open themselves fully to the economic interests of European companies. In exchange, the EU opens its economy to countries where rules on plant health are not at all the same as in Europe, like Brazil and Argentina, the main producers of transgenic soybeans for livestock feed. That reality is rightly decried – for example by farmers who are currently struggling and whose products are “in competition” with products from powerful major agribusiness exporters in Argentina or Brazil in the case of the MERCOSUR agreement. These agreements are favourable to the interests of major European importers, but unfavourable to small local producers in the Global South as well as in Europe.

At the start of the CoViD crisis, Mario Draghi, who had ended his term as head of the European Central Bank Central Bank The establishment which in a given State is in charge of issuing bank notes and controlling the volume of currency and credit. In France, it is the Banque de France which assumes this role under the auspices of the European Central Bank (see ECB) while in the UK it is the Bank of England.

ECB : http://www.bankofengland.co.uk/Pages/home.aspx in late 2019, declared – along with his successor Christine Lagarde – that public debt needed to be increased in order to deal with the pandemic. He made a point of not proposing what seemed self-evident: that the cost of the struggle against the pandemic and its multiple effects be borne by the major private corporations who profited from the crisis (including Big Pharma, Big Tech and the major retail chains). To ensure that the public did not raise questions about how to finance the necessary struggle against the pandemic, EU leaders temporarily relaxed the aforementioned budget rules. Now that public debt has greatly increased and the cost of refinancing it has skyrocketed as a result of increasing interest rates Interest rates When A lends money to B, B repays the amount lent by A (the capital) as well as a supplementary sum known as interest, so that A has an interest in agreeing to this financial operation. The interest is determined by the interest rate, which may be high or low. To take a very simple example: if A borrows 100 million dollars for 10 years at a fixed interest rate of 5%, the first year he will repay a tenth of the capital initially borrowed (10 million dollars) plus 5% of the capital owed, i.e. 5 million dollars, that is a total of 15 million dollars. In the second year, he will again repay 10% of the capital borrowed, but the 5% now only applies to the remaining 90 million dollars still due, i.e. 4.5 million dollars, or a total of 14.5 million dollars. And so on, until the tenth year when he will repay the last 10 million dollars, plus 5% of that remaining 10 million dollars, i.e. 0.5 million dollars, giving a total of 10.5 million dollars. Over 10 years, the total amount repaid will come to 127.5 million dollars. The repayment of the capital is not usually made in equal instalments. In the initial years, the repayment concerns mainly the interest, and the proportion of capital repaid increases over the years. In this case, if repayments are stopped, the capital still due is higher…

The nominal interest rate is the rate at which the loan is contracted. The real interest rate is the nominal rate reduced by the rate of inflation. , austerity again rears its head, as the same leaders announce extensions of austerity measures on the pretext that public debt has reached an unsustainable level. Such austerity policies must once again be strongly denounced, and the struggle for the cancellation of illegitimate public debt must continue.

It is also high time to reflect on the re-founding of Europe. Obviously there is a need for a European structure, but not in the form taken by the EU, the Eurozone, etc. The Europe of Big Capital must be dismantled and replaced by another Europe that will serve the interests of its peoples. What is needed is an authentically democratic constitutional process beginning at the grass roots. This will also require democratic elections of delegates to a European Constitutional Convention. These delegates would have the power to create a new constitution for the EU and endow it with structures that are truly democratic, with a true Parliament with legislative power. Any proposal for a new European treaty should not be adopted until it has been the subject of widespread debate and then a referendum in each country. The new Europe of the Peoples must be genuinely in solidarity with the peoples of the Global South and pay reparations in compensation for the economic plunder and violations of human rights caused by European leaders and major corporations dating back centuries and up until today, for the catastrophic environmental damage caused by the policies encouraged by the EU, and for other wrongs. The goal is a Europe that is feminist, environmentalist, socialist, internationalist and pacifist.

Translated by Snake Arbusto in collaboration with Vicki Briault