International

Last week it was a case of ‘here we go again’. In a forced attempt to come over as the ‘President of Europe’, Commission President Jose Barroso delivered his ‘State of the Union’ address in Strasbourg. According to Barroso the time has come for a ‘Federation of Nation States’. A banking union, an economic union and a political union must be quickly brought into being. The European Parliament must become a parliament in which only European political parties are represented, parties which can in their turn also provide the new president of the Commission. Barroso has shown himself once again to be like ‘Rupsje Nooitgenoeg’, the caterpillar who was always hungry for more.

In all the sturm und drang of an election it’s easy to forget that next week the European Parliament will awake from its summer sleep. Things should, moreover, be quite exciting: at least I will have the chance to enter into serious negotiations with the European Commission over the composition and transparency of its advisory ‘expert groups’, while on Thursday we will vote on the question of whether the finance for these groups, which we recently blocked, can now be released. That would be fine, but only if the Commission guarantees that the expert groups will cease to be the playthings of major corporations, and instead be opened to representatives of all interest groups, including workers, consumers and small business.

It was a heated discussion of Europe that we had yesterday at the SP’s members’ day at Arnhem’s Open Air Museum, and not only because of the literal heat of the day. The assembled members showered Harry van Bommel (responsible for European affairs in the party’s parliamentary group in the Hague) and myself with questions about the sources of their annoyance: the waste, the high salaries and of course the eurocrisis. The heart of the discussion, however, and not only in Arnhem but in general, concerns people’s dignity. Whether we let the financial markets and neoliberal directors of major corporations run the show in Brussels, or take the power back and work together with ordinary people from the whole of Europe. The SP stands for the latter: no more tricks, no more decisions taken behind the scenes and no eurocratic power games.

The European Commission this week presented its findings on the situation in Romania and Bulgaria. These were, in a word, devastating, and the Commission openly casts doubt on whether these countries should have been allowed into the European Union at all. Since the publication of the findings, however, things have remained surprisingly quiet. Parties which attempted to put the SP and other doubters under pressure to agree to the removal of border controls and to accept the two countries into full membership of Schengen now have nothing much to say. At most they express strong criticism of Romania in particular, a country in which what almost amounted to a coup d’état has taken place. Generally speaking it’s nice to be proved right, but in the meantime the people of both nations are suffering under state systems which hardly even merit the term ‘semi-democratic’, with raging corruption and organised crime in abundance.