International

Now that the knives are being sharpened for the European election campaigns, I'm struck by the way that the liberals, with people like Macron and Verhofstadt to the fore, are claiming that they want to defend 'European values', in particular from the populists. This is all a bit cheap and also dangerous. Cheap, because it's the (neo-)liberals who have left people to their fate with their striving for unbridled marketisation and budget fetishism which have led to the destruction of services in, for example, health care, education and the law. Dangerous too, because traditionally Europe has always sought universal values, human rights which are valid everywhere. Evidently the liberals have now withdrawn from this struggle in the belief that Europe knows better than the rest of the world, That is to misjudge decades of international negotiations in primarily the Council of Europe and the UN.

It's no coincidence that well-informed journalists such as Bas Heijne and Hella Hueck are drawing attention to the damage which has been done in recent decades by the sacred belief in the market, the way in which people feel insecure, rejected and in competition with everyone else, a struggle which they think they will lose. It's time therefore to look for the tools to give people hope of a victory. In this context could the international human rights treaties add another strand, obliging everyone to take account of the interests of others? My answer is that they could not exactly do this, but they could certainly help.

It's January 1st, the day we recuperate and look to the future. And for the SP's group in the European Parliament that means rounding off ongoing tasks and getting ready for May's European elections. And we're not the only ones to whom this applies. French President Immanuel Macron and Dutch European Commissioner Frans Timmermans have for weeks been busily constructing their profiles. Over one thing they are in passionate agreement: these European elections will pose the question of whether they can keep the European Union out of the hands of the populists or will see it smashed to pieces. But don't be fooled. It's not a matter of whether the the EU will survive, but of whether we can free it from the yoke of the multinationals under the weight of which it has bowed for so many decades. The real conflict is not over whether we like the EU or not, but about whether we can get it to work in the interests of ordinary people. For that to happen,the power of the multinationals and of the Eurocrats must first be broken.

I know: everyone's now writing about the Gilets Jaunes, the 'Yellow Vests' in France, but I can't avoid doing so. Though I wrote just two weeks ago an article for our party magazine comparing the merrily dancing europhile students to the heated atmosphere amongst the 90%, the growing protests of the Yellow Vests have exploded into life rather sooner than I had expected. And of course the European Union is a factor in this. With 100% support from the member state governments who are just as responsible for this, the EU has pursued a policy dictated by the multinationals. In France the dancing students have been suddenly replaced by large numbers of other students angered by the spending cuts and commercialisation affecting education. This is thanks to the EU which since the Bologna Declaration of 1999 have advocated the 'reform', and therefore the selling off, of education.