International

Movements are arising in the European Union. Macron has his ‘En Marche’, which he wants to see also established at the European level. There's a movement of 'progressive youth', Volt, aimed at a European superstate. And then there's Jean-Luc  Mélenchon's 'La France Insoumise’ (LFI), which he also wants to broaden into a European movement, 'Now, the People’. Three movements, each completely different from the other, but if it's justice for all that moves you, it's only the latter, Mélenchon's, which is of any real interest.

Sometimes things can get genuinely exciting in the European Union, and sometimes it's simply pure theatre. When it comes to the future of the euro, it's for the most part the latter, and the various roles are decided in advance. Macron wants a common budget for good times and bad, managed by a European Finance Minister. Merkel is happy to go along with him to a degree, but only if the member states are forced to subject themselves to the yoke of budgetary discipline. And while Dutch Prime Minister Mark Rutte does want budgetary discipline, he doesn't favour a common budget. Three leading actors who have long known that there'll be a happy ending: Rutte is used as the bad guy in her plan to impose her own views on Macron. And so this summer we're seeing important steps towards a federal eurozone. Only real left forces can see through this charade. For example the Mélenchon movement in France, whose very name, La France Insoumise -”France Unsubdued” - expresses a refusal to don the European yoke. In a famous event in the 1960s, known as the Tomato Action, drama students began to throw tomatoes at the actors in protest at the extremely conservative nature of the selection of plays. We need those tomato throwers to step up again, because this play doesn't deserve a happy ending, at least not for those playing the leading roles.

Just a week to go until the summer recess, but there's still hard work to be done around the European Commission's proposals for the protection of whistle-blowers. What's striking about these proposals is that they offer protection to all whistle-blowers everywhere, except in the EU institutions themselves, which go unmentioned in the proposed legislative text. This fits a trend, where the Commission is happy to tell the member states what they must do, but lags behind when it comes to its own practices.

Attention has been so focussed on the debate around immigration that other important issues have been hardly noticed. The heads of EU member state governments, for instance, last week voted to establish a European Defence Fund. I am not in the least surprised that these leaders took no notice of the criticisms of the militarisation of the European research programme from ourselves and others, but that they should ignore the call from more than 800 scientists to at least spend no money on the development of killer robots was less predictable.  The combination of artificial intelligence and weapons is - literally and figuratively – deadly. The EU, however, finds this of sufficient interest to develop it further. Nothing, absolutely nothing, remains of the original ideal of peace.