Deligitimize EU treaties, break free from them and build another Europe
The crisis of the EU combines with the global crisis. The Pact for the euro and the projected new economic governance mean that European populations will have to bear an ever more severe austerity; they further increase the anti-democratic nature of the European construction. Building on popular discontent and perplexity, the Far Right is getting stronger everywhere in Europe.
This European Union is not ours. It serves the oligarchies it has been devised and tailored for. The EU and its member states have no regard for democratic choices and only want to sacrifice people to financial markets. This has to stop.
No empowering and democratic policy promoting solidarity and meeting social needs and environmental challenges can be initiated unless it relies on a radical break with the rules prevailing in the EU. This means that at the local and national level political decision-makers must be able to break free from all legal constraints that enforce neoliberal policies, and that all possible convergences be sought so that such constraints are also abolished at the European level. This uprising of European peoples would make it possible to build another Europe.
To this end, we need to create a new balance of power based on cultural, social and popular struggles in all European countries; we have to be able to rely particularly on trade unions and citizen movements at the local, national and European levels.
Our role as Attac is to contribute to the development of this new balance of power, notably through promoting a wider awareness of how necessary such breaks and convergences are in Europe. To this end we must further show that other policies and another Europe are possible: based on solidarity, democracy, and protection of the environment. We must expose the illegitimacy of the debt, of austerity measures, of the treaties on which the EU is based, and more generally of all neoliberal measures. We must recall the antidemocratic and illegitimate nature of the EU, as shown by the way the Lisbon treaty was adopted.
To develop a European solidarity, we could strengthen our common strategy among Attac Europe chapters through converging actions, we could highlight the connection between regressive government measures and the neoliberal trend in the EU, and we could show our support to the people in other countries: publicizing their struggles, sending delegations, meeting in front of embassies and consulates…
We must relate what is at stake at the local national and European levels, and in this respect demand the restoration of genuine public services that are not subjected to the current liberalizing guidelines; retrieve democratic control of public budgets which means leaving the euro pact and the stability pact; rein in the financial sector and refuse to implement dispositions about free capital flow; set up fair trade agreements while denouncing bilateral agreements the EU has imposed on countries of the South for instance, etc. At the local level we should demand that communities decide on relocalizing procurements and prohibiting GM crops. …
While we seem to be caught in a dead end called ‘crisis of the EU’, we must not give up, we must stop accepting, fight back, and explore all possible ways to initiate a process that breaks with the past and opens on a policy of economic, social and environmental justice, and on a European refoundation.
National Conference of Local Committees of Attac France, 19 June 2011