European Union

What kind of organisation is the European Union?

The European Union is neither a country nor an ordinary international organisation like the United Nations. Members remain sovereign states, but in fields set by treaty they make law together, and that law applies directly at home. Hence the usual description of a one-of-a-kind body combining features of a federation and a confederation.

At its centre is the single market: on top of a customs union, one set of rules so that people, goods, services and capital can move without being stopped at borders. There are also common policies on trade, agriculture, fisheries and regional development, and passport checks have been abolished within the Schengen Area. Some of this involves only some members; the outstanding case is the single currency, the euro, used by 21 countries.

How did it come about?

After two world wars, European integration was taken as an antidote to extreme nationalism. It was also a product of the Cold War: institutional integration within Western Europe began around 1948, as the rift between the Western Allies and the Soviet Union widened. The Schuman Declaration of 1950 promised to "make war unthinkable and materially impossible", and in 1951 the Treaty of Paris set up the European Coal and Steel Community among six countries: Belgium, France, Italy, Luxembourg, the Netherlands and West Germany.

The same six signed the Treaty of Rome on 25 March 1957, creating the European Economic Community (EEC). It would reduce customs duties towards a customs union, build a common market for goods, labour, services and capital, and set up a Common Agricultural Policy and a European Social Fund. The United Kingdom, Denmark and Ireland joined on 1 January 1973. The name European Community (EC) came into use around this time and was later fixed by treaty.

In the 1980s market integration picked up speed again. Against a background of discontent among business and political leaders about the de facto lack of free trade in the Community, the Single European Act of 1986 set the goal of completing a single market by the end of 1992 by removing non-tariff barriers, and to speed the legislation it extended qualified majority voting in place of unanimity.

What did the Maastricht Treaty change?

Just after the Cold War ended and Germany reunified, the twelve members signed the Treaty on European Union in the Dutch city of Maastricht on 7 February 1992. When it came into force on 1 November 1993, the European Union was formally born. The European Economic Community was renamed the European Community and became the central pillar of the Union; European citizenship and a common foreign and security policy were added; and the stages towards a single currency, with the convergence criteria as their threshold, were written into the treaty.

Ratification was not easy. Denmark rejected the treaty 50.7 to 49.3 percent in a first referendum on 2 June 1992, then accepted it with 56.7 percent in May 1993 after winning an exemption from the single currency. France's referendum passed with only 50.8 percent in favour, the "petit oui". Jacques Delors commented that Europe began as an elitist project in which it was believed that all that was required was to convince the decision-makers, and that "that phase of benign despotism is over."

How did it widen eastward and come to lose a member?

To take in the former socialist countries, the Copenhagen criteria were agreed in June 1993, a threshold requiring a stable democratic government and the rule of law along with economic conditions. Austria, Finland and Sweden joined in 1995, and the biggest enlargement came in 2004 with the Czech Republic, Estonia, Hungary, Latvia, Lithuania, Poland, Slovakia and Slovenia along with Cyprus and Malta. Bulgaria and Romania followed in 2007 and Croatia in 2013.

An attempt to bind integration in a constitution was rejected by French and Dutch voters in May and June 2005. Much of its content moved into the Treaty of Lisbon, signed on 13 December 2007 and in force from 1 December 2009. For the first time, the treaty gave member states the explicit legal right to leave and a procedure for doing so (Article 50 of the Treaty on European Union).

The 2010s brought the eurozone crisis, the 2015 migrant crisis and Brexit. In the British referendum of 23 June 2016, 51.9 percent voted to leave, and on 31 January 2020 the United Kingdom became the first and so far only member state to withdraw. During the COVID-19 crisis in 2020 the EU for the first time created common debt, financing the €750 billion Next Generation EU fund.

What is the European Union for workers?

EU citizens may live and work freely in other member states, and the Union has set minimum labour and environmental standards in the name of preventing social dumping, meaning the use of labour on lower pay or conditions to drive down standards elsewhere.

Yet the freedoms of the single market and the rights of workers can collide. The outstanding case is the Laval judgment of the European Court of Justice in 2007. When the Latvian company Laval posted its own workers to a school renovation in Sweden and refused to sign the Swedish building workers' collective agreement, the union blockaded its sites. The court recognised a right to strike, but held that where it could infringe the freedom to provide services it must be justified, and that here it was not.

Part of the British labour movement opposed membership from the start. Britain's National Union of Mineworkers voted unanimously at its 1971 conference to oppose joining, and Arthur Scargill later supported Brexit. The case for leaving on left-wing grounds is known as "Lexit".

How have socialists seen European unification?

The argument is older than the Union. During the First World War, in "On the Slogan for a United States of Europe" (1915), Lenin wrote that a republican United States of Europe, tied to the overthrow of the monarchies, was above reproach as a political slogan, but that its economic content was another matter. Under capitalism, he argued, it would amount to an agreement on the partition of colonies, and the only principle of partition is force.

From the standpoint of the economic conditions of imperialism—i.e., the export of capital and the division of the world by the "advanced" and "civilised" colonial powers—a United States of Europe, under capitalism, is either impossible or reactionary.

Trotsky took up the same slogan in 1923 and filled it differently: for him the United States of Europe was the counterpart of the slogan of "a Workers' (or Workers' and Peasants') Government".

Positions today also divide. European social democracy, like Delors, sought to widen social standards within integration. The Communist Party of Greece sees the EU as an imperialist alliance and calls for a rupture. Wolfgang Streeck calls the EU not a federation in the making but a "Liberal Empire", in which a core centred on Germany imposes market discipline on the southern periphery and takes away its democratic sovereignty to devalue or manage deficits; his alternative is loose cooperation among smaller sovereign states. Costas Lapavitsas likewise argues that left policies are impossible without conflict with the EU.