The European Union: A Critical Guide - Updated edition

• Publisher:   Pluto Press; Updated edition (October 20, 2005)
• Number Of Pages:   240
• Publication Date:   2005-10-20
• ISBN-10 / ASIN:   0745325068
• ISBN-13 / EAN:   9780745325064

Steve McGiffen's book gives a clear yet critical introduction to the origins, development and current direction of the EU. He is a long-time critic of the EU who works for the United Left Group in the European Parliament.
His brief, well-organised chapters cover the EU's treaties, institutions, enlargement, Common Foreign and Security Policy, Justice and Home Affairs, the euro, the internal market, external economic relations, employment, social policy, the environment, the Common Agricultural and Fisheries Policies, transport, and regional and industrial policy. He includes an extremely useful and up-to-date survey of information available in books, articles and websites.
McGiffen shows that the EU is capitalist through and through, created by employers for employers, designed to leach power away from workers. The EU is not about democratic nations cooperating for peace, but about employers railroading Europe's nations into a single undemocratic `superpower' (Blair's word).
Most importantly, he shows how the euro gives vast unaccountable powers to the European Central Bank, ending all democratic control over economic policy, and implementing an extreme monetarism. He shows how the euro strengthens capital's power to destroy European nations' welfare states, achieved by workers' struggles over the centuries. He cites the economist Melvyn Krauss: "Behind the euro's falling exchange rate is a life-and-death struggle between it and Europe's welfare state. Either the euro subverts the welfare state, or Europe's welfare state subverts the euro."
So the welfare state is at stake in the fight against the euro, but not only the welfare state. EU monetarism installs deflation as a permanent policy, cutting down jobs and industries across Europe: the EU mortally threatens manufacturing industry, so vital for our working class's very existence as a creative, world-making force. Without industry, there can be no independent, sovereign Britain.
So how do we stop the EU and the euro from destroying Britain? Not by rallying the forces of `the left'. The idea of workers' nationalism alone has the huge potential of uniting all our class in the fight to save Britain. Renouncing the nation only weakens the class. As Ho Chi Minh always said, real internationalism begins at home.

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