Remaking Europe

Some may fear it, some may relish it, but there is no doubting that European unity is one of the biggest, most complex and bitterly contested political issues of the day. Whatever we might be told there are no easy ‘yes’ or ‘no’ answers. Europe is an enigma. Variously a nascent military threat and a guarantor against war, a wide field of struggle and a remote bureaucratic machine, a black hole of patronage, subsidy and corruption and a global haven of stability, enlightenment and rationality.

Certainly the ruling class and political establishment in Britain has long been at loggerheads over the European Union. One camp includes the largest and most statist sections of industry, represented by the Confederation of British Industry, the European Roundtable, and is nowadays led by the Labour government and supported by its Liberal Democrat outriders. This camp quietly, almost shamefacedly, wants Britain to place itself at the “heart of Europe”.

The other capitalist camp - fronted by Michael Howard’s Tory Party - is either woefully uncompetitive, determinedly monolingual or, as with Rupert Murdoch’s media empire, is linked with and oriented towards the US and the Asia-Pacific. Further integration with Europe is denounced under the cloak of patriotism. At most, all that is wanted is a semi-detached relationship. Anything else is akin to treachery. Hence, alongside the successful launch of the euro, the EU’s triumphant eastward enlargement and constitutional agreement, there runs an ever-increasing plutocratic hostility, dogging it like a shadow and growing with its growth. Beethoven’s wonderful, but misappropriated, Ode to joy is constantly interrupted by shrill notes of well-financed Europhobic dissent.

Meanwhile, and not without justification, because the EU is seen as a runaway juggernaut pursuing its own agenda and being under only negligible democratic supervision and control, there is an expanding reservoir of petty bourgeois and plebeian opinion which is downright antagonistic (not least towards the Brussels commissioners and their endless and seemingly pettifogging rules and regulations). Combine all that with a rich dose of jingoism, recruit a few B-list celebrities and you have the United Kingdom Independence Party. In Holland, Transparent Europe; in Poland, the League of Polish Families; in Belgium, the Vlaams Blok; in the Czech Republic, the Civic Democrats, etc.

The EU has divided the left too. Nationalism runs deep. Talk of sovereignty and setting interest rates has in some quarters replaced the language of working class solidarity and international socialism. This collapse into, pandering to, or opportunist flirtation with nationalism, directly stems from tailist politics. So sadly, when it comes to Tony Blair’s forthcoming, promised referendum on the EU constitution most sections of the left would willingly play second fiddle to the Tories in the name of saving Britain and building the “widest possible” opposition.¹

The prime focus of this book is neither on the banal ‘yes’ or ‘no’. Though I shall discuss in detail immediate issues such as the EU’s constitution, my overriding aim is to open up wider vistas. The working class can, and must, establish a ‘third’, fully articulated, camp, with a view to winning our own, social, Europe. A Europe stamped by the working class, which is ready for its domination and rapid emancipatory extension. In short whereas the 25 heads of government propose enshrining the virtues of neo-liberal capitalism, the EU’s quasi-democratic institutions and reformist palliatives, we require our inspiring, and thoroughly practical, alternative.

What follows is a contribution to debate and, despite my insistence that Europe is a complex issue, will hopefully help to bring about the hard lines of clarity. Readers of my Europe: meeting the challenge of continental unity (London 2002) will doubtless recognise some of the material, in particular what now constitutes the four appendixes which all deal with history. However, I have not only reworked all the old chapters to a greater or lesser extent, but also added several new ones. Hence the new title.

October 2004

1. Imagining Europe

Let us begin by asking a simple question: what is Europe?

In late 2003 George W Bush staged a lavish White House banquet for Romano Prodi, the outgoing president of the European Commission. Keen to impress his blood-splattered host, Prodi reportedly boasted about Europe’s imminent expansion and how the EU was destined to become a key world player in its own right. “Sounds like the Roman empire, Romano,” remarked Bush.² Presumably a barbed put-down. Opponents of “ever closer” European unity - whether American neocons, left reformists or little British populists - like to equate the EU with the Roman empire. A jaundiced comparison which implies artificial unity, fragility and hubris.

Of course, the Roman empire was based on the Mediterranean - Romans called it mare nostrum, ‘our sea’ - and the glittering cities strung around its rim. The Roman empire included modern-day Turkey, Syria, Israel, Lebanon, Egypt and the whole of the north African coastal strip. Despite the empire surviving in Constantinople and a constricted eastern zone well into the middle ages as a redoubt of Greek speaking christianity, it was Rome’s 500 years of power and glory which inspired one imperial project after another.

Conquering barbarian chiefs quickly, greedily, elevated themselves. They separated themselves off from their warrior kith and kin by becoming Roman emperors. They reached for an off-the-peg imperial purple and adopted all the old Roman ostentation and vices. Hence their kingdoms also became officially christian. A conversion hardened into a carapace by the meteoric rise of islam and its leaping series of conquests over the rotting Byzantine and Sassanid empires and the brittle Vandal kingdom in northern Africa - which finally saw Gebal al-Tariq strike out from today’s Mauritania to take most of Spain. In defence memories of the Roman empire fused with the idea of christianity in the feudal mind.

Charlemagne, king of the Franks, famously established his Roman empire from the Pyrenees in the west to the Adriatic in the east and from the Elbe in the north to middle Italy in the south. Obviously a feudal conglomeration - each subordinate baron, duke and count possessed his own well fortified castles and commanded large bands of knights and mercenary troops. Crowned Romanorum gubernans imperium by pope Leo III in December 800 AD, Charlemagne was formally recognised by the Byzantine emperor Michael I as an equal. Not surprisingly, despite that, his empire quickly disintegrated following his death. Nevertheless the imperium Romanum continued to exert a powerful material influence.

In Charlemagne’s footsteps there followed the Ottonian and Salian kings of 10th and the 11th centuries, Spain in the 16th and 17th centuries, Napoleonic France and Hitler Germany. Succeeding generations donned the trappings of the past. Eg, ‘German’ kings would call themselves Imperator Augustus or Imperator Romanorum Augustus. To reward loyal minions, in 1802 Napoleon founded the Légion d’Honneur on the model of the Roman Legio Honoratorum, and he too invoked Charlemagne during his 1804 coronation. Nazis gave the Roman stiff-arm salute and cried “heil Hitler!” - a copy of “hail Caesar!” And when a new SS division for French volunteers was formed it was named the Charlemagne.

However, in actual fact, the foremost historic model informing and inspiring European federalists is not the Roman empire nor its epigones - Charlemagne, Habsburg Spain, Napoleon and Hitler (Nicholas Ridley, a minister in Margaret Thatcher’s cabinet, bizarrely warned that the EU was in danger of becoming a “Fourth Reich”). Ironically it is the idea that Europe can emulate America. In terms of method, scale, ambition and possible consequences surely the only parallel to the EU under capitalism is the formation of the USA in 1787 out of the loose confederation of 13 states which emerged victorious from the revolutionary war against the British crown (the US itself heavily borrowed Roman forms, symbols and styles - look at its mixed constitution, imperial eagles and the classic architecture of Washington’s Capitol Hill and other famous state buildings). Valéry Giscard d’Estaing - chair of the convention on the future of Europe - grandeloquently compared his own work to that of the founding fathers of the US.³ Painfully longwinded though it is, his constitution is designed to inspire supranational European loyalty. The preamble is drawn in part from the French Revolution’s ‘Rights of man’ and the US declaration of independence. Presumably Giscard d’Estaing imagined himself embodying the best qualities of Thomas Jefferson and Georges-Jacques Danton.

So what is Europe? The name is, of course, Greek in origin. Europe, or Europa, being the mythological daughter of Agenor and Telephassa. Kidnapped by Zeus, in the shape of an eagle, she gave birth to three sons - Minos, Rhadamanthys and Sarpedon. Robert Graves speculates that the rape of Europe records either the “Hellenic occupation of Crete” or a raid by Hellenes from Crete on Phoenicia.⁴ During the Renaissance, and in later British and German attempts to claim prestigious antecedents, Rome, but more particularly Greece itself, was recast as the fountainhead of European civilisation. Needless to say, the ancient Greeks, or Hellenes, did not think of themselves as Europeans. Theirs was a politically fractured, highly variegated and constantly warring culture centred on the Aegean Sea and therefore included the coastline of Asia Minor (as well as a series of city-state colonies in Sicily and southern Italy). Greece was a distant, and economically poor, outpost, or offshoot, of the great riverine civilisations of the ancient near east - Egypt and Mesopotamia. As for their stunning intellectual attainments in astronomy, drama, poetry, history, philosophy, medicine, mathematics and geometry they were reshaped and filtered back to Europe by way of Arab learned men and sources. Between the 8th and 13th century the Abbassid rulers of Baghdad oversaw the work of thousands of state-scholars who translated, interpreted and developed Greek learning.

Europe as an ideological vehicle, it should be stressed, is a comparatively recent concept. The historian Norman Davies explains that it “gradually replaced the earlier concept of ‘christendom’ in a complex intellectual process lasting from the 14th to the 18th centuries”.⁵ Only in the early years of the 18th century did notions of a common European identity finally supersede those of christendom. The Treaty of Utrecht in 1713 provides perhaps the last major diplomatic reference to the ‘christian commonwealth’.

Europe is a continent of the mind. Europe certainly owes more to ideology and history than geography. Geographically it is merely a part, and an extension, of the great Asian landmass, akin in that sense to India. Over time the exact borders of Europe have waxed and waned. William Blake illustrates his 1794 poem ‘Europa’ with a cartoon depicting god reaching down from the heavens holding a pair of compasses. Yet despite such divine intervention the matter has never been fixed. Europe is “tidal”; the main gravitational factor being Russian state power.⁶

Russia, and Russian otherness, stretches far into the east and Asia but is also vast to the west. Sometimes the perceived borders of Europe have included Russia (as now they potentially include secular-muslim Turkey). At other times Russia - along with its occidental possessions and satellites - have been excluded. But whether Europe stops at the Elbe, the Wista, the Don, the Urals or the Caucasus mountains there have been repeated proposals to overcome Europe’s chronic and often bloody divisions. The so-called religious wars of the 15th, 16th and 17th centuries - which pitted the pope and the catholic kings, princes and bishops against protestant heretics - and the emergence of orthodox Russia as a great power certainly necessitated radical rethinking. Notions of a European commonality steadily gained prominence.

The quaker leader, William Penn (1644-1718), the founder of Pennsylvania, advocated religious toleration and should be credited with being perhaps the first to call for a European parliament. Charles Castel de St Pierre (1658-1743), a dissident French abbot, explicitly called for a confederation of European powers in order to secure peace. Voltaire, writing in 1751, described Europe as a “kind of great republic”, some of it monarchical, “others mixed” ... “but all corresponding with one another”. He cites not only common religious foundations but also common “principles of public law and politics unknown in other parts of the world”. ⁷ Twenty years later Rousseau was saying that there were no longer French, German, Spanish, “or even English”, but “only Europeans”.⁸

Europe came to represent an ideal goal, the embodiment of peace and harmony that was so lacking in reality. Invoked by revolutionary democrats and reactionaries alike, Europe has served many causes. Napoleon Bonaparte sought to unite Europe in the image of France. In turn the main counterrevolutionary powers joined in concert against the French revolution in the hallowed name of European civilisation. The 1815 Congress of Vienna put in place an interlocking system of semi-despotic European states. Later, imperialism was justified with reference to Europe’s moral superiority and world-wide mission: eg, Rudyard Kipling’s “white man’s burden”. Meanwhile another Europe gestated. Proletarian Europe. Karl Kautsky desperately wanted to prevent the outbreak of a horrendous inter-European slaughter - socialism would be thrown back a generation or more. So in 1912 he proposed that the working class should settle accounts with autocratic Germany, Austria and Russia and boldly take the lead in bringing about a republican United States of Europe.

World War I bled Europe white. The European autocracies collapsed or were overthrown - but socialism was isolated in the suffocating backwardness of Russia. A precocious United States took over as the main powerhouse of world productive activity. Yet Europe remained of paramount political importance. Both revolutionaries and reformists sought to rescue Europe from decay and fragmentation - the former for socialism, the later for capital. Trotsky won Comintern to call for a United Socialist States of Europe in 1923. In his turn Aristide Briand, a right socialist French politician, attempted to bamboozle the working class with his plan Europe. It envisioned federalism, peace and economic cooperation under a reformed, slightly pink capitalist sky. Constitutionally, he sketched out a European union of 27 sovereign states and a permanent executive.

The coming to power first of Joseph Stalin in 1924, and then Adolf Hitler in 1933, practically scuppered both projects; especially when Germany embarked on its second attempt to dominate Europe by means of conquest and terror. By 1941 half of the continent had been united ... in Nazi fetters. Hitler madly dreamed of a Europe purged of all Untermenschen - jews, Roma, homosexuals, Bolsheviks - and a Germany gigantically expanded with endless agricultural lands to the east. Those semi-Asiatic Slavs who were permitted to survive would be reduced to serfs; their lot in life, to serve under a colonial master class of Aryan farmers.⁹ Hitler drew an analogy with British rule and exploitation of India - “The Russian space is our India”.¹⁰

During the darkest days of World War II, there was a clinging convergence of social democratic and liberal thought. Nazism threatened to wreak universal catastrophe. Capitalism had to be saved and put on new, far firmer, more acceptable foundations. Leon Blum, Conrad Adenauer, Alterio Spinelli, Ernest Rossi, etc, all came forward with seductive and seemingly democratic blueprints for curbing the appetites of the old nation-state with an over-due European integration. Even in Britain Clement Attlee had offered the slogan: “Europe must federate or perish”. ¹¹ Nazi Europe produced its opposite. This Europe recoiled from internal genocide, warmongering and territorial expansionism. The ousted political elite - exiled, underground or imprisoned - sought redemption by rejecting the unfettered nation-state and fled mentally to an old, irenic, ideal. The nation-state was criticised as being not only inherently aggressive but economically far too narrow. Divided, Europe would either fall prey to Germany, or failing that, the US, or worse, the dreaded Soviet Union. Clipping the talons of sovereignty and constructing a “free and unified” Europe was held up as a prerequisite for saving the continent from totalitarianism and founding a “modern civilisation”.¹²

Because of World War II, Europe once again found itself devastated, exhausted and diminished. Under the terms of the Yalta agreement, the eastern half of the continent was surgically sliced off, incorporated into the Soviet Union’s sphere of influence and, through bureaucratic revolution, ‘sovietised’. As to western Europe, it was robbed of imperial glories - and the booty of empire. Humiliatingly it agreed to rely on the US nuclear umbrella to ward off the much exaggerated threat from beyond the iron curtain. And these circumstances, plus the overriding determination to avoid another internecine conflict, plus re-establishing the internal security of the nation-states, plus creating a bulwark against bureaucratic socialism, combined to drive the states of western Europe, in particular Federal Germany and France, towards an historic compromise. It was a deal hatched between, much reduced, rival gangs of global robbers, but it all added up to overcoming the division of Europe into numerous antagonistic powers.

Capitalist integration in Europe has advanced qualitatively since the Treaty of Rome was signed between Belgium, France, Germany, Italy, Luxembourg and the Netherlands in 1957. The untested, tentative customs union has become a huge economic-political zone embracing 450 million people. And what was advancing tortuously - through endless compromises and half-measures - speeded-up markedly following the collapse of bureaucratic socialism in the USSR and eastern Europe over 1989-91. With the Maastricht, Amsterdam and Nice treaties the tempo of integration raced forward. A common currency and plans for new members to the east. Sacrificing his beloved deutschmark for the euro was purportedly the price chancellor Helmut Kohl paid for French acquiescence to German reunification.

Undoubtedly 2004 was a watershed year. Not only did the European Union gain ten new members on May 1, but on June 18 the 25 heads of government finally agreed their constitution which systemises and to some extent enhances the EU’s treaties and fundamental laws. Yalta’s ghosts were finally exorcised. That is for certain. Eight of the EU’s ten new members were either once an integral part of the USSR or constituted its defensive shield against Nato and the capitalist west. Now Europe laps at Russia’s flanks and borders Ukraine and Belarus. Russia’s front door, St Petersburg, its second city, is just a short hop away. Moreover, with the inclusion of Cyprus, the Czech Republic, Estonia, Hungary, Latvia, Lithuania, Malta, Poland, Slovakia and Slovenia, the EU now constitutes the world’s largest economic bloc. And though the EU still appears to be a jerry-built Tower of Babel, leading French and German federalists still hanker after streamlining this precarious construction and bringing nearer the day when the EU becomes the dominant imperialist power and can thereby reshape the world so that it accords to its needs and wants. Even Silvio Berlusconi has spoken in such belligerent terms. On the eve of taking over the EU presidency in July 2003 he declared that “Europe will only be able to look at the United States as something other than a subordinate if it becomes a great Europe”.¹³

The EU has nowhere near China’s 1.2 billion, or India’s 1 billion people. However, in terms of productivity and living standards it is in a completely different, higher, league. The EU’s GDP is marginally bigger than that of the United States (though the US has a much smaller population - 290 million). True, according to a recent World Economic Forum survey, the US remains “significantly more competitive”; nevertheless the EU is committed to becoming the “most competitive and dynamic, knowledge-based economy in the world by 2010” (Financial Times April 27 2004). Whether or not that particular target is met is a moot point, but mere common sense tells us that the EU constitutes the only serious potential challenger to US global hegemony. And though May 1 2004 boosted the EU’s GDP by a meagre five percent - most of the accession countries being relatively poor, with rates of productivity between a half and a fifth less than the EU 15’s average - there is no doubting the political and strategic importance of expansion and growing European unity.

The European bourgeoisie have had to pursue the aim of integration through the market, without recourse to war and in a quasi-democratic fashion. There are two main reasons for this: US hegemony and the working class. We shall deal with the US below. What then of the working class? Despite the working class lacking anything like a viable alternative programme, its power after World War II was instantly revived (a process of recomposition that is constantly reinforced by proletarianisation - but is also constantly undermined by bourgeois ideology, recruitment to the petty bourgeois managerial class and the replacement of labour by machines. That is, decomposition). Nontheless, our rulers were left with little choice: preserving peace and the rule of law became an overriding objective. That is surely why in establishment Europe the hard-edged philosophy of Georg Hegel has been eclipsed by the fuzzy universal ethics of Emmanuel Kant.

All in all, though, it is certainly either dishonest or profoundly mistaken to equate the EU with the inherently unstable multinational Roman prison house or the subsequent empires of Charlemagne, Habsburg Spain, Napoleon and Hitler. The EU is not, except in terms of pre-history, the result of dynastic marriage bed deals or military campaigns. Nor, despite the chauvinist, near hysterical, outbursts by various ‘official communists’, is it based on the domination of a particular nationality - as was the case with the Russians in the Soviet Union and the Germans in Austria-Hungary. The EU is a confederation of states in which the smaller countries have not been suppressed; they have voluntarily integrated and continue to exert some real influence. Not that we wish to glorify capitalist Europe and its dominant German, French, British, Italian power brokers. On the contrary, we are out to greatly enhance working class organisation throughout Europe and thereby overcome the lethargy, ineffectiveness and debilitating nationalist squabbling and intrigues that today characterises the EU. In place of today’s flabby capitalist Europe, we communists shall put in place the most thoroughgoing democratic centralisation.

European unity since 1957 has relied in part on the existence and increasingly widespread, albeit somewhat vague, perception of a common identity. EU sponsored statisticians have sought to measure the extent to which people see themselves as Europeans - as well being national citizens and inhabitants of a particular region. In 1996 a Eurobarometer survey reported that 55% of the EU’s citizens prominently ranked themselves as Europeans. Interestingly, within this figure there exists a swathe of people who actually consider themselves “primarily” European: from the highs in Italy, 30%, and Luxemburg, 21%, to the middling UK, 14%, to the lows of Sweden, 5.5%, and Finland, 3.8%.¹⁴ Obviously, these crude statistics come mediated through the prism of historical experience, cultural mores, class consciousness and national fears and hopes. But what they show beyond doubt is that the EU has so far not succeeded in constructing a European ‘ethnicity’ or ‘nationalism’.

Identity is a much debated, and hotly contested, concept. Suffice to say, a person’s identity is never singular but always multilayered - an ideological Russian doll. I, for example, consider myself at the same time British, a Londoner, European, but most importantly, in my heart of hearts, a communist. Of course, Europe is not a nation-state in waiting. There might be a common territory, a common currency and a common legal system, but there is certainly no common language. Nevertheless, most countries with a United Nations seat are multinational states, not nation-states. Nigeria and Switzerland, South Africa and Iran are all made up of a variety of distinct, and in proportionate terms numerically significant, peoples, each with their own language, established territory and culture. Eg, Ibo, Swiss Deutsch, Zulu and Kurd. That does not mean there is no state consciousness. Evidently there is. To a greater or lesser degree the above mentioned people feel themselves to be Nigerian, Swiss, South African, Iranian, too. State identity is internalised alongside national identity. Undoubtedly the same went for the various nationalities in the former Soviet Union - there was, despite the horrors of Stalinism, a definite Soviet consciousness based in part on the common ideals of preserving peace and even achieving some kind of communism.

However, it should be emphasised, whether it be a nation-state or a multinational state, any associated identity, shared and used by people in their social interactions, is not an individual, but a “collective attribute”, and as such is historically constructed.¹⁵ Individual consciousness “is not the architect of the ideological superstructure, but only a tenant lodging in the social edifice of ideological signs”.¹⁶ Put simply, a person’s identification with a state, or a nation, arises through an external process whereby imagined - ie, thought, but not necessarily false - common interests have been claimed, successfully propagated and are to some extent lived.

For purposes of comparative illustration let us discuss India, which is both a modern state and a broad geographical expression. Its name comes from the river Indus - which is now in Pakistan - and throughout most of recorded history India simply referred to the great land mass south of the Himalayas. There were any number of thin and constantly shifting empires established in the sub-continent, eg, the Mauryan 321-185 BC and during the so-called classical age of 300-650. But in general India remained a mosaic of petty kingdoms, theocratic republics and semi-autonomous trading ports. India was also subject to one after another invasion: Macedonian Greeks, Parthians, Scythians, etc. And it was under the Moguls - Persian speaking muslims led by descendants of Genghis Khan - that India arrived at what was till then its most extensive political unity. By the mid-17th century the Moguls had not only fully consolidated direct rule over the greater part of the wide, riverine, northwest centred on the Indus, and the northeast centred on the Ganges-Brahmaputra, but had extended their hegemony down to the Deccan sultanates of southern central India.

That did not mean that the Moguls, nor their subjects, thought of themselves as Indians. The Moguls were not Indian kings, but muslims and kings of whatever they happened to rule at any one moment in time. As to their subjects, India remained a land of many peoples each with their own language or dialect. There are still perhaps some 100 distinct languages. Admittedly the 12 core language groups are closely aligned internally, so that, for example, speakers of the nine main languages in the north - like Slavic, Germanic and Latinate in Europe - can without too much effort make themselves mutually intelligible one to another. Nevertheless India is also divided across language groups by a wide array of rival religions - jains, buddhists, muslims, sikhs, zoroastrians and christians. And despite the fact that today the majority of the population, around 80%, are hindu, they too, like Europe’s protestants, are split into various sects and traditions - Pashupata, Lingayat, Mahdvas, etc. Furthermore, perhaps a third of hindus are Dalits, or tribal people, who eat beef and reject many other hindu taboos and beliefs.

It was British colonialism in the 19th century which created India as a single political entity - the 565 princely micro-states were nothing but pliant stooges. The nationalist movement and an all-Indian consciousness were the products of this imperial reality, not the rebirth, or rediscovery, of some primordial India. In other words pan-Indian consciousness is a modern phenomenon; and in no small measure its path was cleared by the destructive effects on the native, Asiatic, mode of production and its parochialism, wrought by British militarism, commerce and ruthless plundering. Other factors facilitating pan-Indian consciousness undoubtedly included the export of the English language and the resulting all-Indian press, the English legal system and notions of formal equality, and not least the railways and telegraph network built under British supervision.

The nationalist movement - primarily in the form of the secular Indian National Congress - manifestly arose in pained, resentful and direct opposition to British colonialism. However, Congress also pitted itself against both hindu and muslim nationalists. The idea that minorities, crucially the muslims, were either a separate nation or a foreign cancer, was passionately rejected. The goal of Congress was to liberate, or take over, the whole of British India. And its leaders, such as Mahatma Gandhi and Jawaharlal Nerhru, drew inspiration not just from a largely invented Indian past. They also looked to British liberalism, examples of 19th century European nation making, such as France, Germany and Italy, and Stalin’s five year plans - which were widely admired for lifting the Soviet Union from rural backwardness to industrialised modernity.

When India gained independence from Britain in August 1947 it was not only lacking the Indus river. Pakistan (the eastern half which is now Bangladesh), Nepal, Sri Lanka and Burma were hived off. Nevertheless what remained of British India has survived as a multinational state. Not that there has been any mechanical or unproblematic convergence. Since the 1970s there has been a notable rise in regional or national parties, eg, Kashmir and Tamil Nadu. And not surprisingly there is still heated conflict over which language should serve as the lingua franca. English has the virtue of being of worldwide reach and within India neutral because it is a second language for all. On the other hand, though it is widely spoken, Hindi greatly advantages those who learnt it as their mother tongue and therefore discriminates against other Indians, especially those in the south.

Then there is the poison of hindu nationalism, which over the last 20 years has gone from the outer limits of Indian political life to the mainstream. Between 1996 and 2004 the leader of the Bharatiya Janata Party, Atal Behari Vajpayee, served as prime minister. Although there never was an organically united, let alone a primordial India, these hindu nationalists created one ideologically, and during his period in office ensured that their construct was taught and promoted in the country’s schools as verity. According to the BJP’s ahistorical, peculiar, but pernicious nonsense, the Aryans were said to be not incomers who arrived in the subcontinent some time around 1,500 BC. Rather they were the “indigenous children of the soil”.¹⁷ As to Indian unity, it becomes a hindu ideal cherished over countless centuries. Within Sanskrit literature they find notions of a universal sovereign. There is also a story in the Mahabharata of the battle of Kurukshetra, which brought together the Indian nations, and implied a belief that Indian people, including those in the south, were united by common bonds and interests. Of course, the BJP advocates a hindu, religious or confessional, nationalism, a sacralised India deeply antithetical to christians, atheists and other such minorities. But the special target of their venom and hatred are, of course, India’s 150 million muslims. They are the enemy within and supposedly covertly aligned with their co-religionists in a nuclear armed Pakistan.

This divisive hindutva ideology originates not back in the beginnings of time. Instead it takes first form in the later years of the 19th century and is fully articulated in the 1920s by Vinayak Damodar Savarkar. That was when the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh was founded. The RSS is a cadre organisation which considered the 200 years of British rule to be far less harmful and insidious than the 600 previous years of muslim rule. Most energy was expended attacking muslims, not strengthening the anti-British struggle. They organised along paramilitary lines and demanded jobs not for muslims, but hindus. In the 1930s the RSS incorporated European ‘scientific’ racist and fascist ideas. Hindus are therefore said to constitute both a nation and a race to whom India is holy.

It was in the 1970s that RSS made its breakthrough. Indira Gandhi’s emergency and the subsequent slump in Congress electoral support allowed it to move from the wings and towards centre stage. RSS formed a religious-front, the Vishwa Hindu Parishad, and then in 1979 the BJP party-front. It was this reconfiguration that spearheaded the RSS’s tumescent growth and ability to reach down and organise wide sections of the most oppressed, poorest and desperate sections of the population. Dalits, the untouchables, slum dwellers, were given dignity, a sense of belonging and a common enemy - the muslims. Today the paramilitary RSS has around two million members, and, of course, that includes Vajpayee and others who served as his key ministers.

Unlike India there is neither all-Europe state nor any real all-Europe political parties; only confederal unity and loose parliamentary groupings. Also on the negative side, this time like India, there are dozens of separate nations, each with their own distinct culture. Hence the EU has to work with 11 official languages (there are at least 40 autochthonous languages). And, needless to say, even that severe limitation necessitates a small army of translators, produces mountains of paper and causes all manner of different tensions - in the autumn of 1999, for example, Germany boycotted all EU meetings under the Finnish presidency, because no translation was provided in to and out of German. And much to the barely concealed fury of France it seems that English is emerging as the EU’s lingua franca. New Europe certainly comes speaking English, not French.

Despite the continued hold of national prejudice and the ever-present possibility of xenophobic outbreaks, there are the growing bounds of multinational commonality. This corresponds in part to the objective frame - EU institutions, laws, the euro, etc. But there are other aspects. There has been no sweep of external conquest and therefore no accumulated ideological unity against an easily identified oppressor. Europe has experienced only spasms of limited expansionism by Spain, France, Germany and Russia and then a cultural, economic and political overlaying of American hegemony. Nonetheless, all this taken together has forged the EU and a definite consciousness, albeit nothing as intense as in India.

True, the close kinship ties that once joined the ruling houses and high aristocracies of Europe are now either gone, are in terminal decline or are irrelevant. The fall of the Russian, German and Austro-Hungarian dynasties, loss of monarchical political power and the growth of democracy has seen to that. Nowadays top royals, like the odious Charles Windsor, are nationalised and tend to marry either minor aristocrats or commoners from within their native country. It is also true that old patterns of wage-labour migration within Europe have altered. Britain once received large influxes of people from Ireland, Germany and Italy. Masses of Italians went to live in France and Switzerland too, while later successive waves of Spanish, Portuguese and Greek workers moved to Britain, Germany, etc. Since the 1980s living standards have to a considerable degree evened out and such movements have largely evaporated.

Despite all this, both short-term and longer term migration within the EU has tended upwards - recently from eastern Europe, of course, but also from elsewhere. Migrants do not consist exclusively of unskilled worst-paid labour. Not only do skilled and professional workers move from Britain to Berlin, Paris and Brussels and from Germany to London, Prague and Warsaw; millions of retired people have gone to live in southern Europe. There are something like 500,000 Britons in Spain. Moreover, through school exchanges and holidaying, most Europeans now know, albeit superficially, other European countries. Until the 1960s that experience of living abroad was confined to diplomats, business people, artists, intellectuals, seamen, and in time of war, soldiers, refugees and prisoners. Again on the negative side, the European religious, political and scientific elite is no longer united by a common ability to converse in Latin and Greek. That said, with mass secondary and university education, those who can hold a conversation in a foreign language have dramatically increased - something like 90% of young people in Germany speak some English.¹⁸

There are other common cultural aspects to Europe. The centres of Europe’s cities and towns are in general different from those in the Americas, Africa and Asia - more pedestrian friendly, relatively efficient public transport, big parks, many gardens, etc - which go together to form a distinct urban lifestyle. There is also what might be called European housing, cars, drinks, food and even furniture. Over many years there has, of course, been much talk of Americanisation. That is not without foundation. McDonalds and Starbucks are now ubiquitous throughout Europe. However, much of what is American is also European. Eg, the English language, cinema, radio, TV and even fast food. That said, there is no doubt about the cultural differences between Europe and America.

Take religion. US bible belt rightwingers indignantly complain of the Europeans that they are unchristian and atheists to boot. Unfortunately, that is not quite the case. Nonetheless, Gallop estimates that 48% of western Europeans hardly ever go to church during their lives. The figure in eastern Europe is virtually the same - 44%. Holland, Britain, Germany, Sweden and Denmark are particularly ungodly. Fewer than one in ten attend church more than once a month - a sharp decline compared with the 1960s. Only in ‘catholic’ Italy and Ireland do more than a third of the population attend church more than once a month. Another recent survey reported that 49% of Danes, 55% of Norwegians and 55% of Swedes said that god did not matter to them at all. In contrast 82% of Americans say that god is “very important” to them, and we all know that far too many Americans not only believe in a god but take the bible literally. With a fervent irrationalism, they refuse to accept Darwinism and the theory of evolution.¹⁹

Europe led the way when it came to capitalism – along with its antipode; the working class, and its socialist, communist and trade union organisations and traditions and ideas of solidarity. The organised working class has had a noticeable, indeed to a degree a defining, effect. Compared with the US, in Europe one finds shorter average working hours, more holidays, and higher welfare spending in proportion to GDP. In that sense there are two Europes: a bourgeois Europe and a proletarian Europe. There is on the one hand the Europe of Napoleon Bonaparte, Adolf Hitler, Charles de Gaulle, Margaret Thatcher and Valéry Giscard d’Estaing. On the other hand, there is the Europe of Thomas Paine, August Blanqui, Ernst Jones, Karl Marx, Frederick Engels, Rosa Luxemburg, Leon Trotsky and Antonio Gramsci.

Neither Euronationalism nor any kind of EU regional chauvinism holds out the prospect of working class liberation, only the playing out of George Orwell’s 1984 for real. Marxists therefore have neither wish nor reason to celebrate, champion, or enhance, what European workers have in common with European capitalists. Of course, that does not mean we refuse to make propaganda against our ‘own’ capitalists using a common language. That goes without saying. However, our overriding task is to unite the workers of all countries and deepen the spirit of internationalism.

We are concerned with building a genuinely world culture - to begin with no matter how embryonic and rudimentary in form - through taking hold of, developing and generalising that which is progressive, democratic and socialist in the culture of each and every country. We do this in irreconcilable opposition to all bourgeois nationalisms and multinationalisms. However, our political starting point must be the widest launch pad objective circumstances permit. Concretely that means the EU.

2. Globalisation and theories of imperialism

Any worthwhile discussion of Europe and European unity must ground itself on a correct understanding of today’s changing world and the process now commonly called ‘globalisation’. Over the last two or three decades there have certainly been profound shifts in the circumstances of reproduction which mark an intensification, further integration and spread of the global system of capital. The post-World War II order continues, but has reached a new stage. I shall sketch out four interrelated areas.

One, class struggle. In the late 1960s and early 1970s Keynesian methods of managing the national economies of the major capitalist countries hit the buffers. The needs of capital clashed with the needs of the working class. Full employment and the provisions of the social democratic state boosted working class self-confidence. Falling profit rates necessitated a ruling class offensive. Hence Monetarism, Thatcherism, Reaganomics, neo-liberalism.

It took many battles. Ideological, legal and physical. But with a venal and incorporated top leadership and lacking any clear-sighted vision of a communist society, the organised working class suffered defeat after defeat. In Britain steel, cars, mines, docks and print. Unemployment everywhere soared. Strikebreaking and anti-trade union legislation cowed. Solidarity crumbled. From this politically constructed vantage point capital could be gallantly rescued from the reviled clutches of taxation - which siphons off surplus labour to provide social housing, health, earnings linked pensions and other such useless and irresponsible frivolities. The social democratic consensus is slain. As is right and proper, capital is kept for capital in order to produce yet more capital.

Unprofitable concerns, including nationalised industries, are either elevated into predatory transnationals in their own right or are snuffed out in the gale of international competition. Regulations over capital are relaxed. There is a take-over boom and an orgy of speculation. Control and the ownership of giant corporations become more and more divorced. Managerial rewards grow and grow. Profit rates appear to skyrocket and the Enron-stage of capitalism arrives. Social inequality steadily widens. The mega-rich have certainly done well. In Britain whereas in the 1970s the top one percent of households owned 20% of national wealth, now it is close to 40%. According to the UN the three richest billionaires have assets worth more than the combined GDP’s of the world’s poorest countries, the inhabitants of which number 600 million people.

Two, spread. The irresistible dynamic of global capital erodes and prevails over even the immovable might of the most despotic ‘socialist’ state. Universal money subverts the anti-cosmopolitan nomenklatura. The cornucopia of commodities lures every stratum into support for democratic counterrevolution. Neither KGB nor Berlin Wall can save the national socialist distopia.

To preserve its power the bureaucratic elite must become bourgeois. Seclusion and self-sufficiency implodes before the capitalist mode of reproduction. Over two years, 1989 to 1991, the ‘second’ world vanished. State industries limp on in hopeless obsolescence or have fallen into the tight fist of bureaucratic thieves and asset strippers, the oligarchs. That, or they have been cherry-picked by calculating western capitalists.

China remains officially a people’s democracy. However, the heirs of Mao Zedong and Deng Xiaoping actively encourage wage slavery and the untrammelled accumulation of capital. The bureaucracy merges with bourgeois capitalism to form a single alloy. Vietnam wants to emulate the Guangdong model. Starving North Korea worships Kim Jong-il as a beneficient and all-powerful god but relies on South Korean and US handouts. Even in Fidel Castro’s Cuba the dollar functions as a parallel currency. Capitalism stares in on these ‘socialist’ states from every window. In short, all countries now lie within, or are subject to, the capitalist metabolism. There is no outside. In parallel, old institutions are given new roles: eg, the World Bank and the IMF rule Africa, and much of southern and eastern Asia and Latin America with a callousness comparable with colonial times. Structural adjustment means destitution, disease and death for millions.

Three, increased interlinkage and velocity. Since 1970 the export of commodities has risen enormously, by something like 200%. Everyday items are produced by single companies across different countries and continents. Designed in Italy, owned in the US, assembled in Taiwan, sold everywhere. During the same 1970-1997 period the export of capital has, in comparison with the export of commodities, shot through the roof, increasing by nearly 1,400%. In 1980 cross-border trade in bonds and equities were equivalent to 8% of Japanese GDP. In 1998 that figure was 91%. For the US the increase has been even greater; from 9% to 230%. And for Germany the rise was from 7% of GDP to 334%. International bank lending has shown a similar expansion. Gross international bank claims went from $315 billion in 1993 to $1.2 trillion in 1997. Overall bank lending in 1998 reached a record $11 trillion. Meanwhile daily currency trading reached $2.0 trillion in 1998, or an annual turnover of over $600 trillion.²⁰ Central banks can easily find themselves overwhelmed. Money flies around the planet nowadays at the speed of light and this engenders chronic financial instability which can bring whole economies crashing down - eg, the once famed east Asian ‘tigers’ in 1997. However, massive speculative profits accrue and accumulate.

Both phenomena - interlinkage and velocity - are in part facilitated by staggering decreases in the value and prices commanded by the means of communication: sea freight, air transport, telephone calls and computers. IMF statisticians estimate that between 1920 and 1990 the real cost of sea freight went down from an index of 100 to 30. Figures for air, telephones and computers are in comparison breath-taking. From a 100 index in 1930 air transport stood at just under 20 in 1990; over the same period telephone calls dropped to almost zero. The same feat has been performed by computers - but from a 1960 base line.²¹

Four, structure. In part as a result of all the above, the internal architecture of the world economy no longer neatly consists of oppressed and oppressor nations; ie, a handful of great imperialist powers who produce and sell finished commodities and an underdeveloped periphery, often colonies, which supply raw materials. The picture is considerably more complicated and multilayered.

Capital as a system of reproduction always was universal and social. Now it is more so. Headed by the US the metropolitan countries remain economically, politically, militarily dominant but account proportionally for less and less finished commodities. Jobs in manufacture have not disappeared. They have been exported. Increasingly the metropoles are characterised by banking, insurance, transport, research and development, advertising and what might be called immaterial commodities, frequently called knowledge and information. The typical worker in Britain is no longer in heavy industry and male, but female and in administration or services.

While commodities freely circulate and transnationals routinely export jobs abroad - so as to reduce labour costs - overseas workers are prevented from moving where they wish. Europe buys internal stability through increasingly turning itself into a fortress against poor outsiders. A phenomenon either mistakenly or cynically equated with racism: hence the sloppy and politically incorrect slogan ‘abolish racist immigration controls’. Those who manage to sneak inside are often illegal and doomed to live as unprotected, unorganised, worst-paid labour. By contrast, transnational corporations demand access to every market, and, backed by IMF and World Bank adjustment programmes, invariably get it, no matter what the dire consequences for local producers. Small and middling national capitalists and the peasantry face ruin.

In tandem, US industries and agriculture are granted special protection or heavy subsidy. And despite the demise of the Bretton Woods system, the dollar is still king (albeit now within a dual monarchy alongside the euro). Hence the US can parasitically offload its massive debts onto others, primarily through the simple device of devaluation. Others stump up. This is akin to fleecing its creditors. Meanwhile, thanks to the World Bank, the IMF, etc, on the one hand, and kleptocrats on the other, the so-called ‘third world’ suffers under an impossible debt burden that amounts to usury.

There is no scramble for Africa. On the contrary, apart from South Africa the countries south of the Sahara are left to rot. Aids, petty wars, famine as well as draining debts. Russia is a huge exporter of oil and gas but still haemorrhages wealth on a chilling scale. Average life expectancy has fallen by 10 years. Ukraine, Kazakhstan, etc, have fared even worse. Afghanistan, Sudan, Somalia, Liberia, Columbia, Iraq and most of former Yugoslavia lie wrecked - failed states. As a concomitant, impoverished parts of Asia, Latin America, Africa and eastern Europe are reproduced in the great cities of the metropoles - Los Angeles, Houston, New York, London, Rotterdam, Berlin, Paris, Marseilles.

On the other hand, Ireland, Spain, Greece and Portugal have not only joined the EU but have adopted the euro. They can hardly be regarded as backward semi-colonies. Poland, the Czech Republic and Hungary are surely set to follow. China, India and Mexico are no longer mere exporters of raw materials, but of finished commodities too. And at a significant level. Something like 80% of the world’s footwear comes from China. Places such as Turkey, Singapore, Chile and South Korea have also undergone a qualitative shift. These medium developed capitalist countries have their own monopolies, export capital as well as finished commodities, and face large, often very militant, working classes.

These features of globalisation we have just listed are responsible for a great deal of confusion, and in some cases, consternation. There is a strange amalgam of paleoconservatives, greens, liberals and national socialists: the party of backward looking hopelessness. Alike they have a visceral fear of what they see as stateless capital - ie, the subordination of the nation-state to the power of giant corporations, faceless currency dealers and institutions such as the World Bank and the World Trade Organisation. The United Kingdom Independence Party and the British National Party; the new Labour left and rheumy-eyed ‘official communists’ huddled around John Haylettt’s Morning Star; the Green Party and Arthur Scargill; George Monbiot and other modern-day Proudonists; the ‘awkward squad’ of trade union leaders - Bob Crow, Billy Hayes and Derek Simpson; Peter Taaffe’s Socialist Party in England and Wales and Alan McCombes in Scotland; would, if only they could, turn back the wheel of history.

Suffice to say it cannot be done. National economic autonomy and self-sufficiency, so treasured and venerated by conservatives, greens and national socialists alike, was always a much exaggerated myth. Every country is dependent. Europe’s nation-states must join together or admit impotence. The mighty US relies on Saudi Arabia, Kuwait and Venezuela to ensure oil for its gas-guzzling businesses and citizenry. Latin America supplies an endless flow of cheap, often illegal, labour. The Clinton boom could be sustained only through a huge influx of foreign capital - mainly German and Japanese. Under George W Bush the US state budget runs on a parasitic black hole of indebtedness. A kind of neo-Keynesian parasitism. Even the most populous state on earth, China with its 1.2 billion inhabitants, can only satisfy its needs by ensuring all manner of economic and political relations with other countries. China has its special zones, Hong Kong and is now a full member of the WTO with all that means in terms of subordination to the capitalist metabolism.

Then there are those who welcome globalisation, or at least claim to be reconciled with the decline, and what they believe is the virtual powerlessness, of the nation-state before the global market. The party of cynical acceptance. New Labour, Michael Howard’s Tories, Romano Prodi, Mikhail Gorbachev, South Africa’s ANC are all latter-day converts to the rigid, unforgiving, doctrines of Milton Friedman and the Chicago school: an over generous welfare state and conceding excessive pay demands will inevitably be punished by inflation, a jobs exodus and rising unemployment. Resistance is useless. Bow to the new god. Francis Fukuyama even announced the “end of history” - meaning that capitalism was at the “end point of mankind’s ideological evolution”.²² Donald Sassoon - Issac Deutscher Memorial Prize winner in 1997 - mournfully admits that European socialism has successively retreated from the “aim of abolishing capitalism”, or even attempting to “countervail the negative tendencies of the private sector”.²³ A common diagnosis. After the fall of the Berlin wall in 1989 there has been a total surrender to globalisation and neo-liberalism. Social democrats now privatise where conservatives once feared to tread. Sassoon’s own advice is though hardly inspiring ... he urges socialists to be “modest”.²⁴

Under these circumstances it is hardly surprising that sections of the ‘thinking’ far left too have been overawed, seduced, bedazzled, hypnotised by a ‘moribund’ capitalism that stubbornly refuses to roll over and die, but instead vigorously leaps to new unprecedented heights, only, hardly pausing for breath, to go on to achieve yet new conquests. This paradox has produced a whole literature ... unfortunately at best it amounts to misdirected optimism and putting a communist spin on capitalist triumphalism, at worst it is capitulation. Three samples:

Nigel Harris - former editor of the SWP’s International Socialism - now holds to a thoroughly opportunist world outlook. Effectively he is a bourgeois socialist. In a series of well researched books he charts what he believes is the rise and continued rise of capitalism. He pictures capitalism as still being ascendant as a system. Quite frankly, despite all his nights of hard work and voluminous statistics, his conclusion amounts to little more than a vulgar apologia. His basic thesis is that world history, since around 1500, has been characterised by an ongoing struggle between a “cosmopolitan bourgeoisie” - company merchants, commodity traders and multinational corporations - and those who control territorial states. Kings, princes, generals, politicians and bureaucrats exploit the productive classes through the state and they have also succeeded in subordinating the positive features of capitalist development to the unproductive and terribly wasteful business of waging war. Globalisation, thankfully, is once again forcing the malign state into retreat and heralds a “new bourgeois revolution” and the domination of world markets and business people over states - this will benefit the mass of humanity, end poverty and make the “conditions of all consistent with the best”.²⁵

Martin Thomas and his comrades in the Alliance for Workers’ Liberty such as Cathy Nugent and Paul Hampton exhibit all the tell-tale signs of a right moving centrism. They maintain that while the nation-state is far from dead, capitalism now operates a system of cartelled free trade which is merely policed by a US “globocop”.²⁶ Market, or “para-market forces”, are seen as primary, and, despite some unpleasant social consequences, the continued spread of capitalism is deemed as progressive. A one-sided assessment which leads the AWL to an inexcusable, not to say treacherous, softness when it comes to US wars and military interventions. They come with Abrams tanks and stealth bombers... but are supposed to be followed by full scale capitalist development. Consequently, the AWL cannot bring itself to call for the immediate, or unconditional, withdraw of US forces from Iraq. In point of fact, the AWL welcomed the US-UK victory over the forces of Saddam Hussein. It was, for them, the least worst outcome.

Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri are associated with anarcho-syndicalism and the autonomist left. The supposed end of imperialism and the emergence of what they call “empire”, “broke and buried” the nation-state.²⁷ Various left communists likewise argue that the days of the nation-state as an effective site of struggle are long gone. Capital now exists unmediated, in pure form, and freed from the constraints once imposed by governments. Or so they say.

Their empire is not US imperialism, it has no territorial centre of power. There is neither a Rome nor an emperor. The world has become “smooth” - empire is “everywhere and nowhere”.²⁸ Capital was pushed, by working class struggles in the 20th century, towards integrating everything into a global system of control. Capital, the state, civil society, production and life itself merge into each other. Communication and control of the means of communication assume “a central position”.²⁹ Parliament and national legislation thereby become obsolete or irrelevant. Traditional working class organisations also lose power and new forms of resistance come to the fore. The working class dissolves into the “multitude” (a term seemingly resurrected from Spinoza).

Hardt and Negri emphatically, and in many ways well-foundedly, reject all strategies based on the local because they negate or obscure the real alternatives. They mention the Palestinian intifada, the 1989 Chinese democracy movement, the Los Angeles riots in May 1992, the Zapatistas and the French and Korean strike waves. Though these struggles failed to communicate or find common language, they contradictorily insist that any revolt or protest by the “multitude”, no matter how isolated or parochial, immediately touches the global level. A case of having your cake and eating it too. They pose as international communists. In reality they are leftwing cheerleaders. Giving answers as to how we might practically join together the countless, disconnected, national and workplace struggles into international answers, is studiously avoided. Blowing away the philosophical fog we find little more than a condescending, ivory tower, glorification of the most desperate, often counter-productive and blind acts.

Hardt and Negri are admirably, if sentimentally, optimistic, and unlike Nigel Harris, espouse militant struggle. However, their undimmed hope for a bright future rests on the nomadism, suffering and refusal of the “poor”. A near theological approach which has far more in common with St Francis of Assisi than Karl Marx of Kentish Town. The disjointed, nebulous and surely deliberately opaque philosophical meanderings of Hardt and Negri find fitting political expression in headlining but totally ephemeral semi-anarchist groupings.

Such woefully inadequate, lopsided, exaggerated accounts are useful only to the extent that they facilitate a corrective discussion. Act as a springboard. In order to go forward, however, we must first go back.

No matter how many heads, no matter how many personifications, capital has always existed as a single metabolism. Average profit and abstract labour see to that. Globalisation, doubtless an ongoing process, begins with capital itself. In the Communist manifesto of 1848 Marx and Engels describe the capitalist mode of reproduction as joining the most diverse countries into a single “world market”.³⁰ And precisely because of its global reach, its restless outward strivings, capital needs the state. Armies, police forces, laws, prisons, courts, customs posts, international treaties are vital if capital is not to be robbed, cheated or destroyed - either by rival capitals or the working class. Capital as capital is rarely armed. Without the state, capital would find it impossible to exercise its dictatorship in the workplace. They are billionaires, we are billions. The state also provides capital - which is internally fractured by its very nature of being many capitals - an overall cohesion it must otherwise lack. So from the first, capital interweaves with the state. The enclosure acts and the bloody expropriation of England’s peasant farmers, the colonial plunder of India and the mass transportation of African slaves, these were the chief moments of primitive capitalist accumulation. And upon these “idyllic foundations” Britain became the workshop of the world. Under the protection of the royal navy the commodities of British machine industry invaded every market. Cheap prices were heavy artillery in their own right and no country, no person was left unaffected.

Undisputed British industrial supremacy was perfectly complemented by the ideology of laissez-faire and Adam Smith’s small state. Free trade meant in practice British sales and British profits. The Manchester school dismissed the whole colonial system as an expensive relic, urged a profitable peace instead of the waste of national wars, had no wish for a large standing army and even toyed with ending the monarchy and the House of Lords. Their motto was simple: ‘Produce as cheaply as you can and do away with all fripperies’. But that hardly amounted to a clarion call for the abolition of the state. In the background there always stood the law and well-drilled regiments of redcoats.

Capitalism is uneven development. One firm falls behind, another speeds ahead. And what goes for individual capitals goes for countries too. Inevitably Britain was overtaken competitively ... by first the US, then Germany. They produced cheaper and better. The turning point was in the 1880s. Indeed other leading powers were compelled to introduce capitalism from above, through state sponsorship: that or face economic burial and consequent draining of military prowess. So Italy, Austria, Russia and Japan rushed to join the capitalist club. Tariffs were erected to guarantee accumulation. Favoured capitals were from birth typically guided by a visible parental state hand and had instant monopolistic proportions. Markets closed, or became increasingly difficult, for Britain. The epoch of competitive capitalism closes. And though the US produced and exported gold, silver, grain, beef, coal, oil, etc - and on an enormous scale - there came into being a characteristic two-tone global pattern. The rival European and American metropoles were responsible for the great bulk of finished manufactured goods, while the rest of the world provided raw materials and markets.

Objectively socialism is possible and increasingly necessary. However, as the ideology of laissez-faire ceases to be expedient, becomes a self-inflicted burden, an open goal, it is not only challenged by the agitators of the Social Democratic Federation. Establishment grandees like Benjamin Disraeli, Joseph Chamberlain and Cecil Rhodes clamoured for an end to free trade and lobbied for new colonies as an alternative to socialism and civil war. Through imperialism the surplus population could be usefully offloaded and British factories kept in business - not least through the sale of expensive, second-rate, goods to what were captive, or walled off, markets.

Britain remained immensely strong. The number one power. Through well entrenched industrial capacity, navel might and huge financial reserves, a web of royal marriages, inter-state alliances and understandings, Britain could smoothly, almost effortlessly, manage the transition from free trade capitalism to monopoly by constructing a much expanded empire - dominions, colonies and semi-colonies. Furthermore, in place of simply marketing finished commodities, its big capitalists augmented profits through overseas lending, running infrastructural projects and establishing mines and factories in other countries. Hence the global market condenses, ripens and eventually hatches out into the global economy. Globalisation is therefore hardly a novel phenomenon: it began with capital and reaches a higher stage when capital turns to imperialism.

Militarism, bureaucracy and the big state were inevitable concomitants of imperialism. Capitalism thereby continued; but only through growing state intervention, or organisation. British capital thereby appears more European. At a deeper, more theoretical level, the laws of value and socialism interpenetrate and produce a social hybrid. Imperialism is capitalism, but it is a capitalism pregnant with socialism.

In turn Europe once again follows in the footsteps of Britain. By around 1900 most of the world had been all but divided - alongside Britain’s empire there stood those of France, Holland, Germany, Portugal and Belgium. Russia, Austria-Hungary and the US were, or had, what might be called internal empires (a term most problematic when it comes to the US because of the low density of the native population and its ability to turn successive waves of European migrants into American farmers - nor should the US expansion into Hawaii, Puerto Rico, the Philippines or Cuba be forgotten). There remained a definite pecking order with Britain still at the top and hence as well as formal empires there were relations of dependence, or informal empires. Eg, through banking capital France established a grip over tsarist Russia (Leon Trotsky called it a colonising semi-colony) while Britain propped up Portugal, to a lesser extent Holland, and exercised a determining influence throughout most of South America. Likewise China, Persia and Ottoman Turkey could maintain a notional independence only.

Marxists were quick to recognise that capitalism has entered a new, higher, stage of development. Debate was triggered in no small part by the setback suffered by the German Social Democratic Party in the elections of January 1907 - they were reduced by half, from 81 to 43 Reichstag seats. The yellow press had been barking and baying against the “unpatriotic” speeches made by SDP deputies protesting against the inhuman treatment meted out to the native peoples of South West Africa by the German colonial authorities. It amounted to genocide. Things came to a head at the Stuttgart congress of the Second, Socialist, International, August 18-24 1907. The rightwing of the SDP, in particular, but also the Dutch and Belgians, came out with suggestions that far from opposing the colonial policy of the European powers outright - as had the 1900 congress in Paris - a more ‘nuanced’ attitude should be adopted (shades of the AWL, Nigel Harris, et al). The intellectual leader of this right revisionist trend was, of course, Eduard Bernstein.

Colonialism had a good side, it was rapidly spreading development and replacing primitive, pre-capitalist, modes of production. This “civilising mission” was being carried out brutally, with exploitation and violence by the capitalists, and should therefore be roundly condemned. But socialists could not abandon those in the colonies. Indeed “Europe needs colonies”, said the SPD’s main rapporteur and leading trade unionist, Eduard David.³¹ When its time finally comes, the SDP should carry through a “socialist colonial policy”: not to do so was to doom Germany to ruination. Due to the international division of labour Europe had become dependent on the colonies for food and industrial raw materials. Other rightists resorted to the crudest racist stereotypes and joked about naked savages and cannibalism.

All this was fiercely denounced by Karl Kautsky and others on the left and centre left of the Second International. It was a duty to bring civilisation to technologically backward peoples, they should not be “abandoned”; however, that meant “giving them freedom”, not further military conquests.³² The right lost the vote on colonial policy by 127 votes to 108 in 1907. But as August 1914 tragically showed, it was a practical majority.

During this period the left produced a barrage of books and pamphlets which attempted to theoretically explain capitalism’s latest phase and equip the working class with the correct politics. Those by Karl Kautsky, Rudolf Hilferding, Rosa Luxemburg, Nikolai Bukharin and Vladimir Lenin being particularly noteworthy.

Outraged by the rightwing’s abject prostration before German colonialism at the Stuttgart congress, Kautsky wrote his Socialism and colonial policy in the three weeks before the SDP’s Essen congress. In the event the right chose not to fight and the resolution of the Stuttgart congress was endorsed. Kautsky distinguished between “work colonies” and “exploitation colonies”: eg, the USA on the one hand and Belgium Congo on the other.³³ Kautsky insisted that the settlement of “work colonies” - such as Australia, Canada, Argentina and the United States - by European workers and peasants was on balance progressive. Such colonies could not be rejected “in principle”, especially given their vast geographical expanse and paucity of aboriginal inhabitants. The productive forces were revolutionised by colonisation and a new, very big, working class had been created. Nor could these colonisations be reversed. Nevertheless, socialists were obliged to pay close and sympathetic attention to, and strive to safeguard, the interests of the native populations. As to the “exploitation colonies”, they involved imposing forced labour upon the natives and undisguised plunder. The effect was impoverishment. Oppression of these “exploitation colonies” should be immediately ended and self-determination conceded.

Kautsky goes on to elaborate how the limitation of workers’ consumption puts a curb on the development of capital and how the capitalist class found a series of “expedients” which allowed it to continue to expand: monopolies, monopoly prices and generating an “arms race on land and sea”. The forces of production are increasingly orientated towards producing the means of destruction. A horrendous world war was beckoning and for the sake of humanity had to be stopped. Another expedient which allowed for continued expansion was exports, especially loans and arms, to agrarian countries, hopelessly indebting and therefore cruelly exploiting them. Once again the effect is impoverishment. This had occurred in the case of Britain and Egypt, and constituted another, third form, of colonialism, and once again, said Kautsky, socialists were obliged to oppose foreign domination.

In 1910 Hilferding published his Finance capital, in 1913 Luxemburg’s Accumulation of capital came out and in 1914 Kautsky produced Ultra imperialism and a series of closely related articles in Neue Zeit. Despite important differences in terms of analytical tools - eg, disproportionality between departments one and two in the case of Luxemburg and Hilferding’s emphasis on the rising organic composition and overproduction of capital - there are unmistakable common themes and certain common conclusions. Historically, capitalism had led to monopolies, a merger of banking and industrial capital and hence finance capital, the growth of the bureaucratic-military state and the effective division of the world by the great powers.

However, whereas Luxemburg described imperialism in terms of capitalist development - associated in her account, one in part shared by Kautsky, with the final seizure of agrarian regions of the world by the big powers, regions which are “indispensable”³⁴ for continued capital expansion - Hilferding and Kautsky insisted that imperialism was “a particular kind of policy”, not an “economic ‘phase’”.³⁵ In fact imperialism caused positive harm to sections of industrial capital and could by implication be sloughed off if the will was there. Moreover, Kautsky speculated that capitalism need not engender war. Economically the export of capital and the growth of cartels was leading inexorably to a situation where all the leading countries were becoming so “dependent” and so bound up one with another that the “stronger nations” could quite possibly put an end to the “arms race” and conclude between themselves a “Holy Alliance of the imperialists”.³⁶

This contemptible volte-face excused social democracy from the necessity of defeatism and was, of course, written just prior to the outbreak of World War I and published on September 11 1914; that is during the opening stanza of a mass slaughter which eventually cost some 20 million lives. (Martin Thomas revealingly claims that all Kautsky got wrong was the timing - he argues that since the 1989-91 collapse of bureaucratic socialism “ultra-imperialism” has finally come into existence, along with the system of give-and-take negotiations and agreements between powers who are “more-or-less equals”, as once envisaged by Kautsky). The fact of the matter is that in August 1914 Kautsky finally collapsed as a revolutionary before a war he had predicted and fought to prevent. Like a drowning man, he desperately clung to unity with what was now the social chauvinist right majority in the SDP and urged class peace for the duration of the war. Miserably, pathetically, he even pledged to suspend the weapons of criticism.

By 1915 Bukharin had completed his Imperialism and the world economy. It is a detailed analysis and describes how the super (extra) profits derived from imperialist exploitation of the colonies had helped provide the wherewithal to subvert, or bribe, the metropolitan working class - the horrors of war were, though, rapidly changing around this situation. Bukharin also stresses that the nation-state is becoming outmoded due to global capitalist development. Nevertheless, militarism and war necessitated state control of capital. Hence, capital was contradictorily being both nationalised in the form of the state capitalist war machine and was yet still international and driven to expand globally by its innate laws.

His manuscript was, however, seized by the tsarist police and not published till November 1917 when it appeared under the imprimatur of Kommunist - the ‘left’ Bolshevik paper. Nevertheless, Lenin had read it and there can be no doubting that despite their heated factional disputes, Bukharin’s Imperialism and the world economy influenced to a considerable extent his own Imperialism: the highest stage of capitalism. Lenin’s introduction to the book (written in December 1915 but lost until 1927) stresses that the facts relating to imperialism need to be closely studied and that the “scientific significance” of Bukharin’s work consists of precisely this. He “studies the facts of world economy relating to imperialism as a whole”. Above all, Bukharin locates imperialism as a “definite stage” of capitalism; ie, it was no mere policy. Incidentally, Lenin admits that Kautsky’s “ultra-imperialism” was abstractly conceivable and this is where capitalist economic development was pointing. “But”, he added, such were the mounting stresses, contradictions and conflicts, that well before such “a single world trust will be reached”, imperialism will “inevitably explode” and capitalism “will turn into its opposite”.³⁷

Written in early 1916, but, due to the disorganisation of the Bolshevik party, not published till September 1917, Lenin’s Imperialism, the highest stage of capitalism was designed to get through the eye of tsarist censorship (Imperialism and the split in socialism constituted the overtly political broadside).

Except for the power-driving logic of presentation and razor shape theoretical categories, there is nothing particularly original in Lenin’s account. Modestly, Lenin subtitles it a “popular outline”. His prime object is propaganda against Kautsky and the centre and the job of political annihilation. Hence the accumulating weight of description is combined with sudden moments of lacerating polemic.

For Lenin the essence of imperialism is monopoly. He highlights other basic features and trends. In each case Lenin provides a wealth of supporting argument. He recounts the social significance of capitalism’s growing parasitism: obviously a socio-economic not a moral category. While for Lenin the export of capital speeds development where it is exported to, it impedes and distorts development in the region where it is exported from. A class of useless bourgeois slackers and pleasure-seekers is spawned which lives off the spoils of imperialism. Moreover, like Bukharin, he too locates the collapse of the Second International in the growth of a labour aristocracy: basically better paid skilled workers in the imperialist countries, who because of material interests derived from the super (extra) profits from the exploitation of colonies, betray the interests of the whole class. (It was, though, the much maligned Gregori Zinoviev who in my opinion provided the most convincing analysis of this issue at the time, he discusses the labour aristocracy - which he rightly uses as a political, not simply an economic, category - but crucially, he highlights the institutional role of the labour bureaucracy - see his Social roots of opportunism.)³⁸ Lenin also agrees with Bukharin that imperialism is a stage, the last, in the development of capitalism. It is not a policy.

Without theoretical elaboration, simply relying on bald empirical facts, Lenin refutes both Luxemburg and Kautsky and their claims that capitalism relies on the annexation of agrarian territories for self-expansion. He cites Germany’s takeover of Belgium and the coveting of Alsace-Lorraine by France. Following Hilferding he builds his account on the merger of industrial and banking capital and the subsequent emergence of finance capital. As proven by World War I, competition, and political liberty, had been superseded, or overlaid, by monopoly, and police oppression, and hence capitalism as a system had become a break on progress and was in Marxist terms moribund or in decline.

However, there is no attempt to integrate the laws and growing contradictions of capitalism into a fully rounded, ie, dynamic, analysis. A general theory. That was not his intention. Working quickly, and primarily for polemical purposes, Lenin took hold of and synthesised the latest and best theory of 1900-1916. He had read, studied, absorbed and generously quotes amongst many others the British social-liberal JA Hobson (JA Hobson Imperialism; a study London 1902). Where necessary, Lenin corrected or modified. But his basic conclusion is clear: monopoly had lead to imperialism and the division of the world and this in turn had led to war of redivision. On that basis, Lenin could easily extrapolate into the future: capitalism meant big power conflicts and war. Periods of peace were nothing but periods of preparation for war.

Of course, his Imperialism, the highest stage of capitalism should not be treated as holy writ. Yet unfortunately that is exactly what much of the left has done. There were, even in 1916, minor or secondary limitations to Lenin’s account: eg, the labour aristocracy and the “possible” generalisation of the pleasure-seeking class from the Rivera, Switzerland and the Surrey hills to the whole of western Europe. That mattered little in the early 1920s when the Third, Communist, International, began the work of creating a systematic Leninism. And quite frankly, Lenin’s Imperialism could still serve as a useful signpost up to and even during World War II: despite the complicating factor of the Soviet Union’s bureaucratic socialism and the occupation of advanced European capitalist countries such as Belgium, Denmark, Czechoslovakia, Holland, France and Norway by Nazi Germany and the political dilemmas that entailed: eg, national liberation versus revolutionary defeatism.

That said, the post-1945 world presents a radically different picture to the one described by Lenin in 1916. While it would doubtless be stupid in the extreme to simply dismiss or abandon Lenin’s Imperialism, quite clearly Marxists are obliged to think anew, to critically build from its essential foundations if they are not to become mired in dogmatism: ie, the very antithesis of Marxism.

3. America organises Europe

World War II was fought out between two great predatory blocs. On the one side, the axis of Germany, Italy and Japan and, on the other, the alliance of Britain, the United States and the Soviet Union. Yet within these bitterly opposed camps, not least that of the ultimate victors, there were underlying rivalries and deep contradictions. Britain, the US and the USSR each wanted to win out over the others. In that sense, the war conducted against the axis powers was simultaneously a hidden conflict between Britain, the US and the USSR; a conflict which continued and intensified after VE and VJ day.

Britain beat Germany. And yet, in 1945, the country lay exhausted and massively in debt to the US. Britain’s Yankee child moved to exact its two pounds of flesh - controlled decolonisation and subordination of sterling to the dollar. Leon Trotsky’s prediction of an Anglo-American war proved accurate - except that it was carried out using other, peaceful, means. For a few years Britain stuck to the conceit that it could play a global role comparable with both the US and the Soviet Union. Ernest Bevin, Labour foreign minister, spoke regretfully, but rather nonchalantly, of the world being divided into three spheres. The US seemed interested in the western hemisphere plus Japan and China, Stalin was consolidating his hold over eastern Europe, and that left “a socialist Britain” with its empire plus what it thought of as leadership over western Europe.

Foreign office mandarins urged the government to build Britain as “the great European power”.³⁹ Plans for an Anglo-French dominated western Europe had been broached during World War II but did not get very far due to the hostility of Charles de Gaulle and Winston Churchill’s indifference. Nevertheless, in 1947 a joint military agreement was signed between Britain and France guaranteeing French security against a resurgent Germany and any threat from the Soviet Union. Bevin wanted to move beyond military cooperation and mooted the idea of a western European customs union headed by Britain.

There were, in 1947, hasty British withdrawals from India, Greece, Turkey and Palestine. However, the empire in Africa, the Middle East and Far East was maintained, and the expectation was that, when feasible, it should once again be considerably expanded. John Kent, an historian of the ‘close of empire’, writes that the “overriding aim” was the “re-establishment of Britain as a world power equal to and independent of both the US and the Soviet Union”. British weakness was viewed by Whitehall as “a temporary rather than a permanent phenomenon”.⁴⁰

The US was, though, not content with a merely hemispheric role. In June 1947 the Marshall plan was announced along with the Truman doctrine. The much delayed American century had begun at last. British strategy underwent a swift adjustment. The US now occupied the top position in the imperialist pecking order. With enthusiastic backing from Whitehall the US reached out to assume a hegemonic role globally. Naturally that included domination over western Europe; achieved through Nato and pumping in surplus dollars. Britain was thereby relieved of the costly burden of being the foremost defender and promoter of western Europe. A welcome relief. Moreover Britain eagerly looked to the benefits that would accrue from playing Greece to the new Rome. Britain put on offer its still potent military and intelligence capacity and historically accumulated experience of running a huge, variegated, empire. Possession of a common language eased and facilitated cooperation, reducing the size of the Atlantic from an ocean to a pond. Winston Churchill and other establishment ideologues subsequently invented and popularised a common history celebrating the “English speaking peoples”.

British interest in a western European union faded. Instead of attempting to maintain itself as an independent, third, superpower, the principal feature of British foreign policy shifted to the ‘special relationship’. Britain was not quite a “warrior satellite of the US” - it remained a sovereign state seemingly free to make war or peace - but it was now politically and economically increasingly serving itself by serving America.⁴¹ Not that the US abandoned the goal of demolishing the sterling area and Britain’s trading bloc - it relentlessly pressed ahead. Washington envisaged integrating the whole of western Europe, Britain included, into a US-dominated world economy. Britain was seen as the “potential leader of a tariff free United States of Europe”.⁴²

European unity was regarded as creating a bulwark against communism externally and internally. Besides an extended Soviet Union there were strong ‘official communist’ parties in Italy and France. And not surprisingly, both dutifully serving Stalin’s foreign policy dictates and pursuing their very own nationalist roads to socialism, ‘official communists’ steadfastly turned their backs on European unity and sought salvation instead within the narrow limits of the nation-state. Philip Bolsover spoke for the lot of them. “This European Union”, he explained - heroically ignoring the lack of democracy and national self-determination in eastern Europe - was not an “international federation of equal peoples”. Rather he claimed it was the merger of US “satellite states” and would soon have Federal Germany as the “general manager and chief executive.” An exaggeration - but obviously with more than a grain of truth. If the sinister designs of the US and the prospect of German revanchism were not bad enough, he indignantly complained that a united Europe was bound to pose a “threat to British exports”.⁴³

Amongst British ruling class circles there were few objections to a European Union as such. However, there was no longer any wish to join. Continued illusions of grandeur and a conviction that national decline would soon be put in reverse meant that Britain would not willingly accept such a lowly position in the international pecking order. Bevin protested that Britain was no Luxembourg. After some stubborn digging in of heels and not a little acrimony another modus vivendi was agreed which seemed to offer something more fitting. Britain was exempted from US plans for an integrated western Europe. Leadership of the project passed to France. Much reduced though it was, Britain still had a GDP equalling Germany and France combined, an extensive empire and henceforth was allowed to pursue “a semi-independent international role”, albeit as a junior partner of the US.⁴⁴ The Anglophone alliance, together with the post-World War II economic boom, provided British imperialism with a sheltered position, a strategic harbour from where it could safely weather the transition from a formal, and increasingly hollow, empire to the sham equality of the Commonwealth. The “special crisis of Britain”, keenly awaited by ‘official communist’ theorists, failed to materialise.⁴⁵

Ideologically the residues of empire arrogance continued to cloud the brain. Nevertheless, the limits of British power, and its subordinate - special - relationship with the US, were dramatically highlighted by the 1956 Suez fiasco. Basically the US refused to sanction the British-French-Israeli invasion of Egypt and attempted overthrow of Gamal Abdul Nasser and his military-nationalist regime. Nasser had the effrontery to n