Impact of the French ‘no’ vote
Part 1: A look at the EU referendum
By
Rémy Herrera
Paris
Published Jul 15, 2005 10:50 PM
With a vote of 55
percent, the French electorate rejected the proposed European Constitution in a
May 29 referendum. This proposal had aimed to write into constitutional law the
policy of economic neoliberalism that for years has been defended by right-wing
libertarians, in Europe as well as the United States.
Their dream was to
equip Europe with a Constitution that, by installing flexible supranational
institutions, would deprive national states of the most essential part of their
sovereignty, and in turn reinforce the rule of finance capital.
This
proposal was heavily promoted by the transnational monopolies, whose managers in
France invited the public to vote “yes for a prosperous Europe.”
These included the petroleum concern Total, which reported $10.9 billion
in profits in 2004, the highest ever recorded by a French firm, and which is
laying off workers on French territory; the cosmetics firm L’Oréal,
whose CEO is the highest paid in the country at $7.9 million per year and whose
owner is “the richest woman in France” with a fortune of $13.7
billion.
Meanwhile, one of every six French work ers is paid only the
minimum wage and 7 million people in France live in poverty.
There is
also the machine tools company Schneider, whose shareholders enjoyed the biggest
increase in dividends last year—63.6 percent—and which is
outsourcing its production. And don’t forget the armaments firm Dassault,
which has just bought part of the media. The last-mentioned bombarded the public
with “yes” slogans, attempting to manipulate public consciousness
and bludgeon them with lies.
The French still said “no.” This
“no” vote was along class lines. It is a reminder to the elites that
the people exist, that the popular classes resist, and that the world of labor
can still be mobilized.
The “no” rallied the votes of 80
percent of production workers, 70 percent of small farmers, 67 percent of
white-collar workers, 64 percent of civil servants and more than 50 percent of
craft workers, small shopkeepers and intermediate professions. It got the vote
of 66 percent of households with monthly incomes less than $1,800, 75 percent of
those without degrees and 71 percent of the unemployed. Among those voting
“no” were many young people from working-class
neighborhoods.
This result was the product of the consciousness,
resistance and unity of the popular classes. It was their first victory in a
confrontation with neoliberalism since the great strikes of 1995. This
“no” was a rejection of those politicians, whether from right-wing
parties or the traditional “left,” who over the last 20 years have
handed the country over to speculators for plunder.
The French people know
how much they lost when the right-wing parties in power carried out a drastic
destruction of social services—the pension “reform” under the
government of Premier Jean-Pierre Raffarin—but they also have not
forgotten that neoliberalism was first implanted in France in 1984 by the
socialist government of President François Mitterrand and Premier Laurent
Fabius. It is more accurate to call them members of the Socialist Party (PS), a
social-democratic and pro-imperialist party, than real
socialists.
Alternation without alternatives
Alternating the
government between the PS and the rightists, with each of them managing the
neoliberal program, provided no real alternative for the workers and poor but
only shades of difference in rhetoric. The PS governments wiped out
workers’ past social gains, imposing the neoliberal program on trade
unions paralyzed from acting against a PS government. This made them as
essential to the ruling class as the right-wing parties with their open
neoliberalism.
More and more French people became aware that there is a
close connection between neoliberalism and U.S. hegemony. Neoliberalism can be
defined as the power of finance capital, rule by the owners of capital. And
those who dominate internationally are essentially based in the United States.
Neoliberal “globalization” was imposed, starting from the United
States, especially after the U.S. Federal Reserve Bank, the Fed, unilaterally
increased interest rates in 1979.
The Europe now under construction
(without its citizens) is a Europe planned to serve the interests of big West
European capital. Since the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989, this Europe has
been trying to turn the economies of the Central and Eastern European countries
into subservient subsidiaries. This Europe is market-driven and has been
oriented to U.S. imperialism since its origin.
Indeed, after the collapse
of the USSR these dominant European forces limited their ambitions to a prudent
defense of their interests while remaining subordinate to U.S. finance capital,
to its neoliberal-warlike strategy and to the instruments used to enforce its
hegemony: NATO for its military component; the Inter national Monetary
Fund-World Bank-World Trade Organization for its economic
domination.
Europeans did not put up any significant
resistance—outside of some speeches at the Security Council of the United
Nations, which are already well-known—to the crimes and plunder
perpetrated by U.S. finance capital, whose tool is the Bush administration.
In France, it was by a consensus among the PS and the right-wing parties
that the Maastricht treaty was adopted for the Common Market in 1992, an example
of neoliberalism. This is also how it decided to enter the war against
Yugoslavia in 1999, another submission to U.S. policies that is known here as
Atlanticism.
Is France really democratic?
This alliance
between the dominant classes of Europe and the United States, with which Japan
is also associated, is basically directed against the people of the South,
including China. They justify it in ruling-class ideology by the democratic
values they claim to incarnate. As their post-referendum activity shows,
however, bourgeois democracy, as it functions in France, is
fictitious.
Almost the entire collection of French traditional politicians
supported the Euro pean Constitution. They all were beaten. Yet they all remain
in power.
Jacques Chirac remained president with only a 24-percent
favorable rating in June 2005 opinion polls. Nicolas Sarkozy is still head of
the leading right-wing party (UMP), François Hollande is head of the PS,
with a popularity rating of about 35 percent as of now, lower than that of the
leaders of the Communist (PCF), Revo lutionary Communist League (LCR) and
Workers’ Struggle (LO) parties.
If, for the large majority of the
French people, democracy is reduced to a small walk in silence to the polling
booth one Sunday every 12 or 18 months, to get into the voting line in silence,
to nod one’s head in silence when one’s name is called, to slip an
envelope into the ballot box in silence and to go back home in silence with
nothing changed, then this democracy is much noise about nothing. The
bourgeoisie is in power and has no intention of giving it up. Could it be then
that we do not really live in a democracy?
Next: Where is France
headed?
Rémy Herrera is a researcher at the National Center
for Scientific Research (CNRS) and teaches Economics of Development at the
University of Paris—Panthéon-Sorbonne.
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