Europe, Britain, And Canada: A Canadian Dilemma (Part Two)

Perhaps the increasingly united Europe, Canadians thought, means some balance to U.S. might in the world. After all, the building of a united Europe began in 1957 and has gone on ever since. But we need to remember that the U.S.-dominated NATO was formed in 1953 and has also been growing ever since. We also need to remember that at the time Pauline Jewett was NDP foreign affairs critic the NDP wanted Canada out of NATO, seeing it as a simple front for U.S. power. As you read this column Europe is in conflict, in deep conflict. Germans protested at the 15th anniversary of German reunification about failures in unity both in German and Europe. They protested the failures of government to provide for a distribution of wealth that would assure the larger population decent social security. French workers have been engaging in huge demonstrations against the Chirac/Rafferin repressive economic and social policies. A Dutch friend tells me groups that supported Nazi collaboration are now in power in Holland and are stripping the country of social securities that are at least 50 years old. The Swedish people recently refused to accept the Euro as Swedish currency because it is associated with an attack on ordinary people and the basic social protections they have fought for and gained. The Euro, we must remember, is the symbol of a united Europe. All across Europe - renowned in past years for its insistence that a social contract be maintained which assures decent securities for ordinary people – an attempt is being made at the behest of the bureaucratic moguls of the European Union and the leaders of major European countries to strip the European population of its benefits. It is an attempt, in short, to reproduce U.S. conditions in Europe. Just as the Tony Blair government in England has unabashedly adopted repressive U.S. initiatives, Europe – less obviously – is working in the same mode. Was the German/French refusal to follow the U.S. into Iraq, then, an accident, a false signal, something else than a determined rebuff to U.S. leadership claims of delivering “the U.S. Way Of Life” to the whole world? Surely, following upon continuing disagreements with the U.S.A. over beef, bananas, genetically modified organisms, steel, agricultural assistance, and cultural products, the refusal to go into Iraq was simply another assertion of European independence. Unfortunately, that is not the case. The refusal to go into Iraq was one more image in a giant mirage. Bernard Cassen puts the matter with painful clarity in “The apparent transatlantic confrontation” (Le Monde diplomatique, Sept 04 30-31, my translation throughout). Cassen writes of Europe accepting for more than twenty-five years “a liberal model of economic integration of the [viable] fraction of the planet conceived in Washington as fitting to serve U.S. financial interests and the interests of transnational U.S. enterprises.” Though NATO apparently lost all purpose with the break-up of the Soviet empire, still the NATO armed force has been expanded in Europe, has taken a significant role in the U.S. war in Afghanistan, and is being pushed by the U.S. to become a “police agency” in Iraq. NATO was created as a force dominated by the U.S., and it continues to be that as it expands in and outside of Europe. For years now a core of people at the centre of the European Union bureaucracy has bought into U.S.-shaped arguments of neo-liberalism, privatization, globalization and – in short – the rule of society by profit-driven gigantic corporations, or what may fairly be called “corporate totalitarianism”. Resistance from the people within France, Germany, Italy, and Holland, for instance, has had very little effect. Canadians have to see the European scene with clear eyes. Social securities are not guaranteed there. An on-going, successful assault is being made on pensions, education, health care, and unemployment insurance. Publicly-owned institutions and services are being privatized. For the “me to” mentality in Canadian government, the European moves are a bad example. In addition, what might be called “trans-Atlantic integration” – the co-owning of Europe and North America by capitalists in both regions is increasing alarmingly. Bernard Cassen discusses a study by the the French Robert-Schuman Foundation released in June 2004 showing growing integration of the “North American (the U.S. and Canada) and European economies” since September 11, 2001. The writer of the study’s Preface, Daniel Hamilton, states that the power of “transnational” social and economic interests and their transnational agents “is breaking national boundaries and going around and beyond conventional governmental structures in the whole of the Atlantic world”. For Canadians that is a way of saying that the super-government of corporate capitalist interests in the Atlantic region is dominant – or, as Bernard Cassen writes “is situated outside the reach of voters and the intervention of citizens. The end of democratic history, you might say….” Or, as I have put it, the beginning of “corporate totalitarianism”. What of the “real conflicts” between Europe and the U.S.A.? Issues about which much is made in the press and media concern only 1% of transatlantic commerce. And while real “international trade” between Europe and the U.S. is significant – in the 2 to 3 hundred billion dollar range each year, the sales by U.S. branch-plant operations in Europe, and of European branch-plant operations in the U.S., now are in the range of 15 hundred billion dollars for each entity in the political region of the other. That “deep-rooting” means, more and more, that the fundamental guiding policies of both entities – Europe and the U.S.A. – will become increasingly unified. The attack on the social securities of the populations across Europe is – in that perspective – perfectly understandable. The military “enforcer” of this dangerously undemocratic structure is, of course, NATO, an all-purpose force. By agreement of its members, NATO no longer has any geographical limit but may be used where the “interests” of its members require. I have been writing, mostly, of Europe and the U.S.A. But Bernard Cassen tucks Canada into the “North American economy”, and he is not wrong to do so – on the heels of the Free Trade Agreement, the NAFTA, and successive Canadian governments practicing abject subservience in the face of U.S. economic bullying. The larger implications for Canadians are chilling. (1) Accompanied by lyrical rhetoric about the sanctity of Canada, Canadian politicians are in the process of giving up more and more power to “transatlantic integration”. (2) As U.S. racist madness and expansionist designs take greater and greater hold (and influence Europe more) Canadians may well be forced into a Holy War against ‘dusky’ Islam. (3) As U.S. corporate control of Canada increases Canadians will be used less and less to manage the Canadian economy and culture and will become – more and more – banana republic serfs in their own country. Already the B.C. Campbell Liberal government is pipe-lining in U.S. CEOs and major managers for “British Columbian” enterprises. And as I reported in the last column, the Leonard Asper Canwest communications giant just hired three U.S. people directly out of the U.S. to take major, top administrative positions over Canadian communication instruments. (4) The scenario for Canada’s relation with China has two possibilities, both ugly. As open confrontation between the new, undemocratic Western Giant and China develops, no one can foretell the outcome. Especially since China itself is very far from being, in any way, a democratic country. All the barking dogs warning of the dangers of a China growing in power fail completely to see that the alignment against China is more and more manipulated by the force Bernard Cassen has written “is outside the reach of voters and the intervention of citizens”. If terms are made between the two (non-democratic) giants, both given over to what are governments dominated by capitalist, corporate interests, the final choice of world populations may well be insurgence, revolution, and the overthrow of what Westerners used to describe quaintly and poetically as “oriental-style despotisms”. “The fat is in the fire” or appears to be. But history has a way of turning out differently than seems inevitable. Already U.S. greed is astonishing an increasing number of people (outside present governments) in the West, in Africa, and in Central and South America. U.S. election-rigging is becoming more apparent and could result in civil strife in the U.S. China’s “miracle” is marginalizing ordinary Chinese in the tens of millions, and huge numbers of male youth are beginning to face lives without wives and families – surely an explosive combination even in China. As Iraq and Afghanistan are making clear, conquest of resource-rich or recalcitrant populations is not the pushover that born-again U.S. politicians and mandarins have believed. Maybe there is hope in a world that looks increasingly bleak and in a Canada where major politicians and corporations are eagerly joining the new capitalist/corporate totalitarianism.