From Kommunistisk Politik
No. 26, December 23, 2000

The Union as a federal state

Evil tongues maintain that when the heads of state in the late hours of the night in Nice signed the new treaty after four days of marathon meetings, they were hardly aware of what they were signing. Afterwards, lawyers and diplomats are still disputing about the details of the decisions.

In fact, it is really true that the adopted Nice Treaty, at a number of points, differs considerably from the draft presented by the French presidency and known to the public before the Nice Summit. But it is not unusual that the treaties are being changed considerably in the last minute.

Of course, the heads of state of the fifteen EU member countries, including the Danish Prime Minister Poul Nyrup Rasmussen of the Social Democratic Party, knew exactly what they were doing: They took the decisive step towards the EU as a federal state where the single member states in the future will get the same status as the states of the US when they decided that the crown of achievement shall be the coming government conference in 2004 which will adopt a real constitution for the Union, thereby becoming "the United States of Europe".

The Nice Treaty is not a separate treaty, but it has a number of appendices and changes to the two basic treaties – the EC and EU treaties – and a number of protocols, supplements, declarations etc., including the Charter of Fundamental Rights of the European Union. They all serve to strengthen the development of the Union towards the federal state and to make the EU still more "operational" as a regional Great Power on the European continent and as a coming global superpower.

The official heading of the government conference was "The Reform of the Institutions", and it was said in the propaganda that its decisive purpose was to prepare the Union for the admission of a number of countries from Eastern and Central Europe – and with it ensure the enlargement of the EU from 15 to 27 member states in the course of the first decade of the new century.

However, it was neither these candidate countries nor their problems, which was at the centre at the Nice Summit. The candidate countries were merely called in extras appearing on the "EU family pictures" at the opening. Hereafter, they were sent home to await the result of the fights behind closed doors.

The decisive questions were to pave the way for the development of the Union into a real federal state, regardless of the number of members, and to ensure the control of the European Great Powers with the process, especially to ensure the leading role of the French-German axis in a rapid development of the federal state which in the main will be finished with the constitutional conference that will be initiated under the Swedish and later on Belgian presidency next year.

In this sense, the Nice Summit was undoubtedly a success. As the French newspaper Libéracion expressed it: "The Nice Summit gave birth … to a treaty in favour of the big member states – which will lead European politics – at the expense of the small states which lost because they were divided."

The result of the Nice Summit is that the four big countries in the Union can never be voted down by any coalition of smaller countries.

The drawing of the federal state

All decisions of the Nice Summit point unambiguously in the same direction: towards the preparation of the Union as a federal state with its own constitution. The leading role of the Great Powers, and not at least the leading role of Germany, especially in the Council of Ministers (Council of the European Union), has been consolidated. Through the agreement on "a closer cooperation" between a group of countries, with Germany in its centre, the European Commission is being developed into a real federal government with a president who also will get extended powers as the head of the government. The common foreign and security policy is being speeded up with the rapid construction of the EU alarm force as the immediate instrument for crisis management and so-called "peace-keeping".

And everywhere, there are headings like "the democratisation of the Union" and "getting the Union closer to the citizens".

It is with slogans like these that they are attempting to sell this anti-popular project of "the United States of Europe" to the citizens in the Union who do not want this construction.

As it was given beforehand, Nyrup Rasmussen and the united Union politicians were happy about the Nice Treaty and claimed that "most of Denmark’s wishes were granted," and that there is no need for a referendum on the treaty. Just as expected beforehand, there was a lot of criticism from different countries, especially the small ones, and from the federalists, not at least the European Parliament and the European Trade Union Confederation (ETUC) that are criticising the federal development for not moving fast enough (sic!) as well as the lack of "democracy" and "social dimension" in the Union. All this is nothing but noise that serves the purpose of hiding that the Nice Summit was a giant step towards the Union as a federal state.

A referendum on the Nice Treaty, which reduces the Danish influence and changes the conditions of affiliation to the two basic treaties, would be obvious seen from a democratic point of view, but the Danish Union politicians do not at all share this view.

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