NAFTA and European Union: Different sides of the Atlantic but same function

The logic of the multi-national euro currency is tighter economic integration and loss of popular sovereignty. Unless the eurozone breaks up and its users return to their own national currencies, pressure will be built by the “markets” for further centralization and harmonization of rules. In plain language, tightened control by big capitalists.

The eurozone, functionally, is much the same as the North American Free Trade Agreement across the Atlantic. NAFTA makes corporate profiteering paramount by eroding the ability of the governments within it to enforce regulations; places decision-making in the hands of unaccountable and undemocratic arbitration boards convened by either the commercial arm of the United Nations or the World Bank; and elevates the interests of large corporations and financiers above all other human considerations.

(There are the occasional conspiracy-mongers who claim that NAFTA is a precursor to the dismantling of the United States in favor of some “North American republic” and that the dollar will be eliminated in favor of a regional currency, but besides the fact that these feverish Right-wing conspiracies are laughable on their face they completely ignore the fact that U.S. capitalism needs U.S. military might, that the world capitalist system needs a center with the requisite financial and military clout to act as the enforcer, that the U.S. relies on the dominance of its national currency to be able to run budget and trade deficits, and that the nationalistic U.S. public would rise up, in arms if necessary, against any such idea.)

“Canada in fog” photo by Kat Spence

The key NAFTA provision is Chapter 11, which codifies “equal treatment” in accordance with international law and enables corporations to sue over any regulation or other government act that violates “investor rights,” which means any regulation or act that might prevent the corporation from earning the maximum possible profit. Thus we have had the spectacle of a corporate parcel-delivery service suing Canada in attempt to have the Canadian postal system dismantled and chemical companies suing because a chemical they produce has been banned because it is poisoning water supplies.

Profits at any cost

The idea that safe drinking water is considered a trifle next to the maximization of profits, sadly, is not a mordant joke. Any company that has its shares traded on stock exchanges is legally required to maximize its profits for shareholders, to the exclusion of all else — under capitalism, safe drinking water is unimportant. (Except, of course, for the bottled-water companies that drain aquifers to supply their products.)

Although Canada, which has the most stringent regulations of the three NAFTA countries, has won five decisions before the arbitration boards, three of them were on technicalities in which the merits of the cases were not ruled upon. Only twice has the Canadian government won a clean victory in the dozens of cases brought against it. Just this week, The Globe and Mail newspaper of Toronto reported that Exxon Mobil Corp. won a Chapter 11 arbitration case against the province of Newfoundland and Labrador because Exxon and a partner company were required to conduct research before commencing projects.

A U.S. watchdog group, Public Citizen, summed up the rules of NAFTA and other trade treaties in this succinct fashion:

“This ‘investor-state’ enforcement mechanism elevates private firms and investors to the same status as sovereign governments, effectively privatizing the right to enforce public treaties’ expansive new investor rights. There is no such private enforcement for labor rights or environmental standards. … The [free-trade] pacts provide firms a way to attack other countries’ domestic public interest laws and skirt their court systems.”

If readers in Canada, the United States or Mexico have no recollection of voting on any of this, there is good reason.

No accountability to the public

Similarly, the financiers who dominate European Union policy are not subject to any democratic accounting, either. And under the rubric of not allowing a perfectly good crisis to go to waste, the ongoing eurozone crisis is being used as leverage to install an ever harsher régime. Doing so is completely logical within the imperial construct of the European Union, which is a supra-national institution to impose corporate domination on a reluctant population. National governments are not insulated from popular opinion, but a supra-national structure can impose dictates on those governments, which can then tell citizens that is has “no choice” but to adhere to them so that the country can remain “part of Europe.”

Concomitantly, European capitalists desire the ability to challenge the United States for economic supremacy, but cannot do so without the combined clout of a united continent. This wish underlies the anti-democratic push to steadily tighten the E.U., including mandatory national budget benchmarks that require cutting social safety nets and policies that are designed to break down solidarity among wage earners across borders by imposing harsher competition through imposed austerity.

The E.U., in its current capitalist form, is a logical step for business leaders who desire greater commercial power on a global basis: It creates a “free trade” zone complete with suppression of social accountability while giving muscle to a currency that has the potential of challenging the U.S. dollar as the world’s pre-eminent currency.

A difficulty for E.U. business elites is that nationalism tends to act as a disorganizing force within the E.U., whereas nationalism is a potent unifying force in China and the United States. But nationalism, as always, has its uses: Instead of uniting on their common interests across borders, all too many Europeans are attacking one another on a national basis. Nationalism, ordinarily an easily manipulated ethos used to provide a unifying glue within countries that are otherwise consciously atomized by capitalist pressures and individualist propaganda, becomes a divide-and-conquer tool par excellence in a supra-national context. And so we have the dispiriting spectacle of venomous attacks on “lazy Greeks,” “arrogant Germans” and the rest of the assortment of tired clichés.

Nationalism is fine for working people, but an impediment for business elites who are increasingly bold in calling for economic policy to be directed by Brussels. In the past week, an assortment of E.U. officials, joined by national leaders elected and unelected, said the E.U. must be bound together more tightly. Arrogant and hypocritical as they may be, these officials are simply enunciating the logic of E.U. capitalism. The most prominent tangible form of these calls are for the issuance of “euro bonds” — government bonds to finance debt issued by the European Central Bank in place of bonds issued by individual national governments.

The new French government has endorsed the issuance of “euro bonds,” adding to the momentum. The proximate cause of pleas for the creating of “euro bonds” is that too many eurozone governments can’t afford to borrow at the high interests rates demanded by financiers and the rich who buy bonds (in lieu of paying taxes, which would end the need for selling bonds in such large amounts). The price of pooling together the risk of all E.U. governments by issuing such bonds is much closer economic integration. And what that means is financiers controlling policy to an even greater degree than they already do.

Financiers, that is, as an international interest group; not German bankers or Germany as a country. The corporate news media continues to cover the ongoing crisis and its slow-motion developments as a contest of wills between Germans (or Chancellor Angela Merkel) and the Southern rim of the E.U. with France as a buffer in between. But, as I have previously written, it is German industrialists, not German working people, who are the beneficiaries of German government policy.

German capitalists win, not German workers

Germany has become reliant on exports as German workers have absorbed a decade of wage cuts, leaving domestic demand inadequate to soak up German production or to pick up the slack when export markets soften. German exports have become more competitive on the backs of German employees, making it more difficult for other eurozone countries to remain competitive because, by not having their own currency that they can devalue, they can’t use that route to give their exports a boost. Thus, German industrialists have prospered through the widespread adoption of the euro, which has “locked in” their competitive advantages.

German, French and other bankers earned fat bonuses because the euro also made it easier for them to make loans to the Southern rim, which also enabled those countries to buy more German products. In turn, deficits mount and production is shuttered in countries such as Greece (where the shipping industry, the rich and even many private-sector middle class people don’t pay taxes), and the price for more loans is more harsh austerity.

But the money doesn’t go to the Greek budget, it goes right back to the banks. The 130 billion euro bailout of Greece is used almost exclusively to service the interest on Greece’s debt — not even to pay down the principal! The so-called “troika” — the European Central Bank, the International Monetary Fund and the European Commission — wire Greece the money, which is almost immediately sent right back. Most of the small amount that is retained by the Greek government is used to bail out Greek banks. The price for this? An unemployment rate of 22 percent and rising, pay cuts of 40 percent for those still employed and large numbers of small businesses closing.

The troika went so far as to demand that the Greek government change its constitution to ensure that banks are paid back before there is any spending on social programs. That is a taste of what will be experienced across Europe if more power is concentrated in the hands of unelected and unaccountable officials at the European level. A de facto financier dictatorship, although one to benefit big industrialists as well as financiers, because financiers are dependent on big industrialists to generate the profits that are poured into speculation (nor is there a neat separation between the two). For working people across Europe, the program can be summed up in two words: permanent austerity.

Cuts for now but no security in the future

And not even German workers, who have acquiesced to their unions agreeing to a decade of wage cuts in exchange for job security, will be immune. German workers’ living standards are slowly eroding, and when German exports slow or decline because buyers in other advanced capitalist countries buy fewer of their their products because of austerity and buyers in developing countries like China buy less because they can no longer sustain the pace of investment in infrastructure and industrial capacity, austerity will hit Germans. The route to German industrialists maintaining their profits under these future conditions will be either deeper cuts to wages, an end to job security, export of production to places with much lower wages or a combination of these.

The alternative to harmonizing economy policy among the eurozone countries (harmonizing with the tightest policy among them) is for the eurozone to break up, and countries to resume using their own currencies and setting their own policies, which would at least be subject to elections, and provide space for policies other than neoliberal austerity.

It is no surprise, then, that centralizing economic policy is the preferred route for European business elites. The arguments among them are over details — Chancellor Merkel is not a stubborn holdout nor obsessed with Weimar-era inflation; she is simply reminding other national political leaders that the harmonization will conform to the tightest policy among them and Germany so happens to have that tightest policy. None of the eurozone’s national leaders are in any sense reducible to “puppets,” but their perceived national interests are distorted by whatever consensus their capitalists arrive at, which in turn are determined by larger market forces. Big industrialists and financiers dominate their societies through control of the mass media and a range of other institutions to the point that their preferred policies become, through repetition, the dominant ideas across society and the ideas adopted by the political leaders who become dependent on them.

Similarly, “markets” seek regulatory harmonization within NAFTA countries at the level of the weakest regulations. Governments must respond because capitalists can move production at will, leaving everyone else at their mercy.

Such is the logic of “markets,” which are not the disembodied forces of nature so often portrayed but are simply the interests of the most powerful capitalist elites. It is futile to expect anything different from their system.