================================================================== Editorial - 6/6/97 France and the Euro THE defeat of France's right wing government showed that the strikes and protest marches of the past two years were not isolated events but signs of a deep and widespread discontent. French workers have been increasingly angered by high unemployment, now estimated at 12.8 per cent, and the draconian social spending cuts, largely, but not solely, imposed by the former government to meet the conditions for joining the Single European Currency. This problem is not of course peculiar to France. The other European Union's governments have also sought to put the burden of achieving monetary union onto the backs of working people. Social spending cuts have afflicted the EU's working class like an epidemic. In Britain the belt-tightening has been going on for many years. We were the first EU country to embark, under Margaret Thatcher, on a programme of wholesale privations -- a measure which contributed to high unemployment. We have also suffered year in, year out, cuts in local and national social spending. But the protests against these measures in Britain were also spread out over a long period -- battles to save hospitals, schools, services, benefits and public sector jobs have occupied local and labour movement activists for nearly two decades. In France and Germany the savage austerity programmes came later and faster sending shock waves through the working class. These policies were therefore closely identified with the Maastricht Treaty and its criteria for the Single Currency. The newly elected French socialist leader Lionel Jospin says his government will lift the burden of savage cuts and, if necessary, seek to ease the entry criteria for monetary union. The French communists, who are expected to join Jospin in government, are opposed to the current plan for a Single Currency. This has raised speculation in some capitalist newspapers that France might wreck the whole monetary union ship, or at least delay its sailing date. Opponents of the EU and those who are unhappy about further integration may be hoping that this will happen. But the Single Currency, far less the EU itself, will not be defeated just by cheering the new French government from the sidelines. The election victory for the left in France is undoubtedly very good news. Like the Labour victory in Britain it has pushed the favoured party of the ruling class out of office. But it should be remembered that the French left got into the European bed a long time ago. Even the communists, who don't like the plan for a Single Currency, do not oppose France's membership of the EU -- they show little desire to fight the Treaty of Rome. The complexion of the new government will be social democratic and reformist. It will,at most, only try to minimise the attacks on the working class by a process of lowering the Maastricht criteria or slowing down its timetable. The dream of the most powerful capitalists in Europe -- the Single Currency and the eventual European State -- will surely survive such reforms. And, of course, Britain's new government is committed to the EU and the Maastricht Treaty. But this doesn't mean the working class of Europe might as well raise the white flag and succumb to the grand design of the leading sections of Europe's capitalist class. We should reject the defeatist arguments put by some on the left to accept the EU as being here to stay and that we'd better make the best of a bad job and leam how to use its structures to out advantage -- the only fight, they argue, should be against the Single Currency. If we go down this path, we might as well say that capitalism is here to stay and that all we can do is learn to accommodate ourselves to it. As communists we recognise the necessity and inevitability of change. If we accept that the eventual defeat of capitalism is possible, then it is certainly possible to reverse the anti-working class and anti-democratic set up that is the EU. But the fight has to be waged on a class basis. Campaigns based on nationalism and reformist half measures will not expose the capitalist nature and purpose of the EU. Nor will they be able to galvanise the organised working class into root and branch opposition to the Treaty of Rome itself. In any case, xenophobic arguments need to be rejected as they are laden with barely concealed racist ideas and serve to weaken the vital principle of international worlking class solidarity. We welcome the French election victory while carrying forward the fight in Britain. New Communist Party of Britain Homepage http://www.geocities.com/CapitolHill/2853 A news service for the Working Class! Workers of all countries Unite!