The emphatic French and Dutch rejection of the proposed Constitution for the European Union creates an unstable situation in which, unless the European Left begins to define an alternative and rally support behind it, the neoliberal project will actually profit from votes that were, more than anything else, an expression of popular anger at the failure of the existing Euro-regime and its project of ‘reform’. European monetary union has been accompanied by deregulation of financial markets, privatization of public assets and the cutting of social provision. At different times this is a programme that has been espoused by such varied sponsors as German Christian Democrats, German Social Democrats, German Greens, French Gaullists and Socialists, Italian former Communists and neo-conservatives, British New Labour and the Spanish Right. The project was flimsily disguised by attaching to it the phrase ‘social Europe’, but behind this was the drive to cut back collective provision and to commodify social protection.

In nearly all cases, social protections have been established at the national level and it is these that have been dismantled. While so-called ‘reform’ has on several occasions been stubbornly resisted—notably in the great French strikes of November–December 1995—this resistance has eventually been worn down by a succession of half-measures with great cumulative effect. In 1998 there was a brief moment when the German and French finance ministers seemed poised to drive through a programme of tax harmonization and Keynesian macro-management at European level but, with the resignation of Oskar Lafontaine in 1999, this soon passed. The remorseless sapping of social provision at national level continued and was propelled by pressure from the eu and ecb—indeed the latter gave an alibi to national governments. The toleration of deflation and mass unemployment further demoralized and weakened organized labour.

The eu does not have a fiscal regime adequate to the huge challenges that its member states face. These include the heavy costs of the ageing society, the knowledge-based economy, and such ecological shocks as global warming, desertification and the destruction of marine life. For two decades the Union has been dogged by persistently high levels of unemployment in its core states, and it is now unprepared for the consequences of a poorly planned enlargement. Although the proposed Constitutional Treaty paid lip service to ‘social Europe’, it did not envisage a single new measure that would extend social provision on a eu-wide basis, nor furnish the eu (which only commands 1 per cent of the gdp of its member states) with new fiscal powers.

Some of these challenges have been seized on by Europe’s leaders to justify downsizing entitlements. Social movements will defend these where they are rooted in national welfare regimes, but they are more likely to be successful if they also respond on an eu-wide basis. The Left now has the chance to articulate its own alternative at continental level. The eu has a scale and level of development which potentially allows it to contain the corrosive forces of globalization and elaborate its own social model—one in which the promises embodied in universal social insurance are met and combined with low levels of unemployment and more generous provision for education, childcare, social infrastructure and research and development. It has an economic weight equal to that of the United States and a fiscal and regulatory regime which the large corporations and finance houses are obliged to respect. A distinctive feature of Europe is its relatively strong labour and social movements. It has a successful record of public initiative in areas like transport, communications and land reclamation, and a tradition of decent social provision, even if the eu’s current leaders have largely turned their backs on this inheritance. In what follows I will be exploring the ways in which Europe could reorient its economy and find new pathways to economic redistribution, good labour standards, social justice and ecological sustainability. I will argue that we need to find qualitatively more effective ways to tax corporations and, with the proceeds, to establish a network of social funds.

Europe has an opportunity for a creative response to the crises it faces. The sterile formula of Europe’s grotesquely misnamed Stability and Growth Pact has been breached by three of the eu’s largest states. This represents a break with the baneful rule of the European Central Bank and its disastrous monetarist dogmas. With the accession of the new members the eu has demonstrated that it has attractive power, but this widening is compromised by the failure to provide for any social deepening. Only a fiscally more powerful eu could contain the pressures of globalization and integrate the new members in a way that improves life for all.

The current programme of the eu seeks to extend the internal market without offering social safeguards or tax harmonization. National regimes of social protection are to be submerged by a rising tide of laissez-faire legislation at the European level. For over a decade the leaders of the eu have pushed for ever more explicit and ‘implicit’ privatization in the provision of social insurance. The latter is a process whereby public services and social protections are degraded in order to oblige the mass of citizens to buy social protection from private finance and insurance houses.footnote¹ Blair, Raffarin, Schroeder and Berlusconi have all pursued the commodification of pensions, social insurance and educational provision, cut back public programmes and offered openings to the global financial services industry. The latter are offered generous tax relief to make their products more attractive, a subsidy that underwrites much of their own costly marketing. The further pursuit of privatizing measures is the declared aim of the European Commission President José Manuel Barroso.

The theorists of globalization have yet adequately to integrate the importance of pension funding—in essence a claim over future surplus—as a dimension of modern class struggles. The dismantling of social Europe has encountered large-scale, but episodic, resistance. In 2004 there were huge demonstrations and major strikes against cuts in pension entitlements in France, Germany, Austria and Italy. In 2004 and 2005 national elections in Spain and Portugal, and local elections in Italy and France, reflected widespread unhappiness with the dominant neoliberal model, including the erosion of pensions. Yet Europe’s centre-left leaders are as besotted with the us economic model as those on the centre-right (indeed Chirac has sometimes proved more resistant to the siren song of Anglo-Saxon economics than Europe’s social democrats). Far from being worthy of emulation, the us economy is weighed down by mountainous deficits and mired in corruption and failure. A us fiscal deficit stretching as far as the eye can see means that future Medicare and Social Security commitments, limited as they are by European standards, cannot be met by the current tax regime. Assuming entitlements and revenue provisions remain the same, the Social Security programme will begin paying out more than it takes in around 2016, will exhaust its reserves by around 2038 and will pile up a deficit of $3.5 trillion by 2075.footnote² The Medicare programme will run into difficulties even sooner and will eventually generate a deficit that is about three times as large, though this could be somewhat reduced by better cost control. To finance these programmes the us Treasury will need to find revenues equivalent to an extra 4–5 per cent of gdp annually.