by Jacques Cheminade,
President of Solidarité & Progrès, former French Presidential candidate.

February 9, 2008

This way, the European "simplified" treaty has been ratified by both houses of the French parliament once the nation's constitution was modified by them gathered in a "congress" procedure allowing them to do so. Shall we be demoralized? No, but ashamed, yes, while waiting for this farce to come to an end.

Ashamed, yes, since for our elites and republican democracy, this is the darkest day ever for Europe since its 1957 founding at the Treaty of Rome. Here we face the fact, that without any in-depth debate, what the people had decided by way of popular referendum in 2005 was undone. It might be legal, but it mocks the people. The financial elites took their revenge, with the support of what has indeed to be called parliamentary cretinism.

At the very moment that our Fifth Republic is drifting towards an arbitrary regime of monarchic rule, and needs a counterweight composed of thinking representatives, it is a tragedy to see our Assemblies dishonor themselves in this way.

Even worse, the adoption of the Lisbon Treaty paralyzes the fight of European nations against injustice and the chaos of financial globalization. In practice, the treaty consecrates the interdiction against the recourse to productive public credit, the sole instrument capable, aside from increased taxes and borrowing, of launching a policy of great projects getting out of global economy of financial and monetary disintegration. It enhances the absurd policy of the European Central Bank which advances cash to speculators in exchange for toxic paper as collateral, and can not even be the lender of last resort to protect Europe's producers and workers. On top of it all, it offers numerous exceptions and privileges to Great Britain, a country whose governments are nothing but accomplices or emanations of the destructive policy of the City of London.

If any evidence would be required to prove our case, just note the recent declaration made in Brussels, by European Commission President José Manuel Barroso: "We must not be tempted by protectionism or to launch into equally futile attempts to stem financial globalization, or set up artificial stimulus of the economy." In other words, all the measures such as those that Mr. Sarkozy wanted to undertake to save the Gandrange steel mill is in contradiction with the very objective of the Europe that Sarkozy wanted voted up!

Never has Europe seemed so distant from the ordinary citizen who, at best, considers it to be a disgusting bureaucracy, or worse, a work of evil.

Why then announce the coming end of this farce? Because such a Europe cannot stand. Two directions remain: Financial fascism, with a super-controlled and police-state society, or return to an international financial and monetary order founded anew on the principles of the Global New Deal of Roosevelt and his European post-war reconstruction policies. That's what the fight is all about and for which we have to mobilize without delay. This farce will end soon, with the crisis exploding in Italy, with the real estate bubble in Spain and Great Britain, and more generally, with the ongoing disintegration of the dominant monetary and financial order. The Europe of the "simplified" Treaty of Lisbon as such will be a still-born.

The real Europe will be the Europe of new great projects, from the Atlantic to the Sea of China, a true Europe that can only be defined on the scale of Eurasian development. Otherwise, "Europe" will be no more than a word, meaning a going back to the '40s, a drive for low wages, a march towards social austerity, and the war of each against all. Our fight is to give Europe a new foundation for its renaissance as an alliance of fatherlands for reinforced and advanced cooperation within a monetary and financial order redefined at last.