furthermore Maastricht means more austerity, thus a deeper recession and additional reasons for financial chaos.
MAXIME DURAND* W HATEVER the outcome of the French referendum on the Maastricht Treaty on European union, the rise in support for a "no" has revealed the true face of Euro-democracy. When the weight of forged evidence is not enough to get a conviction, the establishment looks for the hand of the devil.
If we are to believe the kind of articles appearing in the French press at the end of August, the danger of a vote against Maastricht on September 20 was the direct cause of the fall in the dollar, while the prestigious pro-government daily Le Monde devoted a whole front page to a concocted catastrophe scenario.
In fact, the dollar's fall and its effects on the European currency started even before the opinion polls, and its causes lie elsewhere.
The current economic buzzword is deflation. It is used to describe a sluggish world economy which is refusing to respond to any of the remedies promoted by the various economic gurus. On top of this is the vast weight of the debts accumulated on all sides during the 1980s. It thus looks as if the crisis of the system - meaning its inability to regain a minimum dynamism
— has set in for the long-term.
The economic stupor takes place in a context of disorganization that is enough to explain the fall of the dollar. High German interest rates are drawing in capital; everyone wants to own deutschmarks rather than dollars. The resulting rise in the mark throws the European monetary system offbalance; the British pound, falling sharply against the mark, comes within a hair's breadth of devaluation, while the defence of the strong franc rules out any cut in French interest rates. The monetary disorder strengthens the obstacles to growth, already stifled by austerity policies.
The moral of all this is that the system does not need bad opinion polls for it to slump into depression and that the good health of currencies is obtained at the expense of jobs. In France we have a strong currency and high unemployment.
The president speaks
Would the measures envisaged in the Maastricht Treaty improve things? In his big TV appearance to defend the treaty, French President Mitterrand used a new argument: a single market set up by the Single Act alone would be incomplete; it would be one of a poorly controlled liberalism. It would be highly dangerous to have a single market without a single currency.
If thic is true Mitterrand (and a series of If this is true, Mitterrand (and a series of Eurocrats) should resign for incompetence, since in 1988 he went into battle for the Single Act and has been praising its merits ever since. The basic swindle is well-known from business: they sell you the basic gadget cheap, but you then find that all the accessories needed to make it work are very expensive.
In fact there is no reason to suppose that the single market would be incompatible with the existing European monetary system. The margins of fluctuations are not great and the financial experts have a fair grasp of the risks. Furthermore they have been at pains to assure us that the possibility of a "no" vote has already been taken into account by speculators.
As for the single currency, the present mechanisms preserve a degree of flexibility that has been tested to the limit during the recent excitement. It is hard to see how a more rigid post-Maastricht system could have coped with the fall in the dollar without exploding into pieces.
We should thus distinguish between the political and economic significance of the
September 20 referendum. On the political level, a French "no" would bring the unity process grinding to a halt. As Hervé Monet put in the Le Monde on September 8, 1992, "negative developments could be expected in the short term". . However "it is certain that a 'yes' would mean a better immediate situation".
FRANCE The leftwing "no" to Maastricht THE French and Euro-establishments have been pulling out all the stops to get a "yes" vote in the September 20 referendum in France on the Maastricht Treaty on European Union. An unending parade of Eurocrats, experts and celebrities have predicted the direst catastrophes. One of the highlights has been the stage-managed "debate" between pro-Maastricht French president François Mitterrand and the Gaullist advocate of a "no" vote, Phillippe Séguin, before a hand-picked audience of eight "yes" and six "no" supporters.
The choice of Séguin was significant; apart from being tipped as a possible member of a future Mitterrandist centre coalition, his presence told the public that the opposition to Maastricht comes exclusively from the right. Furthermore, there were no left critics of Maastricht - from the Communist Party, the Greens, the far left or the anti-Maastricht current in Mitterrand's own Socialist Party - in the audience.
But there is, in fact, significant support for a "no" to Maastricht from the left, an opposition based not on fear of foreigners and appeals to national sovereignty, but on the treaty's anti-working class and pro-austerity content. The Ligue Communiste Révolutionaire (LCR — French section of the Fourth International) has been at the centre of efforts to explain why workers and all progressiveminded people should reject the treaty; it has also fought hard to ensure that the left opposition remains untainted by nationalism and xenophobia. Throughout France the LCR has helped to build joint meetings to put forward the case for a leftwing "no", drawing in leit Socialists, Greens, dissident Communists and other far left currents. Its campaign culminated in a big rally in Paris on September 17.
The next issue of IV will report on the results of the referendum and give a more detailed account of the progress of the leftwing
"no" to Maastricht in France. *
On the other hand the economic effect of a "no" would be a return to the status quo ante; the capitalist governments have nothing else on offer other than austerity whatever the result.
The pro-Maastricht camp is predicting all kinds of catastrophes if they lose this referendum. In fact, however, the argument can be turned against them. No study demonstrating the benefits of Maastricht has yet been published. This is for the good reason that they are all bad and are thus being kept under wraps. Only one IMF study has slipped out. Claude Soula comments in le Nouvel Observateur (August 6, 1992) on "this little semi-official study" and its conclusions which he finds "hardly surprising; in fact a child could have reached them; when states go on a strict diet... growth slows and unemployment rises". '. This is what is hidden under all the pro-Maastricht Euro-guff.
Indeed the whole single currency project is the expression of a form of bizarre fetishism which sees money as the final cause and effect of economic life.
The Maastricht plan for convergence of the economies of the EC states means trying to achieve a rapprochement between economies as different as those of Germany and Portugal. If this were to be achieved at the level of the overall economy, then monetary union would pose few problems (at least from an economic point of view). But Maastricht puts the cart before the horse, proposing that monetary union should be the engine of economic convergence. Even those economists who are most enthusiastic about Maastricht envisage an incomplete monetary union, without the southern European countries. Which makes you wonder about the point of signing a treaty that everyone in the know agrees cannot be implemented.
This brings us to the heart of the matter; the Maastricht Treaty is a sort of plebiscite on austerity; approval of the treaty will be taken as a mandate for continuing and toughening the austerity policies already in operation throughout Europe. The drastic plans recently announced in Spain and Portugal are related to the demands of "convergence" and foreshadow the catastrophes planned for the continent's workers. For them, a "no" vote is simply a sensible defensive reaction. * • This article first appeared in the September 10, 5 1992 issue of the French revolutionary Marxist weekly Rouge.
ECONOMY
AS the disastrous consequences of