COLUMN LEFT : New Europe: A Shape Far From Decided : Will the European Community be more than a capitalists’ club?

During one Christmas season in the course of World War I, German and Allied troops fraternized across the trenches, to the horror of their commanders. The men much preferred saying “Happy Christmas” to trying to kill each other. There are no trenches now, but today the argot of amity is more complicated. During the mid-December Euro-summit in Rome, the newspapers sprouted an almost impenetrable undergrowth of prose about the “hard ecu” and the merits of a central bank for the entire European Community.

The complexity makes some folk reel and holler for traditional verities, like the “good old pound.” Such nostalgia about the national currency is probably more a function of age than anything else. Polls show that younger people are much more laconic about Euro-fusion. But some British people over 60 cherish the old, white five-pound note, which looked like a personal letter from the governor of the Bank of England. As a boy who used to get a few of them pressed into my palm by uncles and aunts at Christmas time, I revere the former Irish half-crown, a beautiful silver coin with a horse on it.

It’s the same with national boundaries. Back in the 1950s, the working people of Cork City thought it a fine holiday to travel down by rail some 30 miles to the spacious beaches of Youghal. We folks of Youghal traveled over to Ardmore, eight miles east, for our vacation. I took a poll in the pub in Ardmore the other night and recent holiday destinations included the Canary Islands (very popular with the Irish), Turkey, as well as the United States, which of course is second home and workplace of last resort. In this perspective, “Europe” is a matter of work permits, customs dues and other brusque economic realities, but not an affront to national senses of identity.

But behind the varying “senses” of Europe (which in Ardmore means a sign outside the village announcing that the European Community is financing the widening of the local highway) there are some basic, crude questions that can be glimpsed through the verbal fog. These concern not so much the desirability of a more closely federated Europe but what the nature of this federation would be.

At the moment there is no real federated structure. The community has no army, no police, no prisons and only a few thousand employees. But, despite the lack of a federal infrastructure, there are pan-European structural realities, most fundamentally the economic power of Germany, hence of the deutsche mark. To offset this, the British are maneuvering for a “hard ecu” (European currency unit), but this could end up being essentially the selfsame deutsche mark, with values and interest rates set by a European Central Bank dominated by Germany.

This raises the question of democratic control, just as the role of a Federal Reserve dominated by Eastern bankers has raised questions about democratic control in the United States ever since the establishment of the reserve system.

Right now the European Council of Ministers uses EC powers to press through measures that have no detailed sanction from either national parliaments or the European Parliament. The community suffers from something politely known as a “deficit of democracy.” This deficit springs from the original impulse for the European Economic Community, which was an attempt to achieve some coordination among a collection of regional capitalist powers.

And indeed the community could, in the next phase, remain just such a coordinating unit: a formidable cartel set to do battle with the emerging dollar and yen blocs west and east of it, but without proper democratic supervision and hence without pressure for communitywide standards on wages, the work week, labor rights, women’s rights, civil liberties, environmental standards and so forth.

Crammed up against the windows of this bloc, peering enviously in from the cold, perhaps given “associated status,” would be the Eastern European nations, allowed a sparse amount of bailout money and treated as a reserve army of the unemployed or low-paid with which to chasten better-paid Western European workers.

The effort to establish an alternative to this corporate utopia will be the business of the next generation of the European left, starting with full membership for Eastern European nations as well as for Austria, Sweden and Turkey, which are now pressing to join. In such a truly pan-European community the struggle for democratic accountability and controls can honestly begin, in language rather more accessible than the bureaucratic lingo that is the present idiom of the community.