No 2 Nice

national | miscellaneous | news report

Saturday August 31, 2002 22:00

by Malatested - Anarchist Federation Ireland

ireaf at yahoo dot ie

The Government’s declaration at the Seville summit in June has it that “Nor is Ireland party to any plans to develop a European Army”. EU Commission President Romano Prodi said it well “If you don’t want to call it a European army, don’t call it a European army. You can call it ‘Margaret’, you can call it ‘Mary-Anne’, you can find any name”.

Rapid Reaction Force

The name they have found is the “Rapid Reaction Force” and the Irish Government is committed to this project, giving it millions of euro, as well as troops. All this is justified by lofty visions of crusading knights coming to right the world’s wrongs in Bosnia or Rwanda. If only the world hadn’t “turned a blind eye” then. This is, of course, based on an unmentioned assumption, it is decided without discussion that the purpose of the array of death delivering weaponry horded by London, Berlin and Washington is to save life. The most powerful states on the planet are actually charities, they are just not very good at it, hence the world’s problems.

An examination of reality, without the assumption, shows something different.
Take for example the massacres in Rwanda in 1994.If only there had been intervention…But there was. The Rwandan army, which carried out the atrocities, was armed, trained, advised and finally rescued by the French military.

200 million dollars in EU aid went to “Plan Columbia”, the latest phase in the Columbian government’s war effort. A government whose forces are, according to Human Rights Watch, responsible for over 80% of human rights violations (including massacres as vicious as those of the more televised rebels) through their links with right-wing paramilitaries.
Meanwhile trade liberalisation, has opened up the Columbian economy to foreign business investment, for example the Smurfit group and British Petroleum (BP). Generally speaking the Columbian government favours the sort of pro-big business policies that the EU does, and as a result gets the support of the EU.

Intervention for human rights and peace is only for when the TV cameras are on, the rest of the time it’s intervention for profit and plunder.

Privatisation

The Nice Treaty sets out a program of ‘harmonisation’, i.e. that the policies of all E.U. states should be the same, in matters of ‘liberalisation’, which is the polite way of saying privatisation. The E.U. is committed to the introduction of GATS, the General Agreement on Trade in Services, which is the long way of saying privatisation. Under the World Trade Organisation’s GATS treaty, practices which ‘discriminate’ against foreign businesses in favour of native companies (including the state owned public sector) are outlawed, this can include, in the context of third level education, grants, free fees and any state subsidy to universities or colleges (if they are not equally applicable to all private education).To privatise a public service, first of all it’s got to be making a profit, to attract investment, so you have to have people paying for it. Are the bin charges omens of what lies down the road?

Privatisation, in order to turn a profit, attracts investment, and competes in the marketplace, makes for increased costs for the consumer and lower wages and worse working conditions for the worker.

Its child is two tier services, with the capital of private investment being poured in to develop services that provide for whoever can pay for them while under-funded and over-crowded state owned services must provide for the rest.

The EU

The E.U. is the tool of big business. The Big business lobby group behind the E.U. is the European RoundTable of Industrialists (E.R.T.) which includes among it’s select elite the bosses of Unilever, Carlsberg, Fiat, Vodafone, Volvo, Philips, Nokia, Renault, Pirelli, and Shell, as well as those of the aforementioned BP and the Smurfit group. According to one of it’s number, Gerhard Cromme, of the Thyssen Krupp corporation, there is a “culture of laziness” in “the European education system” where students “take liberties to pursue subjects not directly related to industry. Instead they are pursuing subjects which have no practical application."

The privatisation agenda, and resistance to it, has already hit the education systems across Europe. For instance, in May and June students across Germany went on strike, demonstrated, blocked roads and briefly occupied a TV station and the buildings of the ruling SPD party, in response to the introduction of fees for what was formerly free education. Likewise Spain has seen massive demonstrations, and the mass protests at E.U. Summits in Brussels (last December), and Seville (June) have had ‘student blocs’.
Early in September activists from all Ireland’s anarchist organisations along with non-aligned individuals will meet up to establish a broad libertarian campaign calling for another No vote on Nice.

However we recognise it is mass direct action such as that described above, which gets results, rather than putting an x to a piece of paper.

To get details of the campaign visit http://www.rebelweb.cjb.net.

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No 2 Nice