britain and europe (2007)

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Britain and Europe: Class, state and the politics of integration

Britain and Europe: Class,state and the politics ofintegrationHugo Radice

This paper explores the way socialists have deployedMarxist theories in analysing European integration andBritains participation in it. The first section shows howtheories of the relationship between nation states andglobal capitalism opened up new perspectives onregional integration in Europe. The second section looksat later debates about varieties of capitalism, andargues that these debates have ignored the globalconstitution of capitalism and exaggerated the rangeof variation within it. The third section develops thispoint in relation to the possibility of challengingneoliberalism within the EU.

Introduction

At the time of the referendum on Britishmembership of the , the socialist left both within

and outside the Labour Party was virtually unanimousin its hostility to membership. As Gamble observed ( :), membership was seen as incompatible with the

national strategy of state-led industrial modernisation thatthe left then espoused, and the lefts defeat on the referendumindeed led quickly to the Wilson governments abandonmentof that industrial strategy in favour of an early form of monetarism. The ignominious defeat of Labour in under

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Callaghan ensured that the left remained steadfastly anti-Europe through the Thatcher years, but over the last twentyyears that hostility has steadily diminished, both in the tradeunion movement (Strange, a) and in the extra-parliamentary context of the social forum movement. As theEuropean political elites prepare to celebrate the fiftiethanniversary of the Treaty of Rome, it seems appropriate toconsider this evolution from a historical-materialiststandpoint.

The argument that follows develops in three stages. Thefirst section looks at the way Marxist theorising on class, stateand the world economy has evolved in Britain in relation toEuropean integration, drawing largely on the Open Marxismtradition developed within the . The second section thenexamines European capitalism through the lens of thevarieties of capitalism literature, arguing that the left hastoo readily accepted a discourse that excludes socialisttransformation in favour of reformist attempts to moderatethe effects of global neoliberalism. The third section looksmore directly at political strategy: it begins by rejecting anyattempt by the left to reconstruct nationalism as progressive,and goes on to argue that the increasing entrenchment of neoliberalism in Europe has removed any possibility of theEuropean Union moderating the anti-working-class policiesof New Labour.

Marxist theory and European integration: A brief history

While some capitalist states in western Europe negotiatedtheir paths to the Treaty of Rome, to the east of the ironcurtain, the death of Stalin was followed by a period of politicaluncertainty, reform and even revolution ( in Hungary).These changes in the east, culminating in the twentiethcongress of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union ( ),helped to generate the renaissance of western Marxism

which, in the s, yielded a substantive renewal of theMarxist critique of political economy and the first tentativecritical analyses of European integration.

Official Soviet ideology had prescribed for westerncommunists the theory of state monopoly capitalism, underwhich the apparently inexorable expansion in the economicrole of the state was seen as the ruling classes last and doomedattempt to offset the sclerosis of monopoly and the growing

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economic strength of labour. The novel analyses offered bythe new non-communist left included (to cite English-language work only) the work of Baran ( ), Barratt Brown( ), Baran and Sweezy ( ), Mandel ( ), Magdoff ( ), Frank ( ) and Mattick ( ), who sought torenew Marxs critique of political economy by analysingcontemporary capitalism and imperialism in ways thatdeparted, to varying degrees and in various respects, fromthe Soviet orthodoxy.

The response of orthodox state-monopoly-capitalismtheory (stamocap) to European integration was to see it asa further phase in the fusion of capital and the state. Theroots of national state monopoly capitalism lay in theconcentration and centralisation of capital, which preventedthe law of value from operating effectively throughcompetitive market-adjustment processes. This, takentogether with the growing power of organised labour to resistexploitation and to challenge capitalist power politically, hadled the bourgeoisie to develop complex mechanisms of stateregulation and intervention that would ensure the expandedreproduction of capital and stave off the systems crisistendencies. However, in postwar Europe the economicprocesses of concentration and centralisation had outgrownthe confines of the national state, most notably in the crisisof overcapacity in the regions coal, iron and steel industries.While historically such tendencies had led to fusions,annexations and wars, the new postwar world of hegemonyand Soviet threat now led western-European capitalists toseek the peaceful negotiation of a solution to these economicproblems. For communists, the participation of the Europeanpowers in indicated further that the primary political drivers of European integration, reinforcing this economicmotive, were subordination to imperialism and hostilityto the .

In the post- renewal of Marxian economic analysis,there are abundant signs of continuity with the old orthodoxy:

it is as if the political break with the Soviet Union was not yetmatched by an analytical break with its ruling ideology. Inparticular, the analysis of international economic relationsremained heavily circumscribed by Lenins Imperialism andthe other classic contributions by Kautsky, Hilferding,Luxemburg, Trotsky and Bukharin. This is very clear from arereading of Mandel ( ) and Picciotto & Radice ( )on European integration, and Rowthorn ( ) on imperial

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rivalries: these are fundamentally economistic analyses, inwhich the state is treated as an epiphenomenonan agent of class rule whose activities are designed directly for thatpurpose.

The break with this approach came from three sources.First, the economists took note of an emerging debate onthe nature of the capitalist state, which in Britain is usuallyremembered as the Miliband-Poulantzas debate (e.g.Miliband, ; Poulantzas, , reviewed in Clarke, :

). Second, political events around the world inled to a surge of interest in Marxist theory centred on thestudy of Marxs work in general, but especially the early Marx,the Grundrisse and Capital . Third, significant parts of the newleft in western Europe and North America sought to engagewith labour movements which were themselves respondingto the end of the postwar boom with rank-and-file oppositionto the rule of capital, most spectacularly in France in May

. In Britain, the s saw intensive debates within theinherited framework of Marxist theory over the law of value,accumulation and economic crises, class, state andimperialism, and these debates soon generated new analysesof the causes and consequences of European integration.

For the understanding of imperialism and internationaleconomic relations, the new analyses led some Marxists to aradically different ontological stance in relation to class andstate. While the revival of value theory had already generatednew insights into the economic role of the state in relation tocrisis, Clarke ( ) and Holloway and Picciotto ( ) (thelatter drawing on contemporary German debates) argued thatthe state should itself be treated as a form of capitalist social relations , rather than as being in some sense relativelyautonomous, or as intervening in economic relations fromoutside. Historically, the state was central to the constitutionof capitalism, while in contemporary practice, the struggle of workers against capital took place at one and the same timein and against both the workplace and the state (London

Edinburgh Weekend Return Group, ). The historically-contingent character of the capitalist state also encompassedthe states system : there was nothing in the social relations of capitalist production as such that entailed a multiplicity of states, the existence of which had its origins in pre-capitalistterritorial politics. Capital as a social relation had no inherentterritoriality, and its very boundlessness implied that it wasconstituted immediately as global. However, the struggle to

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emerged within the Marxist tradition, and in closeinteraction with the approach outlined above (e.g. Bieleret al., ): that of the Amsterdam School (e.g. van derPijl, , ; Overbeek, , ) and the neo-Gramscian tendency in international political economy(e.g. Bieler & Morton, ; van Apeldoorn, ). Verybriefly, the formers key contribution was to develop theanalysis of the internationalisation of capital (as in e.g.Palloix, ) by identifying different fract ions of capitalbased on whether their circulation took place nationallyor transnationally, leading to the advocacy of different setsof institutions and policies at national, regional and globallevels. The dominant fractions of capital generatecomprehensive concepts of control that translate theirmaterial interests into strategies and practices of class ruleembracing the global, regional and national levels. Theiranalysis of European integration therefore centres on theidentification of a nascent European capitalist class, andits contradictory relationship with hegemony (see e.g.Holman & van der Pijl, ).

The more recent emergence of an explicitly neo-Gramscianapproach to European integration has its orig ins in the workof Cox ( ) and Gill ( ), who have sought to apply thekey concepts in Gramscis political thought, mutatis mutandis ,to the analysis of international political economy. In thisapproach, disciplinary neoliberalism is promoted as aframework for safeguarding and intensifying the rule of capital,taking concrete forms at global, regional and national levelthat are shaped by struggles between opposing social forces.The renewal of European integration in the s is seen asa new constitutionalism (Gill, ) in which the regionalembedding of neoliberalism overcomes national social forcesof resistance through its imposition as an ineluctable externalconstraint.

The neo-Gramscian approach had already been vigorouslycriticised by Burnham ( ), drawing on the work of Clarke

and others outlined above, for its identification of the statespolicies and practices with the interests of specific capitalfractions rather than with capital in general. It has, however,clearly provided a fruitful approach to the empirical analysisof struggles over accession and enlargement and itsinstitutional evolution (e.g. Bieler, ; Cafruny & Ryder,

; Shields, ; McCarthy, ). The next section takesup these issues.

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What sort of Europe? From the struggle for socialism tothe defense of social capitalism

The previous section offered a history of Marxisms analyticalstrategy for understanding European integration; this sectionexamines its normative political engagement in terms of attitudes to particular policies and directions of institutionalchange.

The political conjuncture of the cold war in Europe in thes ensured that the lefts political engagement with the

early process of integration divided primarily along thetraditional line between reform and revolution. Socialdemocracy, economic interventionism and the welfare statestood on the middle ground of bourgeois politics in theEuropean democracies, as part of what Holman and van derPijl ( : ) term corporate liberalism. Reformism inBritain as elsewhere took an instrumental attitude towardsthe Common Market, up to and beyond British entry andthe referendum: would membership (or in memberstates, specific policy initiatives) promote or impede thepursuit of cherished objectives of domestic and foreign policy?For the Labour Party, the key stated domestic objectivesremained full employment, economic growth, industrialmodernisation and the provision of equal opportunitiesthrough investment in education, housing and health: in theseareas there was a predictable tension between those whothought that market integration would yield substantialeconomic benefits through economies of scale, and those whofeared the erosion of Keynesian capacities of fiscal andmonetary management. In foreign policy, Atlanticism, anti-communism and Commonwealth neo-colonialism hadformed the three pillars of Labour thinking since , andincluded a barely-hidden strain of hostility towardscontinental Europe that seemed confirmed by de Gaullesveto of Britains first application for membership.However, by the erosion of hegemony, Brandts

Ostpolitik and the growing investments of business inEurope had reconciled most of Labours centre and right tocampaigning for membership.

The left of Labour and of the (the latter dominated atthis time by the ostensibly left barons of the and ,

Jones and Scanlon) predictably opposed British membershipthrough a mixture of commitment to the old politics of Britishexceptionalism, and opposition to anything advocated by the

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Labour right. Yet there was remarkably little real interest in the among either the labour Left or the revolutionary left,

whether communist, Trotskyist or libertarian: the issues of TheSocialist Register for , and likewise the short-lived TradeUnion Register of the period, contain no articles on the oron British membership. Apart from s brief spark of internationalism, which scanned rapidly from Hue to Paris toMexico City to Prague, the left was far more preoccupied withthe domestic politics of industrial and social issues.

After Thatchers second election victory in , however,Europe assumed a far greater importance for British politicsand for socialists in Britain. Thatcher cleverly exploited thesclerotic processes of policy-making in the to rail against alargely imaginary federalism, and then return in tr iumph withbudgetary concessions; in the end her cultivation of Euroscepticism proved instrumental in her downfall, but everyBritish government since her departure has played the samegame. However, the crude instrumentalism of the rulingstance towards Europe led the moderate left of the LabourParty, and especially the , to look more closely at thepotential of the as a defense against Thatcherism. Besetby electoral failure, declining membership and the steadymarch of anti-union legislation and privatisation, they saw

Jacques Delorss presidency, and eventually and especiallyhis promotion of the Social Charter, as offering them apotential lifeline (Strange, a). By the time the Blair Brown Labour leadership took over in , only a few isolatedelements on the left still called for British withdrawal fromthe , while the great majority both within and outside theLabour Party saw the as part of their normal arena of political struggle.

At the same time, events in the east once again, as in themid- s, dramatically changed the broader global contextof the British lefts political engagement with the wider world.The rapid collapse of Soviet communism in and theapparent triumph of global neoliberalism was a political defeat

not only for diehard communists but for all democraticvarieties of socialism, which were completely unable to offera viable alternative third way. The restoration of capitalismin eastern Europe went largely unchallenged by the left, andwas shaped along neoliberal lines by new political elitessupported steadfastly by the whole panoply of intergovernmental institutions from the , and theto the , and World Bank (Shields, ; Radice, ).

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From the ashes of the confrontation between capitalismand communism, however, arose a pale shadow that might,by a trick of the light, be mistaken for an equally historicconfrontationbetween varieties of capitalism. Popularisedin Britain by Hutton ( ), the comparative analysis of Anglo-Saxon/neoliberal/free-market capitalism on the onehand and Rhineland/social-market/organised capitalism onthe other offered a new strategy of political engagement forthe British left, explicitly limited to a progressive agendacentred on the defense of the Keynesian welfare state. Thevarieties-of-capitalism (hereafter o ) literature embraced apositive research strategy aimed at convincing political elitesthat some specific variety would generate superior results interms of desired outcomes imputed to a given society (seeAlbert, ; Berger & Dore, ; Crouch & Streeck, ;Hall & Soskice, ; Coates, ). An early example of this came in the USA in the s, when the superioreconomic and technological performance of Japan ledprogressive scholars to advocate the adoption of Japanese-style statebusiness relations in place of the Reaganadministrations militant neoliberalism (Burkett & Hart-Landsberg, ).

In Europe, there was a parallel espousal of alternatives toAnglo-Saxon neoliberalism. Given the political climate inBritain, this focused not on the statist model attributed toFrance and Italy, but rather the social market capitalism( ) attributed variously to Germany, Austria, Holland andthe Scandinavian countries. The effectiveness of this advocacydepended, however, on two necessary conditions: first, thesuperior performance of , and second, the persistence of salient differences between the two models. In the early-to-middle s, these conditions appeared to be fulfilled.and economic performance appeared decidedly weakerunder George Bush senior and John Major respectively, whilethe German slowdown could plausibly be attributed to theburden of post- unification, and the other exemplars

appeared to be doing well. By the end of the decade, however,these circumstances were reversed: the was dramaticallyoutstripping Japan (and the east Asian miracle was over),while the Blair government was trumpeting its success overEuropean in reducing unemployment and restoringsound finance (Radice, ).

The second condition for the effective advocacy ofconcerned the question of convergence. The mainstream o

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literature was precisely structured around perceiveddivergences between countries in the institutions andpractices of capitalism. Differences in national economicperformance had conventionally been attributed byeconomists to comparative advantages in trade, based onresource endowments, capital accumulation and productivitygrowth. o writers proposed a further factor, drawing onthe new institutionalisms in the social sciences: theeffectiveness of institutions in managing a countryseconomic responses to the challenge of internationalcompetition (Hollingsworth, ). The new institutionaleconomics proposed that institutions were themselvessubject to a process of market selection, ensuring the survivalof the fittest model; sociological institutionalism arguedthat the process of elimination of unfit models might beslow or incomplete because the embeddedness of institutionsled to path dependency and thus inertia in the face of pressures for change; and certain forms of politicalinstitutionalism would add that culturally-rooted politicaland policy preferences could further slow or prevent change(Peters, ; Radice, ). Thus convergence might beslow, and alternative models could coexist and compete oversignificant periods of time, with international comparativesuccess perhaps changing hands in response to exogenousfactors; and in any case, at some level of observational oranalytical detail, institutional differences are bound topersist. Within the terms of the o literature, it is simplynot possible to establish either the existence or otherwise of convergence, or the definitive superiority of one or anothermodel. This, then, provides the intellectual justification forcontinuing to advocate forms of in opposition to theglobal tide of neoliberalism; whether this advocacy occursat national or level depends pragmatically on politicaland economic circumstances.

However, what is clear is that the o literature ispowerfully locked into methodological nationalism (as defined

by Gore, : ), and this has led to tensions andcontradictions in relation to the question of globalisation. Itwas argued in the previous section that while states as formsof the capital relation are national, capital itself, and thus themode of production in general, is constituted globally. Thisexplains why the political and economic circumstances justreferred to are experienced as exogenous to the politics of institutional and policy positions contested at national or

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level. But the neoliberal reconstitution of global capitalism isunquestionably not exogenous: it is the outcome of a complex,multilayered and often barely visible process of class struggle.Within the European Union, at any point in time and in anygiven country, the modalities of response to these apparentlyexternal forces will be contingent on the disposition of socialforces in that country, but both state and market remain associal forms of a global capital relation.

In this context, the alternative institutions and practicesdebated in the o literature, including its progressive wing,undoubtedly do represent arenas of class struggle. However,it is only an exploration of how these institutions and practiceshave evolved within the global relation of capital that can revealthe potential and the limits of the fight for a preferred modelof capitalism. What is all too rarely appreciated is the extentto which elements of that preferred model have historicallyeither emerged as or been transformed into purposivestrategies for the containment of challenges from the workingclasses and the elimination of any emancipatory content. Thisis especially clear in relation to that most fundamental of capitalist processes: the exploitation of labour power.

The class politics of Britain and the EU

In workplace relations between labour and capital, the choicebetween the simple carrot-and-stick modalities of exploitationvisible in the neoliberal model and the participation-and-consensus modalities attributed to the model wasunderstood long ago by Friedman ( ) as a choice of managerial strategy within the capitalist firm. Attempts weremade in the s to turn the managerial strategy of jobenlargement into a springboard for new forms of collectivechallenge to the rule of capital through the advocacy of workers participation, cooperatives and the conversion of production to meet social needs (e.g. Cooley, ;Wainwright & Elliott, ). At the level of state policy, all

such proposals had been successfully eliminated fromdiscussion twenty years later.A parallel story can be told about the institutions and

practices surrounding the labour market, including skillsand training. The highly-regulated German model waswidely lauded in the progressive o literature forgenerating a virtuous circle of high wages and highproductivity, which would at least improve the life

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circumstances of a significant part of the working class.Such regulation has persisted in the teeth of ideologicaldisapproval from the Anglo-Saxon world because socialprotection aids the market by helping economic actorsovercome market failures in skill formation (Estevez-Abeet al., : ), indicating that this is an effective strategyfor some employers in the face of global competition, ratherthan necessarily a prefigurative strategy for the workingclass. The adoption of a minimum wage by New Labour,while welcome in itself, has been overshadowed by thegovernments refusal to act against illegal employmentpractices, especially in relation to migrant labour.

Third, consider the condition of trade unionism in Britainand in Europe (see also Taylor & Mathers, ). The Blairgovernments, while not challenging the constitutional roleof the unions in the Labour Party, have resolutely refusedto restore any semblance of the policy partnership thatexisted at least on paper between the Labour Party and theunions prior to . The recent industrial-relationsliterature charts the relentless advance of the businessunionism model and the decline of effective collectivebargaining in favour of workplace and partnershipagreements; and the election of left-wing leaderships in anumber of unions since , while heartening, has notstemmed the tide (McIlroy, ).

Parallel tales could be told, if space permitted, about manyother policy areas in which the o literature sets out theendurance and superiority of the model (Radice, ).None of this means that socialists should proclaim indifferenceto the potential for change within capitalismon the contrary.What should be expected is a degree of realism, and above allan understanding of the overarching framework of capitalistrelations within which policy institutions and practices areset. Nevertheless, the approach taken so far will be interpretedby many as pessimistic and defeatist, as Strange ( b)argues in relation to previous contributions on globalisation

by the present author. Such an interpretation depends onperceiving substantive opportunities for contestation withinthe framework of European governance:

Taken together, Euro-Keynesianism and radical Euro-corporatism can be seen as providing a socially inclusivegovernance framework for a sustainable alternativecompromise between European labour and European

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capital based on negotiated involvement. In neo-Gramscianterms, such a framework can be seen as having the potentialto mobilise an alternative transnational, European historicbloc in favour of a new regional social democracyappropriate to the structural constraints of globalisation.(Strange, b: )

an alternative that is transforming of the system ratherthan merely transcending of it (ibid: ). This section seeksto refute that argument, suggesting instead that the renewalof socialism in Britain and in Europe as a whole requires aresolutely and consistently global political strategy guidedby the objective of transcending it.

Taking up the argument of the previous section, thepotential for social-democratic or progressive change incapitalism at the European level is heavily constrained notby the structures of globalisation (important though they are),but by the historical experience of British nationalism. Overthe past years, almost every political nation hasexperienced nationalism at some time or other as a socially-progressive political ideology. However, it takes only amoments reflection to appreciate both how paper-thin thisprogressive character is in most cases, and how utterlyregressive nationalism has been at other times. The modernBritish left has relentlessly castigated itself for its inability towrench Britishness from the extreme right: it has lookedback to the Dunkirk spirit that resonated from throughthe postwar Labour governments, and further back to therise of organised labour from the creation of the until thedefeat of the general strike, to Chartism, cooperativesand the Luddite resistance to the industrial revolution, andto Thomas Paine. Those Eurosceptic social democrats andsocialists who have opposed European integration have,however, found their appeals to these radical British rootsswamped by much uglier social forces on the political right,epitomised by the Murdoch and Rothermere presses.

The same inability to effectively articulate a progressivenationalist alternative can be identified throughout the inrecent years, whether in relation to opposition to accession,to enlargement, or to the new constitution sidelined by theFrench and Dutch referendum defeats. Even in themobilisations of ethnic-minority communities withinEuropean nation states, traditionally taken to be almostnaturally progressive by the left, perceived historical injustices

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or religious differences have provided the strongestjustification for revolt, rather than any predisposition againstcapitalism or even social inequality. But in the British case,to argue on the basis of the last fifty years that British societyis in any sense more socialist, more democratic or indeedmore egalitarian than Europe is frankly ludicrous. Over littleBritain rejection of European integration, then, there cansurely be no disagreement: the revival of any sort of socialistor even progressive politics in Britain has to embrace aEuropean dimensionand that means not clarion calls for aunited socialist states of Europe, but politically living inactually existing Europe , recognising and celebrating ourmultiple identities as citizens of Europe and the world andas, historically, a blessedly mongrel nation.

From that starting point, the more interesting question isposed: how is European socialism to be nurtured?Traditionally, this issue has been presented rathermechanically in terms of a strong European movement canonly be built on the basis of strong national movements.Restricting the argument to the labour movement, this is nothowever simply a matter of choice, whether for union leadersor rank-and-file members. We live in a world in which thelegislative and policy frameworks governing our spheres of political action remain very predominantly national, whilethe social forces shaping the challenges we face areincreasingly transnational. What implications can we drawfor the politics of labour from this apparent contradictionbetween the national and the global?

For the neo-Gramscians, economic globalisation (of production, trade and finance) means that an increasingnumber of sectors of the economy are transnationallyintegrated, and in these sectors both capital and labour willseek to influence government policies in a neoliberaldirectionincluding that of accessionwhile this isresisted by both capital and labour in those sectors that remainpredominantly national in orientation (Bieler, ).

However, such a view implies that the dynamics of capitalismare merely those of competition in the marketplace. The neo-Gramscians appear to assume that sectors are independentof each other in terms of value chains; but most nationalbusiness sectors are characterised by relatively small firmswhich are characteristically highly dependent on large,typically transnational enterprises, as Shutt & Whittington( ) have explained. The crucial point is that, while the

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circumstances faced by workers in any given workplace arecontingent on product- and labour-market factors, the overallconditions of exploitation are necessarily determined throughthe operation of the law of value at the level of capital ingeneral, which is enforced by the capacity of individualcapitalists to withdraw their money capital from one locus of production, and reinvest it elsewhere (or hoard it). Theexistence of significant differences in wages and workingconditions, both between sectors and between individualworkplaces, merely indicates that the law of value is mediatedby the contingent circumstances of individual parts of totalsocial capital (see Botwinnick, ). So extensive are thetransnational interrelations of investment, production andtrade now for all European countries, but pre-eminently forBritain (Radice, ), that it no longer makes any sense todistinguish national and transnational fractions of capital interms of alternative world-market strategies of free trade orprotectionism.

Instead, what is required is the charting of the historicaldevelopment of the patterns of engagement between capital,labour and the state in each particular national context, onthe understanding that these patterns necessarily co-evolvewith those of global capitalism. In the Br itish case, as Gifford( ) has recently restated, the national forms of classstruggle have over several centuries been unusuallytransnational in content, embodied in the predominance of mercantile and financial interests in the determination of government policies and the shaping of the institutions of governanceperiodically imposed as an external constraint(Callaghan, ) on social democracy. There was a brief moment in the second quarter of the twentieth century inwhich the intrinsically global character of British capitalismappeared to be seriously under threat; but the postwar Labourgovernment, whatever its achievements in relation to thewelfare state, rejected any real break with the past as vigorouslyas had the National government of . Neither the Labour

Party nor the trade unions challenged the Atlanticimperialinternational economic policies of the Conservativegovernments. The left attempted to articulate a strategy of national industrial modernisation for thirty years from themid- s, culminating in the alternative economic strategy(e.g. London group, ; Cowling & Sugden, ),but in , at the only moment in which this could havebeen brought into effect, it was decisively rejected by Labour

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in government in favour of a monetarist retrenchment thatechoed that of Snowden in .

The turn to Europe by British unions in the s wasentirely understandable at the time: it amounted to an attemptto expose the British business and political elites to a verydifferent kind of external constraint, namely the impositionof social-market capitalism from Brussels. But the course of events since New Labour came to power has amplydemonstrated that the BlairBrown strategy of engagementwith Europe has consistently promoted the neoliberal agendaof reform, aimed especially at imposing labour-marketflexibility and the mobility of capital, in historical continuitywith the pattern of British engagement with global capitalism.The new social-democratic dawn of the late- s was sweptaside by Lisbon (Gifford, : ), and by the accession of new member states in eastern Europe whose politics appearedto offer only a choice between neoliberalism and nationalrevanchism. What is now required is a far more arduous longmarch into and across the European Union, constructing apopular movement against neoliberalism based on commonconcerns about equality, citizenship, human rights and theenvironment, and engaging unions and social movements aswell as the groundswell of broader opposition since toEuropean complicity in the renewed imperial adventures of the regime.

Notes

. It is increasingly clear that the term neoliberalism hasbeen overused and underinvestigated almost as much ashas globalisation. A succinct and helpful account canbe found in Gamble ( ); see also Saad-Filho and

Johnston ( ) and Harvey ( ).. Callaghan ( ) gives a historical analysis of the role of

external constraints in explaining the limits of social

democracy in Britain and Europe.

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