EU’s post-Brexit plans foresee growing conflict
By
Alex Lantier
4 March 2017
The March 1 White Paper on Europe issued by European Commission President Jean-Claude Juncker was billed as the most significant global policy response by the executive of the European Union (EU) to Britain’s unprecedented vote to leave the EU last year.
The Brexit vote last June was the first in a series of political blows dealt to the EU. Italian voters turned down a pro-EU constitutional referendum last autumn, and voters are going to the polls this spring in Dutch and French elections dominated by the rise of far-right, anti-EU parties exploiting deep popular anger at the EU’s austerity policies. Should France’s neo-fascist National Front (FN) take power on its anti-euro and anti-EU program, the prospect of a collapse of the EU and of its central Franco-German axis is very real.
Above all, the election of Donald Trump as US president, and his denunciation of the EU as a tool of Germany to strangle other European countries, showed that the main historic driver of attempts to unify European capitalism—US imperialism—is divided over the EU. During the election campaign, as the Obama administration and the EU stoked conflicts with Russia over Syria and Ukraine, Trump explicitly raised the possible use of nuclear weapons in Europe.
Juncker’s document shows that the leaders of the EU executive, which is especially close to Berlin, have nothing to propose to address the ongoing social collapse and drive to war. While it tries to put the best possible face on the situation, it paints a devastating, deeply pessimistic picture of the EU. The five scenarios that it forecasts, in broad and vague lines, each foresee escalating divisions and political disunity inside the EU’s existing borders, and…