The European Security Strategy

international | eu | press release

Friday January 23, 2004 15:20

by Press Release - Socialist Party

At a press conference in Dublin today, organised by "Another Europe is Possible," Socialist Party T.D. Joe Higgins presented the following statement:

The European Security Strategy is a coded blueprint for creating an armed superpower to protect, in the international arena, the economic and political interests of the major powers in the European Union. The proposal is that, as an economic unit of 450 million people accounting for 25% of the world's Gross National Product, the EU should have sufficient military power to be able to throw around its weight on the world stage on an equal footing to the United States. In fact, the E.U. Security Strategy is a mirror image of the National Security Strategy of the U.S.A., laying the basis for military intervention around the world.

While placing the EU on a high pedestal of democracy, there is no reference to the EU Governments that supported the criminal invasion of Iraq by the United States and Britain. The fact that this invasion was mounted on foot of a monstrous lie and in defiance of the United Nations is not even commented on. Should we now trust those Governments with a massive E.U. military machine?

The Draft Treaty establishing a Constitution for Europe proposes the establishment of a European Armaments Agency "to support defence technology research, and coordinate and plan joint research activities and the study of technical solutions meeting future operational needs". The armaments industry is about creating technology that can more effectively shred ever-greater numbers of people over greater distance. That the taxes of working people in the EU should be increasingly committed to this is reprehensible.

The Socialist Party is very clear that the European Security Strategy will no more create a world free from conflict than the national Security Strategy of the United States. Conflict will be eliminated when conditions are created to eliminate the cesspit of poverty, disease, exploitation, repression and the political and religious obscurantism, which arise from these factors.

This requires the major sources of the world's wealth being taken from the hands of unaccountable transnational corporations to be run democratically by working people. It means production for the needs of humanity, rather than the bloated profits of these corporations. And it means the creation of genuine democratic structures, which put real economic and social power in the hands of ordinary people rather than in the hands of political parties, which are in the pockets of the major capitalists. This programme of democratic socialism would mean real security for all humanity and would mean the elimination for all time of obscene wastage of massive resources and human ingenuity on armaments and war.