Liberal models of European construction

It is a “liberal” (in reality neoconservative) and universal article of faith that privatisation and the unfettered mobility of capital internationally must bring growth and satisfaction of needs at the lowest cost. So  the cornerstone of liberal orientations is the free flow of private capital, combined with the “flexibility” of the labor force, both according to market criteria. 
The external vectors of this trend in the world, those that provide the needed “experts”, have been the major international financial institutions. But, more important for East European countries (EEC), it has been the European Union (EU) itself which imposed as criteria for becoming member, the very same “ajustment policies” imposed elsewhere by the IMF, despite the fact that the UE is often seen from outside as an alternative to the liberal globalisation.
The dominant discourse associates the successes of the “transition” in Eastern Europe with these structural transformations measured in figures on privatisation. Theoretically, the more open one country is to privatisation, the more it is supposed to attract foreign investments (the source of efficiency), and the better off it ought to be. So that those recipes play the role of the de facto criteria for Eastward enlargement of the EU. 
	The balance sheet bears little relationship to this dogma. Which also means increasing contradictions of the liberal construction of Europe – and therefore possible variants along several possible scenarios of more or less open crisis.

	In the former “socialist countries”, liberal recipes meant wiping the slate clean, doing away with not only the bureaucracy or its single-party system (which would be met with near-universal joy) but the old system as a whole : the financing of the economy had to be oriented by private interests supposedly always more “rational” and “efficient” then any kind of public financing and management.
Although these precepts and hypotheses are more controversial than ever among Western economists (as Joseph Stiglitz, former vice president of the WB, and new Nobel Laureate), the new/former elites and “experts” in Eastern Europe are much less receptive to criticism of them: they must “prove” that they have broken with the “socialist” past. “Economic science” (liberal doctrine, in fact) supposedly replaces the political arbitrariness of the old single-party regime. And privatisations are often presented as the only way to get rid of the bureaucratism of the past. Any way, they are a precondition for credits, aids and future membership to the Union…
	The dominant discourse and statistical analyses refering to a “transition to the market economy” have to be judged through the prism of an “alignment” with the criteria of the “liberal globalisation” (the so-called Washington consensus) that has been operating since 1980. Any criticism of the liberal policies and unprotected openness to foreign capital is quickly denounced as “old-fashioned”. Those who resist, using popular discontent to get elected, are simply called “populist” instead of recognizing the legitimacy of popular discontent and their election is taken as a proof of a non democratic transformation.

The wealth of Western Europe, the positive image derived from its democratic traditions and the memory of past social policy achievements, served as the principal argument in favour of “swallowing the pill” (albeit with increasing reluctance) of the “systemic transition” in those countries in the periphery and the orbit of the European Union. The privatisations of public services and the elimination of social welfare, subsidies and protection from foreign trade have become “rules” and surreptitiously transformed into “acquis communautaire” – that is to say a supposed already stabilised set of “laws” within the Union, that the new candidates                                                                          had to incorporate. De facto, the acceptance of the “market law” of free competition and opening to foreign capital has even been a key criteria for judging “democracy”.
In other words, the “right of competition”, prevailing over all other rights, has been the basis for attracting private financing and considering the “advance” of the “transition” towards market and democracy – i.e. “European” model.

General forms and logics of  capital flows

	“Foreign investments”, in the IMF’s standardized balance of payments terminology, refers not to an increase in (physical) productive capacity but to any entry of capital irrespective of its purpose. It may take three major forms:

•	Foreign Direct Investment (FDI): this presupposes greater stability (as opposed to speculative capital). FDI is “defined” according to the capacity to “control” ownership. An entire business is directly purchased or created, or at least 10% of the shares in an existing company are held by foreign investors. This 10% figure is obviously arbitrary: it does not produce any certainty of stable “ownership” conduct, still less the efficiency of that conduct apart from the simple logic of maximizing the profits of shareholders, especially foreigners. But it reflects a strong trend in contemporary capitalism, exemplified by pension funds: the desire to draw a large number of “small stakeholders” (“households”) into the financial markets, dispersing ownership while depriving these shareholders of any real power, the effective control over decisions resting in the hands of a “strategic investor” holding a minority of the shares. 
	This is precisely the dominant form of the privatisations in Eastern Europe: millions of powerless shareholders (through “mass privatisation” de facto without capital) allowing a concentration of assets in hands that are often almost invisible  the State, with its periodic alterations in dominant parties and its turf wars, alternately combining with and confronting the oligarchs and former managers of enterprises, banks and government ministries and of course foreign capital.
	
•	“Portfolio” investment: this is the bulk of the more volatile and speculative capital  debt securities (bonds), or shares in the capital of a business, provided, as noted above, that they comprise less than 10% of the shares. This “floating” capital is attracted in particular by the privatisations at fire-sale prices under a debt repayment program, or by the high interest rates on public debt issues. One of the IMF’s basic precepts, apart from budget austerity, was to push for financing government deficits through the issue of securities available to non-residents. The Maastricht criteria gave a radical monetarist interpretation and implementation of such trend : not only are member state’s fiscal resources on capital  to be reduced by the competition to attract capital, but credits at low rates from the central banks to the state are simply forbidden. Short term public bonds (treasury bills) have been created and open for selling to non resident (those who are precisely the less interested in stable financing of public needs…).
The giddy rise in interest rates on Russian GKOs (treasury bills) after the Asian crisis, to try to retain in Russia the capital that was financing the debt, was a catalyser of the Russian crisis of the summer of 1998. The sudden swings in such unstable financing were a common feature of the financial crises of the 1990s, from Mexico to Asia to Russia. Some investments in shares can be just as unstable thanks to the development of the “secondary markets” in which these securities can be “liquidated”. 

·	Finally, the “other foreign investments” may be credits. They are often hinged on the preceding forms of investment, although the debtor countries prefer FDI because it does not increase their debt burden. But the banks made credits for the purchase of some securities freely available in the period when stock markets were booming. In the Russian crisis, the new private banks themselves promoted speculation in GKOs in lieu of financing the economy. Who controls the banks controls the underlying logic of the economy. That is why opening up this sector to foreign capital was consistently considered “strategic” and thus protected. The logic of the WTO’s negotiations over “services” was to drop those protections as well.

In practice, the scenario in Eastern Europe involved a limited opening to FDI in the 1970s, but indebtedness for the purpose of importing Western technology, in the hope of later repaying the debt through improved exports. Profits from the oil industry were generally recycled by the private banks to the countries of the South and the East, which became heavily indebted. But the downturn in the advanced capitalist countries and the neo-conservative offensive of the 1980s shuffled the cards  and triggered IMF intervention. 
The debt and UE accession then became essential levers for imposing privatisations and an opening to FDI, which was supposedly to reduce the debt and, in the countries of the so-called Soviet bloc, to dismantle the old system. According to the neo-conservative dogma, foreign direct investment would be completely beneficial to the host countries. The actual effect requires a concrete analysis : when FDI comes, what is its logics ? And what if they don’t come ?
 The host countries generally expect that non-debt financing will bring in advanced technology and know-how, create jobs and increase export capacity, which can then more than cover external deficits. But the investors’ expectations may be quite different: equity participation in an existing company aimed at controlling a competitor; low-paying jobs with little or no union protection, hence fragile; an opportunity to unload polluting technologies that are outmoded or prohibited elsewhere; a forced expansion of imports of their own products (notwithstanding existing substitutes), etc. Far from a sharing of technological and scientific knowledge, the general dynamic is to exclude the host country, creating an ongoing dependency accompanied by an accelerating and dramatic “brain drain”. The use of parts factories, relocated far from the parent company, prevents the host country from controlling the production process as a whole. 
 But more important, even, are the limits (quantity, instability, branch and region destribution) of FDI – which raises the question of dependency upon such kind of financing for development and satisfaction of basic needs and infrastructures.
There is every reason to question the logic of the MAI (Multilateral Agreement on Investment) and WTO negotiations, in which a central issue is precisely a state’s right to control investment, and hence to be able to determine its own development priorities and objectives and to subordinate FDI to them

What capital could buy privatised firms in EECs ?

	Hungary is the only case (other than Estonia, on a lesser scale) in which the principal form of privatisation from the beginning of the 1990s was the direct sale of the best firms. But in a context in which the accumulation of national capital is very low, it is foreign capital that took the lion’s share (and that is why, until the mid-1990s, Hungary received half of all FDI going into Eastern Europe). However, selling off the best companies to foreign capital was not popular either in the nomenklatura or in the population as a whole. The principal form of privatisation in the early 1990s in the Czech Republic, Slovenia, Russia and Poland was what was referred to (in a number of variants) as “mass privatisation” of public companies: the distribution to citizens or employees of “coupons” (a official paper representing a given amount of money) with which they could purchase shares in the enterprises, now transformed into limited liability companies.
	The workers took over these companies in an attempt to stabilize their jobs, opting for “privatisations” that left the majority of the shares in enterprise collectives (including managers). The governments, however, viewed these processes as a means of compensating for the lack of national capital; giving some popular “legitimacy” to the privatisation of the bulk of the firms; “demonstrating” to the international institutions that the reforms “were going ahead” and therefore making some headway in their negotiations over their debts and membership in the EU; and enabling the former managers of the firms and the party/State to allocate to themselves substantial shares in these “privatisations” and open up a process of undermining social protection measures.
	But none of this brought new money into the State treasury, nor did it bring about a relationship of forces that would make it possible to impose on the workers restructuring projects entailing high unemployment  although it did make way for some opaque financial transactions.
	The privatisations and opening to foreign capital have been characterized systematically  from Albania to Russia, Romania and the Czech Republic  by recurring corruption scandals, rigged financial deals and privatisations of state functions. Veritable wars have broken out over natural resources and tourist resorts (sources of foreign exchange): who will control the oil and natural gas of the former Soviet republics, the mines of Kosovo, access to the Adriatic coast? Far from putting an end to the rule of the old nomenklatura, the privatisations have enabled a great many of its cadres to convert their old privileges of position into privileges of property. “Nationalism” has replaced the rights of the workers in Yugoslavia, legitimizing the new powers  and the appropriation of the territories on pseudo-ethnic foundations. And far from being a “postcommunist” immature feature of “emergent markets”, corruptions and financial scandals within the most sophisticated developed markets like the US, are the “rationale” of short-term and financial profit-making in the context of financial globalisation.  

	Under international pressure, the second half of the 1990s witnessed an acceleration of the opening to foreign capital in Eastern Europe. But where did it go?

Distribution of FDI over the decade

	Where it went depended, on the one hand, on the choices made by the ruling groups and, on the other, on the decisions of the foreign investors.

	The share of FDI in Hungary has already been stressed as a result of an orientation taken by the former regime to pay back the foreign debt through the selling of the best factories. The relative weakness of the privatisations and of FDI in Slovenia up to the end of the 90s is an illustration of the impact of another kind of decisions (under social pressures). Domestic resistance to “outside advisors” was particularly effective in Slovenia thanks to the fact that the republic’s standard of living and capacity to export to Western European markets were relatively high in the former Yugoslavia. So Slovenia’s past accomplishments and resistance to neo-conservative precepts (and not privatisations) were major factors in its success and he fact that among all candidates to UE it has the highest  living standards (close to Southern Europe).

	As far as foreign capital’s choice is concerned, the distribution of FDI in Eastern Europe was dictated by some universal criteria. Private money, in its quest for purchasing power, goes first to the wealthy regions. The bulk of global FDI is conducted between developed countries  in 1998, the source of 90% of FDI and the recipients of 60% of FDI (see UN reports, UNCTAD 2000). In the “rest of the world”, FDI is strongly focused on a few countries in the South and the East, the best off in terms of resources and growth, and especially those where the government is the most firmly established and property rights are protected. The former Soviet Union and the countries of Eastern Europe potentially offered substantial natural resources and/or a cheap and skilled labour force, as well as market segments (wherever there is some purchasing power, although the widening poverty reduces its scope) and, quite simply, quick profits (speculation on “emerging markets”). But political and social instability, the lack of infrastructures (including telecommunications) and thus the high cost of the necessary restructuring, as well as the bureaucratic mazes and jurisdictional conflicts (if not local wars) served as disincentives.

	The major part of FDI outside the developed countries went to China, with its strong state. China took in a total of $300 billion during the 1990s, against a mere $15 billion for Yeltsin’s chaotic Russia. The latter, notwithstanding the attractiveness of its natural resources, had accumulated FDI of only $345 per capita by 1997, on the eve of the summer 1998 crisis. Over the same period Hungary, by way of comparison, had attracted more than $1,600 in FDI per capita.

	As a percentage of GDP, the statistics sometimes vary considerably, depending on the source. In the Commonwealth of Independent States, GDP evaluations are often quite problematic owing to the new monetary criteria and the extent of barter relationships. Furthermore, the effective FDI figures may also vary depending on whether contracts are accounted for at the time they are registered as a project or when they are actually completed. According to Wladimir Andreff, Azerbaijan held the record, with foreign direct investment accounting for 70% of its GDP in 1998 (a reflection of the “contracts of the century” in the oil and natural gas industry signed in 1994 and 1998 with the United States and Turkey, but also with Japan, Russia, Great Britain and Saudi Arabia). Apart from this case (and based on the same sources), FDI as a percentage of GDP ranges between 12  and 45 percent in Kazakhstan, Armenia and the Central European countries (the lowest levels being in Slovenia). The other countries of the CIS and the Balkans received less than 10% of their GDP in FDI during the same period. And no matter which source is consulted, Russia was at the bottom of the scale with FDI accounting for less than 3% of its GDP in 1998.

	This distribution of FDI in 1998 reflects the larger reality when the FDI figures are viewed from the perspective of the stock of FDI in all the countries in transition in this region. Central Europe (Hungary, Poland, the Czech Republic, Slovakia and Slovenia) accounted for 58% of all FDI inputs. More generally, the ten countries of Central and Eastern Europe that are candidates for membership in the European Union account for 69% of all FDI in the region. In contrast, the CIS as a whole, including Russia, has attracted only 29%, and the Balkans 2%.

	Finally, looking at FDI per capita  a more meaningful measure than the absolute figures, and less problematic in interpretation than GDP  it is Central Europe, in the orbit of the EU and the wealthiest part of the group, which was clearly on top in 1998, with more than $1,000 in FDI per capita. Azerbaijan and Kazakhstan came next with about $400 per capita and the vast majority of all the others had between 30 and 100 dollars per capita (only $91 in the case of Russia).

Luckily for Central European countries, their financial markets are relatively underdeveloped and they were not affected too much by the fluctuations in the “emerging markets” (Asia, Russia, Latin America) in 1998. Their insertion in the EU orbit tended to serve as a positive factor in the eyes of investors. However, there are major differences developing among them.

	Together, the CEECs had taken in a total of about $100 billion over ten years by the year 2000  almost ten times more than Russia. Close to 80% of this FDI was concentrated in the three wealthiest countries of the 10-member CEEC: Poland, the Czech Republic and Hungary. Poland, by its size, had the largest share. In 2000, the CEECs took in about 1.7% of FDI flows, amounting to about $20 billion in an area with a hundred million inhabitants  half the flow into China that year.

	Within each country (Russia as well as the CEECs) most FDI has gone to the capital cities; in 1977, 77% of FDI going to Russia was concentrated in Moscow. As a rule, FDI heads for the most prosperous regions and especially urban concentrations (those with the best infrastructure, the highest standard of living and the most skills). This deepens the inequality between countries and between regions.

	The vast majority of FDI is in major retailing (particularly the food industry), telecommunications including mobile phones (France Télécom purchased the Polish exchange TPSA for $3 billion in 2000), and, beginning in the late 1990s, the financial sector: more than 70% of the Polish banks and most of the Central European banks overall are now controlled by foreign capital. This process, which is relatively recent, means that the credit constraints weighing on the major companies may well harden, without giving them real means for restructuring. In Latin America foreign banks are often financing mainly foreign factories – and certainly not “unprofitable” public services. This could be also the trend in Eastern Europe.

	Behind the “successes”, as registered in the numbers and quantities of FDI or privatisations, social relations are being transformed. Bulgaria’s real unemployment rate is higher than 30%. Similar levels exist in a number of regions of Poland and Hungary. And far from having reached the “end of the tunnel”, the “most advanced” economies such as Poland, entered a recession in recent months, as did the Czech Republic in 1998. 

	The deepening of social and regional disparities, the unemployment and foreign trade external deficits illustrate how these countries are experiencing “competition”. 

	 Most of the foreign-owned firms are also the ones that export to EU markets, and they often import their own products. All of the CEECs that are candidates for EU membership are running current account deficits with the Union. The radical restructuring of trade flows in the wake of the 1991 dissolution of the COMECON (the Soviet bloc’s counterpart to the Common Market) has resulted in a new dependency that can be a serious drag on the East European economies. The slowdown in EU growth, particularly in Germany, will mean a significant drop in exports to the West. And domestic purchasing power is limited; the queues have disappeared but most citizens cannot afford to buy the products. Fiscal austerity and the contraction in banking credit will not help to sustain growth. Furthermore, in a country like Poland the desire to attract foreign capital in order to finance the public debt has been expressed in a rise in interest rates that is now adding to the difficulties faced by private businesses.

Conditional “assistance” and geo-strategic criteria

	The funding originating from the European Union for “assisting membership” has much the effect of a vicious circle: far from compensating for these problems, it aggravates them. For the most part, this funding is not donations but credits (in the case of two thirds of such “assistance”), and conditional credits at that. The criteria for allocation, or for the rescheduling of debts, are in fact political and economic. The interrelationship between “assistance”, credits, privatisations and FDI is therefore “organic”, and associated with the overall economic and geostrategic logic of the governing institutions (governments, international financial institutions and the EU). 

In terms of donations, Poland is the only one of these countries to have had its debt cancelled, in the early 1990s  something that is never mentioned as having anything to do with the fact that it is also the first economy to register growth again. The cancellation of Poland’s debt was one of the “other foreign investments” noted in the balance of payments. Concealed in this entry were some geo-strategic considerations: Poland was the only such country in which a mass trade union movement, Solidarnosc, had challenged the old regime, in 1980. The privatisations, allegedly associated with democracy and pluralism, were never demanded by a congress of Solidarnosc. The corruption of the Polish trade unionists  like that of the independent union of the Ukrainian miners in the early 1990s  was also part of the “invisibles” in the balance of payments. That is one more proof that liberal policies (including criteria for “aid”) are far from political neutrality and “pure” economical criteria. 

	Geo-strategic criteria and world relationship of forces were behind Marshall Plan. Keynesian policies were also an effect of the Cold war. And there was much state intervention and even planning in the post-war reconstruction using Marshall aid. For some exceptional decades in capitalist history, the trend was a reduction of inequalities, an increase of wages in the share of increasing productivity and the development of social intervention of the state.
 The conservative offensive behind the language of the Washington consensus of the 80s was to destroy this trend to establish a better position for capital in the share of added value both against labour and against welfare state. The liberal choice of the French left government in 1983 closed the limited resistance I 1981-82 to the new liberal priorities. It opened a decade where wages lost ten points in the added value in France. The argument was that at the national level, resistance to liberal policies was impossible. But the “Unique Act” proposed en 1985 by the French socialist government was to oriented the European construction towards… a large market open to free flow of capital. In 1992, Maastricht criteria had to be “monetarist” to convince the German powers to leave the DM. So all new European treaties and institutions of the past 20 years have helped imposing “from above” a “real existing” liberal construction at all national levels. The fall of the Berlin wall and of Soviet Union could only strengthen that liberal and monetarist trend of the EU. German powers hoped that privatisation would pay the price of restructuring East German firms while the monetary union was supposed to consolidate politically and socially the unification without increasing fiscal policy. The cost of the unification was underestimate and financed by liberal recipes again : increasing the rate of interest to finance the public debt through foreign capital flow. During a decade the federal government had to transfer about 600 billion euro to the Eastern Länder – from 40 to nearly 80% of the GDP of those Länder each year. But German unification is politically much different from UE enlargement… 

The future boundaries of the European Union are a basic issue. For workers and citizen in general, the reduction of boundaries is attractive. For capital investment on a liberal logic, it is not a problem. Free movement is increasingly imposed. And the lack of financing in the East (or South) is not a lack of mobility for private funds. It expresses the logics of private interest and the lack of public (international) funds for development. But for Western powers and bourgeoisie, the question of boundaries covers other dimensions. The liberal European construction is minimizing fiscal policy on capital. So the concern is also to “minimize the costs of enlargement” and, increasingly, to use the “clandestine immigrant” as the new potential danger : boundaries are both limits for allocations (budgets) and for immigration.

 Therefore the presentation of “enlargement’s costs” is highly biased. First because no evaluation is made from the point of view of Eastern European countries and populations : they have no other possible future then to “become European”  (a current formula aiming as if they were not, or as if the only European values come from the Western side). It also means that they have no past (except before the communist “parenthesis”), nothing to lose and no other policy to implement then the liberal one. Second because only visible costs through budgets are evaluated – but not invisible gain through trade, for instance ; and not middle and long-term cost of social regressions in EECs. Worse, using cheap and often very qualified labour force from EECs is both a source of hidden or open profit and an ideological tool for the repressive logics of “liberal” policies.

Over ten years (from 1990 to 1999), the Commission in Brussels has committed a total of 10.89 billion Euros of “aid” (under the dominant form of conditional credits) in favour of the CEECs the richest and closest countries) and the net cost of enlargement for 10 candidates (8 from Eastern Europe, without Rumania and Bulgaria plus Cyprus and Malt) between 2004-2006 will be about 25 billion euro  to be compared with about 600 billion euro that Germany’s eastern Länder have received from that country’s federal government, and to 97 billion euro of (updated) Marshall Plan (1948-1951)… During the last decade the EU surplus from trade with CEECs has been $112 billion… 
What this means is that, on the one hand, the EU is not prepared to pay, in order to absorb all the CEECs, what it cost to unify Germany and on the other, that the CEECs bring in far more than they cost.
	
Alternative liberal scenarios

	But all those policies and choices are confronted to main contradictions. The budget limits has been fixed at 1.27% of the Union’s GDP in the “Agenda 2000”. One logic has been to propose to reduce the funds allocated to the Southern European countries in order to give more to the East. But strong protest from Spain and other countries receiving shares of European structural funds limit such trend. Rules have recently also been established preventing new members to have free move of their workers during at least 7 years after accession, and not to give the same amount to new members. 
So, the first (and up to now dominant) scenario of liberal enlargement of the UE has been imposing all liberal recipes as “European rules” decided in treaties and European institutions…  without guarantees about the access of new members to existing structural funds, and to labour market : private investment (free capital flow) much more then public financing and European budget, is supposed to pay for that “historical move” without real equality in citizenship (right to work and to receive allocations) between new and existing members. Polish peasants will not receive the same direct allocation then a French one : in general peasants from the new member countries will receive 25% of the amount given to their colleague in existing members. And as far other structural funds are concerned the 10 new candidates will receive each year 114 euro for infrastructures while Greece, Ireland, Portugal and Spain will receive 231 euros for similar expanses (despite the fact that they are relatively richest then all new members from EECs. A “rule” has been established : not to give more then 4% of the GDP of a recipient country (to be compared with the amount of aid representing 40 to 80% of East German GDP that those Länder have received…). So the poorest is the country, the less it will cost ! 

That “line” of integration of new member with non equal formal rights could lead to a crisis and a second liberal variant : the transformation of the Union into a simple free euromarket zone with the suppression of any European budget and logics of “cohesive funds”. But that would increase inequalities and economic pressure for migration from poorest parts to richest one… It is often presented as the only liberal scenario – as if the ongoing Union was not another kind of extension of market rules with the help of strong institutions. 

But the recent electoral trends  show another possible variant. More and more rightwing currents and governments, confronted to increasing unemployment and social unrest, instead of putting in question liberal policy, present “immigration” as the cause of unemployment for “their” workers in the richest parts of Europe. Yesterday delocalisation in the Third world  was supposed to be the cause of social desintegration in the North. Today, building new repressive (Schengen) walls against Eastward enlargement could become a dominant liberal concept combining “free trade” and investment in the East while protecting the rich “fortress Europe” from new citizens – workers.

…with a possible forth variant as a result of increasing consistent “nationalist liberal” answers : “immigrants” would even be from other members states… And an open crisis and split of the union into national states and a crisis of the euro could occur, along Lepen’s type of policies.

Sure, the promises of enlargement has become a political and ideological challenge as much as the European construction itself : both have been a substitute to concrete debates on social rights and choices of society. The euro in itself could be used for a different kind of policy. But up to now since the 80s, the dominant socio-political choices have been taken under the pressure of financial markets, not under that of any cold war between systems nor labour global resistance. Social unrests have been constrained by the difficulty to resist collectively at the level where key decisions are taken : multinationals, international institutions, European level. Structural unemployment pushes people to try and find survival strategies – cultivation of small plots or several partial jobs. That doesn’t leave much energy to resist (even to go and vote at elections). And for those who still have jobs, the drop in unionisation (the bureaucratic reality of former trade unions in Eastern Europe), the integration of unions in liberal policies and the new flexibility of labour, all that mean atomisation of resistances. Not to speak of ideological crisis linked with an assimilation of a socialist perspective to the past single party system and command economy. 
But false alternative are more and more rejected. Choices are still possible and matter of political will and relationship of forces. Liberal policies are more and more confronted  to a disastrous universal balance-sheet. The new emerging “alter-globalist” movements with the perspective of a European social forum developing alternatives to the liberal construction of Europe are only the first steps of a new phase : the globalisation of resistances for another world.

Catherine Samary
August 2002