Neither London nor Brussels
The mainstream debate is being framed around how Ireland can remain as close as possible to both the EU and Britain. The establishment want Irish people to support the state in doing deals that will keep Britain in the customs union and Ireland at the heart of the EU. Again, we reject the way the debate is framed.
For us, what matters is the lives of working people in Ireland and in Europe. Neither London nor Brussels share this objective, as they both want to push neoliberalism in their respective areas and to make working people pay the costs.
This means they should not be seen as the partners of Irish workers. Remember that Brexit is a symptom of an unstable global system.
Austerity created bitterness among the British working population. The Tories and their media friends stepped up their anti-immigrant and racist rhetoric to re-connect with that bitterness. Corbyn’s critical view of the EU was rarely heard and Brexit took on a right wing and xenophobic form.
But political developments are only one reflection of a deeper fragmentation among the allies of US imperialism.
Today an intense rivalry has been set off between the leaders of British capitalism and those of Franco-German capitalism who dominate the EU.
The Tories believe they can power forward British capitalism by turning it, into what Corbyn has described, as a bargain basement economy’ built on low wages and more de-regulation. They fantasise about making Britain ‘great again’ and hope they can use this rhetoric to retain electoral support.
The EU leaders have a different imperial agenda – but, despite the use of a liberal progressive rhetoric – an equally nasty one.
They want to use the departure of Britain to strengthen the EU and turn it into a more centralised, ‘federal’ system where decision making is increasingly sealed off from popular pressure. The first step in this process was to discipline Greece and other peripheral nations for stepping out of line. It was the EU that pushed massive austerity onto working people and reinforced neoliberalism by creating the fiscal compact and closer banking and capital markets. The next step is the creation of an EU army, through the PESCO project.
In order to do this, they must first extract the maximum punishment from Britain – in order to deter others from leaving the EU.
The Irish people as a whole, and working people in particular, may be caught up in the cross fire.
We need a government that is bound by no intrinsic loyalty to the EU and puts the needs of the majority of the Irish people ahead of any loyalty to one bloc.
This is not, however, how the Irish elite see matters.
Fianna Fail and Fine Gael pretend that the rulers of the EU have the interests of the Irish people at heart, but even while they position themselves inside the camp of their ‘EU partners’, they still want to maintain their links with the British ruling class.
This is why they may settle so easily for a ‘form of words’ that only sets ‘parameters’ for future arrangements on the Irish border.
Only a government that is firmly committed to ending partition and putting the interests of the Irish people, ahead of the rival imperial powers, can take the decisive measure that are necessary to stop a hard border.