For a workers' United States of Europe

'In place of the old local and national seclusion and self-sufficiency, we have intercourse in every direction, universal interdependence of nations'.

Capitalism was binding the world together into a closely-linked international economic system, wrote Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels in 1847.

The EU is fundamentally a reflection of this drive by capitalism to knit together the world into larger economic units. But why did it come into existence only 110 years after 1847?

Capitalism first created the big nation-states in Westem Europe. The next stage was not harmonisation between those states, but sharpening competition between them for economic territory and colonies on the other continents and in Eastern Europe.

Towards the end of the 19th century tariff walls were built higher and higher. The process culminated in the First World War.

After that war, and especially after the Great Crash of 1929, the rivalry between the big capitalist states only became sharper. Tariff walls rose yet higher. After a new World War, it was not until 1950 that intra-European trade (trade between one European country and another) recovered to its level of 1913.

Forward-looking capitalist thinkers had been proposing a United States of Europe since early in the century. The harsh competitive conflicts between national capitalist classes made this impossible. After l950 two factors made a halfway house towards it possible.

Those were the unprecedented capitalist boom of the 1950s and '60s, which lubricated the frictions of integration, and the unparalleled dominance of the US in the capitalist world.

The US provided the umbrella under which Westem Europe was semi-integrated. The starting points were the Marshall Plan of US aid - in connection with which the Organisation for European Economic Co-operation was set up in 1948 - and the post-war US/UK/French control over West Germany.

The Allies had to allow West German capitalism to grow and flourish to provide a bulwark against USSR-occupied Eastern Europe. But they wanted to avoid a competition for supremacy in Western Europe between West Germany, France and the UK. The solution was a partial integration of the West European economy under US hegemony.

As the US/UK/French control over West German coal and steel was ended, the European Coal and Steel Commission was proposed and eventually set up in 1951. It was a 'common market' in coal and steel, with the same six members - West Germany, France, Italy, Belgium, Netherlands, Luxemburg - as eventually formed the full Common Market in 1957.

Britain refused to join - mainly because its trade was still heavily directed towards the Empire, or ex-Empire. (In 1957 only 15% of the UK's trade was with the Common Market).

The aim of the Common Market was to create a unified home market for West European capitalists, with free movement of goods, labour and capital, with common policies for economic infrastructure - transport, basic industry, energy, agriculture - and with harmonised economic laws and regulations. It would be a home market on the scale demanded by the huge productive power of the modern technology.

In that aim the EU has been half-successful. A customs union was established in 1968, a 'single market' in 1993, a single currency in 1999. Trade within the EU has grown tremendously. US multinational have poured in investment for this wider market. The paradoxical result has been to make the EU today a challenger to the US's supremacy in the capitalist world.

Britain's trade with the EU grew, to 31% of its total trade by 1972, and the UK, Denmark and Ireland joined the EU in 1972-3. Greece joined in 1981; Spain and Portugal in 1986; Austria, Finland and Sweden in 1995. Thirteen further countries are negotiating to join the EU.

Even from a capitalist point of view, the EU is still a very limited form of international integration. 'Cross frontier' mergers of companies have mostly flopped: many barriers between nations remain. At each economic or political jolt, the EU is thrown into crisis and only long, wearisome negotiations between different states can patch together a compromise to keep going. Nevertheless, it has kept going. Capital has united Europe to a considerable degree.

From a socialist point of view, there is a lot to be said against the EU. It has all the vices of capitalism writ large. It faces the Third World as an imperialist consortium. The Common Agricultural Policy means not only high food prices in the EU for the sake of fat profits for capitalist farmers, but also massive surpluses while millions starve, and high tariff walls round the EU for agricultural producers in the Third World wishing to export to it.

The EU, however, is not a particular 'bad policy' of capital which can be amputated from the system to provide better conditions for the working class to fight in. It is a reflection of the most fundamental economic trends of capital.

The economic integration of Europe began before the EU; the EU is only a set of arrangements to accommodate and accelerate it.

No amount of calls for 'Britain out' will turn the economic clock back and abolish the huge scale of modern capitalist industry and its interconnections. If capitalism did not have the EU, then it would inevitably have another arrangement differing only in details - or it would have a murderous battle between the big capitalist states of Western Europe over which of them would integrate the region in the form of making the other states its vassals.

To call for countries to withdraw from the EU is as foolish and reactionary as calling for the great capitalist multinational corporations to be broken up into smaller units, or for globalisation in general to be halted in favour of returning economic life to a local or national scale.

We need an international working class fight against international capitalism.

We need the economic and social reconstruction of Europe in the interests of the working class - by way of building on the integration of the European economy, seizing control of it rather than seeking to unscramble it.