(excerpts)
Our criticism of Euro and of the hasty and forced march to achieve it has always been a left contribution to the debate on its social implications, on the consequences to Europe and to our country and on the road to the European construction.
We have always defended and keep on defending an Europe of peace, co-operation and solidarity, giving priority to the social dimension and to the approach of the actual development level of the economies.
In fact, the PCP' s position regarding the European integration has clearly been the one of being fully engaged in minimising the negative aspects, in dynamising everything we believe to be positive, and in contributing, through proposals and through a committed intervention, namely in the European Parliament, to increase Portugal' s negotiating power and to defend the national interests. (…)
Both PSD and PS have always played on the accomplished facts. They have first refused a referendum on Maastricht as they refuse it now on the single currency, and they have stuck to the successive and expensive propaganda campaigns conducted by the Commission' s heavy machine on the virtues of the Euro and of the Maastricht' s criteria.
By sacrificing our agriculture, fishery and important industrial sectors, and with a growing number of workers without job-security and a structural unemployment of about half million workers, Portugal, except Sweden, United Kingdom, Greece and Denmark, is among the countries which, with some creative accountancy, have constituted themselves as the Euro founders.
With the lowest wages, the lowest minimum pay, the lowest pensions and the highest levels of poverty and wealth concentration, Portugal has entered the Euro club. It is a serious change that ties the country down to a central bank with no control, created in the image and likeness of the German central bank and of a single monetary policy.
In face of future competitiveness difficulties of our exports, the tendency and the excuse will be to press the wages and unemployment. (…)
We should remind that all the steps towards the Economic and Monetary Union – the Single Act, the Maastricht Treaty, the Amsterdam Treaty, … - were presented to the peoples as measures aiming at the creation of employment. But, what reality shows us is that unemployment and the social inequalities are growing.
The European Union of the millions of unemployed people, of the several millions of poor people and of the wealth polarisation should give way to the Europe of full employment, of social progress, of culture dialogue, of the opening to the world, of co-operation and common work for peace and a more harmonious development.
But the neo-liberal and monetarist trend of the "European construction" does not follow that direction. (…)
Our Position
The decision to accomplish the admission of Portugal to the Economic and Monetary Union (EMU), with the replacement of Escudo by Euro beginning in 2002, although foreseeable, assumes an irrecusable political dimension to the future of the country. Its consequences at all levels of our national life demand that the PCP, with the authority that comes from the fact of being a national political and responsible force, strongly engaged in defending the interests of Portugal and of the Portuguese, and particularly the interests of the workers and of the most disfavoured strata, clearly expresses its position.
* First of all, we refute that a decision with a political, economic and social meaning so relevant to the future of the Portuguese has been taken and accomplished without the necessary public and national debate, and without the Portuguese having pronounced themselves through a referendum on the replacement of the national currency by the Euro, as the PCP has demanded.
* We denounce the serious abdication of sovereignty that is represented by the replacement of the national currency and the submission of the budget policy to the Stability Pact and of the monetary policy to the European Central Bank (ECB). An abdication of sovereignty, which means to deprive the Portuguese State of important prerogatives in leading the economic life, in accordance with the national interests decided and determined by the democratic vote of the Portuguese. An abdication of sovereignty, which means, thus, to empty the Portuguese democracy of its capacity of choosing the options that will decide our common future.
* We reaffirm – what renowned and respectable economists from different political and ideological quadrants, and several economic schools subscribe – that this "administrative and artificial" insertion of a single currency in the actual diversity of the European economies – productive structures and specialisation, levels of productivity, fiscal norms, material and human resources, … - will inevitably cause crashes in the most fragile, less productive, and most peripheral economies.
* We stress and reaffirm the loss of important intervention tools of the State in the economy, as well as the serious consequences that might follow concerning employment and the life quality of many Portuguese (...)
* We believe that the single currency is, in this process, a piece of the neo-liberal construction of Europe, supported by the transnational capital, by the Round Table of the Big Industrials and by the associations of the big European employers, a currency to serve the competitive and economic war (...)
The PCP wants clearly to state that its position has nothing to do with any anti-European or economic or political autarchy view. It arises from an evaluation of the objective situation of the country, from the Portuguese' s interests, from its positions of internationalist solidarity in face of the objective interdependence and internationalisation of the economic, social and cultural processes by the end of the 20th century.
Another trend for the European construction
The PCP, by refusing the process, by refusing the false alternative between the single currency and chaos, keeps on being engaged, together with other left-wing and progressive forces, in another trend for the European construction:
* To the accomplishment, with means and scheduled measures, of the economic and social cohesion principle and the actual economy convergence;
* So that the transition period of three years, during which the national currency is still circulating, with a fixed parity anchored in the Euro, may be used to reconsider our position and to shed light upon the problems that the country will face, to retrace our way and find new ways for the co-operation, the monetary one inclusive, among the Europe' s peoples;
* To prevent this process from becoming the antechamber of the political federalism, depriving the Portuguese of any capacity of decision, turning the Portuguese State, according to a wise analyst, into a huge common council;
* To try that the foreseeable and high costs of the currency change are at the expense of the community budget and financial capital, and not as everything points to, at the expense of the consumers and small and medium entrepreneurs;
* To defend national policies that, at the different fields and in the frame of a narrow manoeuvre field that arises from the single currency, might reduce the negative consequences for the workers and the country. To defend, at the level of community institutions, the Stability Pact to be renegotiated, altered and made flexible – that was no part of the Maastricht Treaty, and was never ratified – and the community budget to be strongly increased so that the foreseeable asymmetric crashes might have the sufficient answers, without the sacrifice of the less developed countries of the European Union. Particularly, the proposals included in the Agenda 2000 should take into account the new constraints to the Portuguese economy arising from the introduction of the single currency;
* So that the working hours (35 hours) all over the European Union come into force in a phased way, taking into account the productivity levels of the several countries and of the several productive sectors;
* So that we might go forward in the capital movement taxation;
* So that there is a reorientation of the Investment European Bank's role, putting it at the service of creating employment, namely by the substantial increase in the subsidised credits to the small and medium companies.
The PCP reaffirms its decision to go on fighting for the defence of the national interests and for a change in the trend of the European construction. To fight for an Europe of sovereign countries, co-operating among them for the employment and the peoples' well-being, and for their mutual development. An European construction different from the one established in Maastricht, that might explore ways of monetary co-operation that are tools to the economic and social co-operation and convergence among all countries.
The social Europe and the struggle against unemployment cannot be a figure of speech in order to allow an Europe controlled by the interests of the financial markets.
The workers and the peoples are not condemned to "adapt themselves" to a neo-liberal European Union, with a more and more concentrated economic growth, side by side with the procession of unemployment, work without safety, poverty, urban exclusion and violence.
On our part, we join our voice and our struggle to the ones of several left-wing and progressive forces that, in Europe, by fighting the neo-liberal construction of the European Union, point out new ways to that "construction", fighting, under a left perspective, for a social Europe, of well-being, peace and co-operation.
