Reasons to come to Brussels on 13/14 December
Workers Power Global, London

The European Confederation of Trade Unions have called for a mass international demonstration at the Laeken summit of the EU leaders in Brussels for 13 December. Last year in Nice they brought 80,000 European workers to town. They expect the more this time.

The next day a coalition of anti-capitalist groups from across Europe (D14) will hold another march to the summit made up of thousands of young workers and students. These groups believe that under the leadership of the European Commission and inter-governmental machinery the European Union (EU) "is being forged by capitalist and not social interests, that it is not democratic but repressive and is not peaceful but rather, threatens world peace."

School and college students in Germany, Belgium and Holland have called strikes during the summit. Supporters of Workers Power and their comrades throughout the EU and REVO - the independent socialist organisation for youth - will be there as we have been at Prague, Nice, Gothenburg and Genoa. We will be joined by anti-capitalist organisations across Europe like Globalise Resistance, by NGOs and members of campaigns like ATTAC.

Here are the reasons why British trade unionists, youth, students and anti-capitalists should join their European sisters and brothers on both demonstrations:

Their Europe is a union of big business interests.
The EU spent years debating and adopting a Charter of Fundamental Rights that excludes the rights to work, to social housing and to welfare benefits while the rights of capitalist property are guaranteed. The EU is regularly lobbied successfully by bosses' unions like the European Employers' Association (UNICE) and the Round Table of European business leaders while the trade unions are left in the cold.

Business ideas find their way into EU Commission draft legislation. The big push now is by the financial services sector in Europe. Their chiefs meet as the European Services Forum and Liberalisation of Trade in Services (LOTIS). In a series of secret meetings they succeeded in getting EU trade representatives to argue for an amendment to the World Trade Organisation's policies on services which backed the "necessity test".

This test would require Third World nations to prove that their regulations - from pollution controls to child labour laws - do not impede trade. The "test" is an even stronger version of the one embedded in the North American Free Trade Agreement, which has been used to such crippling effect against Mexico when it tried to stop a US company opening up a toxic waste site.

EU demands that all member countries raise high taxes on medium and low paid workers while giant corporations and the rich get tax cuts and offshore havens is a result of business lobbying. When EU business wants public services to be privatised and subsidies removed from education and healthcare these find their way into EU Commission proposals.

A specific proposal at the Brussels summit says all public transport systems in major cities should be privatised and run for profit. The Commission sees its jobs as tearing down all health and safety, labour and environmental legislation that stands in the way of unrestricted entry of their goods and services into other states so that EU businesses can compete with their US counterparts in a race to the bottom.

Their Europe is a union of bureaucrats.
EU is run by unelected bodies like the European Commission, European Council, Council of Ministers and Committee of Permanent Representatives while its parliament has no real powers. Yet according to UNICE, "In European countries, 60 per cent of new laws are introduced at a European Union level and 70 per cent of these measures (regulations, directives, decisions and recommendations) are concerned with the economic domain".

Tens of millions do not vote in European elections since they sense rightly that their representatives can make little or no difference, beyond setting up inquiries, asking questions and deliberating over the budget.

The Brussels summit will in part launch a "Future of Europe" reform process to overhaul existing EU treaties, set up a Convention with officials and politicians of member states in order to propose a new political framework for the EU to a summit in 2004, probably by then with several new members.

This process will be as closed and undemocratic as all other past examples of drawing up treaties; it will not involve the working people of Europe in the process through a democratically elected constituent assembly, based on one vote for all those living and working inside the European Union.

Their Europe is a union of corruption.
The lack of accountability leads to immense abuse and misuse of funds. Regular scandals over expenses for MEPs erupt or contracts awarded to Commission members' families and friends, only to be eclipsed by bigger scandals over the misuse of EU funds for projects abroad that are used to line the pockets of corrupt officials in the Balkans, Middle East, Turkey so that these governments will favour EU companies when it comes to awarding contracts.

Their Europe is a union against the poor and oppressed of the Third World.
At last month's World Trade Organisation ministerial in Qatar the EU trade officials were among the worst imperialist representatives present.

Pascal Lamy, the EU's trade commissioner, had the breathtaking hypocrisy to call the new round of trade talks launched in Qatar as a "development round". Yet he fought tooth and nail to protect the EU's right to dump subsidised farm products in poorer countries which has a devastating effect on the poor farmers of the south who cannot compete against cheaper imports.

Lamy threatened to walk out unless he got his way on postponing to the future "negotiations with a view to phasing out" subsidies to rich farmers. The EU representatives refused to agree to the Third World request for a study into the effects of lower tariffs on the economies of the South before proceeding to lower them. Lamy was shoulder to shoulder with US trade representatives in bullying the delegates from the south with the threat that unless they agreed to a new round now they would have their debt relief programmes withdrawn.

Yet while the EU plays tough with the south it bends over backwards to help out the oppressive state of Israel. Last month the EU again refused to take sanctions against Israel for illegally exporting goods to the EU which are produced in Jewish settlements in the West Bank, yet at the same time they provide satellite monitors to track Palestinian activists.

Their Europe is a union of war mongering and aggressive militarism.
The EU governments one after another rushed to back Bush's "war against terrorism" in the wake of the 11 September attacks on the World Trade Centre. EU heads were desperate to be seen in the front rank of those signed up to attack on the Taliban.

Britain promised 6,000 troops to fight in Afghanistan, Germany 3,000 more. France provided unprecedented naval and intelligence co-operation to the US. Unlimited money has been found for all the EU members' armed forces while pensions and health service struggle for scraps of funding.

The Brussels summit will hear a report from Romano Prodi, the head of the European Commission, about progress in putting together a force of tens of thousands drawn from different member states under a unified command.

Embarrassed by their utter dependency on the US for their "peacemaking" forces within Europe itself, the member states have been striving to construct their own "rapid reaction force". They hope to use this to secure "stability" in all regions in the EU's backyard (e.g. North Africa, Balkans, Middle East) where uprisings against reactionary pro-western governments can be put down.

Their Europe is a union that erodes civil liberties with impunity.
The UK has just passed a draconian bill which opts out of the European Convention on Human Rights to allow the Home Secretary to detain foreign nationals indefinitely and without trial who are "suspected" by him of involvement in "terrorism". This follows on for legislation last year which massively broadens the definition of terrorism to embrace most forms of anti-parliamentary protests movements.

It would have been impossible to back the anti-apartheid movement in the 1980s with these laws and ANC representatives would have been locked up. In France the government has used the cover of the "war against  terrorism" to adopt a "security law" designed to show that the ruling Socialist Party is tough on crime - this is likely to be one of the key themes of next years' presidential and parliamentary elections - and whose main provisions are aimed not at "terrorists" at all but youth.

In Austria after 11 September the government made it impossible to seek asylum in Austrian embassies abroad. Also wider powers of wire-tapping and house search were approved. All over the EU spy cameras cover entire areas. The number of police has been increased as well as stop-and-search controls, especially in poor neighbourhoods.

Their Europe is a union of states dedicated to crushing the anti-capitalist movement.
Faced with the growth and success of the anti-capitalist movement over the last few years the EU states have gone from treating the activists with contempt to using the EU level bodies to co-ordinate their repression.

In the run up to the G8 summit in Genoa many EU leaders like Blair and Schroeder urged Berlusconi to restrict the free movement of protesters across Europe and prevent many from getting into Italy by suspending their own Schengen agreement that allows for free movement across EU borders. They urged the Italian authorities to repress the demonstrators and welcomed the use of a part of the army (the carabinieri) to counter the demonstrations on the streets.

Since Genoa they have gone further. Under the initiative of Germany they have taken the first steps to create a Europol force whose job will be to share intelligence about the anti-capitalist movement and co-ordinate their repression of it.

Their Europe is a union that is hypocritical and racist towards immigrants and refugees.
The EU allows free access for capital across its borders and demands the right for its bosses and bankers to operate freely anywhere in the world. Yet millions of legal immigrants working and paying taxes in Europe are denied the right to vote; many are denied employment in the public sector.

Immigration, for our leaders, is nothing but a commodity to be imported according to the needs of capital. On the one hand it welcomes with open arms workers who are very well qualified and on the other hand it uses (but does not sanction) clandestine immigration to keep wages down. Refugees fleeing from political persecution or from economic devastation caused by IMF-devised and EU-backed policies in the Third World are denied entry or herded into camps surrounded by barbed wire, often for months or years on end. In the UK they have been denied money and forced into the indignity of using vouchers for food.

Their Europe is a union of deepening recession and growing unemployment.
Europe, especially "eurozone", is now in recession, led by Germany. This will deepen as we move through next year. Tens of thousands across Europe have already been chucked onto the scrapheap since 11 September.

Sabena workers from the collapsed Belgian airline will be in the front ranks of the demo. Austrian Airlines have announced the sacking of between 2.000 and 4.000 workers. Telekom Austria has sacked 5,000 in recent months. Thousands of Rolls Royce workers in the UK have been sacked.

The response of the European Commission in the face of this is typically pro-business: they turn a blind eye to their own rules to allow subsidies to be handed over to failing airline businesses, (i.e. shareholders) while allowing thousands of jobs to be destroyed in these same airlines.

For all these reasons the EU is as much a legitimate target for protesters as the G8 or the World Trade Organisation. D13/D14 must stand in the tradition of the international anti-capitalist protests begun in Seattle against the WTO in 1999, Prague against the IMF and World Bank last year and Genoa against the G8 in the summer.

The European Union is a an anti-democratic and pro-business union that is seeking a more global role for itself to enforce anti-Third World polices and have a military machine that can back up its economic and diplomatic might.

The workers of the European Union must reject attempts to withdraw "their" nation states from this entity but rather combine our forces more urgently and militantly to overthrow the bureaucracies in each state and in Europe as a whole. We want to build a Socialist United States of Europe with real democratic rights for all and free from exploitation by the big corporations and militarism.

It is criminal for the bureaucratic leaders of the ETUC to try and keep the trade union march on D13 separate from the anti-capitalist demo on D14. Far from playing into the bosses' hands, the anti-capitalist movement, with its tactics of direct action and confrontation, has forced the globalisers to address the issues of global injustice. Trade unionists must defy their leaders and stay in Brussels for both protests.

A dynamic combination of the massed ranks of the labour movement and the creative courage of the anti-capitalist movement can stop the bosses in their tracks and consign their system to the dustbin of history.

Brussels D13/14 must be another step along that road. We'll be there. Join us!