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At the EU summit in Brussels, the bourgeoisie in Europe is developing new policies for increased integration, leading to the formation of a federal republic - a European superstate. Policies are being developed that undermine democracy including the legal struggle of the working class and the peoples of Europe.
The EU institutions are being strengthened with these aims and the largest imperialist powers are strengthening their positions. It's becoming increasingly obvious that a strategy to struggle within the EU system, to reform it, is an impossible policy. The only way to go forward is to raise the struggle to withdraw from EU and to cooperate in a struggle to have the EU dissolved. For a non-member like Norway this means getting out of the suffocating grip of the Treaty on the European Economic Area.
In 1994 the Norwegian people voted no to joining the EU a second time (the first time was in 1972). The Labour Party, the Conservative Party, the Progress Party (extreme right) were all in favour of membership in the EU. They said: We cannot survive outside the EU. We will be isolated and our economy will stagnate. They said exactly the same things in 1972. They were lies then and now. The Norwegian economy is not ailing more than the rest of Europe, on the contrary.
But national sovereignty is not only a question for Norway. The EU project is the political expression of the development of capitalism today in Europe. The EU cannot be turned into a socialist state, it must be dissolved. No socialist society can build on a state where the question of national independence is subordinate to some form of supra-nationalism. Our internationalism must be based on voluntariness. The fact that the progressive forces combating the EU leadership's policies back away from forwarding the parole of getting out of the EU leaves the arena open for the extreme rightist parties, which seize the national question and pervert it like Hitler's party seized the national question and the question of unemployment and perverted them in the 1930's.
The idea that socialism cannot be built in one country is a defeatist idea that stops the working class from developing tactics to achieve just this. We are of course aware that the working class in Norway cannot hold on to power alone over a longer period, as the imperialist forces would be overwhelming. But our goal is to establish socialism in Norway, and we expect the international working class in all nations to struggle to achieve socialism in their respective nation-states. Socialism cannot be exported or imported.
It is the imperialist forces that are undermining the nation states and subjecting them to supra-national state forms. The multi-nationals are traitors to the nations of Europe and are developing EU into a prison of nations. This is what the Maastricht, Amsterdam and Nice agreements are about.
In Norway the bourgeois media continually claim that national independence is no longer possible, and that we must submit to supra-national constructions. The same goes for the bourgeois parties, the most important being the Labour Party. This ideology has its twin in the Trotskyite movements that claim that there can be no socialism in one country. Pressure is developed against the idea that socialism can and must be built in each individual country within an international setting based on voluntary cooperation between nation states. Giving up the policy of fighting for national sovereignty and socialism in one country fits very well with the interests of the multinationals that are in the lead of building the European Union.
Of course nations and nation-states are products of history, and will in due time be replaced by other social structures, but that time is not now, and not within the foreseeable future.
AKP considers that a socialist strategy must involve the liberation of the nations of Europe from supra-national state forms like the EU. A future socialist Europe must build on multilateral agreements based on voluntariness on the part of all nations. In Norway we uphold the paroles: No to EU membership, Norway out of the West European Union, No to the Schengen Agreement and Norway out of the European Economic Area.
A positive future for Europe's working class and nations presupposes the dissolution of the European Union.
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