Wrong! Big business does not want a weaker state. In fact, it wants a stronger state, a state that is strong enough to do without welfare schemes and other concessions that ease the lives of working people. A state, in short, that allows corporations to weaken those democratic institutions regulating the governing of state power. (Ever wondered why leading businessmen all over Europe are so fond of the European Union?)

Travel back with us briefly to 1975 and the publication of "Crisis of Democracy". This says it all, really. Again the twist is not that democracy needs help, but that irresponsible groups then were assaulting governments with demands for better welfare, social equality, peace in Vietnam and other heinous issues. The creators of this report belonged to The Trilateral Commission, a top-level organization for politicians, academics and company leaders from North America, Europe and Japan, set up by David Rockefeller. The crux of the report was that a "surplus of democracy" had developed in Western societies. In order to strengthen "authority" in society some "restraint in democracy" was necessary.⁽¹⁾

Leaders of industry were thus demanding a change of policy away from the welfare state, but it seemed like governments could not deliver. 'Progress' in this new corporatespeak was only perceived to be possible by freeing state power from the shackles of national democracy – and the most effective way to do this was to utilise the European Union.

The EU is well suited to deal with the 'surplus' resulting from this crisis of democracy:

* Firstly, decision-making power is not even formally located in a publicly elected parliament; major decisions are instead brokered in secret by ministers from the different governments.

* Secondly, the bureaucracy of the EU is unique. It is far more powerful than the various national bureaucracies as making proposals for decisions is the prerogative of an un-elected body of administrators – the Commission, alongside the European Monetary Union (EMU) constituting a major part of economic policy - with the adjustments of interest rates and money supply being transferred to bankers who by law are not allowed to take advice from democratically elected institutions.

* Thirdly, the basic treaties of the European Union assure the pre-eminence of big business interests masquerading as 'free trade' dealing within 'free markets'.

It's this misleading terminology again. With the introduction of the Euro and its stability pact, the Union has cannily introduced major legal obstacles to the effective re-emergence of the welfare state, causing one member of a consulting group for competitiveness(!) which the EU established to declare: "The greatest value of EMU for industry is perhaps the fact that external pressure is put on national governments to take necessary, though not always popular measures." ⁽³⁾

The ERT is regularly consulted on important issues and represented in committees and working groups. It wrote the script for the internal market, and its members have been instrumental in launching the Common Currency.

'Flexibility' became the new key word in this ERT program for the labour market: flexible salaries, flexible working hours, and flexible terms of employment – flexible corporatespeak for working people forgoing increases in salaries, fixed working hours and job security. The public sector and small and medium sized companies, employing two-thirds of the workers in the EU, were to be starved for the sake of the inflexible corporate giants. This rationale was evident between the lines in ERT documents: "Positive policies to improve the viability of small and medium sized businesses are supported by all large firms, which need to focus on their core business and to an ever increasing extent depend on a large number of subcontractors."⁽⁵⁾

This hype about an information society where people will have pleasant, creative and well-paid jobs hides the reality that depletes working people and the environment even more than before.

Monotonous production-line work in manufacturing industry is not on its way out - the conveyor belt is in fact now being introduced into those stages of production it never reached before. And these principles are being extended to greater areas of the economy. The stockpiles that were buffers during swings of supply and demand are also being eliminated, with deliveries between companies being made 'just-in-time'. The production process from subcontractors to assembling factories to market outlets thus functions like a huge conveyor belt itself - with call centres and fast food chains the most glaring examples.

According to euphemistic business consultants, this model is 'lean production'. Trade unionists in the US have given it another name: 'management by stress'.

The ERT sensitively noticed a growing conflict between the short-term demands of competition and the long-term needs of industry ⁽⁶⁾, as the physical wear and tear on the labour force became greater than before. Corporations found it more difficult to make use of and develop the knowledge of a workforce becoming both physically and intellectually unfit for their needs.

For these reasons, those altruistic Round Table businessmen have for a long time promoted the concept of 'life-long learning'. This is now a hot topic on the EU-agenda for an 'eEurope'.

When these flexible, standard educated blue- and white-collar workers have been worn out, the corporations envisage exchanging them for a fresh, updated batch.

"The new ways of structuring and managing business to ride through times of economic recession have... rendered obsolete the concept of life-long employment in large companies", states ERT. "Life-long learning, on the other hand, opens the door to allow people to move easily to another job..."⁽⁷⁾

Lifelong learning is thus another flexi-term employed by the corporates: not a life of all-round, creative work at all, but a few decades of rushing between temporary employments and re-training, ending in unemployment and premature retirement from working life.

As a total of 55,000 km of new roads are to be built, 12,000 km of which are to be motorways, it is unsurprising to find that car companies and other industries dependent on private car transport dominate the ERT. Traffic congestion threatens their cash flow, but new transport links, particularly motorways, are also a precondition for lean production. The relocation of peripheral parts of production to specialized subcontractors means transporting components over ever longer distances (fitting in nicely with their 'just-in-time' concept of deliveries) to shops and factories to enforce greater control over a stressed workforce. Within the rhetoric of this logic, minimal stockpiles multiply the number of shipments, which benefits only one constituency – big business.

They argue that the global economic interests of EU-based corporations are vulnerable unless they are accompanied by a comparable political influence. The ERT thus calls for the EU to develop a capability to defend its interests globally: "Industry and the people working in industry ... expect their [political] leaders to exercise a proper influence on the world and cannot accept that their Community should be relegated to the margins of international politics"⁽⁹⁾

European-based corporations see military rearmament and a common European military force as a means to secure their global interests. This demand is now top of the EU agenda. With the Common European Defence Policy (no flexible ambiguities here), the freeing of state power from democracy will get a familiar imperial touch.