The Confederal Group of the European United Left is a forum for cooperation between its different political components, each of which retains its own independent identity and commitment to its own positions.
The Group remains open to other political forces and individual members who agree with the general outline of the programme set out below.
Notwithstanding the different approaches that its various components may choose to follow, the Confederal Group of the European United Left is firmly committed to European integration, although in a different form from the existing model. We want to see integration based on fully democratic institutions with a priority commitment to ensuring a new model of development aimed at tackling the most serious issues facing us. For us, these are: large-scale and increasing unemployment; ensuring respect for the environment; creating a common social area that provides equal rights at the highest level for all citizens; and, meeting the needs of those who are forced by poverty in their countries of origin (for which Europe bears a heavy responsibility) to seek their livelihood in the Union. We want a Europe that operates on a basis of complete solidarity in order to bring ever closer the real parameters of the economies of each Member State and, accordingly, we oppose the efforts of the most powerful countries to impose their policies on everyone else.
We want to see a different Europe, without the democratic deficit which the Treaty of Maastricht served to confirm and free from the neo-liberal monetarist policies that go with it. The Group's main objective, therefore, is to encourage a broad consultation of the people, both by the convening of a second conference between the national parliaments and the European Parliament, and through popular referenda on the outcome of the treaty review process scheduled for 1996. The current Treaties should be amended in order to achieve a Europe capable of forging new and equitable ties of cooperation with other regions of the world, particularly in the wider Europe, including both the individual countries that make up these regions and the blocs they may wish to form, without disrupting their independent development by making it dependent on our own, while at the same time preventing them from being used as areas for social or environmental dumping.
In order to deepen its ties of friendship, solidarity and cooperation with the other countries of Europe, the Union should strive to strengthen the OSCE, where instruments should be developed capable of addressing problems of joint security, while disbanding all those structures which, like NATO and the WEU, are a hangover from the political blocs of the Cold War. A secure peace cannot be guaranteed by military instruments but rather by ensuring that democracy gains a firm hold throughout the world and, above all, by reducing the huge gap separating the 'centre' from the 'periphery' , which is the main cause of instability and excessive concentrations of power, as well as largescale migration, racism and xenophobia. With this in view, it is vital that the European Union correct its Eurocentric approach and its current model of development (which will only serve to increase disparities and results in serious environmental, social and political risks) and develop a policy in all international fora aimed at reforming all those international financial and political institutions which were founded in the 1950s and have today become inadequate and biased spokesmen for, rather than representative of, all the peoples of the Earth. In so doing, emphasis should be placed on mutual efforts to achieve a balance between everyone's common concerns, rather than the current tendency to seek to bring the South in line with the North.
On the basis of these general guidelines, the Group intends to draw up a programme of work for the parliamentary term.
Brussels, 14 July 1994