Social Europe

politics, economy and employment & labour

  • Themes
    • European digital sphere
    • Recovery and resilience
  • Publications
    • Books
    • Dossiers
    • Occasional Papers
    • Research Essays
    • Brexit Paper Series
  • Podcast
  • Videos
  • Newsletter

EUSSR: A Reasonable Analogy?

Vytenis Andriukaitis 8th October 2018

Dear Brian,

Thank you for your sincere letter that I read with great interest. I respectfully disagree with many things you wrote and hence feel compelled to reply openly. It will also help me to address issues that have been raised here and there by other people. I hope you do not mind.

I will reply point by point and I dare to hope, since we are of similar age and thus “old enough to read and comprehend history with objectivity”, that you will consider my replies the way I considered yours. By that matter, I must warn you that I also happen to have a degree in history.

Let us start with 1973 when ‘your misfortune’ started with the UK joining the EEC, just a few years after Charles de Gaulle’s resignation.

Our job is keeping you informed!


Subscribe to our free newsletter and stay up to date with the latest Social Europe content.


We will never send you spam and you can unsubscribe anytime.

Thank you!

Please check your inbox and click on the link in the confirmation email to complete your newsletter subscription.

.

Back in the USSR

Back in 1973 there was no such thing as freedom of speech, religion, property, or press in the USSR. There was no multiparty system either, there was only one view and one ideology allowed. From a USSR point of view, the UK joining the EEC meant that the ‘imperialistic’ forces in the world gained more power. I wonder what would have happened if instead of joining the EEC, the UK had chosen to join the USSR? To my historical knowledge, your leaders quite unanimously saw some differences between the two back then.

I accept your sincerity when you say that Britain would have been glad to ‘save’ the Baltic countries if only it had been in the position to do so. I do not want to sound petty and dig into the ‘dirty laundry’ but signing Yalta and Potsdam agreements did not really ‘help’. Au contraire… But that’s history.

 And, indeed,  rationing of food after WWII was a rather normal thing for more than a decade in the whole of Europe, the islands and the continent. For instance, rationing in Siberia was equivalent to 140 g of bread per person per day.

You mention some specific secret documents. I will be honest I am not a big fan of conspiracy theories.  Maybe it is because they remind me of Stalin’s regime. Conspiracy theories always have the same pattern and I have witnessed too many of those being spread as plague in the USSR…

Because of such theories millions of people were imprisoned in gulags. So no, I am not a fan of any ‘secret documents’ and do not know of any ‘underhand’ plans of Jean Monet sending people to concentration and forced labour camps.


We need your support


Social Europe is an independent publisher and we believe in freely available content. For this model to be sustainable, however, we depend on the solidarity of our readers. Become a Social Europe member for less than 5 Euro per month and help us produce more articles, podcasts and videos. Thank you very much for your support!

Become a Social Europe Member

Opt-out UK

You mention ‘laws and regulations’ from Brussels. Could you point me to a single regulation where London did not have a say since the UK joined the EU? I am eager to learn. As far as I have witnessed all of these ‘laws’ are being negotiated by the UK government and in the past, when some were regarded by London as fundamentally against the British interests, the UK has been quite successful in getting derogations. More than that, many of these same laws and regulations were actually initiated by the UK. You might know that the single market was your former Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher’s idea. I believe it was a true British success.

And respectfully, Mr. Gorbachev have said many things after his attempts to copy-paste some of the elements of the EU into the USSR utterly failed because copy-paste without accepting fundamental rights cannot work.

All in all, dear Brian, likening the EU to the USSR is wrong and offensive. Many people who lived under Soviet regime can tell you why. One example would be that a letter such as yours, addressed by any USSR inhabitant to the government. would have meant a sentence for its author – concentration camp, psychiatric clinic or, in worse case, a death row.

So why and how to compare? Maybe the situation would have been different had the UK joined the USSR in 1973, had de Gaulle not resigned and continued to block the UK accession. Who knows. I don’t. What I know is that in Lithuania, we did not want to go ‘back to the USSR’, but instead chose to ‘go West’.

You also mention the Treaty. I assure you that I know a lotof the articles by heart and even some very specific terms used in the Treaty such as the ‘ever closer union’ that was initially proposed by the UK conservatives.

While fully respecting the referendum results I cannot see how saying that ‘Britain is leaving an Organization’ supports the Catalonian case. Spain is a country, not an Organization. Or have I missed something in your reasoning?

History should indeed tell us something. You say the UK has done without Europe before and can do again. Well, I believe that no country can do alone. We are all interdependent, we all need each other and ahead of challenges that we face, such as climate change, we will need each other even more. Friendship and partnership has been, is and will always be paramount. I am constantly reassured that many of your fellow citizens still count, us, Europeans, among their close friends and partners.

In partnership both the UK and the EU will prosper. For that to happen, we better make sure that no generation, either in the EU or in Britain, believes the toxic lies of the likes of Farage, Johnson, Le Pen and others.

I cared about people all my life, when I was a medical doctor, when I was a Member of Parliament, or now as Commissioner. Rest assured of that. And take care.

Can you still compare?

Yours truly,

Vytenis Andriukaitis

Citizen of Lithuania, citizen of the European Union (not subject of anything or anyone).

P.S. I wrote this reply to you after bumping into Reza Deghati exhibition in Buenos Aires and seeing the photo above. Prisoners in the gulags would tattoo faces of Marx, Engels, Lenin and Stalin in order to avoid execution as no one was allowed to shoot at a portrait of a leader. I have seen with my own eyes these tattoos being done.

First published on the Commissioner’s blog site

Vytenis Andriukaitis
Website

EU Commissioner for Health and Food Safety

Home ・ Politics ・ EUSSR: A Reasonable Analogy?

Most Popular Posts

schools,Sweden,Swedish,voucher,choice Sweden’s schools: Milton Friedman’s wet dreamLisa Pelling
world order,Russia,China,Europe,United States,US The coming world orderMarc Saxer
south working,remote work ‘South working’: the future of remote workAntonio Aloisi and Luisa Corazza
Russia,Putin,assets,oligarchs Seizing the assets of Russian oligarchsBranko Milanovic
Russians,support,war,Ukraine Why do Russians support the war against Ukraine?Svetlana Erpyleva

Most Recent Posts

Sakharov,nuclear,Khrushchev Unhappy birthday, Andrei SakharovNina L Khrushcheva
Gazprom,Putin,Nordstream,Putin,Schröder How the public loses out when politicians cash inKatharina Pistor
defence,europe,spending Ukraine and Europe’s defence spendingValerio Alfonso Bruno and Adriano Cozzolino
North Atlantic Treaty Organization,NATO,Ukraine The Ukraine war and NATO’s renewed credibilityPaul Rogers
transnational list,European constituency,European elections,European public sphere A European constituency for a European public sphereDomènec Ruiz Devesa

Other Social Europe Publications

The transatlantic relationship
Women and the coronavirus crisis
RE No. 12: Why No Economic Democracy in Sweden?
US election 2020
Corporate taxation in a globalised era

Eurofound advertisement

Living and working in Europe 2021

The Covid-19 pandemic continued to be a defining force in 2021, and Eurofound continued its work of examining and recording the many and diverse impacts across the EU. Living and working in Europe 2021 provides a snapshot of the changes to employment, work and living conditions in Europe. It also summarises the agency’s findings on issues such as gender equality in employment, wealth inequality and labour shortages. These will have a significant bearing on recovery from the pandemic, resilience in the face of the war in Ukraine and a successful transition to a green and digital future.


AVAILABLE HERE

Foundation for European Progressive Studies Advertisement

EU Care Atlas: a new interactive data map showing how care deficits affect the gender earnings gap in the EU

Browse through the EU Care Atlas, a new interactive data map to help uncover what the statistics are often hiding: how care deficits directly feed into the gender earnings gap.

While attention is often focused on the gender pay gap (13%), the EU Care Atlas brings to light the more worrisome and complex picture of women’s economic inequalities. The pay gap is just one of three main elements that explain the overall earnings gap, which is estimated at 36.7%. The EU Care Atlas illustrates the urgent need to look beyond the pay gap and understand the interplay between the overall earnings gap and care imbalances.


BROWSE THROUGH THE MAP

Hans Böckler Stiftung Advertisement

Towards a new Minimum Wage Policy in Germany and Europe: WSI minimum wage report 2022

The past year has seen a much higher political profile for the issue of minimum wages, not only in Germany, which has seen fresh initiatives to tackle low pay, but also in those many other countries in Europe that have embarked on substantial and sustained increases in statutory minimum wages. One key benchmark in determining what should count as an adequate minimum wage is the threshold of 60 per cent of the median wage, a ratio that has also played a role in the European Commission's proposals for an EU-level policy on minimum wages. This year's WSI Minimum Wage Report highlights the feasibility of achieving minimum wages that meet this criterion, given the political will. And with an increase to 12 euro per hour planned for autumn 2022, Germany might now find itself promoted from laggard to minimum-wage trailblazer.


FREE DOWNLOAD

ETUI advertisement

Bilan social / Social policy in the EU: state of play 2021 and perspectives

The new edition of the Bilan social 2021, co-produced by the European Social Observatory (OSE) and the European Trade Union Institute (ETUI), reveals that while EU social policy-making took a blow in 2020, 2021 was guided by the re-emerging social aspirations of the European Commission and the launch of several important initiatives. Against the background of Covid-19, climate change and the debate on the future of Europe, the French presidency of the Council of the EU and the von der Leyen commission must now be closely scrutinised by EU citizens and social stakeholders.


AVAILABLE HERE

About Social Europe

Our Mission

Article Submission

Membership

Advertisements

Legal Disclosure

Privacy Policy

Copyright

Social Europe ISSN 2628-7641

Social Europe Archives

Search Social Europe

Themes Archive

Politics Archive

Economy Archive

Society Archive

Ecology Archive

Follow us on social media

Follow us on Facebook

Follow us on Twitter

Follow us on LinkedIn

Follow us on YouTube