Having just completed four years doctorate on the European Union, I came to the conclusion that it was a pretty reactionary development, and that the left were right to oppose it (though some of their reasons are the wrong ones).
"Even Trotsky supported the end of custom barriers and a federation of European states as a transitional demand."
Yes, and that would have been a good basis on which to support the European Economic Community, which was a common european tariff (though not a federation of states). But the European Union is something else again. Under the reforms of the nineties, elected governments derogated control over various government functions (such as central banks, trade legislation, currency) to unelected officials.
'So what if the EU is neo-liberal, who isn't at this point?'
Which is not a bad point. The main problem with the EU is not quite that it is neoliberal, but that it is the substitution of unelected for elected institutions, which is to say a reform of the landscape to reduce democratic accountability.
'It's a contested field, which I'm afraid the right-wing has been playing well in as of late.'
A contested field? What is a contested field - the European Commission? Coprepor? Those are the places that policy is made in the European Union. They are secretive, and peopled a by a score Europe's most senior civil servants. Minutes are secret. They discuss policy in what are called 'non-papers' (to avoid the rule that government papers are published). The House of Lords is a more open institution. The Star Chamber was a more open institution.
Contestation is the very thing that the European Union has developed to displace. As European member states have seen a decline in political contestation (and a concomitant decline in the authority of national parliaments) the European Union has expanded to fill the void, and fill it with secretive 'non-majoritarian' (and that is the official term in EU-speak) institutions.
Europeans do elect a 'parliament' - but this parliament has no powers whatsoever. Not surprisingly, there are no pan-European political parties contesting elections, the turnout is lower that local council elections. In the last election here the crackpot United Kingdom Independence Party (membership 37) came *second* in the poll, beating the Labour Party, which is the governing party in Westminster.
'This looks all to like a sad replay of past episodes where socialists attacked parliamentary democracy - not for being insufficient or not participatory enough, but for being a bourgeois sham from start to finish.'
Hardly. First off Europe's socialists and communists participated in parliamentary democracy throughout the twentieth century. Secondly, the European Union makes no pretence to democratic accountability of any kind. If you were to map the EU onto the American Political System, the Congress would lose all power to make legislation. Executive power would pass from elected president to something halfway between the Federal Reserve and the Supreme Court. And forward policy planning would be cooked up in a meeting run by Governors' secretaries.