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The historic UN Summit on the new Sustainable Development Goals is only weeks away. Everything is all but agreed. The final-outcome document has been in wide circulation since early August and all that remains now is a photo shoot with world leaders and a massive corporate party in Central Park to usher in a new era of global peace and prosperity. Ireland, as co-facilitator of this process, has achieved an almost impossible task in pulling the rabbit out of the hat. The problem is that for all the promises to take “bold and transformative steps” to ensure that “no-one is left behind”, it is increasingly hard to see how this new agreement can achieve anything significant. While “Transforming our World: the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development” abounds in ambition – 17 goals and 169 targets in total – it is very weak on the necessary measures to turn this agenda into reality. The means to implement the new goals were meant to be decided at the third Financing for Development (FfD) Conference, which took place in Addis Ababa in July. This event delivered little in terms of the resources needed to address extreme poverty, inequality and environmental degradation. History may well look back on this as a pivotal moment when state-based multilateralism caved in spectacularly to transnational private interests. The dawn of a new stream of “plurilateralism” has emerged. The Addis Conference was the third such conference hosted by the UN since 2002. The FfD process was established in 2000. It was comprehensive, meaning that it had the mandate to look at ALL areas of global finance and economic governance necessary to deliver on the ambitious Millennium Development Goals. It was not restricted to issues of aid, but could make recommendations on tax, debt, trade, and the private sector as well as systemic issues such as economic-governance reform. This was truly revolutionary. During that first conference in 2002, through strong civil society action, for example, the proposal for a financial transaction tax, which had been ridiculed before, gained formal recognition. Issues of human-development-based debt sustainability were put on the table, as was the idea of a new global economic governance council under UN auspices to temper the power of ad hoc groupings such as the G8 and the OECD. Since then, however, the FfD process has been dogged by the same political obstruction which has hampered other major international reforms. It was seen as a serious threat to the power of wealthy nations, who prefer to discuss finance behind closed doors in institutions such as the World Bank, WTO, IMF and OECD. They have, therefore, sought to undermine the process at every turn, divesting it of any real power to tackle issues of financial reform, especially issues of economic governance and taxation. Despite these efforts, the issue of taxation made it to the top of the agenda for the Addis Ababa FfD Conference. Former South African Prime Minister Thabo Mbeki launched a report showing that African countries have lost the same amount in illicit financial flows as they have received in aid in the last 50 years. Annually they lose $50 billion in tax through these illicit financial flows. Multinational corporations based in rich countries, who also set the tax rules, are by and large responsible for this through tax dodging schemes such as transfer mis-pricing. If development is to be funded through domestic resources, this massive haemorrhage of capital needs to be stemmed. As Mbeki said, “we need to stop the bleeding”. The conference heard calls on the part of the G77 and of civil society for the establishment of a global tax body under the auspices of the UN. Such a body would enable all countries to have an equal say in setting tax rules. This was backed by the report of the Independent Commission on the Reform of International Corporation, headed by Nobel Prize winner Professor Joseph Stiglitz.These calls, however, were blatantly ignored as rich country after rich country, including Ireland, was at pains to state that they prefer to talk about tax in the OECD, a club for rich nations, not the UN. Ireland’s intervention at the conference was, for the most part, very weak. Despite pressure from civil society in advance to use this opportunity to lead by example and re-interate its commitment to meeting the 0.7% target on development aid by 2020, the government preferred to hide behind the weak EU position. On other controversial issues, such as taxation, it was clear that it shared the broad OECD consensus. Despite its prominent role in the UN process for new Sustainable Development Goals, no new commitments were made. The focus of most wealthy countries was not even in the main conference room. As has become the pattern at such UN conferences, the main action was happening elsewhere in the many hotel conference suites surrounding the conference venue. The private side-events, many of them invitation-only (though it was not hard to get in if you could find them), represented the main focus of attention. Here the transnational private sector and governments joined forces to launch new ‘blended financing initiatives’. At such events, initiatives can simply be announced rather than agreed. The ReDesigning Development Finance Initiative backed by the World Economic Forum announced several new initiatives which have the potential to re-shape the development landscape. Whilst the initiatives may have been dressed up in their best sustainable-development rhetoric for the occasion, they are far from sustainable. In reality, they are essentially about replacing the role of public finance with new unsustainable cycles of international debt. The new “collaborative development financing model”, backed by the online Convergence Platform, describes itself as “a new global platform that generates a flow of credible investment opportunities in emerging and frontier markets from a network of leading investors and financiers. Convergence allows private and public funders to blend their capital, creating more financially attractive, high-quality deals”. It aims to harness $100bn in blended finance towards public private partnerships in the developing

The political Left, whether social democratic, communist or Trotskyist, has always found the European Union problematic. This is because supranational EU ‘integration’ poses the issue of national independence and national democracy so acutely, something many on the Left find embarrassing. They prefer to concentrate on economic issues, for on political ones like national independence they fear being found on the same side as the Right. Their political sectarianism makes that hard for them to cope with. The EU shifts a myriad of government functions from the national level, where they have traditionally been under the control of democratically elected parliaments and governments, to the supranational, where the bureaucrats of the EU Commission have the monopoly of legislative initiative and where technocracy rules. Should the Left oppose or support this process? The classical socialist position is clear. It is that leftwingers should eschew “economism” and should seek to give a lead on democratic political questions as well as economic ones. They thereby put themselves in the best position to win political hegemony in their respective countries and to implement leftwing economic measures in due course when their peoples desire these. Marx and Engels took it for granted that socialism could only be achieved in independent national states. In ‘The Communist Manifesto’ of 1848 they wrote: “Though not in substance, yet in form, the struggle of the proletariat with the bourgeoisie is at first a national struggle. The proletariat of each country must, of course, first of all settle matters with its own bourgeoisie”. They supported Irish independence from Britain. Engels wrote to his friend Kugelman: “There are two oppressed peoples in Europe, the Irish and the Poles, who are never more international than when they are most national”. Their Irish follower, James Connolly, showed by his political practice in allying himself with the radical democrats of the IRB in the Easter Rising that he regarded the establishment of a fully independent Irish State as the prerequisite of being able to achieve the socialist measures that he advocated. While awaiting execution he speculated on how the international socialist press would interpret the Dublin rebellion: “They will never understand why I am here. They will all forget I am an Irishman”. Outside Europe the proposition that the Left should be the foremost advocates of national sovereignty would be taken as self-evident. The strength of communism in Asian countries like China and Vietnam rests on its identification with nationalism. The appeal of the Left in Latin America is largely based on its opposition to Yankee imperialism. Only in Europe do so many Leftwingers regard the defence of national independence in face of EU integration as “right-wing” and therefore by definition reactionary. This is primarily due to the fact that the main countries of Western Europe – France, Germany, Britain, Spain, Italy etc. – were all imperial powers in their day and historically their mainstream labour movements identified with that imperialism and its colonial accompaniments. With honourable if marginal exceptions, the national labour movements in these countries supported their respective national bourgeoisies in going to war with one another in World Wars I and II. In the second half of the 20th century transnational capital became predominant over national capital in the advanced industrial world. In Europe continental social democrats now shifted to backing European-based transnational capital in supporting its main political project, the construction of a supranational power, the EU/Eurozone, in which the classical principles of capitalist laissez faire – free movement of goods, services, capital and labour – would for the first time in history have the force of constitutional law. In Britain and Ireland Labour initially dissented. The political tradition in Britain is that all the main issues of national policy are decided inside the Tory Party, with the rest of society having bit parts. Joining the EEC became the central goal of Conservative policy from 1961. The Labour Left originally opposed this, as indeed in this country the Irish Labour Party opposed Irish membership of the EEC in our 1972 Accession referendum. Under Michael Foot’s leadership British Labour advocated the UK’s withdrawal from the EEC in the 1983 general election. Then in 1988, with Margaret Thatcher in Downing Street, Commission President Jacques Delors, a French socialist, wooed the British TUC at Blackpool and Ireland’s ICTU at Malahide and promised them labour-friendly legislation from Brussels which they would never get at home. The Trade Union leaders embraced “social Europe” and much of the Labour Left followed them, in some cases becoming missionaries for the grand “project”. As the downside of the EU/Eurozone became clear in recent years, Euro-scepticism began to grow on the political Right. Now some on the Left are starting to follow the Right in that too, in Southern Europe and maybe in Britain. In France and Italy the central role of communists in the war-time Resistance and their consequent appeal to national sentiment gave these countries mass communist parties for three decades after World War II. A key factor in the subsequent decline of these parties was their embrace of the EC/EU in the 1970s and 1980s as one of the tenets of “Eurocommunism”. In France this volte-face was necessary to allow Communist Ministers join Francois Mitterand’s socialist government in 1981. I recall the labour historian Desmond Greaves remarking at the time; “This will revive fascism in France.” That was before anyone had heard of Le Pen. The French CP, which had one-quarter of the seats in France’s National Assembly in 1956, has 2% there today. Many former French working-class communist voters now vote for the National Front. Leftwingers in the Trotskyist tradition tend to be upholders of EU supranationalism as “objectively progressive”, while stigmatising concern for national independence as nationalism and “rightwing”. This goes back to Trotsky’s famous dispute with Stalin in the 1920s over whether it was possible to build socialism in one country – that being Stalin’s view – or whether it required a more general transformation, world revolution, as Trotsky thought. The EU is