IN THIS pamphlet, Anthony Coughlan examines the political and economic roots of Eurofederalism and asks who loses and who wins from it, given that Ireland is now a net contributor to the EU.

“The EU is … a supranational anti-democratic system that deprives Europe’s diverse peoples of their democracy,” he writes, “while serving the interests of its big states, in particular Germany and France … through their ruling politico-economic elites, interacting with the Brussels bureaucracy … on the economic side it serves the interests of EU-based transnational finance and corporate capital.

“Free movement of labour and capital provides cheap labour and freedom from democratic control to the European and American transnational firms that are the principal economic backers of the EU ‘project’.”