Refugees and other migrants wanting to come to Britain congregate in the ‘Jungle’, a shanty town near Calais. For over a decade several thousand people have been living there, or prior to that in the official Sangatte camp that was destroyed in 2002 at the request of the UK. They are there in the hope of being able to get into the UK through the Channel Tunnel. This is where Britain, like so many other countries, has built a barbed wire fence to protect its borders and keep out refugees, except that it only needs to defend the entrance to the Eurotunnel and not a land border. The refugees around Calais returned to the news over the summer when striking French ferry workers blocked the entrance to the Eurotunnel, causing queues of cars and lorries that people desperate to get to the Britain tried to climb onto.

All the forces of the bourgeoisie, the left, the right, the far right and the extreme left, not to mention the trades unions, all came together in the grand electoral orchestra, whether in France and Holland for the referendums on the European constitution, for the parliamentary elections in Britain, or the Länder elections in North Rhine-Westphalia (Germany's most heavily-populated region).

Europe was the main military theatre in both world wars; it constitutes the epicentre of the world's imperialist tensions and it has never had any real possibility of overcoming the contradictory interests of each national bourgeoisie. In fact, "because of its historic role as the cradle of capitalism and of its geographic situation (�) Europe in the 20th century has become the key to the imperialist struggle for world domination" (International Review 112, 'Europe: economic alliance and field of manoeuvre of imperialist rivalries'). The EU, an expression of post-World War II tensions