Europeans today are caught between a failing and undemocratic EU and
equally failing and undemocratic national states. As Yanis Varoufakis
prepares to launch a new movement for the democratisation of the EU, what’s the way out of the impasse?There is no need to believe, with George Soros, that the EU is on the verge of collapse to believe that it is on the verge of irrelevance. Becoming little more than a dysfunctional common market shunned by its citizens and promoting tensions and antagonisms between states and between people.There is no Plan A for Europe. Mild adjustments to the status quo - the Juncker investment plan, the youth guarantee, additional fiscal leeway of a few decimals points or a banking union already surpassed by history - are unable to seriously address the historical challenges banging at our doors each day.
Plans for increased integration of parts of the European Union get regularly touted.
There are some grounds to being diffident of such plans. Any deepening
of integration risks in fact reinforcing the undemocratic nature of a
Union of financial rules deprived of democratic accountability.
At
the same time there is no viable national Plan B either. There is no
space for political emancipation through a more or less harmonious
abandonment of the European Union. The sirens of nationalism - be they
on the right or on the left - sing a song of destitution and
disempowerment.
Sovereignty belongs to the people, not
to states or to institutions. Too often is this forgotten. Popular
sovereignty is not going to be recuperated by the construction of
micro-nations barricading and barking against flows of people and of
capital but ultimately at the mercy of decisions taken elsewhere. There
is no return to the golden age of the Bretton Woods agreements,
when financial capital could be trapped within national boundaries for
an emancipatory vision of “capitalism in one country”. Today, national
boundaries can only trap refugees escaping war. Their invocation plays
squarely into the hands of the far-right.
Recent years
have marked a watershed in a post-1989 world-view characterised by talk
of the end of history and of a third way of non-conflictual management.
This is evident in the return of a political rhetoric that dares put
into question the fundamentals of our economic and democratic system -
from Sanders to Corbyn via Spain and Portugal. While, less promisingly,
it is equally evident in the rise of a new far-right in Hungary,
Croatia, Poland, and France.
We need to stop portraying the EU as an all-powerful
behemoth impeding any real change at national level.
This rhetoric is
false and only benefits supporters of the status quo. What we lack is
the capacity for articulating and promoting a new vision for all those
policies over which national sovereignty makes sense. Ambitious plans
for income redistribution, fighting privations and the protection of the
commons, fair integration of migrants, tax justice, fair and free
access to education for all, and more. In this sense, the campaign of
Bernie Sanders is inspiring.
Failure to achieve
progressive national policies is not due to the EU. It is due to the
incapacity of the progressive field to win popular consent. I have much
sympathy for Jean-Luc Mélenchon, Oskar Lafontaine, and other old left
leaders who met recently in Paris to expound a Plan B for Europe.
But I often feel their attacks on the EU have more to do with
justifying their political failure nationally than opening up a new
field of action for their countries.
Europe is the only space large enough to be able to rein in the rule of financial capital, forcefully addressing the scandal of 62 people
in control of half of global wealth. It is the only space where it will
be possible to free Julian Assange and Edward Snowden and provide a new
technological infrastructure free of surveillance. Where a new
ecological understanding of development can be fostered and forced on
the rest of the world through commercial treaties based on climate
justice and not competition to the bottom. Or, again, where we can
nurture a multipolar alternative to US militarism and the rising
nationalisms - often with an ethnic basis - of many emerging powers.
It
is the capacity to decide through political struggle how to tackle
systemic and historical issues such as these that popular sovereignty
should really be about.
Until today European parties
have failed to articulate and organise a convincing way out of our
multiple crises. National parties have hidden behind unpronounceable
acronyms at the European level - who knows the meaning of GUE/NGL?
- creating umbrella-groups where they individually maintain their
feeble autonomy and collectively maintain their tragic impotence.
A
genuine multi-level political force - and not necessarily a political
party as traditionally understood - is long overdue. A transnational
coordination summing up the plurality of national forces into a single
and recognisable European political actor capable of campaigning and
organising over all those issues that require European-level action.
We
have an example of this multi-level dynamic – albeit limited at the
national level – in Spain. Where a clearly Catalan force such as the
list headed by Ada Colau participates, at state level, in a political
project that is able to act as a national political subject in its own
right.
Rebuilding power for change ultimately means
rebuilding ambition and innovating political practices. Beyond sterile
arguments over the benefits of an independent nation-state or of a
united Europe, what we should really be talking about is how to organise
to transform both.
EU-Digest
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