Swapping one mirage for another: the Left’s turn away from social Europe

Witnessing the punishment inflicted on Syriza by the European Union (EU) as well as that party’s own inept handling of the Eurozone crisis, the Left is recoiling from the ‘good Euro’ strategy – the hope for ending austerity within the Eurozone – and beating a hasty retreat to the shelter of the sovereign state. We have seen explicit calls for the restoration of fiscal and monetary sovereignty to national states, and even calls to explore political alternatives outside of the EU itself. Yet if ‘social Europe’ has been exposed as a mirage, the European Left now risks embracing another chimera – the vision of a social-democratic national state.

The sudden rush to the sovereign state is a remarkably rapid turn-around for the Left as a whole. Although there has long been a rump of old social-democrats suspicious of globalisation and its associated supranational institutions, over the last thirty years the larger portion of the Left subscribed to globalist ideologies and institutions in one form or another. On one end of the spectrum, ‘Third Way’-style movements saw the embrace of political centrism, international competitiveness, free trade and EU integration as a necessary part of progressive politics. On the other end, anti-globalisation activists and non-governmental organisations hoped that the global coordination of various social movements would allow them to ratchet above the nation-state onto a higher, transnational plane of progressive politics. Part of the problem with the latest about-face back towards the state is that the Left itself is not clear about what it is turning away from, and what it opposes in the EU. Stathis Kouvelakis denounces the EU as ‘imperialist’, while Cedric Durand sees the EU as a proto-state defined and captured by neo-liberal capitalist interests.

Durand’s piece exemplifies some of the confusion with which the Left has approached the EU. On the one hand, Durand criticises the EU for being too large and cumbersome to be easily shifted, making it rigid and insensitive to popular will. On the other hand, he criticises the EU for its tiny bureaucracy, having insufficient institutional capacity to effect any meaningful social and political transformation. On the one hand, monolithic and sprawling, on the other a stripped-back proto-state focused only on neo-liberal imperatives. Durand charges the EU with failing ‘to keep diverse societies and social strata together in turbulent times’. The implicit contrast here is between the ‘bad’ EU proto-state, stripped back to its core capacities to serve the interests of neoliberalism, and the supposedly good, progressive national state. But there are several problems with this contrast.

First, it is a mistake to see the EU as a state at all, whether proto-, imperialist, neoliberal or otherwise. To conceptually distinguish the EU bureaucracy from the bureaucracy of its member-states as Durand does is a cardinal error. For what need does the EU have of its own independent bureaucracy, given that the EU itself is nothing more than the intermingling and regional coordination of these very same national bureaucracies? As Christopher Bickerton’s work has shown, the EU is not a new type of state, but a new protuberance from the old nation-state. The EU is the external manifestation of European states’ attempts to manage and defuse popular conflict and social struggle over the last third of the twentieth century, in which the defeat and retreat of social democracy was institutionalised at the pan-European level. Thus what both the pro- and anti-EU Left fails to recognise is that the EU is built on the failures and compromises of late Cold War-era social democracy.

Now that the EU itself is tottering, it would be a mistake to expect social democracy to emerge from the rubble, as the EU itself is built on the ruins of social democracy. Even Durand seems to implicitly concede this, given the limited content that he gives to national sovereignty: ‘Formulating policy proposals guaranteeing people a safety net during this transition will be key to facilitating new electoral victories, beginning with Spain’s elections this fall.’ Here, the minimal protections against destitution offered by old-style social democracy is offered as the defining criteria of state sovereignty in place of the imperative of popular self-rule.

Waiting to excavate the ruins of social democracy from beneath the crumbling EU will lead to nothing – as it is these ruins themselves that are the shaky foundations of today’s European order. In the face of the Left’s defeats in the 1970s, in the 1980s, many on the Left retreated to ‘social Europe’ in the hope that it would emplace supranational protections for the remnants of social democracy. It was contempt for mass democracy, representative institutions and popular support that sustained the Left in the delusions of ‘social Europe’, ‘global civil society’ and ‘global resistance’ over the last two decades. Tragic enough the first time, it would be a farcical error to repeat the same mistake now in reverse – retreating from the dissolved mirage of ‘social Europe’ into the empty desert that is national social democracy. Even while being remote from power, the leader of Podemos, Pablo Iglesias, already seems content to reside in this desert, as evidenced in in a remarkably cynical statement of political abdication when he discounted mass support in the name of compromise with Spanish social democracy.

One way to avoid this trucking in the politics of fantasy, whether pro- or anti-EU, is to see that the struggle against the EU is not the attempt defensively to rally the nation against supranational institutions in order to protect the welfare state, but that it is first and foremost a struggle to restore popular self-rule – or, in a word, sovereignty.

Philip Cunliffe

Why Torture a Victim Whose Will Is Already Broken?

The draft of the agreement between the Greeks and the Eurogroup is out and, as everyone has noticed, it is not just an act of revenge, it is a piece of legislative torture. It contains old demands, like pension reductions and higher taxes to fund primary surpluses, as well as new demands, like reduction in the power of unions and a massive privatization of state assets using a separate fund controlled by Greece but monitored by the EU’s institutions. In fact the document asks for a massive legislative program touching on every aspect of Greek economic life – tax policy, product regulation, labor markets, state-owned assets, financial sector, shipping, budget surpluses, pensions, and so on. This legislation is demanded within the next few weeks. Such a package is the kind of thing one sees during or just after wartime, not as the product of democratically negotiated decisions. Let’s remember that the programme on which Tsipras and the Eurogroup agreed is something asked of a country that has already experienced a very severe depression, already implemented a number of constraints requested by creditors, has 25% unemployment and a banking crisis. What is the point of torturing a victim whose will is already broken? To destroy all opposition.

I think this should not be read as a proposal for restoring growth to Greece or even as the reflection of an economic blindness in Europe but as the reflux of the EU political project, of which the euro is the purest expression: the preference for technocratic domination over popular sovereignty. This program describes an architecture of rule, one that expresses utter indifference to the attempt by peoples to manage their affairs democratically, and one that demands enormous reserves of discretionary power for the Eurogroup. Note not just the scope of the Eurogroup’s demands but the molecular level of detail with which they lay out demands. For instance, as part of their package of “ambitious product market reforms,” they insist on changes in “Sunday trade, sales periods, pharmacy ownership, milk and bakeries, except over-the-counter pharmaceutical products, which will be implemented in a next step, as well as for the opening of macro-critical closed professions (e.g. ferry transportation).” Then there are the new demands, like “rigorous reviews and modernization of collective bargaining [and] industrial action,” which is Eurospeak for rubbing out labor rights. Other demands make it clear that these decisions are not only extensive and fine-grained, but designed as much as possible to remove responsibility and control from the Greek people and their government. The “scaled up privatisation programme” is to “be established in Greece and be managed by the Greek authorities under the supervision of the relevant European Institutions.” And the “quasi-automatic spending cuts in case of deviations from ambitious primary surplus targets” are “subject to prior approval of the [European] Institutions.”

Most telling of all, “The government needs to consult and agree with the Institutions on all draft legislation in relevant areas with adequate time before submitting it for public consultation or to Parliament.” That is to say, on every above named area of reform – from tax policy to labor markets – the government must consult first with its European managers. The piece-de-resistance, however, is that the Greeks are maximally accountable to the Eurogroup while the Eurogroup is minimally accountable and maximally arbitrary. Having listed its demands the document then says, “The above-listed commitments are minimum requirements to start the negotiations with the Greek authorities.” Later, the document says that an ESM programme is possible “Provided that all the necessary conditions contained in this document are fulfilled.” There is no guarantee the money is forthcoming. In other words, the Eurogroup retains maximum discretion to decide that Greece has failed to meet any of the impossible demands made upon it, while the Greeks possess no similar ability to hold the Europeans to account for their failures. Recall, for instance, that the agreement requires Greece to run budget surpluses that the Germans and French have never managed to achieve and that the ECB recently refused to extend sufficient emergency financing to the Greek banks, essentially engineering a near bank-failure in direct violation of its mandate to provide emergency liquidity to illiquid banks.

There are those who think that you can be pro-Euro and anti-austerity. As this round of negotiations show, the economics and politics of the euro are not separated like that. The Euro is a political project. It is unification without sovereignty. It is the delegation of national sovereignty to groups of finance ministers and supranational bodies whose main task is to suppress the re-appearance of the very source of their power. The political institutions and practices that have grown up around the euro and the EU are based on the belief that exercises of sovereignty are dangerous, irresponsible, and unaccountable. Although these institutions are in one sense nothing more than the product of agreements between nations, their raison d’etre is to prevent any further, outright expression of that sovereign power. That is why they insist on total subjection to their decisions, and why Greece became about more than Greece. The Greeks dared to assert popular sovereignty at the only level it is currently possible to do so. The bitter irony being that the discretion demanded by these post-sovereign entities is less accountable than when exercised as the outright power of a democratically elected government. And no less vindictive.

Alex Gourevitch

 

French sovereignty wars

A good article in yesterday’s Le Monde by former French foreign minister, Hubert Védrine. He points out that in the discussion around the ongoing Eurozone crisis, more federalism is viewed as a natural and common sensical step forward. Any resistance is disdainfully regarded as little more than anachronistic national atavism. That doesn’t mean federalism will happen, but it does mean that its critics appear as irrational and behind the times. Védrine takes issue with this given that on paper and in practice further moves away from national sovereignty are by no means so self-evident: deregulated financial markets were part of the cause of the present crisis and those stepping in to shore up the international economy are national governments disbursing money raised in taxes on national citizens.

In this debate, we are reminded of the name given to those who in 1982-1983 urged France’s François Mitterrand to give up on the European Monetary System’s fixed exchange rate and pursue a narrowly national solution to the economic crisis. They were dubbed ‘the Albanians’ – a sign that even then, in the early 80s, anything resembling a resolute defence of national sovereignty in economic affairs looked like the actions of a tinpot Maoist regime.

Védrine’s argument chimes with a wider debate in France around globalization. In another op-ed piece in Le Monde, Sciences Po professor Zaki Laïdi described the idea of “de-globalization”, floated by some leading figures of the French left (such as Arnaud Montebourg and Jean-Luc Mélenchon) as economically inefficient and politically worrying. A similar complaint had been made by World Trade Organization director, Pascal Lamy, for whom the idea was “reactionary”.

It is easy to dismiss an idea by calling it old-fashioned and out-dated. Védrine’s point still stands: isn’t it bizarre to call for more political union in Europe when there is so little support for the EU among citizens? Angela Merkel’s problem from the beginning of the Eurozone crisis has been to square her support for the EU bail-out packages with a predominantly skeptical German population. One of the reasons that Eurozone governments have proceeded so cautiously has been their desire to avoid introducing measures that would require modifications to existing treaties. That would mean national ratification by parliaments or peoples – something all Eurozone members want to avoid as they know the results won’t be pretty.

The French sovereignty wars reflect a deeper crisis in European economic governance. Conflict today plays out as much between disenchanted national populations and their respective political elites as between individual nation states. More federalism may be the preferred solution of markets and technocrats but it has little to offer those concerned about democracy.