Foto: EPA
JUN 24, 2016
ATHENS – The United Kingdom’s referendum on whether to
leave the European Union created odd bedfellows – and some odder adversaries.
As Tory turned mercilessly against Tory, the schism in the Conservative
establishment received much attention. But a parallel (thankfully more
civilized) split afflicted my side: the left.
Having campaigned against “Leave” for several months
in England, Wales, Northern Ireland, and Scotland, it was inevitable that I
faced criticism from left-wing supporters of “Brexit,” or “Lexit” as it came to
be known.
Lexiteers reject the call issued by DiEM25 (the radical
Democracy in Europe Movement,launched in Berlin in February) for a pan-European movement to change the EU from
within. They believe that reviving progressive politics requires exiting an
incorrigibly neoliberal EU. The left needed the resulting debate.
Many on the left rightly disdain the easy surrender of
others on their side to the premise that globalization has rendered the
nation-state irrelevant. While nation-states have become weaker, power should
never be confused with sovereignty.
As little Iceland has demonstrated, it is possible for
a sovereign people to safeguard basic freedoms and values independently of
their state’s power. And, crucially, Iceland, unlike Greece and the UK, never
entered the EU.
Back in the 1990s, I campaigned against Greece’s entry
into the eurozone, just like Britain’s Labour Party leader, Jeremy Corbyn,
campaigned in the 1970s against joining the EU. Indeed, when asked by friends
in Norway or Switzerland whether they should support their countries’ entry
into the EU, my answer is negative.
But it is one thing to oppose entering the EU; it is
quite another to favor exiting it once inside. Exiting is unlikely to get you
to where you would have been, economically and politically, had you not
entered. So opposing both entry and exit is a coherent position.
Whether it makes sense for leftists to advocate exit
hinges on whether a nation-state freed from EU institutions provides more
fertile ground for cultivating a progressive agenda of redistribution, labor
rights, and anti-racism. It also depends on the likely impact of an exit
campaign on transnational solidarity. As I travel across Europe, advocating a
pan-European movement to confront the EU’s authoritarianism, I sense a great
surge of internationalism in places as different from one another as Germany,
Ireland, and Portugal.
Distinguished Lexiteers, like Harvard’s Richard Tuck,
are prepared to risk quashing this surge. They point to pivotal moments when
the left took advantage of Britain’s lack of a written constitution to
expropriate private medical business and create its National Health Service and
other such institutions. “A vote to stay within the EU,” Tuck writes, “will…end any hope of genuinely left politics in the
UK.”
Similarly, on immigration, Tuck claims that, despite
the insufferable xenophobia dominating the Leave campaign, the only way to
overcome racism is to let Britain’s people “feel” sovereign again by returning
control of their borders to London.
Tuck’s historical analysis is correct. The EU is
inimical to projects such as the NHS and nationalized industries (though it was
the British nation-state, under Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher, that gave the
EU its neoliberal cast). And perhaps the loss of control over immigration from
Europe inspired greater xenophobia.
But once locked into this EU, a
political campaign to exit it is unlikely to steer national politics in the
direction of leftist goals. Most likely, it will result in a new Tory
administration that tightens the screw of austerity further and erects new
fences to keep despised foreigners out.
Many leftists find it hard to fathom why I campaigned
for “Remain” after EU leaders vilified me personally and crushed Greece’s
“Athens Spring” in 2015. Of course, no truly progressive agenda can be revived through the
EU institutions. DiEM25 was founded on the conviction that it is only against EU
institutions, but within the EU, that progressive politics has
a chance in Europe. Leftists once understood that the good society is to be won
by entering the prevailing institutions in order to overcome their regressive
function. “In and against” used to be our motto. We should revive it.
Another critic of DiEM25, Thomas Fazi, believes that, “given the current make-up of the European
Parliament,” Greece would still have been crushed, even if the parliament were
more democratic. But DiEM25’s view is not simply that the EU suffers a
democratic deficit; it is that the European Parliament is not a proper
parliament. Creating a proper parliament, able to dismiss the executive, would
destroy the European Parliament’s “current make-up” and usher in a democratic
politics that would prevent official creditors from crushing countries like
Greece.
Fazi’s fellow economist Heiner Flassbeck likewise argues that the nation-state, not some airy-fairy
pan-European terrain, as DiEM25 purportedly suggests, is the right place to
push for change. In fact, DiEM25 focuses on both levels and beyond. The left,
once upon a time, understood the importance of operating simultaneously at the
municipal, regional, national, and international levels. Why do we, suddenly,
feel the need to prioritize the national over the European?
Perhaps Flassbeck’s harshest criticism of DiEM25’s
radical pan-Europeanism is the charge that we are peddling left-wing TINA:
“there is no alternative” to operating at the level of the EU. While DiEM25
advocates a democratic union, we certainly reject both the inevitability and
the desirability of “ever closer union.” Today, the European establishment is
working toward a political union that, we regard as an austerian iron cage. We
have declared war on this conception of Europe.
Last year, when Greece’s official creditors threatened
us with ejection from the eurozone, even from the EU, I was undaunted. DiEM25
is imbued with this spirit of defiance: we will not be forced by the prospect
of the EU’s disintegration to acquiesce to an EU of the establishment’s
choosing. In fact, we believe it is important to prepare for the collapse of EU
under the weight of its leaders’ hubris. But that is not the same as making the
EU’s disintegration our objective and inviting European progressives to join
neo-fascists in campaigning for it.
The philosopher Slavoj Žižek, a DiEM25 signatory, recently quipped that socialist nationalism is not a good defense
against the postmodern national socialism that the EU’s disintegration would
bring. He’s right. Now more than ever, a pan-European humanist movement to
democratize the EU is the left’s best bet.
YANIS VAROUFAKIS
In https://www.project-syndicate.org/commentary/leftist-debate-european-union-by-yanis-varoufakis-2016-06?utm_medium=twitter&utm_source=twitterfeed#comments
