For a quarter of a century most of the mainstream western European left have embraced the EU as a potential engine of progress. This idea has modified through time and experience as with, for example, the British Labour Party and even a section of the Greek Syriza government, to become the EU as a possible shelter, first from domination by the US, then as a platform for a more socially responsible response to the impact of global multi-nationals and latterly as continental wide insurance policy against the rise of the BRIC economies, led by China.
In the last ten and especially in the last five years the prevailing social democratic outlook on the EU has come under pressure. In many EU countries, including Britain, Denmark and Holland, popular political movements have arisen around internal EU immigration and the intendent perceived undermining of indigenous wage rates and access to services. The defence of the 'free market' and labour 'reforms' as the magic bullets to be fired at European societies in order to overcome the impact of the 2008 banking crisis; plus an EU leadership dominated by the unelected Council of Ministers, the unelected European Central Bank and emergent German hegemony, means that positive enthusiasm has soured in most of the EU's larger countries. Support for the EU in the mainstream left is now an almost entirely defensive affair; to hold on to Nurse for fear of something worse.
This blog has noted the the ideas of some of the leaders in Syriza; a radical anti-austerity party battling at this moment against EU political scheming and intransigence. (See 3 March 2015, 'Yanis Varoufakis - erratic Marxist?') Greece, a country that represents barely 3% of the EU economy, has particular concerns about the vulnerability of any future outside of the Euro. This blog argued alongside with the left of Syriza, that exit from the euro will be inevitable for Syriza to meet its electoral commitments. But Varoufakis and others make a strong case that, as things stand, the implosion of the Euro and the EU could engender a nationalist, rightist, even protofascist response across a series of European countries. The level of debate at the other end of the European mainstream left's political spectrum - in the British Labour Party - is embarrassingly superficial, self serving and timid. The new candidates for Labour leadership are desperate for any hand to hold. And none of them have yet said a single word about the EU that is worth an instant's consideration.
Meanwhile the EU is in deep crisis. It helps organise the economics and politics of the least successful continent since the the 2008 shock wave. More worryingly for its admirers and over a much longer term it has signally failed to use what was the largest market in the world to develop any sort of global lead.
'In the spring of 2008, the most careful estimate, by Andrea Boltho and Barry Eichengreen, two distinguished economists of impeccably pro-European outlook, concluded that the Common Market may have increased growth by 3 to 4 per cent of the GDP of the EEC across the whole period from the mid-1950s to the mid-1970s, and the Single European Act by another 1 per cent, while the positive impact of monetary union had to date been negligible – making for a grand total of perhaps a 5 per cent increment in GDP over half a century. That was before the onset of the crisis.' (Perry Anderson 'The Italian Disaster', London Review of Books, May 2014.)
Since the crisis of 2008 EU austerity policies have plunged large and small European nations into penury and large parts of their populations into the abyss. The EU has now accelerated Europe's relative decline.
Turning to politics, in the last quarter of a century the European political classes especially in the larger countries have become more corrupt, more 'bought and sold', less representative or accountable to their voting populations. But does the 'higher' level of European politics perhaps offer some immunity to this infection? In 2014 the European Commission released its first official report on corruption in the Union, whose extent the commissioner who authored it described as ‘breath-taking’: at a low estimate, costing the EU as much as the entire Union budget, some €120 billion a year – the real figure being ‘probably much higher’. The report did not examine corruption in EU institutions as such. Your guess ... ?
Speaking objectively, the EU therefore has not advanced life for most Europeans. Worse. The EU has, in its fossilised, inaccessible institutions, its remoteness and lack of popular or day to day relevance, its corruption and its obeisance to global wealth, crystallised all that is most rotten in the individual political and economic systems of its members. It has gradually become the Europe wide expression of the worst characteristics of politics and economics to be found in its member states. The social democratic illusion, that the EU might be some sort of repository of rights and social conscience, is dead. Indeed, it was stillborn.
Which is not at all the signal to make common cause with Ukip in the UK - or any its various relatives in other European countries. The realities of peoples' actual struggles in Europe will govern any analysis of the EU's concrete contradictions - and therefore any line of action decided by the left.
Today, right now, radical socialists in Greece are battling for concessions from the EU in the context of retaining Greek membership of the Euro and the EU. This battle is of immense, continental significance. The gathering forces within Podemus in Spain are not neutral in their interest over Syriza's battle. Indeed rebuilding a popular left in society across most of Europe will hinge, in large part, on its progress and on its outcome. In Britain the coming referendum on remaining in the EU or leaving will also have its own content created by its context. The referendum (together with the prospects of the next referendum in Scotland) are already provoking a debate about the general future of Britain. The vote will take place in an atmosphere of deepening economic and political crisis in Europe and with the corrosive impact of the non-representative, outworn political system in Britain itself.
One possibility could be if the wider European left were to make gains between now and the British referendum, the UK vote might become a vote of confidence in the rise of a new, anti-austerity prospect for European people as a whole. In Britain the role of the City of London remains the key obstacle to economic (and political) progress. And the EU's current and past role in that structure is and was entirely supportive and obsequious (notwithstanding the odd French cavil about the need for a Paris based finance sector.) But if the referendum became a means to express a political link with new, dynamic, anti-austerity forces, that would reinforce any challenge to the City.
For now there needs to be a united anti-austerity movement in the UK, marshaling those who will come from Labour, from the SNP, the Greens, the Unions, wherever possible, in action, against the coming Government assault. It starts with the Peoples Assembly demonstration on June 21. And in that context the EU is an implacable enemy.
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